CIA psychologist defends torture before Guantanamo court
A psychologist who helped design the CIA’s “war on terror” torture program after the September 11, 2001 attacks defended the program this week before its victims at the US military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba.
James Mitchell was unapologetic Tuesday when he appeared at a hearing to answer questions about the waterboarding, stress position and sleep deprivation techniques applied to 9/11 plot suspects detained in secret prisons following the attacks.
“I’d get up today and do it again,” he said before five of those men, whose slow-moving cases at the Guantanamo military tribunals have them facing possible death sentences.
Mitchell was one of the architects of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” operations deployed against suspected Al-Qaeda extremists after the 2001 attacks, which left 2,976 dead.
While the techniques he and another psychologist helped devise have now been banned as illegal torture, Mitchell said it had been his “moral duty,” to help protect the country.
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