In Torture Case, No Secrets Left to Protect?

            Abu Zubaydah, wrongly suspected of being an Islamic terrorist, was tortured cruelly and secretly two decades ago at a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site in Poland. The details of his torture – waterboarding and half a dozen other “enhanced interrogation techniques” – have been laid out in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, a federal court opinion, and extensive news media coverage.

            Despite all that publicity, the government is now invoking the “state secrets privilege” before the Supreme Court in an effort to prevent Zubaydah’s lawyers from gathering sworn testimony from the two CIA contractors who designed the interrogation techniques used for a period of time in the CIA’s now discredited detention and interrogation program.

            The justices will hear oral arguments in the case, United States v. Zubaydah, on Wednesday, Oct. 6, two days after the opening of the 2021 term. A government lawyer will argue, implausibly, that it is immaterial that the “secrets” have been reported officially and unofficially in the United States and worldwide for more than a decade.   

            Pakistani authorities cooperating with the CIA captured Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002 based on the mistaken assumption that he was a high-ranking member of al Qaeda. He was taken to the CIA’s black site in Poland, held there for nine months, and was subjected to waterboarding more than eighty times and to other torture-like techniques developed by two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $80 million for their work in developing and implementing the techniques.

Mitchell and Jessen, who were doing business as Mitchell Jessen Associates in Spokane, Washington, based the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” on their work in training Air Force pilots and other U.S. service members on resistance to the enemy if captured.

            Zubaydah was transferred in September 2003 to the prison camp that the Bush administration established for “enemy combatants” at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He is still being held at Guantanamo today even though the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on the CIA program concluded that his designation as a high-ranking enemy terrorist was “erroneous.”

            While Zubaydah was held in Guantanamo, his lawyer, Cornell law professor Joseph Margulies, sued Poland before the European Court on Human Rights seeking damages for the Polish government’s role in Zubaydah’s detention and interrogation. That court ordered Poland in 2014 to pay Zubaydah and a second detainee 100,000 Euros each for having exposed them to the risk of torture through its complicity in the CIA’s interrogation program.

            The current Supreme Court case stems from a legal move in 2018 by Margulies asking a federal judge in Yakima, Washington, to issue a subpoena for Mitchell and Jessen for testimony to be used in a second proceeding against Poland pending before the European tribunal. U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush initially granted Margulies’ request, but he quashed the subpoena after the Trump administration raised a “state secrets privilege” objection.

            On appeal, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held on September 18, 2019, that Quackenbush should not have quashed the subpoena. The appeals court instead remanded the case with instructions for Quackenbush to redact any testimony specifically found to expose national security secrets.

            The lame-duck Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to review that decision in a petition for certiorari filed on December 17, 2020. The administration argued that discovery would risk exposing  “classified information” and contended that previous unofficial disclosure of the information did not supersede the state secrets privilege.

            Margulies countered the government’s petition by stressing that the existence of the covert CIA facility, now closed, was “already a matter of public record” and Poland’s cooperation was “no secret at all.” 

            The Biden administration reaffirmed the government’s earlier position in a reply brief filed on March 4, 2021, by the acting solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar. The Court granted certiorari seven weeks later, on April 26. More than a dozen civil liberties and human rights organizations filed amicus briefs over the summer urging the justices to allow the limited discovery that the Ninth Circuit panel had ordered.

            In one of those briefs, David Schulz, a lawyer with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, argued aptly that the Court “should not expand the state secrets privilege to shield discussion of publicly established facts.” Courts, Schulz added, “should not defer to the executive in deciding whether a fact is secret.”

            In another of the amicus briefs, Physicians for Human Rights and several other professional associations argue that Mitchell and Jessen violated ethical standards and that transparency about their roles is “paramount for the mental health profession and society at large.”

            The complete history of this shameful episode has yet to be written. The government may have no interest in a full history, but the Supreme Court owes it to future generations now to allow one of the torture victims to put the architects of his abusive treatment under oath to get a more complete record of their foul deeds.

            It is worth noting that seventy-seven years ago, the Court wrongly deferred to the government’s ill-founded claims about national security in upholding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944) is a stain on the Court’s record, but to its credit the Court five years ago pronounced the decision “gravely wrong” and “overruled by history.” With 20/20 hindsight, the Court ought not make a similar mistake again.