“They dragged him outside, cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape,” John “Bruce” Jessen wrote of the interrogation of a detainee named Gul Rahman in 2003 memo to CIA officials months after Rahman was found dead in his unheated cell. “They covered his head with a hood and ran him up and down a long corridor adjacent to his cell. They slapped him and punched him several times.”
Rahman died from “suspected hypothermia” after he was “held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor” in his unheated cell according to documents declassified through the Senate Intelligence Committee’s so-called “torture report” last December. An autopsy confirmed that he likely froze to death.
Along with two other former detainees who were never formally charged, Rahman’s family is suing the two psychologists believed to be the “architects” of the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. The case was filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against Jessen and James E. Mitchell who designed the CIA’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, isolation, and stress positions and oversaw them from 2002 until 2009, when President Obama ended the program.
“The CIA program violated not only international and U.S. prohibitions on torture — it also violated the well-established ban on non-consensual human experimentation,” the ACLU said in a statement. “Mitchell and Jessen, however, were undeterred by law, ethics, or the lessons of history.”
“Defendants Mitchell and Jessen are liable because they directly violated these prohibitions while acting under color of law,” according to the complaint filed by the ACLU.
The ACLU has accused the two psychologists of torture, human experimentation, and war crimes for their roles in developing the secret program which it believes to have been illegal, even though it was authorized by government officials at the time.
It’s unclear how the psychologists, both of whom are Air Force veterans, came to consult for the CIA. The Senate report states that the CIA did not seek them out “after a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques; rather, [they] played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy.”
The CIA awarded $81 million in contracts to Mitchell and Jessen Associates, a Spokane-based company that the two founded. Each of them are reported to have earned about $1,800 a day for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which only they were approved to employ.
Mitchell admitted to VICE news that he was involved in the “interrogation” of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or KSM for short, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
“Yes, I waterboarded KSM,” he said. “I was part of a larger team that waterboarded a small number of detainees.”
“The whole point of the waterboard was to induce fear and panic,” Mitchell added. “We didn’t think [detainees were] going to provide actionable intelligence in a state of fear and panic.”
The questioning was supposed to come after the waterboarding concluded.
According to declassified documents which refer to Mitchell and Jessen with pseudonyms, the techniques they developed were based on the notion that “individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events.” This state of “learned helplessness” underpinned the torture techniques developed by the psychologists.
But, as declassified documents admit, “Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of [al Qaeda], a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise.”
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an advocacy organization that has called for an end to torture, welcomed the lawsuit against Mitchell and Jessen.
“These two psychologists developed an experimental torture program based on brutality and junk science, and sold it to the CIA for $81 million,” Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress. “This lawsuit will hopefully provide greater transparency and some measure of relief to the victims, but the United States still has an obligation to investigate and prosecute these crimes.”
Mitchell has said that his work has been mischaracterized by the “torture report,” which he has called “a partisan pile of bullshit.”
The report did not include the concerns he raised about “abuses” and “unauthorized techniques,” the now-retired psychologist told VICE.
But he has also said that the development of the CIA’s now defunct torture program should be considered within the context that it originated in.
“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.”