A man who was the first prisoner subjected to the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program appeared before a U.S. government review panel this week, seeking release after 20 years of detention at Guantánamo Bay without ever being charged with a crime. Abu Zubaydah, now 55, was tortured at secret CIA black sites, waterboarded more than 80 times in a single month, and confined in a coffin-size box for more than 11 days, according to facts laid out at the hearing.
The hearing, which lasted roughly 20 minutes, took place at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, with a live video feed made available to reporters at Fort Meade, Maryland, according to the Associated Press. Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia, captured in Pakistan in 2002, and transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006 after roughly four and a half years in CIA custody. He was accused by a U.S. government official of being associated with Osama bin Laden and of knowing him personally, though the report notes he was not a member of al-Qaida and had declined a direct request from bin Laden to work for the group.
What Happened Inside the Hearing
Annika Conrad, representing Zubaydah, told the panel he poses no security threat to the United States and requested he be approved for transfer out of Guantánamo. Per the same report, Zubaydah is prepared to accept continuous monitoring and other security measures, has financial and personal support from his family, and has rejected extremist views. His attorneys said he is eager to reconnect with his family and live as a free person, and that he has no intent to engage in violence against the United States in the future.
Detainees are not permitted to speak at their own review hearings. The panel, known as the Periodic Review Board, was created under the Obama administration and evaluates prisoners for possible release without posing a national security threat — though it holds no authority to determine the legal validity of detention, according to the Periodic Review Secretariat. The review panel issued no immediate ruling on Zubaydah's case. His transfer, if approved, would require a multiyear process to find a country willing to accept him.
A Chief Prosecutor's Assessment, and Lasting Injuries
Zubaydah's attorneys said the military's chief prosecutor for U.S. military commissions believes he is unlikely to be charged, and the lawyers said he may never face charges at all. The AP report notes that as a result of his torture, Zubaydah lost his left eye, lost the ability to write in English, and frequently struggles to recall words. U.S. military commissions oversee the 15 men still held at Guantánamo Bay.
Foreign Courts Have Gone Further Than U.S. Ones
While U.S. courts have repeatedly sided with the executive branch's efforts to keep information about Zubaydah's torture out of the public record, foreign courts and international bodies have taken the opposite path. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the government could invoke the state-secrets privilege to block former CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen from testifying in a Polish criminal investigation into a CIA black site there, according to Ballotpedia. Zubaydah had sought that testimony under a federal statute allowing evidence-gathering for use in foreign proceedings, and his time in CIA custody included black sites in Poland and Lithuania.
A British parliamentary committee found in 2018 that U.K. security and intelligence services knew Zubaydah was being tortured and continued to provide questions for the CIA to ask him during his interrogations. In January 2026, the British government agreed to pay a substantial sum to settle a lawsuit alleging U.K. intelligence complicity in his torture, according to Zubaydah's lawyer as reported by The Guardian. That settlement followed a December 2023 ruling from the UK Supreme Court, which unanimously dismissed a British government appeal and found Zubaydah's civil case had to be judged under English law rather than the laws of the foreign nations that hosted the CIA sites, per Bhatt Murphy, the law firm representing him.
A Shrinking Prison Population
The military prison at Guantánamo Bay once held nearly 780 prisoners after opening in January 2002. As of September 2026, only 15 detainees remain at the base, and Zubaydah is among the uncharged men sometimes described as forever prisoners, according to KIRO 7. The Periodic Review Board can weigh whether someone still poses a future security risk, but it cannot rule on the legality of past detention or order a legal release — leaving Zubaydah's case, like those of other remaining detainees, in a kind of administrative limbo even as this week's hearing produced no immediate decision.
