The government appears ready to allow a lawsuit to proceed against designers of the CIA’s torture program.
Department of Justice officials have decided not to invoke state secrets privilege in a case brought by three detainees who were tortured and made the subjects of experiments while in US custody.
Federal prosecutors can, with reliable success, convince judges to block litigation against government agencies if they claim sensitive information might be disclosed as a result. In this case, the DOJ has suggested that it will allow discovery to proceed, as long as certain classified information like interrogator identities and locations are kept secret.
Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said they were surprised by the decision. “The government is actually going to show up at the hearing instead of trying to shut it down,” ACLU staff attorney Dror Ladin told ABC News.
The suit, filed in a Washington state district court targets two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. According to the Senate’s official torture report, they were hired as CIA contractors to design and implement the Bush administration’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program.
One of the three plaintiffs is the estate of Gul Rahman. Rahman allegedly died as a result of his treatment in CIA detention.
The other two plaintiffs are named Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. They claim to have been subjected to “severe physical and psychological abuse including prolonged sleep deprivation and nudity, starvation, beating, water dousing, and extreme forms of sensory deprivation,” the ACLU charged in a statement, after it filed suit last October.
The case was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign nationals to seek relief in US courts for human rights abuses committed overseas.
There is still a chance the US government could rely on state secrets to block the release of sensitive information throughout the trial. As the ACLU notes in its filing, however, critical facts about the CIA’s torture program have already been laid bare through the 2014 release of the senate torture report.
Compiled by then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the investigation “had the effect of disclosing a significant amount of information concerning the detention and interrogation program.”
Last October, ACLU attorney Steven Walt hailed the lawsuit as “the first post-Senate report effort on accountability in US courts.” The next hearing in the case is scheduled to take place on Friday.
