On Tuesday, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sat just yards from Dr. James Mitchell, who waterboarded him 183 times in a CIA black site in Poland in March 2003.
The encounter took place in a courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. enclave in Cuba where suspected terrorists are held.
From The Intercept
“I suspected from the beginning that I would end up here,” James Mitchell told a Guantánamo Bay courtroom. Dressed in a charcoal suit and bright red tie, Mitchell stated that although he could have testified over a video link, he had chosen to come in person. “I did it for the victims and families,” he told James G. Connell III, an attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the accused plotters. “Not for you.”
The topic of Tuesday’s hearing was a motion to suppress statements made by the 9/11 defendants while they were being held in detention, even after they were brought from the CIA’s black sites to Guantánamo. The defense attorneys allege that the statements the men made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture, which was overseen by Mitchell and [fellow psychologist Bruce] Jessen.
Mohammed’s co-defendants Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and Mohammed’s nephew Baluchi also endured torture techniques proposed by Mitchell and Jessen, and they, too, were present in the courtroom on Tuesday. There were no audible reactions from the defendants during the morning testimony, which is expected to continue through next week.
Mitchell and Jessen developed a lucrative business providing “enhanced interrogation techniques” to the CIA, according to the Washington Examiner
Mitchell, Jessen, and Associates, founded in 2005, eventually received $81 million out of an authorized $180 million from the government prior to the contract’s termination in 2009, although much likely went to paying company employees, some of whom were probably former CIA interrogators. Mitchell revealed in a 2017 deposition that he received $1,800 per day for overseas work and $15,000 for travel for his first CIA trip in 2002, centered on Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al Qaeda terrorist whom Mitchell eventually waterboarded.
The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded in a mammoth report, that has never been made public, that the torture techniques were wholly ineffective at developing actionable intelligence. The story is told the movie The Report, starring Adam Driver and Annette Bening.
Source: ‘Difficult to imagine’: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to face psychologist who waterboarded him for CIA
