Advocates of CIA Torture Victims Demand: 'Charge Them, Or Let Them Go'

In the wake of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s bombshell report last week, advocates for those who were victims of the CIA’s brutal torture program have taken up a renewed call: “Charge them or let them go.”

In a piece published on Monday, Helen Duffy, attorney for Abu Zubaydah, who was held and tortured at a CIA black site in Poland and is now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, argues that since the rendition and torture of detainees has now been brought to light, it’s time for “truth, justice, and accountability.”

“It is time for victims of rendition such as Abu Zubaydah to be brought within the legal framework, to be either tried or released, to have the wrongs again them redressed, and for those responsible to be held to account,” Duffy writes.

According to Duffy, there are over 1,000 references to Zubaydah in the so-called torture report and, as the “first victim of the CIA’s detention program,” he is “the only prisoner known to have been subject to all” of the CIA’s torture techniques.

And despite having allegations of being “the third or fourth man in al-Qaeda” now publicly dismissed, Zubaydah continues to be held with no criminal charges, no trial, and no plan for trial. Instead, the CIA, as noted in the report, asked that he “remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

The Senate report acknowledges that the CIA knew of “at least 26” CIA prisoners who were “wrongfully held,” including an “intellectually challenged man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage.” And “due to poor CIA record keeping,” the report notes, “all full accounting of how many specific CIA detainees were held and how they were specifically treated while in custody may never be known.”

Advocates for Guantanamo detainee and torture victim Shaker Aamer on Monday published an open letter in the Daily Mail calling for the British resident, who was one of the 55 prisoners cleared for release by an earlier Obama task force, to be freed.

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