US torturers must be held accountable: Analyst
Press TV has interviewed Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist, in Orlando, about three survivors of the CIA’s brutal torture program suing the psychologists who designed it and helped the agency implement it.
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: This lawsuit, how far do you think it is going to go as far as bringing to justice those who have consistently deployed such methods of torture?
Rickard: Well, this lawsuit was actually started in 2009. The ACLU received the information that you mentioned around the types of torture, there were over a dozen different torture methods, some of the worst ones obviously water boarding - you know drowning individuals is a horrible torture. There are also physical violations that individuals were obviously beaten and as well as given absolutely no sleep for as much as a week at a time and obviously went into hallucination mode.
These kinds of tortures are tortures that the actual Americans learned a lot about torture there in the Vietnam War. In fact both Mitchell and Jessen trained at a POW camp for the United States military and intelligence operations for individuals to learn what torture would be like and a lot of the methods that they used on the actual training were applied during this particular event.
And let’s be clear here that the training is nowhere near as horrific as what was done to these detainees but at the same time the kind of activity that is done to the training environment does also cause some psychological deviations but yet the psychological treatment of following the training is also part of the training. So I am not sure that these detainees got the follow-on treatment and they certainly received a much more brutal, I guess type of torture.
Press TV: But it is not just about Mitchell and Jessen though now, is it? It is also about the government organization that actively hired them and paid them and participated in this torture?
Rickard: That is a great point. I mean the other part there is 80 million dollars for something that these people already did. They wrote a program for the government. It is certainly a highway robbery and at the same time the people who employed them to do this should also be held accountable. I completely agree with that.
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