Historic Settlement Reached on Behalf of CIA
Torture Victims
By Alex
Emmons
August
18, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Two victims of the CIA’s torture program have
reached a historic legal settlement with the
contract psychologists who designed and helped
implement it. The U.S. government has never
publicly compensated any of the men tortured in
CIA custody, and this legal settlement — the
terms of which are confidential — is the first
of its kind.
Under former presidents George W. Bush and
Barack Obama, the Justice Department repeatedly
moved to block lawsuits at their early stages,
arguing that court cases about government
torture in clandestine prisons would reveal
state secrets. In 2015, however, the American
Civil Liberties Union filed
suit against
James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two
psychologists the CIA paid to create torture
techniques.
The lawsuit argued that those techniques were
later used on the plaintiffs in the case —
Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud,
who had been tortured in CIA custody before
being released without charges, as well as the
family of a third man, Gul Rahman, who was
tortured to death
in U.S. custody in 2002.
After
overcoming multiple government attempts
to dismiss the case, the suit was set to go to
trial Sept. 5. Today, the ACLU announced the
last-minute settlement. Because the settlement
mandates confidentiality, lawyers for the ACLU
declined to discuss the terms with The
Intercept.
“Every
previous case involving the CIA torture program
was shut down before it even began,” said Dror
Ladin, an ACLU attorney. “But our clients
prevailed over three separate attempts to
dismiss their claims, were able to force top CIA
officials to answer questions under oath, and
secured a first-of-its-kind settlement.”
Ben Soud told
the New York Times: “I feel that justice has
been served. Our goal from the beginning was
justice and for the people to know what happened
in this black hole that was run by the C.I.A.’s
offices.”
As part of the settlement, the plaintiffs and
defendants released a
joint statement admitting
that Salim and Ben Soud were subject to
“coercive methods,” and that Mitchell and Jessen
had “contemplated the use of specific coercive
methods to interrogate certain detainees.” In
the statement, Mitchell and Jessen maintain that
they had no direct knowledge or involvement in
the plaintiffs’ interrogations.
As the case had progressed, Mitchell and Jessen
maintained that they were not the architects of
the program, and that they were merely following
government orders. In a bizarre legal defense,
the psychologists’ lawyers compared their
clients to the contractors who supplied the
Nazis with Zyklon B, the poison gas used to
murder millions of Jews and others during the
Holocaust.
Senate investigators
found that
Mitchell and Jessen were intimately involved in
the program’s formation, and even personally
waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in
CIA custody. Investigators also found that the
psychologists later formed their own company to
consult with the CIA, which was paid $81 million
before the program was shut down in 2009.
In an
opinion to deny a motion of summary judgment
last week, Judge Justin Quackenbush dismissed
Mitchell and Jessen’s claim that they were not
the creators. “It is not credible to argue
Defendants were paid $80 million for suggesting
some techniques the Air Force … already knew
about,” Quackenbush said. “It is also undisputed
that defendants did not merely suggest
[‘enhanced interrogation techniques’], they
actually applied EITs to Zubaydah, interrogated
Rahman, and participated in the program for
several years.”
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According to the original lawsuit,
Salim and Ben Soud were both subjected to
beatings, starvation, stress positions,
confinement in coffin-like boxes, and various
forms of water torture. Both had suffered
lasting physical and psychological damage. In
November 2002, Rahman was stripped naked,
beaten, immersed in cold water, and put in an
isolation cell overnight, where he died from
hypothermia.
Although the government was not a defendant in
the case, Mitchell and Jessen likely had access
to CIA coffers to cover their legal fees. In
2013, Senate investigators
found that
Mitchell and Jessen had signed a
multimillion-dollar indemnification contract
with the CIA, saying that the government would
foot their legal bills through 2021 if they were
ever sued or prosecuted.
After Obama shut down the CIA’s torture program
in 2009, his administration was
widely criticized
by human rights groups, who argued that the
administration’s failure to prosecute officials
involved in the program opened the door for
future administrations to ignore the law and
practice torture again.
This
article was first published by
The Intercept
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
