BY DAVID ROHDE
U.S. government officials have blocked the
release of 116 pages of defense lawyers' notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo
Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defense lawyers
said on Thursday.
The treatment of Zubaydah, who lost one eye and
was waterboarded 83 times in a single month while held by the CIA, according to
government documents, has been the focus of speculation for years.
"We submitted 116 pages in 10 separate
submissions," Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lead defense lawyer, told Reuters.
"The government declared all of it classified."
Margulies and lawyers for other detainees said
that the decision showed that the Obama administration plans to continue
declaring detainees’ accounts of their own torture classified. A Central
Intelligence Agency spokesperson declined to comment.
After the release of a U.S. Senate report on CIA
torture in December, the government loosened its classification rules and
released 27 pages of interview notes compiled by lawyers for detainee Majid
Khan in which he described his torture.
Khan, a Guantanamo detainee turned government
cooperating witness, said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice
videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his "private parts" -
none of which was described in the Senate report.
Khan said that guards, some of whom smelled of
alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and
leather belts.
"The CIA has apparently changed its mind
about allowing detainees to talk about their torture," said Wells Dixon,
Khan’s lawyer.
CIA and White House officials opposed releasing
the Senate report, but Senator Dianne Feinstein, who then chaired the
Intelligence Committee, made public its 480-page executive summary.
A month after the report's release, government
lawyers said in a January 2015 court filing that the CIA had issued new
classification rules that permitted the release of “general allegations of
torture,” and “information regarding the conditions of confinement.”
But they said the names of CIA employees or
contractors could not be released. Nor the locations of the secret
"black" sites where detainees were held around the world after the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Margulies said the 116 pages of notes he
submitted for clearance were limited to Zubayda's description of his torture
and did not include prohibited information.
Margulies said he followed "the rule to the
letter" and accused the CIA of trying "guarantee that Abu Zubaydah
never discloses what was done to him."
Zubaydah, a 44-year-old Saudi national, has been
held in Guantanamo for nine years and not been charged with a crime.
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