Judge Orders Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Architects to Go to Trial

On August 7, Judge Justin Quackenbush of the U.S. District Court in Spokane ordered a lawsuit against two psychologists who helped design the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program to go to a jury trial in September. The lawsuit, Salim v. Mitchell, was filed by the ACLU in 2015 on behalf of three former detainees, one of whom died in CIA custody.

The defendants, psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, were recruited by the CIA in 2002 to design and help conduct “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used on war-on-terror suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Critics of the techniques (including former CIA Director Leon Panetta) have maintained that “enhanced interrogation” is nothing more than a euphemism for the systematic torture of detainees by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at black sites around the world. The so-called enhanced interrogration techniques have included the use of waterboarding.

The complaint charges that Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman (who died at Detention Site Cobalt — the CIA’s black site outside Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan in 2002) were subjected to an “experimental torture program” that was “designed, implemented, and personally administered” by the two defendants, Mitchell and Jessen.

A summary of the case posted at the Lawfare blog notes the plaintiffs’ argument that the psychologists’ actions constituted torture, non-consensual human experimentation, and war crimes. The plaintiffs seek compensatory and punitive damages.

The lawsuit will be the first involving the torture program to go to trial. While some conservatives may be skeptical of any lawsuit taken by the ACLU, which has a long history of filing cases against things like prayer in schools and the public display of religious symbols in public places, the generally leftist organization will occasionally take up a human rights case that libertarians and constitutionalists can support in good conscience. Salim v. Mitchell is one such case.