Organizations standing up to US 'imperialism and tyranny': Analyst

A former American intelligence linguist in Florida says US organizations are standing up to Washington’s “imperialism and tyranny” that they are perpetrating without any respect for human rights.

Scott Rickard made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday, after a US judge allowed a lawsuit against the psychologists, who designed the CIA’s brutal torture program and helped the agency to implement it, to proceed.

The decision by District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush was a major achievement in the fight to hold CIA individuals responsible for conducting a program that according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) resulted in the torture of at least 119 men between 2002 and 2008.

The case is seeking damages of up to $75,000 for the three victims, all of whom underwent torture in CIA "black sites" in Afghanistan.

“It’s good to see the ACLU have some success with prosecuting the torturers in the CIA operation. What I found most alarming about the report was that the ACLU is only seeking $75,000 in the case which is a very minor cost considering that one of the victims of torture lost their lives,” said Rickard.

He said CIA psychologists “received $80 million for this particular operation to set up the torture environment.”

“[They] were obviously over-compensated for their activities, and certainly it should also be considered in prosecution, because some of the things they carried through would be extreme torture and inhumane activities,” he added. “And then also all the people that approved it, should also be held accountable.”

“This particular judge is standing up to the CIA and making a statement saying that these types of activities are not allowed in the United States,” the activist said. “And hats off to the ACLU for taking this effort; it is the only case of its kind.”

“It’s good to see organizations stand up to the US government’s imperialism and tyranny that they continue, unfortunately, without any regard,” the analyst concluded.

The CIA employed brutal techniques like waterboarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” to interrogate terror suspects imprisoned after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

These torture techniques migrated from the CIA’s undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to US military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

In October of last year, on behalf of former CIA prisoners Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, the ACLU filed the suit against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, former US Air Force trainers, in a federal court in Washington state.

Afghan national Rahman froze to death in a CIA black site in Afghanistan. Salim, a Tanzanian man, was held in US custody in Afghanistan for five years before being released, and Soud, a Libyan man, was held by the US in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.

The lawsuit describes the torture program as a “joint criminal enterprise” and a “war crime” in which the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen conspired and from which the psychologists made millions of dollars.

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