By Eric Lewis

LONDON - The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has released a report which methodically documents multiple grave breaches of treaties and bedrock international norms by the United States, including those forbidding torture, degrading treatment, arbitrary detention, and discrimination based upon religion or nationality, writes Eric Lewis in he London Independent.

The report concerns our client, Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. Mr Zubaydah was shot and captured in March 2002, waterboarded 83 times, held in boxes the size of coffins and smaller, administered forced enemas, deprived of food, clothing, and necessary medical attention, and subjected to sexual violence, among other cruelties dreamed up by people working for the CIA in the wake of September 11.

After one waterboarding, he had to be resuscitated. This was not the kind of evidence-based intelligence gathering so sorely needed in the face of the terrorism threat – rather, it was the brutal fumbling of amateurs using Mr Zubaydah as a guinea pig to win government contracts to interrogate the hundreds of captured detainees captured in the so-called war on terror.

These methods were approved at the highest levels of the US Government. In 2008, the US government conceded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaida. T

he United States had to admit it had gotten it wrong, after six years of torture. Today, Abu Zubaydah remains at Guantanamo, never tried or charged, and in his twenty-second year of captivity.