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18 hours ago
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Joe Biden is under growing pressure to use his last week in office to free Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian detained 23 years ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and held without charge in Guantánamo Bay.
A panel of UN experts and a group of 100 legal and human rights scholars have written to the president appealing to him to pardon the 53-year-old prisoner, the first 9/11 detainee to be tortured at the CIA global network of secret prisons.
“His immediate release and relocation to a third safe country are long overdue,” a group of 12 UN special rapporteurs on arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and other human issues, wrote in their letter to the outgoing president.
“Mr Abu Zubaydah suffers serious health conditions, including from injuries sustained during torture that are allegedly exacerbated by the denial of medical attention. In addition, lawyer-client communication has been seriously impeded,” they said.
Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia as Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, has been called America’s “forever prisoner”. He was detained by US and Pakistani intelligence agencies in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, and spent more than four years in CIA black sites, reportedly including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia and Poland, and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
He has drawn sketches of his torture as well as vivid descriptions, saying he was subjected to physical abuse until he “didn’t know who he was any more”.
He was initially described by the US as one of al-Qaida’s top leaders, but later US intelligence assessments conceded he probably knew nothing of the 9/11 attacks and may not even have been a member of al-Qaida.
In their separate letter, a group of US and international legal and human rights experts told Biden that Zubaydah’s treatment was “a blight on the United States and its history”.
“Your personal order to release and relocate Abu Zubaydah to a state where he can live in safety is perhaps the only action that will break through the patterns of fear, indifference, and bureaucratic inaction that have allowed his detention to continue into a third decade,” the letter said.
Biden has accelerated the transfer of Guantánamo inmates to third countries in his final weeks in office. Last month, two detainees were transferred to Tunisia and Kenya. Last week, 11 Yemeni detainees were sent to Oman for resettlement.
Zubaydah is one of just 15 inmates left in Guantánamo, a US naval base on the south coast of Cuba. Three of the others have already been cleared for release. One of them – Muieen Abd Al-Sattar, a Rohingya Burmese man with Pakistani citizenship – was cleared for transfer 15 years ago.
The White House national security council was approached for comment on Zubaydah’s fate.
Helen Duffy, the head of Human Rights in Practice, an advocacy group based in The Hague, said the UK had a moral obligation to lobby for Zubaydah’s release.
“The UK is also perhaps uniquely placed to engage with the Biden administration to facilitate an end to 23 years of torture and unlawful detention of our client, which it has been found to have aided and assisted,” she said.
“There are no outstanding charges or allegations against him that might give rise to legitimate concerns, but there is a moral and legal imperative to act urgently to get him out of Guantánamo.”
