The two psychologists whose company made more than $80 million helping draw up the CIA's interrogation-torture program were sued Tuesday by three former war-on-terror US detainees who claim they were waterboarded, forced into tiny boxes, starved, chained, deprived of sleep, and beaten while naked.
The suit names James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were inspired by psychological work on dogs. Their work centered on a state of "learned helplessness" from ongoing mental and physical abuse that they believed would help interrogators coerce confessions out of detainees. Their company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates of Spokane, Washington, was contracted in 2001 after the authorities found literature in a suspected terrorist's apartment in England discussing how to defeat interrogation. But this contract ended in 2009, when President Barack Obama signed an executive order terminating what was labeled as an "enhanced interrogation program."
"These psychologists devised and supervised an experiment to degrade human beings and break their bodies and minds," said Dror Ladin, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney. "It was cruel and unethical, and it violated a prohibition against human experimentation that has been in place since World War II." The suit accuses them of personally taking part in the torture and of overseeing the torture program's implementation.
The suit is the first following the government's December release of the "torture report" that questioned whether the program—which included 119 detainees in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks—actually culled valuable intelligence. The lawsuit follows a slew of others that had targeted high-ranking US government officials about the torture program. Previous suits largely went nowhere.
The ACLU is representing two men who say they were tortured in CIA custody and the family of a third man who the ACLU says died in custody.
"The terrible torture I suffered at the hands of the CIA still haunts me. I still have flashbacks, but I’ve learned to deal with them with a psychologist who tries to help people, not hurt them," plaintiff Suleiman Abdullah Salim said in a statement.
One fisherman from Tanzania says he was abducted in Mogadishu in 2003 and tortured at various CIA black sites. He added: "This lawsuit is about achieving justice. No person should ever have to endure the horrors that these two men inflicted."
So far, Jessen and Mitchell have been mum on the lawsuit. Last year, however, Mitchell decried the Senate's torture report as a "partisan pile of bullshit."
The lawsuit, meanwhile, comes two months after the American Psychological Association approved a ban on psychologists' involvement in national security interrogations.
An APA investigation (PDF) discovered psychologists worked with the CIA to help silence dissent over harsh interrogation tactics being employed by the President George W. Bush administration. The report found that APA officials colluded with military officials to adopt APA ethics rules in order to allow psychologists to be a part of torturous interrogations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on US soil. Psychologists' involvement in torturous interrogations aided the administration's claims that the techniques were legal. Having psychologists involved helped the Justice Department draw up secret legal opinions saying that harsh interrogations were OK—and not torture—since health officials were taking part.
Regarding Tuesday's lawsuit, the law the plaintiffs are invoking is the Alien Tort Statute. The ACLU claims this legislation allows federal lawsuits "for gross human rights violations—for their commission of torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes."
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