Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 29, 2016 8:57 am

Lawsuit Aims to Hold 2 Contractors Accountable for C.I.A. Torture
By SHERI FINK and JAMES RISENNOV. 27, 2016
Image
Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian man and a former detainee by the C.I.A., is a plaintiff in a lawsuit focusing on C.I.A. interrogations now likened to torture. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Nearly 15 years after the United States adopted a program to interrogate terrorism suspects using techniques now widely considered to be torture, no one involved in helping craft it has been held legally accountable. Even as President Obama acknowledged that the United States “tortured some folks,” his administration declined to prosecute any government officials.

But now, one lawsuit has gone further than any other in American courts to fix blame. The suit, filed in October 2015 in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., by two former detainees in C.I.A. secret prisons and the representative of a third who died in custody, centers on two contractors, psychologists who were hired by the agency to help devise and run the program.

One of them, James E. Mitchell, has written a book to be released Tuesday about his involvement in the program. In the book, he argues that he acted with government permission and that he and Bruce Jessen, the other psychologist and his co-defendant in the lawsuit, received medals from the C.I.A.

Legal experts say the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump could force the case’s dismissal on national security grounds. Deciding whether to invoke the so-called state secrets privilege over evidence requested in the lawsuit could represent the new president’s first chance to weigh in on the issue of torture. Mr. Trump has endorsed the effectiveness of torture and said he would bring back waterboarding, though it is not clear now that he intends to do so.


Lawyers for Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have clashed with the Justice Department over what classified evidence is needed to defend against the suit’s allegations that the men “designed, implemented, and personally administered an experimental torture program.”

Last month, despite United States government opposition, the court approved the defendants’ request for oral depositions of John Rizzo, a former C.I.A. acting general counsel, and José Rodriguez, the former chief of the agency’s clandestine spy service who also headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

Dr. Mitchell was first publicly identified as one of the architects of the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation” program nearly a decade ago, and has given some news media interviews, but is now providing a more detailed account of his involvement. His book, “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America” (Crown Forum), was written with Bill Harlow, a former C.I.A. spokesman. It was reviewed by the agency before release. (The New York Times obtained a copy of the book before its publication date.)

In the book, Dr. Mitchell alleges that harsh interrogation techniques he devised and carried out, based on those he used as an Air Force trainer in survival schools to prepare airmen if they became prisoners of war, protected the detainees from even worse abuse by the C.I.A.

Dr. Mitchell wrote that he and Dr. Jessen sequestered prisoners in closed boxes, forced them to hold painful positions for hours and prevented them from sleeping for days. He also takes credit for suggesting and implementing waterboarding — covering a detainee’s face with a cloth and pouring water over it to simulate the sensation of drowning — among other now-banned techniques. “Although they were unpleasant, their use protected detainees from being subjected to unproven and perhaps harsher techniques made up on the fly that could have been much worse,” he wrote. C.I.A. officers, he added, “had already decided to get rough.”

Mr. Obama declined to open a broad inquiry into the treatment of terrorism suspects, saying as president-elect that the nation needed to “look forward.” He did not rule out prosecuting those who went beyond techniques authorized by the Justice Department, but no one has been charged with those offenses under his watch. During the George W. Bush administration, a C.I.A. contractor was convicted in the death of an Afghan detainee at an American military base in Afghanistan.

Henry F. Schuelke, a Washington lawyer with the firm Blank Rome, who represents Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said that he believed his clients “were left holding the bag” while C.I.A. officials involved in the program have been protected from the lawsuit. “The government and its officers, namely many of the C.I.A. officers, enjoy sovereign immunity,” Mr. Schuelke said in an interview.

Image

Gul Rahman, an Afghan captured in November 2002, was found dead in a secret C.I.A. prison. A representative of his estate is a party to the lawsuit against the two C.I.A. contractors. Credit Habib Rahman, vis Associated Press
Mr. Schuelke and colleagues have argued in court that the senior United States District Court judge, Justin L. Quackenbush, should dismiss the case because, among other reasons, “sovereign immunity” extended to their clients, who were acting on the government’s behalf. But the judge denied the motion and the case has proceeded under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners to sue in United States court for violations of their human rights.

If the former detainees are successful, it would be the first time a United States civilian court has held individuals accountable for their role in developing counterterrorism policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “All of the other cases have been thrown out on procedural grounds,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall Law School. “If this is successful, it could pave the way for other torture victims to seek redress.” Still, some lawyers say it could be difficult for the plaintiffs to prevail.

The case has proceeded in large part because the psychologists’ role in the program has already been documented, particularly in the declassified executive summary of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the interrogation program released in 2014. While the Justice Department has fought to restrict the scope of sensitive information that it has been asked to produce in the case, it has thus far not asserted the state secrets privilege, a broad power to protect national security that could effectively shut down the suit. That could change, analysts say, under the Justice Department in the Trump administration. Representatives for Mr. Trump did not reply to requests for comment on the case, scheduled for trial in June 2017.

Lawyers for the detainees said they had no need for classified information. “There are dramatically more details in the public record about what the C.I.A. and the psychologists did,” said Steven Watt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Now, any attempt to argue that torture is a state secret would be a transparent attempt to evade accountability.”

But lawyers for the psychologists contend they require access to secret information to prepare an adequate defense. In his book, Dr. Mitchell, who had been identified years before the Senate Intelligence Committee report and had formed a company that received $81 million for counterterrorism after Sept. 11 (his personal percentage of profit from the contract “was in the small single digits,” he wrote), nonetheless criticizes Senate staff for allegedly leaking his name, which he said made him a target of terrorist threats. He also says that the techniques he used sometimes caused resistant detainees to cooperate in providing useful intelligence, though the book offers little, if any, new evidence that this is the case.

Dr. Mitchell says Democratic Senate staff “cherry-picked documents to create a misleading narrative” from tens of thousands of pages of the C.I.A.’s own documentation that the committee reviewed over several years while compiling its report. The report concluded that the C.I.A.’s use of harsh interrogation techniques was brutal, costly, ineffective at gathering intelligence and “damaged the United States’ standing in the world.” The C.I.A. did not provide comment on Dr. Mitchell’s book by the time of this article’s publication.

Image

Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan plaintiff, continues to suffer from psychological problems related to his torture. Credit Holly Pickett/The American Civil Liberties Union
In one instance, Dr. Mitchell describes his and Dr. Jessen’s experiences with Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen captured in November 2002 in Peshawar. He was found dead, naked from the waist down on a bare concrete floor in the freezing cold at a secret C.I.A. prison that month, shackled and short-chained to a wall. A representative of Mr. Rahman’s estate is a party to the lawsuit against the two psychologists.

Dr. Mitchell writes that he and Dr. Jessen raised concerns about Mr. Rahman’s well-being before their departure from the site, just days before his death. “To imply that his death was part of the program I was involved with is simply false,” Dr. Mitchell writes.

But a January 2003 C.I.A. memorandum outlining an investigation into Mr. Rahman’s death, released to the A.C.L.U. in late September, found that Dr. Jessen interrogated Mr. Rahman after he was subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” (The document had previously been released, but in a more redacted form without the psychologists’ names.) During that interrogation, Mr. Rahman resisted answering questions and “complained about the violation of his human rights.”

Dr. Jessen also said he “thought it was worth trying” a so-called rough takedown, during which Mr. Rahman was forced out of his cell, secured with Mylar tape after his clothes were cut off, covered with a hood, slapped, punched and then dragged along a dirt floor, the memo said. Mr. Rahman died of what an autopsy suggested was hypothermia.

The other two plaintiffs, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian, and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan, continue to suffer from psychological problems related to their torture, The New York Times has reported.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages. “This case shows that there are consequences for torturing people,” Mr. Watt of the A.C.L.U. said, adding that it “should serve as a warning to anyone thinking about bringing back torture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/la ... rture.html
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 11:27 pm

have been waiting for this for 3 years!

POLITICS
Judge Again Refuses To Throw Away Torture Suit Against CIA Contractors
The trial against the two psychologists accused of developing the George W. Bush-era torture program is set for June.
01/27/2017 09:04 pm ET
Cristian Farias
Legal Affairs Reporter, The Huffington Post

A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for trial in a case against two psychologists contracted by the CIA to develop what became known as the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” deployed abroad in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling last April, U.S. Senior District Judge Justin Quackenbush had already greenlighted the civil lawsuit against the contractors, who are credited with developing the George W. Bush-era torture program detailed in a scathing Senate intelligence report made public in 2014.

But the two men, James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, had once again moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the laws of war don’t allow courts to entertain private lawsuits against “agents” of the United States, let alone by those the government has designated as “enemy combatants.”

Quackenbush dismissed those arguments in a Friday ruling, reasoning that Mitchell and Jessen presented no evidence of an “agency” relationship with the CIA, which is not a party in the case. He also noted that none of the three former detainees who sued them was officially deemed an enemy combatant.

The civil lawsuit ― filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three foreign nationals who were detained, beaten and subjected to inhumane treatment by the CIA ― may now proceed to trial, which the judge scheduled for June.

“There have been so many cases brought by torture victims ... and not one of them has been able to go forward, for shameful reasons,” the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi told reporters in April, the first time the case was allowed to proceed. “This is a very big deal for our clients.”

Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and Gul Rahman were identified as victims in the executive summary of the Senate torture report, and their case against the CIA contractors relies largely on public information from the report. (Rahman died in captivity in 2002.)

In one filing in the case, Mitchell and Jessen all but admitted their role in developing the program, which the CIA hired them to develop as the spy agency secretly swept up detainees with suspected ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda in the frenzy after 9/11. They netted $81 million from the contract.

The Obama administration abandoned the use of torture in 2009, but it also successfully blocked efforts to hold accountable the CIA and government officials who rationalized its use and implemented it during the Bush years.

In his first week in office, President Donald Trump said that torture “absolutely” works and considered bringing it back, but he said Friday that he would allow his defense secretary, James Mattis, to “override” him on the subject.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia ... 65cbbc12da
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Feb 23, 2017 11:23 am

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... tion-trump


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... tion-trump

DoJ moves to prevent CIA official from detailing role in Bush-era torture

Court filing from Trump’s justice department says government ‘anticipates asserting state secrets privilege’ to prevent CIA deputy director Gina Haspel from being deposed

Donald Trump’s justice department has indicated it will seek to prevent the new deputy CIA director from telling a court about her role in Bush-era torture.

In a Wednesday filing in a federal court in Washington state, a team of US attorneys and justice department officials said the government “anticipates asserting the state secrets privilege” to prevent Gina Haspel from being deposed by two former CIA contractor psychologists.

The psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are battling a lawsuit by representatives for four men who seek to hold them liable for torture they experienced in secret CIA prisons. Mitchell and Jessen designed for the CIA the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program that three of the men endured and which killed one of them.

As part of their defense, Mitchell and Jessen are seeking depositions from several former CIA officials, in order to claim that their actions ought to be immunized because they were working in service of the US government.

Haspel, a career CIA officer whom Trump selected as deputy director on 2 February, is among them. Haspel has been linked to torture at a CIA black site in Thailand where Mitchell and Jessen’s first torture test case, a man known as Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded 83 times.

Years later, Haspel implemented an order by her then boss, Jose Rodriguez, to destroy videotapes of torture at the black site, an act confirmed recently by the former acting CIA director Michael Morell, who cleared Haspel of “any wrongdoing” in the tapes destruction.

In a 14 February filing, Mitchell and Jessen’s attorney, Brian Paszamant, said Haspel was “centrally involved” in the events leading to the torture of the men suing the contractors.

But on Wednesday, the justice department objected to Haspel’s deposition, as well as one from a serving CIA officer with experience in the Renditions Group, a person identified only as John Doe.

The justice department’s grounds for asserting the state-secrets privilege, long the target of criticism by human rights lawyers as a legal gambit for covering up wrongdoing under the veil of national security, is that the government “has never officially acknowledged whether either witness had any role in the former detention and interrogation program. To confirm or deny that fact would itself disclose classified information”.

The government asked the court to permit it to formally submit on 8 March its state-secrets argument preventing them and another CIA witness, James Cotsana, from being deposed.

It is believed to be the first assertion of the state secrets privilege under the Trump administration.

Thus far, however, the justice department is not seeking to prevent Haspel’s ex-boss Rodriguez or the former CIA top attorney John Rizzo from giving depositions in the case. Both Rodriguez and Rizzo have publicly discussed their roles in the torture program through published memoirs that went through CIA censorship screening.
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 21, 2017 1:20 pm

Psychologists Open a Window on Brutal C.I.A. Interrogations

A lawsuit filed on behalf of former prisoners reveals new details about a program that used techniques widely viewed as torture.

By SHERI FINK and JAMES RISEN
JUNE 21, 2017
Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program.

He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.

“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a newly disclosed deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”

The two psychologists — whom C.I.A. officials have called architects of the interrogation program, a designation they dispute — are defendants in the only lawsuit that may hold participants accountable for causing harm.

The program has been well documented, but under deposition, with a camera focused on their faces, Drs. Jessen and Mitchell provided new details about the interrogation effort, their roles in it and their rationales. Their accounts were sometimes at odds with their own correspondence at the time, as well as previous portrayals of them by officials and other interrogators as eager participants in the program.


Read the Case Documents
Linked below are PDF transcripts of the depositions and other declassified agency documents.

CIA Cables
CIA Interrogation Plan
James E. Mitchell
John B. Jessen
John Rizzo
Jose Rodriguez
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud
Obaidullah
Suleiman Abdullah Salim


The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of several former prisoners of the Central Intelligence Agency. The New York Times has obtained the video depositions of Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell, as well as those of two former C.I.A. officials and two former detainees. Newly declassified agency documents have also been released in the case.

Revelations about the C.I.A. practices, which were a radical departure for the United States, set off global denunciations and bitter divisions at home. They led to an eventual ban on the techniques and a prohibition by the American Psychological Association against members’ participation in national security interrogations. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report condemned the interrogation techniques as torture and ineffective in providing useful intelligence.

For years, Dr. Mitchell, polished and assertive, has defended the two men’s actions in the press and in a recent book, while Dr. Jessen remained silent. But Dr. Jessen answered questions under oath on Jan. 20, the same day that President Trump was inaugurated. During the election campaign Mr. Trump had pledged to revive the use of torture, including waterboarding, though he later backed off.

The two psychologists argue that the C.I.A., for which they were contractors, controlled the program. But it is difficult to successfully sue agency officials because of government immunity.

Under the agency’s direction, the two men said, they proposed the “enhanced interrogation” techniques — which were then authorized by the Justice Department — applied them and trained others to do so. Their business received $81 million from the agency.


PLAY VIDEO 2:02
Video depositions in a case brought by former C.I.A. detainees give an insight into the almost informal beginnings of the agency's enhanced interrogation programme. Malachy Browne and Natalie Reneau
But in his deposition, Dr. Jessen indicated that the two men had some reservations. “Jim and I didn’t want to continue doing what we were doing,” Dr. Jessen testified. “We tried to get out several times and they needed us, and we — we kept going.”

The outline for the techniques emerged in 2002 when C.I.A. officials asked them to come up with proposals. The techniques were largely adapted from those the psychologists had used to train American soldiers in survival schools to resist brutal interrogations by hostile forces that were violating the laws of war.

“Jim and I went into a cubicle,” Dr. Jessen said. “He sat down at a typewriter and together we wrote out a list.” They thought those techniques — including sensory and sleep deprivation, shackling for hours in uncomfortable positions and waterboarding — would be safer than others the C.I.A. might consider to get resistant detainees to provide information that could help head off another terrorist attack, he said.


Lasting Scars
Articles in this series examine the American legacy of brutal interrogations.


How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

Secret Documents Show a Tortured Prisoner's Descent

Memories of a Secret C.I.A. Prison
Soon after, the C.I.A. asked them to use the techniques to interrogate a terrorism suspect, something with which they had no experience.

“I had been in the military my whole life and — and I was committed to and used to doing what I was ordered to do,” Dr. Jessen said. “That’s the way I considered this circumstance.”

Abu Zubaydah, taken into custody in 2002, was the first detainee to be waterboarded. The United States government believed he was a top leader of Al Qaeda, though it later abandoned that claim.

At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, he provided useful intelligence to F.B.I. agents who questioned him using traditional methods, including rapport-building. But worried that he was holding back information, which the C.I.A. later concluded he never had, agency leaders chose to use extreme physical force to break him.

Drs. Mitchell and Jessen were sent to the jail to carry out the techniques, including waterboarding. Water was poured over a cloth covering Abu Zubaydah’s face to simulate drowning. He underwent the procedure 83 times over a period of days; at one point he was completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising from his mouth, according to the Senate report. A newly declassified August 2002 cable from the prison to headquarters noted: “At the onset of involuntary stomach and leg spasms, subject was again elevated to clear his airway, which was followed by hysterical pleas. Subject was distressed to the level that he was unable to effectively communicate or adequately engage the team.”

AUDIO
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What we’ve learned about the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques from a lawsuit that seeks to hold two psychologists accountable.

ART19
When those at the prison wanted to end the waterboarding sessions as no longer useful, C.I.A. supervisors — including Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center and a witness who testified under oath in the lawsuit — ordered them to continue.

“They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States and that because I had told them to stop, I had lost my nerve and it was going to be my fault if I didn’t continue,” Dr. Jessen testified.

Dr. Mitchell said that the C.I.A. officials told them: “‘You guys have lost your spine.’ I think the word that was actually used is that you guys are pussies. There was going to be another attack in America and the blood of dead civilians are going to be on your hands.”


A plaintiff, Mohamed Ben Soud, drew pictures depicting his treatment in a C.I.A. prison. They included, left, being placed in a wooden box and poked through its holes and, right, being strapped to a wooden board on which he was abused with water. via ACLU
Still, the psychologists’ interrogation team recommended using the aggressive techniques as a “template for future interrogations of high-value captives,” according to an agency cable. The psychologists later subjected two other prisoners — Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — to waterboarding.

In his deposition, Dr. Mitchell, who once said that most people would prefer to have their legs broken than to be waterboarded, disagreed with a lawyer’s reference to the practice as painful. “It sucks, you know. I don’t know that it’s painful,” he said. “I’m using the word distressing.”

Both Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell rejected any notion that men subjected to the harsh techniques suffered any long-term physical or psychological damage. “If they are out there and that happened, then, you know, show me the data,” Dr. Mitchell said. He added that if the techniques were applied as recommended, “my view is, that is so unlikely so as to be impossible.”

But The Times last year found a pattern of long-term psychological damage among dozens of former detainees subjected to brutal treatment by the United States. The men described grappling with depression, anxiety, withdrawal and flashbacks.


Mohamed Ben Soud, a Libyan, was held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Holly Pickett/ACLU
In their depositions, two former prisoners who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit described their torment. Drs. Mitchell and Jessen said they had not interrogated or encountered the two men.

Mohamed Ben Soud, a Libyan, was held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and was subjected to being locked in small boxes, slammed against a wall and doused with buckets of ice water while naked and shackled. He said he still suffered from nightmares, fear, mood swings and other psychological injuries as a result of his captivity.

“It comes to me during my sleep and as if I’m still imprisoned in that horrible place and still shackled,” he said in his deposition, through a translator. “I get the feeling of worry about my future and about the fear that this could happen again.”

Suleiman Salim, a Tanzanian captured in 2003 and also held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan, was beaten, isolated in a dark cell for months, subjected to dousing with water and deprived of sleep. He said he suffered from flashbacks, headaches, sleeplessness and ringing in his ears.

“I don’t feel like being with people, I like being with myself, and I don’t like walking around to see people,” he said in his deposition, also through a translator. “I feel like I’m so weak and I can’t do anything.”


Suleiman Salim, a Tanzanian, was captured in 2003 and held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. He was beaten, isolated in a dark cell for months, subjected to dousing with water and deprived of sleep. Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Dr. Jessen said that after the C.I.A.’s secret detention program became public — it was officially acknowledged by President George W. Bush in 2006, but had been previously described in news reports — he and Dr. Mitchell were asked for guidance about which methods could be eliminated. They also deliberated “damn near every day how we could help our government and not do the things we were doing,” Dr. Jessen said. He said they developed an alternative involving less physical coercion, but never had the chance to put it into practice. He would not provide details because the plans remain classified.

Still, Dr. Mitchell asserted that the current legal limits on interrogation methods were too restrictive, and both men said that some of the physically harsh techniques were useful. “Walling,” in which a prisoner is repeatedly slammed against a flexible plywood wall, was “one of the most effective,” Dr. Jessen said. “It’s discombobulating. It doesn’t hurt you, but it jostles the inner ear, it makes a really loud noise.”

He also described extreme sleep deprivation: “There is a tether anchored to the ceiling in the center of the detention cell. The detainee has handcuffs and they’re attached to the tether in a way that they can’t lie down or rest against a wall. They’re monitored to make sure they don’t get edema if they hang on the cuffs too much.”


Mr. Salim, responding to questions about the same technique, described it as excruciating: “A lot of pain in my arms, a lot of pains in my back and around my waist.”

In his deposition, Dr. Mitchell revealed that he, along with others, urged the C.I.A. to destroy videotapes the agency had made of some interrogations. The destruction of the tapes became the subject of investigations both by the Justice Department and Congress.

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Dr. Mitchell explained his reasoning about the graphic images of waterboarding and other practices: “I thought they were ugly and they would, you know, potentially endanger our lives by putting our pictures out so that the bad guys could see us.”

Both men denied accusations that they evaluated the effectiveness of the methods they promoted. However, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, in a report being released this week, contends that the men and the C.I.A. engaged in unethical experimentation on detainees, which is banned by the Nuremberg Code for health professionals developed after World War II.

The group said the explicit mention of applied research in the psychologists’ contracts with the agency, released recently through the lawsuit, and similar references in recently released C.I.A. cables, indicate that the enhanced interrogation program “was itself an applied research regime and implicitly conceptualized as such by the C.I.A.”


Gul Rahman died in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan in 2002. His estate is a plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. and the Gibbons law firm. Habib Rahman
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Gibbons law firm of Newark brought the lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Salim, Mr. Ben Soud and the estate of a third man, Gul Rahman, who died in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan in 2002, most likely of hypothermia. Dr. Jessen, who participated in the prisoner’s interrogation, said he had asked guards several times to provide clothes and blankets to him.

The case is scheduled for trial on Sept. 5. Last month, both sides asked Judge Justin L. Quackenbush of Federal District Court to rule summarily in their favor. He declined to do so, but did grant the United States government’s request to block the deposition of two additional former C.I.A. officials as witnesses and the release of certain documents requested by Drs. Mitchell and Jessen, on grounds it could harm national security. However, the case was permitted to continue.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... rture.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 30, 2017 6:13 pm


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mD3zVn ... e=youtu.be

The Torturers Speak
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
JUNE 23, 2017

It’s hard to watch the videotaped depositions of the two former military psychologists who, working as independent contractors, designed, oversaw and helped carry out the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees held at C.I.A. black sites in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The men, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, strike a professional pose. Dressed in suits and ties, speaking matter-of-factly, they describe the barbaric acts they and others inflicted on the captives, who were swept up indiscriminately and then waterboarded, slammed into walls, locked in coffins and more — all in the hunt for intelligence that few, if any, of them possessed. One died of apparent hypothermia. Many others were ultimately released without charge.

When pushed to confront the horror and uselessness of what they had done, the psychologists fell back on one of the oldest justifications of wartime. “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do,” Dr. Jessen said. Perhaps, but they were also soldiers whose contracting business was paid more than $81 million.


Still image taken from a video deposition of Dr. James Mitchell.
The Times on Tuesday published the depositions, taken earlier this year in the course of a federal lawsuit brought against Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell by two former detainees and the family of a third who died in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan. The psychologists may be the only two people to face any meaningful legal consequences for their role in one of the darkest periods of recent American history. A federal civil trial is set to start Sept. 5 in Spokane, Wash.


The details of the treatment of dozens of detainees at the hands of American intelligence contractors are by now widely known, yet it is still chilling to watch Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen rationalize their use of techniques that the C.I.A.’s top lawyer at the time called “sadistic and terrifying.”

“I thought he would be uncomfortable,” Dr. Mitchell said of waterboarding, in which torturers simulate the sensation of drowning by pouring water over a cloth covering a person’s face. “It sucks. I don’t know that it’s painful, but it’s distressing.” Dr. Mitchell once said detainees would rather have their legs broken. A 2002 cable described the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, who officials wrongly believed was a leader of Al Qaeda, and who was subjected to the procedure 83 times over a matter of days. “At the onset of involuntary stomach and leg spasms, subject was again elevated to clear his airway, which was followed by hysterical pleas. Subject was distressed to the level that he was unable to effectively communicate or adequately engage the team.”

Mr. Zubaydah did give interrogators key information about the Sept. 11 plot — not as a result of the waterboarding, but in response to traditional interrogation methods. Yet, thinking he might have more, torturers forged ahead with Mr. Zubaydah and with others, confident that physical abuse would lead to actionable intelligence. Some detainees were handcuffed to a bar on the wall so they could not rest or lie down for days at a time. During his own deposition, Jose Rodriguez, a top C.I.A. official who destroyed videotapes of the interrogations because of what he called their “ugly visuals,” compared the abuse to a gym workout. When Suleiman Salim, one of the plaintiffs suing the psychologists, was asked to describe his experience, he broke down in tears.


Even now, the psychologists claim that their techniques, which have been banned, caused no lasting damage. But Mr. Salim, like many other former detainees, still suffers psychological harm — including nightmares, flashbacks, headaches and sleeplessness.

Dr. Jessen admitted to some discomfort with the program he helped devise. “Jim and I didn’t want to continue doing what we were doing,” he said in his deposition. But the pressure from intelligence officials was intense. “They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States and that because I had told them to stop, I had lost my nerve and it was going to be my fault if I didn’t continue.”

The full story of what happened under the torture program may never be made public. Earlier this month, the Trump administration began returning copies of a 2014 Senate classified report on torture to Congress, where it may be locked away for good. Meanwhile, President Trump, with no expertise on torture and its sad history, has at times promised to bring back waterboarding and other techniques banned by President Obama.

Many people bear responsibility for the depravity of the torture program, but most will never suffer any legal consequences. The suit against Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell may be the last opportunity for some accountability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opin ... ation.html
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 26, 2017 9:12 am

DID NOT SEE THAT COMING
CIA’s Mad Torture Scientists: We’re Like Those Who Made Gas For The Nazis
James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen use a novel defense in court: they only gave the agency the tools to abuse detainees, they didn’t do it themselves.

Spencer Ackerman

07.25.17 2:47 PM ET
Usually, and for understandable reasons, the CIA frowns on people comparing it to Nazis, whether the insult comes from random trolls or the president of the United States. Rarer still are Nazi comparisons coming from the CIA’s own contractors.
Vanishingly, once-in-a-lifetime, Halley’s-Comet rare are the times when those CIA contractors will not only compare the agency to Nazis, but themselves to the manufacturers of poison gas used in the Holocaust – and do it in their own defense.
As contractor psychologists for the agency, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played an integral role in designing the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.They personally waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a detainee effectively used as human guinea pig for torture. And the company they subsequently founded to contract with the CIA on the brutal interrogations earned them $81 million, according to the 2014 Senate torture report. Senator Dianne Feinstein called it “a stain on our values and on our history.”

Unlike every senior U.S. official who ordered and implemented the program, Mitchell and Jessen now face civil – though not criminal – liability. Three survivors of the CIA torture program have sued the two contractors in federal court for compensatory damages. They are joined by the estate of Gul Rahman, who died from hypothermia in CIA custody in November 2002 in an undisclosed prison in Afghanistan known as Cobalt. Jessen was present for Rahman’s interrogation.
After failing to convince a federal judge in Washington state to dismiss the suit, attorneys for Mitchell and Jessen have settled on an unexpected argument ahead of a critical Friday court hearing. They’re like contractors to Nazis and other war criminals, attorneys claim, but the sort that war-crimes tribunals have exonerated.
In a recent filing in the case, Mitchell and Jessen’s attorneys portray the two contract psychologists as analogous to those who made the Zyklon B gas used to murder Jews and others in Nazi concentration camps.

Mitchell and Jessen’s lawyers note that in a British military court in 1946, the Zyklon manufacturing company Tesch & Stabenow’s “first gassing technician” was ultimately acquitted. Although the technician, Joachim Drohsin, played “an integral part of the supply and use of the poison gas,” the British court wrote, he was “without influence” and was found not guilty.

“Here,” Mitchell and Jessen’s attorneys argue, “it is undisputed that, as independent contractors serving on a larger interrogation team, Defendants lacked authority to ‘control, prevent or modify’ the CIA’s decision to use [torture] on detainees.”
Since the contractors were unable to make the decision to torture – instead designing torture regimens for the CIA and implementing them – their lawyers contend they are modern-day Drohsins, supplying modern-day Zyklon and advising on its use. (The 1946 court found the owner and second-in-command at the Zyklon manufacturing firm guilty and condemned them to death.)
It is not the only Nazi comparison Mitchell and Jessen roll out in their defense.
The psychologists note that the Nuremberg tribunals acquitted Karl Rasche, a banker who loaned SS head Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Jewish “Final Solution,” large sums of money. The tribunal said the loan was like offering “raw materials” to a “builder of a house that the seller knows will be used for an unlawful purpose,” a point the contractors’ attorneys seized upon.
“By providing a list of pre-existing SERE [survival, evasion, resistance, escape] techniques to the CIA – which had already decided to use an approach on Zubaydah ‘different’ from the FBI’s – Defendants, at most, provided the ‘raw materials,’” Mitchell and Jessen’s attorneys write.

“It is extraordinarily rare for anyone to willingly compare themselves to people who aided and abetted some of the worst crimes in human history,” Dror Levin, an ACLU attorney representing the torture survivors, told The Daily Beast.
At other points in their brief, Mitchell and Jessen contend that the three surviving detainees were too small-time for them to focus on, as the contractors only focused on so-called “HVTs,” or high-value targets. (Though the 2014 Senate torture report recounts in exhaustive detail how the techniques they designed for Abu Zubaydah – from the bodily contortions called “stress positions” to prolonged nudity to days-long sleep deprivations – were used on at least 118 others.)
But they cannot say the same for the now-deceased Gul Rahman. Instead, they have a different exculpation in mind.
“Jessen only applied a single ‘insult slap’ in a non-EIT [enhanced interrogation techniques, a torture euphemism] context to Rahman under the authority of the Chief of Base (“COB”) for Cobalt,” the attorneys write.
On Friday, a judge will hear the opposing sides’ arguments for why the case should or shouldn’t proceed to a full trial. But in their filing, Mitchell and Jessen have already written a new chapter in their own legacy.
“Like Ruehl and Graf in the Nuremberg trials, and Drosihn in Zyklon B, even if Defendants’ played an ‘integral part of the supply and use of the’ EITs (which they did not) this too could not render them liable for the CIA’s alleged ‘criminal use’ on Plaintiffs,” the attorneys write, “as Defendants had no ‘influence’ over the application of EITs on such unknown detainees selected by the CIA.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cias-mad-t ... -the-nazis
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 11, 2018 8:15 pm

Settlement Reached in C.I.A. Torture Case
By SHERI FINKAUG. 17, 2017


Dr. Bruce Jessen, left, and Dr. James Mitchell, psychologists who contracted with the C.I.A.
A settlement in the lawsuit against two psychologists who helped devise the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation program was announced on Thursday, bringing to an end an unusual effort to hold individuals accountable for the techniques the agency adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lawyers for the three plaintiffs in the suit, filed in 2015 in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., said the former prisoners were tortured at secret C.I.A. detention sites. The settlement with the psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, came after a judge last month urged resolving the case before it headed to a jury trial in early September.

The plaintiffs — two former detainees and the family of a third who died in custody — had sought unspecified punitive and compensatory damages. The terms of the settlement are confidential, and it is unclear whether a financial payout was involved. The parties agreed to a joint statement in which the psychologists said that they had advised the C.I.A. and that the plaintiffs had suffered abuses, but that they were not responsible.

In a phone interview, one of the plaintiffs, Mohamed Ben Soud, said through a translator: “I feel that justice has been served. Our goal from the beginning was justice and for people to know what happened in this black hole that was run by the C.I.A.’s offices.”


U.S. By SHERI FINK, MALACHY BROWNE and NATALIE RENEAU 9:28
C.I.A. Torture: Interrogating the Interrogators
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C.I.A. Torture: Interrogating the Interrogators
Two men who proposed interrogation techniques widely viewed as torture are part of a lawsuit filed on behalf of former C.I.A. detainees. Deposition videos, obtained exclusively by The New York Times, reveal new insights into the enhanced interrogation program and the C.I.A. contractors behind it. By SHERI FINK, MALACHY BROWNE and NATALIE RENEAU on Publish Date June 21, 2017. Photo by The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
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Dror Ladin, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the suit, called the case “a historic victory for our clients and for the rule of law.”

The plaintiffs said that Drs. Jessen and Mitchell, former military psychologists, profited from their work as contractors for the C.I.A. The men received up to $1,800 a day and later formed a company that was paid about $81 million to help operate the interrogation program over several years.

Continue reading the main story
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Bob August 18, 2017
These vile shrinks represent a uniquely American form of hypocrisy and moral blight: the well-paid criminal charlatan on the hill.
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Textbook Nuremberg defense. "We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do" -Dr. Jessen, 1st line of video "...I am guilty of having...
Steve Golub August 18, 2017
These absolutely unethical, human rights-abusing quacks should have any professional licences revoked. In addition, what the article leaves...
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The United States government also agreed to indemnify the men and their company, including paying legal fees, judgments and settlements up to $5 million. Some of those funds were used to cover legal bills during Justice Department investigations. As of November 2011, there was close to $4 million left, according to a document made public in the lawsuit.

James T. Smith, the psychologists’ lead counsel, said in a statement that his clients were “public servants whose actions in regard to the interrogation of suspected terrorists were authorized by the U.S. government, legal and done in an effort to protect innocent lives.”

Speaking by phone after the settlement was announced, Dr. Mitchell said he found it “regrettable that one guy died and those other guys were treated badly,” adding: “We had nothing to do with it. We’re not responsible for it. They say we are, but in my view they’re wrong.”

Read the Case Documents
Linked below are PDF transcripts of the depositions and the latest declassified C.I.A. documents.

James E. Mitchell
John B. Jessen
John Rizzo
Jose Rodriguez
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud
Obaidullah
Suleiman Abdullah Salim
CIA Cables
The psychologists produced a memo in 2002 proposing harsh techniques to be used on terrorism suspects thought to be resisting interrogations. The C.I.A. adopted nearly all of these methods, including waterboarding, stuffing prisoners into small boxes, forcing them to hold painful positions for hours and slamming them into flexible walls.

The so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were based on those used in military survival schools to simulate what service members might undergo if captured by regimes violating the laws of war. They were later condemned as illegal under United States and international law and were ultimately banned. The American Psychological Association consequently prohibited its members from participating in national security interrogations.

As a candidate, President Trump said he would bring back waterboarding “and a hell of a lot worse,” but later said he would defer to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s strong opposition — widespread in the military — to torture and prisoner mistreatment.

The case against the psychologists proceeded despite multiple attempts by their lawyers to have it dismissed. They argued that the men acted solely under the authority of the government and were entitled to the same immunity as government officials. The judge, Justin L. Quackenbush, also denied motions by both sides requesting that he rule summarily in their favor before a trial.

Although there will be no public trial, the case — over its nearly two-year course — expanded public knowledge about the C.I.A.’s torture program. Previously secret documents were declassified, including C.I.A. cables from the covert prisons known as black sites. And the two psychologists, along with the former C.I.A. officials Jose Rodriguez and John Rizzo, were subjected to lengthy questioning by opposing lawyers in video depositions. Their sometimes sterile description of the techniques contrasted with the emotional accounts, in separate depositions, of the men who underwent them.

LASTING SCARS
Articles in this series examine the American legacy of brutal interrogations.


How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

Secret Documents Show a Tortured Prisoner's Descent

Memories of a Secret C.I.A. Prison
The plaintiffs and some of their experiences are described in the executive summary of the 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. The report, published in December 2014 and based on a five-year review of over six million pages of documents, lists 38 men known to have been subjected to the techniques in C.I.A. prisons. It denounced the methods as brutal and criticized the C.I.A. for providing false and misleading information to federal officials about the interrogation program’s effectiveness.

The psychologists came into direct contact with only one of the three detainees, Gul Rahman, who died in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan in 2002, probably of hypothermia, according to an agency investigation into his death.

The judge ruled last week that a trial could also proceed on behalf of the two other former prisoners — Mr. Ben Soud and Suleiman Salim — whose lawyers argued that the psychologists had aided and abetted their torture.

Mr. Ben Soud, a Libyan detained by the C.I.A. in 2003 and held in Afghanistan, was locked in small boxes, slammed against a wall and doused with buckets of ice water while naked and shackled. Mr. Salim, a Tanzanian also captured in 2003 and held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan, was beaten, isolated in a dark cell for months, doused with water and deprived of sleep.

The A.C.L.U. and the Gibbons law firm of Newark brought the lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to seek justice in United States courts for violations of their rights under international law or United States treaties.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/c ... ement.html
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby Jerky » Mon Mar 12, 2018 12:21 am

It's an incredibly complex and difficult subject, SLAD. Thank you for collecting all these mainstream and alternative news reports on these little-talked-about figures in our recent history.

J.
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Re: Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 06, 2019 6:41 am

Harrowing Cables Detail How the CIA Tortured Accused 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Jeopardizing the Case Against Him
Daniel DeFraia
September 11 2019, 10:03 a.m.
In March 2003, in a secret CIA prison cell in Poland, a small frog jumped out of a drain and an interrogator caught it.

“No, no,” said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks. “Let it stay.” He asked that the frog be returned to the drain.

Later that day, an unnamed observer included the incident in a CIA cable addressed to “IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR,” calling it “a poignant moment.”
Image

The CIA interrogation program has been well documented. But recently declassified cables, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail interrogators’ attempts to transform detainees into collaborators in the war against Al Qaeda.

The cables chronicle the banal and brutal moments of Mohammed’s so-called enhanced interrogation over a period of almost four weeks in 2003. They display in cold bureaucratic prose the thinking behind torture tactics, including waterboarding, “walling,” and sleep deprivation. And they exhibit a committed belief that enhanced measures always move detainees closer to an imagined breaking point that, once met, force them to produce more accurate information — a belief that the 2014 Senate torture report showed to have been wrong.

“Keep pushing,” a cable urges, “until [Mohammed] reaches his resistance limit, and then exploit his weakness when it occurs.”

Image
The cables were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for records on the interaction between detainees and interrogators Drs. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two contract psychologists who formed a company that was ultimately paid about $81 million to develop and execute the CIA program after 9/11. In May, Mitchell and Jessen were called to testify before a military tribunal trying Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 planners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. If they testify — which Mitchell could do as soon as this month — it will be the first time that the pair are forced to discuss their techniques in a criminal case.

This week, in a military courtroom in Guantánamo Bay, a judge is hearing motions in the case against Mohammed and his four alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. Evidence gathered during Mohammed’s CIA interrogations cannot be used in his trial, which is scheduled to begin in January 2021. Now, a key issue for Mohammed’s defense attorneys is whether information gleaned during FBI interrogations that followed his time at CIA black sites was also tainted by his torture.

In 2005, Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes showing the enhanced interrogation of detainees Abu Zubaydah and alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. With the tapes gone, the cables about Mohammed’s enhanced interrogation constitute one of the few public real-time records to extensively narrate what happened to a “high-value” 9/11 detainee inside an interrogation room.

The cables, some heavily redacted, confirm many findings of the Senate’s torture report. Mitchell, who interrogated Mohammed, criticized the report in his memoir, “Enhanced Interrogation,” writing that neither the report nor its accompanying documents “put you in the room with the action so you get a sense of what was actually going on and why. That’s what I intend to do.”

But Mitchell’s book mostly dodged the agony inside the interrogation room. The cables published here do not.

“We Should Not Rule Out Any Method”

In July 2002, Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s first detainee, was being held in isolation, while the George W. Bush administration determined the legality of coercive tactics. Several weeks earlier, interrogators believed Zubaydah had provided a “revelation” not detailed in the cables. Since then, however, Zubaydah had achieved a series of perceived “victories” that bolstered his “resolve and resistance strategy, thus decreasing the long-term overall effectiveness of the interrogations,” a cable states.

Interrogators concluded that “we must act in a way outside AZ’s expectations and follow through on our threats. Until this point in the interrogations, we have made several threats to AZ while implementing the ‘bad guy’ role,” the cable states. “While the first of these threats facilitated the 19 May ‘revelation,’ each subsequent episode lacked the promised repercussions, a fact that was not lost on AZ.” Enhanced measures were coming.
Image

The CIA’s Legal Group, Counterterrorist Center, identified in the documents as “CTC/LGL,” has “emphasized that we should not/not rule out any method of interrogation whatsoever,” the cable explains, but adds that headquarters “will need to document in advance the legal analysis for such methods, to ensure that our officers are protected.” If the black site team wanted to employ specific enhanced measures that they suspected might not be permitted, they planned to ask then-director of the CIA George Tenet to obtain a formal declination of prosecution from then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

“In short,” the cable concludes, “rule out nothing whatsoever that you believe may be effective; rather, come on back and we will get you the approvals. CTC/LGL officers remain available 24/7 to ensure immediate assistance and documentation on any proposals. … We lawfully may employ methods that even the Israelis may not.”

The Waterboard

The interrogators were convinced that they knew when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was lying.

“When providing answers that were probably truthful, KSM continued his behavior of speaking in a conversational and casual manner,” a March 27, 2003 cable states. “When apparently lying or withholding, KSM continued his earlier pattern of looking down, slowing his answers and speaking pattern, and frequently burping nervously.”

Image
Mohammed lied to his interrogators and, according to the Senate report, the CIA did not always know it. Sometimes, he may also have told the truth.

On March 13, 2003, Mohammed was resigned and anxious, according to one cable. A medical officer had approved “upgraded enhanced measures”: erratic water pours of varying rhythm, timing, and intensity to make the simulated drowning less predictable and more distressing. The fourth session began at 8:40 a.m. and ended nearly an hour later.
Image

“What is the next target in the U.S.?” an interrogator asked.

There was no next target, Mohammed said.

“Subject moaned and blubbered” in between pours, an unnamed psychologist observed.

“What is the plan?” the interrogator asked. “Who are the people? Where are they? What do you have in the U.S.?”

Image
To resist waterboarding, Mohammed held his breath, swallowed water, and, according to a cable, blocked his posterior nasopharynx, a throat cavity behind the nose, letting water run into his nose and out of his mouth. It was a “magic trick,” Mitchell wrote in his memoir. “I was so impressed with how little the reality of being waterboarded seemed to upset him.”

Image
The cables tell a different story.

Enhanced measures were designed to move Mohammed “toward a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness,” a cable states. Rather than engage in a battle of wills with the detainee, interrogators wanted to set Mohammed’s will against itself in a losing battle. Typically during waterboarding, detainees would fail to manage their breathing and emotions. They panicked. They lost. The CIA psychologists called this progress.

However, at times, the cables depict a power struggle between the interrogators and their subject. Mohammed can end the waterboarding. He can talk, but he does not talk. He defeated the waterboard, a proxy for the interrogator, reframing the interrogation not as a rigged test of his own failing will, but as a battle in which a small victory is temporarily possible.

It was an escalating contest. At least once, Mohammed pointed his two index fingers upward as a water pour reached its time limit, which was 40 seconds, according to a 2002 memo from the Department of Justice. In response, interrogators stopped signaling the beginning and end of a pour. Water was redirected “to and around his mouth movements.”

Interrogators believed that “wearing down” Mohammed required erratic “but relatively frequent sessions.” Days later, according to another cable, Mohammed’s “dread of the waterboard has increased so that he whimpers and pleads whenever it is threatened.”

Image
On or around March 18, interrogators made Mohammed choose between the waterboard and sleep deprivation. “Subject immediately turned away from his cell door and appropriately positioned himself in the middle of the room for ‘standing sleep deprivation,’” a cable notes.
Image

Sleep Deprivation

On March 23, at 9 p.m., Mohammed had been subjected to sleep deprivation tactics for 132 hours. He spent most of that time standing, his wrists shackled at or above his head.

He was “only a man,” he had told his interrogators philosophically, “and men break.”

That day, at 30-minute intervals, interrogators entered his cell and demanded information.

“Nothing new,” Mohammed said. At times, he turned “slowly to allow his entire body to be doused” with water “as instructed,” a cable states.

Image
“If I don’t break tomorrow, it will be the next day,” Mohammed told his interrogators.

By March 25, Mohammed was closer to “automatic conformity,” according to a later cable. He wrote and wrote, filling 20 pages. He was finally allowed to sleep, albeit naked and shackled on the floor. After about three weeks and four days, his enhanced interrogation was over.

Image
Image
The Senate report does not explain why Mohammed’s enhanced interrogation ended. But the cables suggest that interrogators thought that Mohammed had entered a new, more compliant phase. “As anticipated, today was a pivotal day for KSM,” a psychologist noted on March 25.

“KSM remains attentive and responsive,” an April assessment states. “He continues to volunteer relevant spontaneous and unsolicited information. His conditioning becomes more effective each day in terms of desired automatic conformity to debriefing preparations as well as his judged level of engagement in the ensuing debriefing dialogue.”

That same month, Mohammed asked how his interrogator viewed his level of cooperation. On a scale of 1 to 100 (with 1 being completely dishonest), KSM registered about 50 or 60, an interrogator said.
Image

This evaluation “distressed” Mohammed, who said “he had something more to tell,” a cable states. He began, in a low, solemn tone, the story of American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan. Mohammed claimed that he had murdered Pearl, offering the confession as evidence that he was “truthful about everything.”
Image

The interrogation team cabled that it “remains vigilant,” believing that Mohammed maintained “some level of deception.” But the team also wrote that Mohammed was not “identifiably” engaging “in overt behaviors of calculated or obvious resistance.”

Out of the Shadows

In April 2008, the CIA program ended, according to the Senate report. But the argument over its utility continued. Former CIA officials wrote op-eds, debated on TV, and published books defending the program. Mitchell wrote his memoir.

“The few of us who were present cannot let others distort history,” Mitchell wrote, criticizing the Senate report and news articles on the interrogation program. Yet he supported Rodriguez’s decision to destroy history — the interrogation tapes — saying, “The bad guys could see us.”

During the 18th century Enlightenment, the idea of universal human rights, fueled by new thinking about the autonomy of the human body, contributed to campaigns to abolish torture, historian Lynn Hunt argues. Making torture taboo helped drive it out of the public square and, eventually, into CIA black sites, where “clean” torture — the kind that left no physical marks — was inflicted.

The CIA redacts its officers’ names. The cables do not show exactly who did what and when. But they make more visible a previously hidden experience. The cables reveal Mohammed and his interrogators, dragging torture into the light.
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/11/kha ... rture-cia/






NEWS

9th Circuit sends ‘torture’ case involving Mitchell and Jessen back to Spokane judge
UPDATED: Thu., Sept. 19, 2019

The Thomas S. Foley United States Courthouse in Spokane. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to compel former Spokane psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen to testify about their interactions with Abu Zubaydah. According to court records, Mitchell and Jessen developed the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that attorneys argue constituted torture that were employed at a CIA “black site” in Poland. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)
The Thomas S. Foley United States Courthouse in Spokane. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to compel former Spokane psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen to testify about their interactions with Abu Zubaydah. According to court records, Mitchell and Jessen developed the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that attorneys argue constituted torture that were employed at a CIA “black site” in Poland. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)

In a split decision, federal appellate judges have ruled that a federal judge in Spokane must reconsider his dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to interview former Spokane psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen about the “torture” of a detainee who was being held in a CIA black site in Poland.

Attorneys representing Abu Zubaydah filed a lawsuit in 2017 in U.S. District Court in Spokane seeking to interview Mitchell and Jessen, who have been described as the architects of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that previously have been alleged as torture. The interview requests relate to an ongoing criminal investigation in Poland about activities that occurred at a CIA secret prison, often referred to as a “black site.”

The lawsuit was seeking to have U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush approve a request by Zubaydah’s attorney, Joseph Margulies, to interview both Jessen and Mitchell about their interactions with Zubaydah as part of the criminal investigation in Poland.

Quackenbush acknowledged in his 2018 dismissal that the case “presented a painful conflict between human rights and national security” but dismissed it at the request of the U.S. government.

“This court concludes the CIA director’s assertion of the government’s national security interests and assertion of the state secrets privilege necessitates dismissal of the action,” Quackenbush wrote in his 2018 decision.

However, in a 2-1 ruling Wednesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Quackenbush’s dismissal and sent it back to him with instructions to determine, if he can, the difference between information that is deemed state secrets and those parts of the case that are not.

The decision was applauded by attorney Margulies, a Cornell law professor, who until recently has represented Zubaydah, who continues to be held as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without any formal criminal charges.

“This is the first time that a court has acknowledged the enhanced interrogation as torture,” Marguiles said. “And two, it’s the first time that any court has acknowledged that the government allegations against (Zubaydah) were mistaken. We’ve been saying that forever. But, it’s never appeared in court before.”

Hired by the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen were paid a total of about $81 million to develop and sometimes carry out the methods of torture used to extract information from detainees. The psychologists, who worked with Air Force officials on a program to help troops resist interrogation, reverse engineered the program to glean information from enemy combatants.

Under the belief that Zubaydah had information that could thwart another attack, interrogators, including Mitchell and Jessen, forced Zubaydah to undergo sleep deprivation, extreme confinement, forced nudity and physical assaults. They also waterboarded Zubaydah about 83 times over 17 days, according to court records.

A U.S. Senate investigation later found that Mitchell and Jessen’s techniques produced no actionable intelligence in the war on terror. That Senate investigation, first released in 2014, became the basis of the civil suit brought by the ACLU on behalf of three men, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and the late Gul Rahmam.


That case ended with a settlement just weeks before a scheduled September 2017 trial. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Despite eventually finding that Zubaydah had no role in the 9/11 attacks or ties to al-Qaida, Zubaydah remains in custody.

Justice Department attorney Andrew Warden, who also argued against the civil case brought by the ACLU, argued in Spokane in 2017 that Zubaydah’s request for depositions should be denied outright because it was in conflict with the government’s state secrets privilege.

“Our concern is … to have Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen sit for a deposition would be confirming or denying a relationship that the U.S. had with Poland,” he said. “We would disagree that fact has been acknowledged and therefore falls under the state secrets privilege. That information … would be catastrophic to covert operations overseas.”

In his dissent to the decision by the other appellate judges, Judge Ronald Gould wrote he defers to the view of government officials that the case could disclose secrets that could cause serious harm.

“The majority jeopardizes critical national security concerns in the hope that the district court will be able to segregate secret information from public information that could be discovered,” Gould wrote.

Attorney David Klein, who argued the appeal on behalf of Zubaydah, praised the majority’s decision and said he believes Quackenbush will be able to separate details needed for the case from state secrets.

“There is no doubt that what is described in the opinion is torture,” said Klein, of Washington, D.C. “In order to get justice, you need to get to the truth. I think the courts are acknowledging the truth.”

As for Zubaydah, Margulies said the government has barred the attorney from discussing Zubaydah’s current emotional and medical status. However, court records indicated that Zubaydah has suffered more than 300 seizures following his treatment during the interrogations.

“His condition is classified,” Margulies said. “What we can say is, we are very concerned about his well-being. That’s what the government has cleared us to say.”
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/ ... itchell-a/


Spokane psychologists Mitchell and Jessen called to testify about ‘torture’ techniques in 9/11 tribunals
Published: May 20, 2019, 9:26 p.m.

UPDATED: Mon., May 20, 2019


John “Bruce” Jessen, shown here in 2009, may testify publicly for the first time about the “enhanced” interrogation techniques that he formulated along with James E. Mitchell. Both have been called to testify before military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (ABC News)

Two Spokane psychologists who devised the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a federal judge later said constituted torture could testify publicly for the first time at a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that is trying five men charged with helping to plan and assist in the 9/11 attacks.

James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen are among a dozen government-approved witnesses for the defense at the military tribunal. Mitchell and Jessen’s company was paid about $81 million by the CIA for providing and sometimes carrying out the interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, during the early days of the post 9/11 war on terror.

“This will be the first time Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen will have to testify in a criminal proceeding about the torture program they implemented,” said James Connell, a lawyer for Ammar al Baluchi, one of the five Guantanamo prisoners.

Both Mitchell and Jessen were deposed but were never forced to testify as part of a civil suit filed in 2015 in Spokane by the ACLU on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud.

According to court records, Rahman was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison in isolation, subjected to darkness and extreme cold water, and eventually died of hypothermia. The other two men are now free.

The U.S. government settled that civil suit in August 2017 just weeks before it was scheduled for trial in Spokane before U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.

That suit was based on a 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that found ample evidence that Mitchell and Jessen provided the CIA with torture methods, including prolonged sleep deprivation, confinement in small, enclosed spaces and waterboarding that were used on dozens of detainees yet produced no useful intelligence.

Based on a request by the defense, Mitchell and Jessen could testify as early as July at a pretrial hearing in Cuba. Those proceedings have faced repeated delays, largely because of legal issues related to the treatment of the five defendants while in CIA custody, according to the Associated Press.

The five defendants include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He and his co-defendants were arraigned in May 2012 on charges that include terrorism and nearly 3,000 counts of murder in violation of the law of war. They could get the death penalty if convicted by the tribunal, which combines elements of military and civilian law.

Mitchell no longer lives in the Spokane area, but Jessen is believed to still reside in the area. They got their start at Fairchild Air Force base as survival trainers who formed a company to help train military personnel to resist interrogations. They reverse-engineered their training and devised a program drawn from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.”

Defense attorney Brian Paszamant argued in court in Spokane in 2017 that his clients only provided the CIA with a list of potential interrogation techniques.

“The problem is (Mitchell and Jessen) were involved in drafting the guidelines (for the CIA) and didn’t know they were going to be applied at” CIA black-site prisons, Paszamant said. “There is a huge disconnect.”

But Quackenbush, the federal judge, noted that Jessen was present when Rahman was placed in a diaper before he died of exposure on a cold floor.

Paszamant said the evidence suggested that Jessen helped interrogate Rahman, but any potential mistreatment only included a slap to his face.

“I’m not sure a single slap to the face would constitute torture under international law,” Paszamant said in July 2017.

Quackenbush replied: “He was tortured.”

Paszamant pointed out that Rahman died of exposure … “none of which my clients had anything to do with. I’m not at a position to acknowledge (Rahman) was subjected to torture.”

The judge then added: “That’s why we have juries.”

In his written findings, Quackenbush noted that the defense attorneys made “several unconvincing arguments” that there was no connection between developing the interrogation techniques and those applied to Suleiman and Ben Soud.

“The factual record would support a finding defendants had a role in the design of the program, trained interrogators for the program, and exercised some discretion in the application of the program,” Quackenbush wrote. Mitchell and Jessen “have not established they merely acted at the direction of the government, within the scope of their authority, and that such authority was legally and validly conferred.”

Mitchell sometimes makes public appearances where he argues that his techniques produced valuable information.

Jessen has made few public comments. But in videotaped depositions in the ACLU lawsuit that were made public, the men described being put under intense pressure by CIA officials to continue to apply pressure to detainees for information even after they wanted to stop.

“They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States, and that because I told them to stop I had lost my nerve,” Jessen said in court records, “and it was going to be my fault if I didn’t continue.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/ ... -called-t/


Torture Casts a Long Shadow over 9/11 Military Commission
By Amanda Strayer

The latest session of pretrial hearings in United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, et al threw into sharp relief the central tension facing the Guantanamo Bay military commission: the extent to which the United States’ torture of the five 9/11 defendants—and government efforts to hide key information related to that torture—undermines any chance at justice.

At times during the hearings, the prosecution went so far as to appear to defend the use of torture. On the final day, Prosecutor Ed Ryan said the U.S. government was “forced” to create the torture program after 9/11 and that the prosecution was prepared to defend the decision, stating they were “ready for that fight.” In response, Rita Radostitz, counsel for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and Walter Ruiz, counsel for Mustafa al Hawsawi, reminded the military commission that the bedrock principles of the U.S. judicial system require a fair trial, regardless of the severity of the crime. To defend torture degrades that system and denies justice.

The five defendants were tortured through the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program at secret CIA prisons, or “black sites.” In late 2006, they were transferred to Guantanamo Bay, and the FBI “clean team” re-questioned them there in January 2007. The purpose was to obtain voluntary statements untainted by torture and thus admissible at trial.

However, the defense teams later discovered the FBI had also played a role in the CIA black sites. Last month, one of the FBI agents involved in the “clean team” interviews revealed he had collaborated extensively with the CIA in the RDI torture program, sending CIA black site operatives hundreds of questions to ask the detainees. This admission, along with other evidence of the FBI’s participation in the RDI torture program, calls into question whether the FBI “clean team” was in fact “clean”—and thus whether statements made by the defendants during those 2007 interrogations could be admitted at trial.

Last week’s hearings featured testimony from several witnesses on defendant Ammar al Baluchi’s motion to suppress alleged statements as involuntary and obtained by torture.

On Monday, September 23, FBI Special Agent Stephen McClain testified about his involvement in the High Value Detainee (HVD) Prosecution Task Force and the January 2007 “clean team” questioning of al Baluchi. McClain stated that before this interrogation, he had no prior knowledge of al Baluchi or his statements to the CIA while detained in a secret CIA prison. James Connell, civilian death penalty attorney for al Baluchi, asked about statements McClain had previously made to him regarding the CIA’s role in selecting him for the HVD Task Force. McClain promptly denied knowledge of any CIA involvement in his selection for the Task Force.

On Tuesday, September 24, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Bernard E. DeLury testified about his prior role in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT), established at Guantanamo Bay in the early 2000s to issue a one-time determination of whether the defendants could be held as “enemy combatants.” The CSRTs were discontinued after the Supreme Court found them legally inadequate. Gary Sowards, civilian death penalty attorney for Mohammad, asked DeLury whether he would be concerned about the voluntariness of the defendants’ statements during the CSRT if he knew they had been tortured. Sowards cited the torture Mohammad had suffered over four years of incommunicado detention: being hung naked in his cell, deprived of sleep, anally raped, subjected to 183 mock executions, and the kidnapping, abuse, and death threats made against his children. DeLury replied that such torture would indeed make him question the voluntariness of Mohammad’s statements. Yet, as Sowards noted, the prosecution intends to use these statements against Mohammad at trial.

Finally, on Wednesday, September 25, testimony from an FBI fingerprint examiner revealed that the U.S. government is asserting national security privilege over the origins of its fingerprint evidence, undermining due process guarantees and preventing defense teams from being able to fully confront the evidence brought against the accused.

In January, the military commission will hear several weeks of testimony from James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen—the psychologists who designed the torture program. As the military commission attempts to balance the imperatives of justice and national security, the impact of torture on this death penalty trial cannot be understated.
https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/t ... commission
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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