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Prosecution of US psychologists who ran CIA torture program moves a step closer

BMJ 2016; 353 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i2454 (Published 28 April 2016) Cite this as: BMJ 2016;353:i2454
  1. Owen Dyer

Two psychologists who designed and managed the now defunct torture program of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may be sued by their victims after a federal judge allowed the case to move forward.

James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen—former employees of the US Air Force Survival School—conducted dozens of torture sessions. The company they formed, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, hired and deployed 60 private interrogators and received over $81 million in payments from the US government.1 The incoming Obama administration ended their contract in 2009.

Mitchell and Jessen are being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of three victims, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, who were tortured using their methods. None of the three were ever charged or accused of any crime. They seek redress under the Alien Tort Statute for the psychologists’commission of torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes.

Until now, no lawsuit against accused torturers had been allowed to proceed in the United States, as the Justice Department blocked previous cases by invoking “state secrets privilege.” But the government’s submission in Salim v. Mitchell said that it would be open to the case proceeding if the identity of CIA operatives could be protected.

The psychologists’ tried to have the case thrown out but US District Court senior judge, Justin Quackenbush, rejected their arguments that they were immune from lawsuits as government contractors, and that the case was a “political question” for the executive and legislative branches to decide.

“Thanks to this unprecedented ruling, CIA victims will be able to call their torturers to account in court for the first time,” said ACLU attorney, Dror Ladin, who represented the victims.

Gul Rahman, an elderly farmer whose seizure the CIA later described as a case of mistaken identity, died of hypothermia after being shackled undressed on a concrete floor in the CIA’s then secret Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan in 2002. He had also been beaten, waterboarded, starved, hung from his arms by chains, and forced into a three foot by three foot box.

According to the report on the CIA’s interrogation program by the Senate’s select committee on intelligence, Jessen participated in the torture of Rahman and left Salt Pit just hours before his death, recommending that “enhanced interrogation” methods be extended to more prisoners held there.2

The Senate’s report found that the two psychologists “played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management” of the torture program, and had played a key role in persuading the CIA to adopt torture in the first place. The report described them by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert for Mitchell and Hammond Dunbar for Jessen, but they were later widely identified in the media.

The ACLU is seeking at least $75 000 in compensation for each of the three men, plus punitive damages.

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