CIA 'torture psychologists' avoid trial with secret settlement

Two psychologists who helped design the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program settled a lawsuit Aug. 17 by detainees alleging they were illegally tortured. 

The secret settlement in the suit, brought on behalf of two living ex-detainees and one who died of hypothermia after brutal questioning in U.S. custody, avoided what would have been the first public trial of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture on suspected Al-Qaeda members.

But it also allowed the two psychologists who supplied the CIA with "coercive" interrogation techniques, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to maintain that they personally had nothing to do with the use of waterboarding, extreme stress positions and beatings on detainees.

"Neither Dr. Mitchell nor I knew about, condoned, participated in, or sanctioned the unauthorized actions that formed the basis for this lawsuit," Jessen said in a mutually agreed statement attached to the settlement.

"We served our country at a time when freedom and safety hung in the balance."

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the suit in 2015 against Mitchell and Jessen, who were recruited by the CIA in 2002 to design and help conduct interrogations of war-on-terror suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The two were paid around $80 million for their work, which included helping interrogate Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda, and Abu Zubaydah, another top Qaeda suspect.

The suit accused Mitchell and Jessen of responsibility for the CIA's use of torture methods on the three detainees, Tanzanian Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Libyan Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman of Afghanistan.

Rahman died of hypothermia in a CIA prison...