Torture expert for CIA testifies at Gitmo
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The architect of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation program, who personally waterboarded the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, testified for the first time to the war court at Guantánamo Bay on Tuesday, defiantly facing defendants who had been subject to his methods.
James Mitchell, a former contract psychologist for the intelligence agency who helped develop what the government euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” appeared in court as a witness, confronting five men who had been subject to elements of his program of violence, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Among them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is charged with leading the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks and was waterboarded 183 times by a team including Mitchell.
Mitchell opened what is expected to be two weeks of testimony by telling defense lawyers that the only reason he had come to Guantánamo was to testify in person in front of families of the 9/11 victims. He was appearing at a pretrial hearing for the five men facing charges in the 9/11 case. They are seeking to have the court throw out as evidence statements they made to the FBI after coming to Guantánamo, saying that their interrogations in CIA custody had conditioned them to tell their captors what they wanted to hear.
“You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. Jessen for years,” Mitchell said, referring to John Bruce Jessen, another psychologist who worked with him to design what amounted to a torture program for the CIA to use on its captives held in secret prisons after the 2001 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.
Had Mitchell refused to come, the Air Force colonel presiding in the case could have ordered him to testify by video teleconference from Washington.
“I actually did it for the victims and families. Not you,” Mitchell said under questioning by James Connell, a lawyer for one of the defendants. About 12 relatives of 9/11 victims and their companions were observing the hearing, one wearing a necktie with the Statue of Liberty on it.
They were sequestered behind a blue curtain in the court’s spectators gallery, hidden from view of the troops, journalists, legal observers and court staff also watching what is expected to be the most dramatic testimony so far since arraignment of the five men in the case in May 2012.
Mitchell entered the courtroom just before 11 a.m. and took the witness stand 25 feet away from Mohammed, who put on a pair of eyeglasses and looked across the room but displayed no evident emotion. Mohammed said something inaudible to a co-defendant, Walid bin Attash.
For the testimony, two defense teams had mental health professionals in the courtroom. Beside Mohammed was Dr. Katherine Porterfield, a New York psychologist. Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army general and psychiatrist, sat beside another defendant, Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi.
Mitchell, with a full snowwhite beard and thinning white hair, wore a charcoal suit to court with a crisp white button-down shirt and a red tie.
Mitchell adopted an aggressive approach as a witness. After a prosecutor provided him with a top secret guide to the codes the U.S. government had assigned to interrogators whose names cannot be used in court, he declared the list flawed. He said it gave a “false and misleading impression that these men were interrogated during their entire time in custody. And they were not.”
He said some of the codenamed people identified as interrogators were actually “debriefers, targeters and analysts.”