The UK has settled out of court by paying a “substantial sum” to a Guantánamo Bay detainee who was suing the government for its alleged complicity in his rendition and torture, according to the inmate’s legal team.
Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah have accused the British intelligence services of providing questions to his CIA interrogators to put to him while they were torturing him at a string of CIA “black sites” around the world where he was held between 2002 and 2006.
They claim that the case has relevant lessons for the UK today, highlighting the legal and moral risks involved in cooperation with the US at a time it is violating international law.
Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, is a stateless Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was one of the first detainees in the US “war on terror” to be tortured, and was subjected to a full range of what the Bush administration at the time termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in secret prisons in Thailand, Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan, Morocco, and then the US base at Guantánamo Bay, on Cuba’s southern coast.
Now 54, he has been held in Guantánamo Bay without charge ever since, becoming one of its “forever prisoners”.