Very Interesting - Torture Lawsuit to Go Forward

A CIVIL SUIT against the architects of the CIA’s torture program, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, will be allowed to proceed, a federal judge in Spokane, Washington, decided on Friday.

[...]

What’s so unprecedented is that this is the first time opponents of the program will have the chance to seek discovery evidence in the case unimpeded by the government.

  The Intercept

I'll believe it when I see it.

The three plaintiffs are Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the estate of Gul Rahman, who died at a CIA black site known as the “Salt Pit.” Each was kidnapped and subjected to extreme physical and psychological torture and experimentation, though none was ever charged with a crime.

[...]

Mitchell and Jessen’s proposed framework for “enhanced interrogation” involved trying to drive detainees to a state of “learned helplessness” through unbearable suffering, to the point they would be willing to totally comply. The theories behind the tactics were drawn from the psychologists’ experiments on dogs decades prior.

Sick bastards.

The only thing that concerns me is the name of the Judge: Justin Quackenbush.  I'll get over it.

Irony Is Dead

[James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen were two former U.S. military psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, develop, and run the agency’s detention, rendition, and interrogation operations. As psychologists in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, the two men had devoted their careers to training U.S. troops to resist abusive treatment in case of capture by governments that violate the Geneva Conventions.

  ACLU

If you have the stomach for it, read the article for details of the torture of one detinee who was held without charge for years, tortured and finally released once he'd been "broken", and the story of how these two criminals aided the US military and CIA's detainee program.

It's well and good that these men should be tried for criminal behavior, but so should the CIA officials who contracted them, and the Bush administration officials who signed off on the use of torture after 9/11 and the rejection of the Geneva Conventions.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 4/22/2016:  A judge has granted three detainees the right to sue these sick quacks.