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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will wrestle with the limits of the government state secrets privilege in a high-stakes case brought by the first al-Qaida suspect detained and harshly interrogated at a CIA “black site” after Sept. 11, 2001.

Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, spent 11 days in a coffin-size confinement box and was subjected to “walling, attention grasps, slapping, facial holds, stress positions and sleep deprivation,” according to a declassified 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report.

He wants the U.S. government to publicly confirm that Poland was one of the locations of his interrogation and allow depositions of two CIA contractors involved with his treatment through the agency’s controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program, also known as the “torture program.”

Zubaydah and his legal team said the information is critical to a case they are pursuing overseas against Polish government officials for alleged complicity in his treatment.

The Biden administration said in court documents that revealing the information would “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

“We have a confrontation in this case between openness and secrecy — major principles that have so corrosively confronted one another during this entire era of modern American history,” said University of Chicago law professor and legal historian Farah Peterson.

Zubaydah, 50, has been detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without charge since 2006. For years, the government asserted that he was a plotter in the 9/11 attacks, but officials later acknowledged that he was not tied to the operation, according to the 2014 report.

Today, the Biden administration calls Zubaydah “an associate and longtime terrorist ally of Osama bin Laden.” His attorneys insist “none of these allegations has support in any CIA record.”

While many details of Zubaydah’s treatment in U.S. custody have been public for years — published in declassified congressional documents, media reports and other outside investigations — the American government has never formally confirmed, nor denied, the existence of a black site in Poland or that Zubaydah was held there for five months between 2002 and 2003.

The European Court of Human Rights, independent investigations by international advocacy groups and several former top Polish officials have each pointed to the existence of a CIA site in Poland and alleged that Zubaydah was held there.

“It’s [about] protecting whether the [U.S.] government has any official confirmation of what foreign country does, or does not, cooperate with them,” said Beth Brinkmann, a former deputy assistant attorney general for the Obama administration, at a recent event at William & Mary Law School. “There’s an interesting government interest in the government saying something and confirming something.”

“It might have a chilling effect on other countries being willing to cooperate with us if they know it might come out,” added Andrew Pincus, a Yale Law School professor, at the same event.

Zubaydah’s attorneys argue that because so many details of the CIA program are widely known, the government’s blanket assertion of the state secrets privilege is too broad and illegal.

“The two former CIA contractors who devised and implemented the torture program … have twice testified under oath about what they saw, heard and did at various black sites, including what they did to Abu Zubaydah and some of what they observed at the black site at issue in this litigation,” they wrote in court documents. “It is undisputed that this testimony contains no state secrets.”

Lower courts have split over the subpoenas for evidence in Zubaydah’s case. A federal district court sided with the government, but the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision.

“The district court erred in quashing the subpoenas in toto rather than attempting to disentangle nonprivileged from privileged information,” the panel wrote.

The Supreme Court will now parse whether sensitive information already in the public domain can be still subject to the state secrets privilege and to what extent information from government contractors may be protected for national security concerns.

A decision in favor of Zubaydah could help him expose more information about the now-defunct, secretive CIA program and advance his case against Polish officials overseas. A decision siding with the U.S. government could bolster the power of the state secrets privilege and limit future attempts at exposure of classified information related to national security.

The CIA did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the case.

Several family members of 9/11 victims have weighed in on the case at the Supreme Court in support of Zubaydah.

“The arc of the moral universe has been twisted and bent over the last 20 years, with justice sadly eluding both the families of the 9/11 dead and the accused, who were, like Mr. Zubaydah, tortured at government black sites,” said Adele Welty, the mother of New York City firefighter Timothy Welty, who was killed in the attack. “In the interest of justice so long denied, we implore the government to separate properly classified information from unclassified and release all relevant documents.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Asked last week what the biggest sticking points were in the ongoing negotiations over the partisan budget reconciliation bill, California Rep. Ro Khanna, a member of the progressive caucus, texted ABC News one word: “climate.”

In television interviews since, several other progressive leaders have also been quick to underscore their commitment to the climate-related provisions in the sweeping budget package, suggesting the issues are top of mind as debate continues with key holdouts Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Without Republican support around the budget proposals, Democrats cannot afford to lose either vote.

Although the White House is eager to strike a deal on the budget bill, the upcoming United National Climate Change Conference in Glasglow, Scotland, at the end of the month is adding pressure for the president to deliver on climate change.

In his recent public remarks to both domestic and foreign audiences, President Joe Biden has not only outlined bold benchmarks for dramatically reducing the United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on fossil fuels over the next 10 years, but he has also leaned on other nations to up their commitments, too.

“The president cannot show up in Glasgow empty-handed,” Jamal Raad, co-founder and executive director of climate change advocacy group Evergreen Action, told ABC News. “The current budget reconciliation package includes major pieces of legislation that will drive down emissions and let us be taken seriously on the global stage.”

But Manchin has expressed skepticism around some of the energy proposals, including new tax incentives for renewable energy production and disincentives for utility companies that do not accelerate a transition to cleaner energy sources. From a state with deep roots in coal, Manchin has repeatedly indicated he is reluctant to support measures viewed as punishing fossil fuels.

On CNN’s State of the Union last month, Manchin expressed his support for many, if not all, of the social programs outlined in the current budget proposal, but when pressed on the climate and carbon emissions proposal he said, “The [energy] transition is happening. Now they’re wanting to pay companies to do what they’re already doing. Makes no sense to me at all for us to take billions of dollars and pay utilities for what they’re going to do as the market transitions.”

In a document obtained by ABC News showing negotiations on the budget from over the summer, Manchin also listed that he was not in favor of cutting subsidies for fossil fuels if energy companies were going to be given tax credits for the production of renewable energies.

Biden campaigned on eliminating tax subsidies for fossil fuel companies, and when asked about it by ABC News on Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said ending them was still the White House’s goal.

The president’s initial proposals for large-scale government spending to foster renewable energy production were scrapped and scaled back to pass the bipartisan infrastructure deal in the Senate in early August. Progressives were told at the time that many of the ideas would be salvaged and included in the partisan budget reconciliation package.

Currently, the budget includes over $300 billion in proposed clean energy tax credits intended to support energy companies’ work to ramp up the production of renewables, cleaner cars and greener buildings; incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles; fees and stricter rules around methane leaks; and $150 billion for a Clean Electricity Performance Program designed to incentivize utility companies to supply at least 4% more clean energy year over year with the target of reaching 80% zero-emission electricity nationwide by 2030.

Speaking to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation, progressive Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Sunday the climate provisions in the budget package were non-negotiable to her. She described a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a “code red for humanity.”

“I think some of the climate provisions that we have, we cannot afford to increase carbon or just fossil fuel emissions at this time. That is simply the science. That is not something we can kick down the line,” Ocasio-Cortez told Brennan.

“You’re going to run right into Sen. Joe Manchin on those issues though, you know that,” Brennan replied to Ocasio-Cortez, and the congresswoman did not disagree.

“Yes, and I think Sen. Manchin is going to run to the science,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, argued that on the issue of fighting climate change, the top-line spending totals for the entire budget package were probably too small.

“When we especially talk about the crisis of climate change, and the need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, the $6 trillion that I had originally proposed was probably too little, $3.5 trillion should be a minimum,” Sanders told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Beyond climate provisions, the budget also includes funding for new social programs like universal pre-K, paid medical leave and free community college.

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