How bad was she? When informed of her death, Walter only had one thing to say: "Good". Abusive Parents: His mother was certainly a horrible parent.He speaks in fragments and lives like a bum, having devoted his life almost entirely to fighting crime - and it's his devotion that allows him to pick up the trail of a man's mysterious death.īack to the main Watchmen character page. That is to say, the Court will have to decide the state-secrets issue in the case, regardless of whether Zubaydah provides a sworn declaration to Polish prosecutors.The only non-government superhero still active as of the beginning of the book, Rorschach is a ruthless, disturbed vigilante who believes the world to be falling apart around him. Such details would have been kept from him.
I continue to believe it is doubtful, to say the least, that he can give reliable testimony on those subjects. The main objective of Zubaydah’s lawsuit is to help the Polish authorities establish when Zubaydah was in Poland (assuming that he was, as is highly likely) and who subjected him to “enhanced” interrogation tactics there 18 years ago. Fletcher cautioned that, while the terrorist would now be permitted to “describe his treatment while in CIA custody”the government reserved the right to redact “information that could prejudice the security of the United States.” The acting SG did not speculate on what type of information that could be, but surely the Justice Department is not going to permit, through the Zubaydah backdoor, the dissemination of information the government would be entitled to withhold via the state-secrets privilege.Īs I explained last week, I doubt there is much chance that Zubaydah has such information. The matter has apparently lain dormant until the Court raised it last week. (The MLAT permits each country to decline to produce information on national-security grounds.) In 2015, after years of inter-governmental discussions, our government finally denied the request under the terms of the bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. The Justice Department explained that, a decade ago, Polish authorities began seeking assistance from our government “to facilitate Abu Zubaydah’s testimony about his allegation” of forcible interrogation. On Friday, Fletcher sent the Court a letter agreeing to permit Zubaydah to pen a declaration that could be transmitted from Guantanamo Bay, where he has been in custody since 2006, to Polish prosecutors. Justice Neil Gorsuch, in particular, seemed exasperated by indications that this had not been considered, seeing it as a potential “off-ramp” that would obviate the need for the Court to decide the state-secrets question.Īcting SG Fletcher committed that the Justice Department would huddle and get back to the Court.
The Justice Department has made a strong case that it has properly invoked the state-secrets privilege to forfend the testimony of the CIA contractors.Īs I recounted, during last week’s argument, a number of the justices pressed the Biden Justice Department’s acting solicitor general, Brian Fletcher, on whether the government had thought about allowing Zubaydah himself to testify. to disclose classified information tying the interrogation tactics (about which much has already been publicly acknowledged) to Poland and its intelligence operatives in the relevant time frame. Zubaydah’s lawsuit is an effort to force the U.S. The narrow issue before the Court is the application of the state-secrets privilege, which allows the government to decline disclosures detrimental to national security, including the compromise of intelligence cooperation between nations, on which our defense often depends.įollowing up on a 2014 ruling by a European human-rights court, which found that Zubaydah was subjected to torture, Polish authorities are investigating.
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