LONDON — The British government has agreed to pay a “substantial sum” to settle a lawsuit by a Guantanamo Bay detainee who said U.K. intelligence agencies were complicit in his torture at secret U.S. interrogation sites, his lawyer said Monday.
Abu Zubaydah was thought to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaida, the terrorist group that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, when he was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, was tortured at so-called CIA black sites abroad before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
Attorney Helen Duffy said the confidential settlement was symbolically and practically significant for the “intolerable suffering” Zubaydah endured. She urged the U.K. to press for the immediate release of Zubaydah and others held without charge more than 25 years after the terror attacks.
“This case is deeply relevant today, as some states ride roughshod over international law, and the world looks to others to respond,” Duffy said. “There are critical lessons about the cost of cooperating with the U.S. or other allies flouting international norms. It is more important than ever that human rights and states international obligations are respected, and violations are met with reparation and accountability.”
The U.K. Foreign Office declined comment, saying it would neither confirm nor deny intelligence matters.
Zubaydah was the first person in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program following 9/11 and subjected to what is now widely viewed as torture. He was held at CIA black sites in Poland and Lithuania, according to the European Court of Human Rights.
Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times in a month at one point and confined over 11 days in a coffin-size box, among a raft of other mistreatment, a U.S. Senate report found.
U.K. security and intelligence services were aware Zubaydah was being tortured but they continued to provide questions for the CIA to ask him without seeking assurances of his condition, a parliamentary committee found in 2018.
Dominic Grieve, a lawyer and former member of the House of Commons who chaired the parliamentary inquiry into detainee abuse, said the payout was very unusual but that Zubaydah was clearly wronged.
“Americans were behaving in a way that should have given us cause for real concern,” Grieve told the BBC. “We should have raised it with the United States and, if necessary, closed down cooperation, but we failed to do that for a considerable period of time.”
Zubaydah remains in a legal limbo, held at Guantanamo as a security risk but without charges or conviction.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by Zubaydah, who was seeking testimony from two former CIA contractors as part of an investigation into his treatment when he was held in Poland. The court rejected his case because the government said it would expose state secrets despite much of the information having been widely reported.
