Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA used as a guinea pig for its post-9/11 torture program, will plead his case before parole board equivalent on 23 August

A man the CIA used as a guinea pig for its post-9/11 torture program will plead his case for freedom from Guantanámo Bay later this month, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday, in perhaps the hardest challenge to date for Barack Obama’s intentions to empty the infamous detention center.



Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah, is one of three men the CIA acknowledged that it waterboarded, a process simulating drowning, at an unacknowledged prison in Thailand. At some point during his 14-year captivity by the US, he lost the use of his left eye.

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The 23 August hearing, Guantánamo’s equivalent of a parole board, will present the first time Abu Zubaydah will have an opportunity to speak about his captivity – an opportunity that contradicts the CIA’s preferences. The CIA, per a landmark 2014 Senate investigation, has contended that he ought to be held incommunicado until he dies.

“We anticipate our client will make a statement” at the hearing, said Zubaydah’s attorney, Joseph Margulies.

Abu Zubaydah presents the hardest test thus far for the Obama administration’s last-ditch attempt at vacating the Guantánamo detention facility through the quasi-parole process. While the much-tortured Abu Zubaydah may or may not be too dangerous to release – the criterion that a multi-agency Guantánamo tribunal known as a Periodic Review Board (PRB) will evaluate later this month – he knows a vast amount about CIA torture, which makes his ultimate release doubtful.

“We know that we went on a crossroad and we took the wrong turn,” said Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah before his torture by the CIA.

“Abu Zubaydah and his case represents that. He represents the falsehood of what’s called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.”

Captured in Pakistan in 2002, Abu Zubaydah was the first person subjected to a CIA torture regimen devised by contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who currently face a federal lawsuit brought by subsequent CIA torture victims. Initially thought to possess vital information on al-Qaida and its plots, and hardened by resistance to interrogation, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, stuffed into a wooden box not much bigger than a coffin, held naked, kept awake for extensive periods and had his body painfully contorted.

Abu Zubaydah in an unknown location. Photograph: AP

Following a 47-day period of isolation at the black site, Abu Zubaydah experienced 19 days of torture on what the Senate intelligence committee later observed was a “near 24-hour-per-day basis”. During that time, interrogators placed him in a coffin-sized box for the equivalent of 11 days and two hours, and inside an even smaller box for a total of 29 hours. It took six days for interrogators to cable back to the CIA that it was unlikely Abu Zubaydah knew anything about upcoming plots, and seven for them to cable back it was “highly unlikely”.

Not only did Abu Zubaydah’s torture continue, the CIA represented it to the Bush administration and Congress as a success, and subsequently tortured at least 118 others.

Recently declassified documents from CIA medical staff, who were present during black-site torture, found that in “retrospect”, Abu Zubaydah “probably reached the point of cooperation even prior to the August [2002] institution of ‘enhanced’ measures – a development missed because of the narrow focus of questioning”.

Never charged with a crime, Abu Zubaydah has been invisible to the public long after his September 2006 transfer to Guantánamo Bay, where he and other former black site denizens have been jailed at the classified Camp 7. His attorneys’ attempts at winning his freedom through habeas-corpus proceedings in federal court have proven fruitless, with a federal judge stalling for years to rule on basic legal filings.

A rare – and bizarre – exception came in June, when he almost made it to a pre-trial military commissions hearing for 9/11 defendant Ramzi Binalshibh, but ultimately did not testify.

The CIA, according to the Senate report, concluded soon after taking Abu Zubaydah into custody that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life … [which] may preclude [Abu Zubaydah] from being turned over to another country”.

According to two Obama administration officials, the administration is seeking to “accelerate” the remaining PRB hearings – the pathway that Obama is taking to clear out all Guantánamo detainees who are not charged with war crimes before the military commissions. One said that the plan is to complete the initial PRB hearings for all detainees not charged in a military tribunal by the end of September.

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That official said that the only remaining Guantánamo detainees not to have received PRB hearings are the so-called “high value detainees”, several of whom are former CIA black-site residents.

The CIA, which declined to comment, does not have a direct role in the PRB deliberations, which reach decisions by consensus. But its nominal parent agency, the office of the director of national intelligence, does, leading observers to doubt that Abu Zubaydah will actually go free. If he does not, the task of closing Guantánamo during the roughly 150 days left remaining in Obama’s presidency grows harder.

Obama has transferred, resettled or released 162 Guantánamo detainees since taking office. Currently 76 detainees remain at Guantánamo, with 34 approved for transfer.

Still, Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security, said the decision to permit Abu Zubaydah a hearing represented a boldness by the White House in its internal and congressional battles over closing Guantánamo.

“Abu Zubaydah is at the heart of everything that keeps Gitmo from closing: the issue of torture,” Greenberg said.

“They’ve changed the calculus with this. Everybody can go before the PRB, and everybody will.”