For the first time, key figures associated with the CIA’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program could be forced to testify under oath about their activities.
During a death penalty trial at Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday, a military judge permitted defense attorneys to call as witnesses four former CIA officials with intimate knowledge of the agency’s torture tactics.
Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri is accused of plotting the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. His defense team is moving to dismiss evidence against their client that was collected while Nashiri was tortured at a CIA black site in Thailand.
According to the Miami Herald, attorneys argued back in December that the subsequent illegal on-site destruction of 91 tapes documenting Nashiri’s treatment deprived their client of having access to key evidence.
Air Force Col. Vance Spath’s ruling on Tuesday paves the way for testimony from former CIA officials John Rizzo and Jose Rodriquez Jr, and agency contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.
Rizzo was the CIA General Counsel at the time of Nashiri’s detention. Rodriguez, the former director of the agency’s National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of Nashiri’s torture tapes in 2005.
Mitchell and Jessen are two former psychologists who were contracted in the months after 9/11 to develop the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Their role in the agency’s illegal activities is detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive torture report, which was released in 2014. In it, they’re presented under the pseudonyms “SWIGERT” and “DUNBAR.”
That same report details that while under CIA detention from 2002 to 2006, Nashiri was waterboarded, kenneled, hung for long periods of time by his arms, psychologically tortured, and rectally force-fed.
Despite all four men’s intimate knowledge and involvement in the unlawful detention policies, none have ever been called to testify in court about their roles, nor have any faced charges for blatant violations of US and international law prohibiting torture.
