Lithuania has paid 100,000 euros (US$113,377) to Abu Zubaydah, the Guantanamo detainee known as the “forever prisoner,” in compensation for having allowed the CIA to hold him at a secret site outside Vilnius where he was subjected to forms of torture.
The payment comes more than three years after the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Lithuanian government to pay compensation for violating European laws banning the use of torture.
HELD FOR 20 YEARS
Photo: AP
It marks a significant shift in the treatment of Zubaydah, who has been detained by the US without charge for more than 20 years.
Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan six months after Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA and lawyers for the administration of then-US president George W. Bush attempted to justify his torture by claiming he was a very senior figure in al-Qaeda. It emerged that he was not a member of the organization and he has never been charged with involvement in 9/11.
For much of the time since his arrest, Zubaydah has been held incommunicado, at the insistence of the CIA as part of its efforts to prevent details of his torture from becoming public.
In the past few months, there have been other signs of a shifting attitude toward Zubaydah and the torture that was inflicted upon him by CIA agents and contractors.
In October, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case in which the US government is seeking to block two CIA contractors from testifying in Poland about torture Zubaydah suffered in 2002 and 2003 at a secret, or “black,” site in that country.
In the course of the hearing, several of the justices, including conservatives, broke a legal taboo by openly using the word “torture.”
CODENAME VIOLET
In Zubaydah’s case against Lithuania, which was led on the European side by his lawyer, Helen Duffy, the European Court of Human Rights heard that Zubaydah was held at a CIA black site in that country from February 2005 to March 2006.
The site, codenamed Violet, was on the outskirts of Vilnius.
The most brutal forms of torture endured by Zubaydah occurred in 2002, when he was held at a CIA black site in Thailand.
An entire program of torture, euphemistically referred to by the CIA as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was devised for the prisoner by two psychologists under contract to the agency.
Zubaydah was waterboarded — a type of controlled drowning — at least 83 times in August 2002, as well as being placed in a coffin-sized box for days on end.
European judges heard that Zubaydah was unlikely to have suffered from the harshest forms of torture while in Lithuania.
However, he was subjected to techniques that still amounted to torture, lawyers argued, including sensory and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, loud noise and harsh light.
The money transferred by Lithuania is in a bank account. Zubaydah is unable to receive the sum given his detention in Guantanamo and because his assets have been frozen by the US Department of the Treasury.
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