Supreme court blocks men behind CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ from testifying
"The case was filed by Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo prisoner arrested and held without charge since 2002, in Poland
Two psychologists who devised the CIA’s post-9/11 system of US “enhanced interrogation”, which has been widely denounced as torture, cannot be called to testify in a case in Poland brought by a terrorism suspect subjected to the abuses, the supreme court has ruled.
In a 6-3 ruling on Thursday, the court allowed the US government to block the psychologists from giving evidence in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo prisoner who was arrested in 2002 and has been held without charge ever since. The majority of the justices granted the government the privilege of “state secrets” – a power that prevents the public disclosure of information deemed harmful to national security.
Zubaydah had wanted to call the psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to confirm that he had been unlawfully detained and tortured in a so-called CIA “black site” in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland. It is public knowledge that the prisoner was tortured in a number of black sites in several countries between 2002 and his transfer to Guantánamo four years later.
Among the many harrowing torture techniques that were applied against him, he was waterboarded – a form of controlled drowning – 83 times.
In Thursday’s ruling, the nine justices of the supreme court divided along unusual lines that crossed the traditional conservative-liberal divide. The majority opinion was written by Stephen Breyer, the court’s senior liberal justice who is retiring at the end of this term.
In his opinion, Breyer argued that the government was entitled to assert the “state secrets” privilege even though the critical information in question – in this case the location of a CIA black site in Poland – was already publicly known. Breyer agreed with the CIA that “clandestine” relations between the US and foreign intelligence services were based on trust and had to be protected in the interests of national security.
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INSERT:
Map: The 54 countries that helped the CIA with its torture-linked rendition program
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"The CIA torture program was even bigger than the details released in the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report might suggest. The reason is that the CIA didn't just have its own torture program, run out of its "black site" secret detention and torture prisons broad. It also used a vast network of other countries to help capture, detain, transport, and, yes, torture detainees.
That network is best shown by looking at the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. This is the program under which the CIA would detain and transport suspected terrorists with the help of foreign governments. In all, a stunning 54 countries participated in the CIA-run rendition program. Here they are:
Whether or not all 54 of those countries are complicit in the CIA torture program is debatable. The program could work in a number of different ways; each of these countries supported the CIA's rendition program, but not every country directly participated in torture.
Sometimes the detainees were captured by the CIA with the help of foreign governments, sometimes captured entirely by foreign governments, which would then hand them over. Sometimes they were shipped to CIA-run black sites in foreign countries, and sometimes handed off to foreign intelligence agencies that would detain and torture them in their own facilities. Sometimes, more modestly but still consequentially, friendly foreign governments would help the CIA in finding, arresting, or transporting suspected terrorists.
But the point of this map is that, however vast and shadowy the CIA's torture program was, the agency's associated and often-linked program of extraordinary rendition was even vaster and more shadowy. . ."
Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/12/9/7361291/map-cia
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C.I.A. Black Sites Are State Secrets, the Supreme Court Rules
A Guantánamo detainee had sought information from two former government contractors to aid in a Polish criminal inquiry into a facility there.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday shut down efforts by a detainee at Guantánamo Bay to obtain information from two former C.I.A. contractors involved in torturing him, ruling that the inquiry would impermissibly expose state secrets.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for a badly fractured court, said the main question was whether the information sought by the detainee, known as Abu Zubaydah, would confirm the location of a C.I.A. black site, which is widely known to have been in Poland.
The justices split 6 to 3 on the question of whether the case could proceed. In dissent, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the government sought to avoid “further embarrassment for past misdeeds.”
“The facts are hard to face,” he wrote. “We know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally — more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial and what it calls ‘rectal rehydration.’ Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government’s vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here.”
“This court’s duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “We should not let shame obscure our vision.” . .
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Two justices dissented from the opinion – the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor and conservative Neil Gorsuch. In a lengthy rebuttal, Gorsuch pointed out that the torture to which Zubaydah was subjected had been extensively chronicled in official reports, books and movies.
“Ending this suit may shield the government from some further modest measure of embarrassment. But respectfully, we should not pretend it will safeguard any secret,” he wrote.
Elena Kagan, the court’s third liberal justice, stood apart from the majority opinion, arguing that the case should have been allowed to proceed in a lower court. . .
Though the Zubaydah case ultimately failed to dent the wall of secrecy that has been erected around the CIA’s torture program, it was remarkable in one other regard. When the supreme court heard arguments in the case in October, several of the justices openly referred to the prisoner’s interrogation as a form of torture. . .It was the first time that the nation’s highest court had used the “torture” word with regard to Guantánamo detainees and their treatment in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 9/11."
