The case's central issue concerns whether a Guantánamo Bay detainee who has never been charged with a crime can subpoena testimony from the CIA contractors who supervised his torture.

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments today in a case focusing on the CIA's secret torture program after the 9/11 attacks. At the center of it all is a Guantanamo detainee who has never been charged with a crime. And he has been in U.S. custody for 20 years.

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner held by the CIA to undergo extensive torture.

JOSEPH MARGULIES: He's the person for whom the torture memo was written. That is, it was drafted in order to authorize his torture. He's the poster child of the program.

TOTENBERG: Cornell law professor Joseph Margulies would years later become Zubaydah's lawyer. But that was long after the torture took place.

MARGULIES: The most aggressive stage of it was in August of 2002. That was the period when the waterboarding began. It lasted for 20 days, 24 hours a day. He was waterboarded 83 times in that period alone.

TOTENBERG: All of this, and much more, was subsequently documented in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Widespread news reports about the torture program described how Zubaydah and others were held for years in so-called black sites in Thailand and Poland. Two psychologists who supervised Zubaydah's torture have testified that after six days of the so-called enhanced questioning, Zubaydah was a broken man. And they concluded he didn't know anything more. But the CIA thought he did, so the torture continued - again, Joseph Margulies.

MARGULIES: They thought he was a close associate of Osama bin Laden and had been involved in 9/11 and a senior leader of al-Qaida, et cetera. And they were just mistaken. They were wrong. And what he had been saying from the beginning - I'm not that person - I don't know that information - turned out to have been true.

TOTENBERG: Indeed, when accounts of the torture program became public, President Bush, for all practical purposes, denounced it. And the Justice Department opinion that had permitted it was withdrawn. What's more, Congress passed legislation forbidding such treatment in the future. In 2010, Zubaydah, through Attorney Margulies, filed a criminal complaint in Poland, seeking to hold Polish officials accountable for their purported complicity in his, quote, "unlawful detention and torture." But when Polish prosecutors separately sought information from the United States about the operations in Poland, the U.S. government refused to provide that information on grounds of national security. Margulies successfully appealed to the European Court on Human Rights. That, in turn, prompted a reopening of the Polish investigation. But it stalled again when the U.S. refused to provide the information sought by the Polish prosecutor.

Zubaydah's lawyer then went to court in the United States, seeking testimony from the two psychologists who had supervised Zubaydah's questioning. Both had testified previously, and one of them had written a book about it. Now the case is before the Supreme Court, a court with a conservative supermajority and one justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who was a top White House aide literally running for his life on 9/11, when one of the planes was thought to be heading for the White House. Lawyer Margulies, however, is undeterred.

MARGULIES: Yes, this case is about gathering information for use by the Polish prosecutors. There needs to be an accounting. Torture must be known. You cannot allow torture to be done in secret and kept in secret. That's fundamentally what this case is about.

TOTENBERG: Specifically, the question before the court is whether the so-called state secrets privilege protects the information in this case. The privilege, created by the high court in 1953, allows the government to seek to block evidence for a trial in the interest of national security. Ultimately, it's the courts that make the decision. In this case, both the Trump administration and now the Biden administration have opposed Zubaydah's subpoena for testimony from the two psychologists. Both administrations have conceded that there's been widespread coverage of Poland's role in the torture program. But it would be entirely different, the administrations have said, for the U.S. government to confirm anything about Poland's role or for the government to provide the names of those who helped facilitate the program.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.