The sparring over the judge’s order underscores that years of pressure over what will be made public about the Bush-era program — which allowed interrogators to work around anti-torture laws — are coming to a head on a range of fronts.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 to ask the Obama administration to declassify a lengthy executive summary of its investigative report. General Martins also recently revealed that he had been pushing the C.I.A. for more than a year to declassify additional information about what interrogators did to Mr. Nashiri, allowing it to be discussed with the defendant and examined in open court.

General Martins’s motion last week also took the unusual step of appending a previously undisclosed letter sent on Feb. 10 from the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Carl Levin of Michigan, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees. Ms. Ruemmler wrote that the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, was taking steps to declassify certain information about the program.

The core of Mr. Kammen’s strategy has been to find legal arguments that would prevent the government from executing his client. In February, he argued that he needed to be able to search C.I.A. files — and to have the ability to ask his client about that material to refresh his memory — to effectively make the case that the government should be barred from executing his client because the C.I.A. tortured him.

Mr. Nashiri was one of three detainees known to have been waterboarded, and the C.I.A. inspector general called his the “most significant” case of a detainee who was brutalized in ways that went beyond the tactics approved by the Bush administration, including being threatened with a power drill. Not all details have been made public; last month, a specialist in treating torture victims testified that Mr. Nashiri had been subjected to “physical, psychological and sexual torture.”