This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, October 9, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Abus Abbew Zebeda has been held incommunicado for well over a decade in Guantanamo Bay Cuba.

His case is now gone before the US Supreme Court.

Cato's Julian Sanchez describes how broad and often bureaucratically self-interested

assertions of state secrets privilege, which of course exists nowhere in the Constitution, means for the ability

of our courts to do their best to deliver justice.

This case has been going on for a very long time.

Start with this.

Who is Abu Zabeda?

So Abu Zubida is a Guantanamo Bay detainee

who has been at this point held by the US for about 20 years.

He was captured some 20 years ago and at the time the intelligence community believed that he was the, essentially the number three guy in Al-Qaeda,

atop Osama bin Laden lieutenant.

It has become increasingly clear that that is probably not

true that he was not necessarily a babe in the woods but a fixer for various radical Islamists operating out of Pakistan, but not even necessarily a member of Al-Qaeda, but believing, as it appears falsely, that he was a very high-ranking

Al-Qaeda lieutenant, he was captured by the United States and then subject to what was

euphemistically termed enhanced interrogation, what most people would call torture at a series of black sites in Thailand and then

Poland. This included being waterboarded at least 83 times tapes that were so disturbing,

apparently, even to the CIA personnel running the torture program that they were destroyed in 2005.

It was also subject to a number of other enhanced interrogation techniques, stress positions, sleep deprivation, physical assault, and he's

had a habeas petition pending now for some, I think, more than a dozen years has not been of course tried and has already

...