WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear the U.S. government’s bid to prevent two former CIA contractors from being questioned in a criminal investigation in Poland over their role in interrogating a suspected high-ranking al Qaeda figure who was repeatedly subjected to waterboarding.
The justices will take up the government’s appeal of a lower court ruling that Central Intelligence Agency contractors James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen could be subpoenaed under a U.S. law that allows federal courts to enforce a request for testimony or other evidence for a foreign legal proceeding.
The case centers on Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian man who was captured in 2002 Pakistan and has been held by the United States since then without charges, spending the past nearly 15 years as a detainee at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
