Three former detainees imprisoned in “black sites” controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have filed suit against the psychologists responsible for overseeing the agency’s “interrogation program that used systematic torture,” reports The Intercept in a groundbreaking report detailing the sadistic torture tactics used by U.S. officials.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the suit is the first to be “brought against major players in the Senate’s so-called ‘torture report’ since it was published last December.”

The torture report was obtained after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit “demanding the CIA, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State release a 6,900-page report of a comprehensive investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture, and other abuse of detainees.”

CIA psychologists used “pseudoscientific” torture acts against detainees

The report exposed systematic and barbarous acts of torture, allowing the ACLU to pursue legal action on behalf of 3 of the 119 detainees: Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman, all of whom were subjected to excruciating pain and mental suffering.

Rahman did not survive and died at a CIA black site as a result of his treatment by U.S. government agents. The ACLU is suing on behalf of his estate.

The psychologists enlisted by the CIA to oversee the barbaric interrogation program are James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, neither of whom had experience with interrogation, yet were awarded nearly “$85 million dollars [sic] in contracted fees from the CIA for executing a pseudoscientific plan to extract information from alleged terrorists,” reports The Intercept.

If you physically and mentally abuse a dog enough, it will become submissive: the ideology CIA psychologists used against detainees

“Mitchell and Jessen took inspiration from a psychologist named Martin Seligman, who determined that dogs would be completely submissive if subjected to repeated physical and mental suffering. This state of ‘learned helplessness’ would force a confession out of detainees, surmised Mitchell and Jessen.”

The plaintiffs, who were never formally charged with a crime, were “waterboarded repeatedly, crammed into tiny coffin-like boxes, stripped naked and then slapped and beaten, and left alone in the dark with nonstop loud music, among other torture techniques,” The Intercept reports.

“Mitchell and Jessen, charged professionally as psychologists with promoting mental health, are guilty of commissioning ‘torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes, all of which violate well-established norms of customary international law,’” the lawsuit states [emphases added].

CIA tortured detainees for FUN – as no evidence exists showing cruel and unusual punishment produces results

Despite the fact that the U.S. government torture report provided ZERO evidence that sadistic torture yields any results, “multiple levels of the government signed off on the techniques at various steps of the program.”

Not only does the report prove torture that doesn’t work, but it admits that it often produces “faulty intelligence” or equally worse, none at all. Yet, Mitchell and Jessen were allowed to continue their “work” from 2001 to 2009, when President Obama finally put a stop to the torture program through an executive order.

The Intercept reports:

The material facts of the case, says ACLU attorney Steven Watt, are all established in extensive publicly available material: the declassified executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, an independent investigation into the American Psychological Association’s involvement in the torture program, Mitchell’s own public statements, and several other studies. …

For Watt, who was the first person to tell Gul Rahman’s family he had died — they have never received official notification — the case is about achieving justice for his clients, and drawing attention to the real purpose of Mitchell and Jessen’s work with the CIA.

“There’s much talk about interrogation” when it comes to Mitchell and Jessen, he says. “But it wasn’t about gathering information for them. It was about breaking [the inmates] down, it was about torturing them. That was their true intent.”

Sources:

TheIntercept.com

ACLU.org

ACLU.org