In what lawyers are calling an unprecedented stance, the U.S. Department of Justice has indicated that it will not try to get a lawsuit dismissed regarding the CIA’s torture-tainted interrogations. The suit was filed last October by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two victims of the program. In the past, the DOJ has argued that the very existence of the program is too secret to talk about in open court and judges have gone along with it. Eric Tucker at the Associated Press reports:
The Justice Department has signaled that it won't try to block a lawsuit arising from the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques, leaving the door open for a court challenge over tactics that have since been discontinued and widely discredited. [...]
"The government is actually going to show up at the hearing instead of trying to shut it down," said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case. "It's going to be suggesting procedures that might allow the case to go forward."
That’s good news. But, of course, after a few hours or days in court the DOJ might try to return to its old ways in the matter.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in October 2015 on behalf of three men who were tortured in accordance with a program designed by two CIA contractors, James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen. In the 525-page summary of the still-unreleased 6,000-page Senate torture report, these psychologists were identified by their pseudonyms: Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar. The pair were not only the architects of the interrogation methods, but also operated and assessed them. DOJ lawyers approved these torture techniques. The CIA paid the men and their company tens of millions of dollars.
In 2008, when activists were first pushing details of these crimes into public view—but before the names of these two guys had become known—I wrote:
What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that medical personnel and psychologists violated the most basic ethics of their professions—Do No Harm—by participating in and helping to design "enhanced" interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory and sleep deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part, psychologists "reverse-engineered" the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program—designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture—as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives.
Let me repeat that. Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors' efforts to break them down was "reverse-engineered" as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and "black sites" run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Talk about becoming the enemy.
The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the estate of the late Gul Rahman, who died as a result of his torture. The three were tortured and experimented on in accordance with Mitchell and Jessen’s guidelines. Among other things, they were beaten, starved, doused with water, forced to remain naked for long periods, and subjected to sleep deprivation—all designed to break their will. The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Statute “for their commission of torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes.”
The total of known victims of these crimes was tallied in the Senate torture report at 119.
In an interview with Vice last year, Mitchell said:
“I would like the American people to look at this from my perspective,” Mitchell said. “At a time when America was under attack, I was asked to take on a task that could potentially save thousands of lives. I was briefed about pending attacks in the wake of 9/11, I was told that [President George W. Bush] had authorized my action, I was told that the highest law enforcement office in the land had judged those actions to be legal, I was told that the intelligence committees in Congress had been briefed.”
“I was told for years that my activities had saved lives and prevented attacks,” he said. “And now I’m being denigrated by some of the very people who pushed me to use harsher measures.”
Neither of these guys should be off the hook for what they did. But, like just about always, the top dogs—the ones who actually authorized these crimes, including pushing for even “harsher measures”—face neither lawsuits nor, of course, prison time. Instead, they’re still publishing books, getting fat fees for speaking engagements, being asked by television interviewers their opinions of U.S. foreign policy, and enjoying their leisure while the victims suffer from PTSD and nightmares engendered by their experience.