04/26/16 – Steven Watt – The Scott Horton Show

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And up next is Stephen Watt.
He is a staff attorney for the ACLU.
Welcome to the show.
Hi Stephen.
I'm very good.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
Very important story.
Good news for a change, which is kind of nice.
Good news about bad news, but still.
The headline is Landmark Ruling Will Finally Allow Victims to Hold CIA Torturers to Account.
And I believe it's an ACLU staff writer who wrote up the article here.
And this is about a decision.
Am I right?
Last Friday in U.S. District Court, and it said that these men will be allowed to sue who?
So we sued our three, our three clients sued two psychologists who were contracted by the CIA.
And they designed and then implemented a program of torture for the CIA, which was ultimately responsible for some 119 men, the torture of 119 men, according to the Senate torture report that was published back in December of 2014.
And then, so now, what exactly was the issue in the court's ruling that the case would be allowed to go ahead?
So lawyers for the two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, had sought dismissal of the lawsuit.
And they'd been arguing that essentially torture was a political question and that they should benefit from governmental immunities.
And the judge decided that torture was not a political question and that as independent contractors to the CIA, they didn't automatically benefit from the same immunities and that the case could go forward.
So he didn't, the judge didn't give full written reasons why these will be forthcoming.
But he ruled from the bench that the case should proceed to discovery and asked the parties, so ourselves and the lawyers for the defendants, as well as the United States government to come up with a proposal for discovery going forward.
So well, I thought you were going to say that about the immunity that this, you know, because these guys were contractors, that's sort of the loophole by which they'll be possibly allowed to be held to account here.
That's good.
But it sounds like possibly maybe even more important there is the other part of that that you said that the judge said this isn't a political question.
It's a legal question.
And if they're breaking the law and committing a criminal act, then they can be held civilly liable for that.
Is that right?
That's correct.
So torture isn't a political question.
There are rules and regulations and have been governing the use of torture in this country and under international law since time immemorial.
And the judge said that these are decisions that the judge can decide upon.
They're not issues that are beyond the court's reach.
But now, does that imply that there's a hole in the immunities provided to the CIA officers here as well, that if it's not a political question, but actually a matter of criminal law, then it doesn't matter what their orders are.
They know or they're at least bound to know what the law is and to obey it.
Right.
Yeah.
That's it.
You know, it's been to Nuremberg.
You can't follow orders to violate the law, certainly not laws as fundamental as the prohibition of torture.
But as independent contractors, they don't know that these guys were operating under contract to the to the CIA.
Right.
So they don't automatically benefit from the government, the same immunities that the government would benefit from.
But I'm sorry, I'm just off on a tangent.
I was just wondering if you thought that maybe since the judge had ruled that in this case, that maybe that could blow a hole in the immunity that the CIA officers have, if this judge has ruled that it is, in fact, not a political question, but a criminal one.
You know, I don't think that I don't think that's what we're at to see what the judge's actual decision is and what his reasoning is.
But I don't think that's what he was saying.
I think I think he was saying that these individuals as independent contractors can be found responsible and that they didn't wouldn't benefit from the government's sovereign immunity because they are contractors, because there is different equities at play, I would say.
But I think we just heard yesterday, in fact, that the government where the judge will actually issue a written ruling.
So perhaps we could have that conversation down the line sometime at what his actual reasoning is.
And now they can just appeal this decision.
So this doesn't necessarily mean that the suit will be allowed to continue, right?
I'm not so sure that they have an appeal of right.
Again, it depends on how the judge decides what his written reasons are.
But as contractors, as opposed to government officers, you know, even if, you know, the judge has certainly found that they're not immune.
But as because they're independent contractors, they don't necessarily have an appeal of right on the immunity issue.
But again, it's going to depend what the reasons are given by the judge, though.
It could be that they have a right of appeal, but it may be the case that they don't.
I see.
OK, well, I sure hope that the suit will be allowed to go forward.
And now, as you said, there are one hundred and nineteen men that are named in the Senate torture report.
Is that correct?
There's one hundred and nineteen persons that were named in the Senate report as being subjected to some aspects of the program from when it began in 2002 through to 2009, when it was ended.
I see.
And is there a special reason that there are these?
Is it three or four men that you guys are representing here?
We represent the family of one man who was tortured to death, Gul Rahman, and two other survivors of the program, Suleiman Abdullah and Mohammed bin Saud.
And these are just they are just an example of three of the men in the program.
And there are individuals who we here at the ACLU were in contact with when the Senate report came out.
So that's why the case was brought on their behalf.
But I think they also speak for the other one hundred and nineteen who are subjected to the same, you know, despicable torture.
Yeah.
All right.
And now in this article, at least as reprinted at Common Dreams, they actually include a video, a short kind of documentary.
It's called Here the Rain Never Finishes.
And it tells the story of I'm sorry, I forgot the name of which one is it?
Rahman?
Yeah.
And can you tell a little bit about what happened to him?
Yeah.
So Suleiman in 2003, he was picked up in an extraordinary rendition operation in Somalia.
He's a fisherman and a trader, and he was trading between his home in Zanzibar and Somalia up and down the Swahili coast.
He was then rendered from Somalia to Kenya, from Kenya to Djibouti and then from Djibouti into the CIA's black site called Cobalt in the CIA's, in the Senate torture report.
He was held there for some five to six weeks and he was subjected to Mitchell and Jessen's phased torture program.
He was, you know, he was held in a dungeon, effectively.
He was chained 24, 24-7.
He was held in the dark, loud music blasted.
He was then assessed by a doctor and then he underwent, you know, the most severe aspects of the program, the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which Mitchell and Jessen had devised.
And those included being stuffed into a tiny box, being hung up by the arms for the best part of a week and slammed into walls and severe water torture, not waterboarding, but water torture.
He was doused in freezing cold water, wrapped up in a plastic sheet.
You know, he was, he was brutalized for six weeks.
It was so intensely excruciating for him that he actually attempted to take his life at one point.
And at that juncture, the CIA removed him from that facility and transferred him to the custody of the CIA, but held in another facility for some a year before being handed over to the U.S. military at Bagram for four, four additional four years.
He was released without charge.
He was asked, you know, he was interrogated and asked a series of questions and he wasn't able to provide them any information that they were after.
So clearly it was an innocent man that was tortured, which makes it even worse.
Right.
Although, you got to be pretty damn guilty to deserve any of this, but yeah, a point well taken.
And now, and again, you're saying this guy, he was just some schmuck, some poor fisherman, and he was handed over to the CIA by a Somali warlord?
That's right, Scott.
He was, he was picked up in Somalia, who was identified because he was a, he was a foreigner in Somalia and he was identified by a Somali warlord and handed over to the Americans.
And that's how he began his, his journey into this, you know, Mitchell and Jessen's terror program.
Yeah.
And you say, and I'm sorry, I want to get back to that in a second, but you say he was held at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and another CIA prison as well.
Was he still tortured in both of those places too, or they finally left him alone after that initial?
You know, as he describes it, Scott, the first five to six weeks when he was in the Mitchell and Jessen program in Kobalt was the worst, but he was, you know, his torture continued beyond that facility into what he calls the next program, the next facility that was held in was the Salt Pit and Bagram.
And there he was, you know, subjected to torture too.
It just wasn't the same nature of torture.
Oh yeah.
Thank God.
Now I'm at the Salt Pit where things aren't quite as bad.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was kind of pretty, you know, he was held in prolonged solitary.
He was, you know, he was chained and he was, you know, deprived of food, but it wasn't the same barrage of techniques that he had in that first sort of five to six weeks.
And Bagram, you know, he speaks about that was, you know, that was, that was torture for him too.
Yeah.
And he's very badly, you know, he was very badly damaged.
And you'll have seen from the video, you know, he still suffers terrifying flashbacks to his time in CIA custody.
It's really horrific what was done to him.
Yeah, it really is something I encourage people to go and look at that video.
It's really easy to find here.
The rain never finishes.
That's what one of his torturers, dousing him in water, freezing water, told him while he was beating him and near drowning him.
So now, as far as Mitchell and Jessen, these psychologists, Lord knows anybody can go to Vice and watch a hagiography of Jessen.
What a great guy he is.
Or is it Mitchell?
I forget.
Oh, he was just trying his best to keep us all safe, according to those hipsters over at Vice.
But can you explain a little bit about what this program was?
I mean, if you've got to torture somebody, why do you hire a psychologist?
Why don't you just find a brute from the CIA's paramilitary program and you just have that brute kick the guy's ass, you tie him up, you punch him, you kick him.
What's so scientific about that?
Why do you need a psychologist?
Well, what what what Mitchell and Jessen told to the CIA was a program which they described as science.
What they said was that if you could induce what's called a state of psychological state of called learned helplessness, it's basically a state of hopelessness.
It's been studied in dogs.
There's a psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman, who had observed this concept in dogs.
Dogs had been subjected to electric shocks over a period of time, and they eventually they would give up.
They were so overwhelmed by their circumstances, the electrocution, they would just give up.
They wouldn't try and escape their effective torture.
So what Mitchell and Jessen proposed was based on that psychological concept is that you could induce a state of learned helplessness in human beings.
This had never been tried before, but this is what they sold to the CIA.
This is what they convinced the CIA to to buy at great expense was this program whereby you would induce learned helplessness by torturing and abusing human beings.
So by torturing them, you would induce the state of learned helplessness in them.
They would become hopeless and then they would become compliant to their interrogators demands for information.
That was their theory.
It was a theory they sold.
It was a theory they tested, and it was a theory they implemented for the CIA and earned in the process some $81 million.
Yeah.
Amazing.
And, you know, there's a brand new article out you may have seen by Karen Greenberg about Abu Zubaydah.
This story's been told.
In fact, it's actually Jason Leopold that Vice has really done the very best work on Abu Zubaydah, in fact, and how, you know, he was a guy who was never the Al-Qaeda number three, as George W. Bush had repeatedly claimed, and a guy who was talking to the FBI before the CIA kidnapped him and started torturing him.
And my understanding is the first thing they did was lock him away in solitary for three months.
Didn't ask him a question for three months.
As the, you know, stage one of their learned helplessness program, these idiots.
While, meanwhile, the cops were actually getting information from him, at least, you know, on the order of what it was that he actually knew.
But the CIA decided, no, we're going to try to torture things that aren't true out of him.
And that seems to be the thing that's often overlooked in these cases and in these stories is that torture does work if what you need is lies.
They'll say, everybody says it doesn't work because the tortured will say whatever you want them to say.
But yeah, no, that's why it does work.
And Abu Zubaydah, just as well as Sheikh Al-Libi, both implicated Saddam Hussein for making a deal with Osama bin Laden and the terrorists of Al-Qaeda that was used.
Those talking points were used to help lie us into war with Iraq in 2003.
That's right, Scott.
Torture is not about information.
It's about power.
It's about dominion.
It's about degrading a human being.
It's not about information.
It's certainly not about the truth.
And that's the program that Mitchell and Jessen devised and that's the program that our clients were subjected to.
And I think, you know, at least at this initial stage, the judge has seen it for what it is and has allowed this case to go forward.
That's good.
And now, by the way, were they trying to beat lies out of him?
I mean, I guess they sure didn't believe him when he said he was just a fisherman.
But were they, for example, suggesting lies for him to tell?
You know, it was the same, you know, it was about and we mentioned this in the legal complaint.
It was like it was about three basic questions over and over again for like six weeks.
And he just didn't have the answers that they wanted.
You know, and he was he was released and I think he was released because they realized that they had completely broken them and they'd realized that they had somebody who was entirely innocent.
And in fact, when he was in the salt pits, you know, this facility was held for a year after Cobalt.
One of his interrogators, one of his torturers, came in and actually apologized to him in that facility and said, you know, he was just doing what he'd been told to do.
And can you tell us what those three questions were?
He was he was asked questions about men that he knew nothing about and whether he was associated with them.
I see.
You know, and are you a member of Al-Qaeda?
You know, it was like really basic.
It was there.
These were not sophisticated questions.
I think they're questions that you and I could have come up with, you know, sitting here at our desks at New York.
Yeah, well, but at least they weren't saying, come on, admit you're the secret messenger between Saddam and Osama.
Yeah, they didn't go that.
They didn't they didn't draw any connection, direct connections between him and Osama bin Laden.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
Or Saddam in this case.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've faced questions of that.
That's what they were.
Yeah.
And then and then Gul Rahman.
Can you tell the story here?
And this is if if if I understand it right, I'm pretty sure I do, because I got it from Marcy Wheeler.
There are a few different poor, unfortunate captives of the CIA by the name of Gul Rahman.
And this is if I if I have it right, the one that died at was killed at the salt pit is not the same guy that was the case of mistaken identity.
That was a different Gul Rahman, another case of mistaken identity in this case, but still a guy who I don't know if you can tell me anything about him or his alleged ties to any bad guys before he lost his life there.
Gul Rahman, who was killed, who is who's the you know, we represent the family.
Right.
Yeah.
He he was picked up in November of 2002 and he was rendered to Cobalt and held.
He was one of the first captives held by the CIA there.
And he was actually he was interrogated and eventually killed under torture under the direction of an individual named a CIA officer, one in the Senate report.
But we know that Jessen was in the interrogation room with them the day before training CIA officer one in the techniques that he and Mitchell had devised.
So he was he was aware, you know, from 2002, at least, about the conditions under which these men were held.
He was also aware of the effects of the techniques on detainees.
And Gul Rahman on the night of November the 20th, freezing cold night, he was ordered stripped naked and ordered to be held in a contorted stress position, kneeling on the floor of his cold cell at night.
And he died from hypothermia.
He was found dead the next morning.
And we know all this because it's documented in the Senate report.
And it was before then documented in a CIA internal investigation and an autopsy report.
So there's an admission there from the agency itself that it killed an individual.
It killed Gul Rahman.
And yet there's been nobody held to account for that, including Bruce Jessen, who was in there directing his torture or CIA officer one.
And in fact, CIA officer one, we know again from the Senate report, was not only not reprimanded, he was actually promoted and he was actually given he was given a cash reward for exemplary service.
And he he he we know from reports remains in the CIA.
Well and then you had at the beginning of the Obama administration, there was this I don't know exactly the title, some some form of special prosecutor, Durham, who looked into at first torture and then he narrowed it to at least a few CIA captives who had died in custody, who had been tortured to death, including Rahman.
And and then that was just a preliminary investigation to see whether there should actually be an investigation.
And he ended up just folding that and the whole thing went away.
And that was as close as we ever got to any accountability for that.
Right.
That's right.
The investigation was closed down by it was in September of 2009, I think, 2010.
Nobody held to account found that there wasn't sufficient to justify criminal charges even.
And to this day, you know, Gul Rahman's family have never been notified of his death.
You know, some 13 years later, never notified of his death and the body's never been returned to them.
So, you know.
So do they only find out when the Senate torture report came out that they find they actually the family find out from me, I sent a copy of the Senate torture report.
I thought they had I thought their representative had actually no one.
He didn't know anything about the circumstances of it.
We represent the nephew represents his interests.
He hadn't heard the family had been unable to move forward because, you know, that's the case of a disappearance.
Yeah.
But one thing that came out of the Senate report, which I found really moving and powerful, was that the family have moved forward, been able to move forward slightly in their life in that they held memorial services last year in Afghanistan and Pakistan, attended by over 500 people from those two countries to honor Gul Rahman.
So they began to to move their life forward.
And, you know, and that's thanks to the documentation in the Senate report.
So there's some, you know, it's greater transparency.
There's some degree of accountability.
But still, somebody has to be held personally accountable for what happened to Gul Rahman and what happened as a consequence to his family.
And now the ACLU as an organization, are you guys still pushing for eventual criminal prosecutions for war crimes or violations of the anti-torture statute?
Absolutely.
I mean, we bring this suit because, you know, the law allows us, you know, and we we believe strongly that the U.S. law allows us to bring this civil suit against these two individuals.
But we're also at the same time pushing for the appointment of a special prosecutor to actually bring criminal charges against those responsible, including senior officials in the CIA, because really only a special prosecutor would have the remit and mandate to actually uncover the crimes, the murder of Gul Rahman and the torture of these 119 men, including, you know, the clients that we represent.
Well, maybe in the George P. Bush or Chelsea Clinton administration, they'll finally go ahead and release the files.
Yeah, I think we have to keep pushing through.
I think it's really important because accountability, I mean, it requires persistence and it just requires to, you know, move some civil society thinking creatively and how to keep the feet to the fire and ensure that the government does bring accountability at some point for what happened.
Hey, you know what?
People complain sometimes.
I agree with them.
Without the ACLU, I hate to think where we would be.
Without this group of determined lawyers suing the government all day long for its transgressions against the law, against its charter and its laws.
So thank you.
I sure appreciate your work and your time on the show.
Thanks for your time, too, Scott.
All right, y'all.
And that is Stephen Watt, ACLU staff attorney there.
I read this great article at CommonDreams.com by their staff writer.
It's called Landmark Ruling Will Finally Allow Victims to Hold CIA Torturers to Account.
And then also especially watch this video embedded here as well.
Here the rain never finishes.
This story of Suleiman Abdullah Saleem.
It's really good stuff.
All right, y'all.
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