Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen began off as contract consultants to the C.I.A. and went on to waterboard three different prisoners now at Guantánamo a
Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen began off as contract consultants to the C.I.A. and went on to waterboard three different prisoners now at Guantánamo along with Mr. Mohammed, beginning with a Palestinian man known as Abu Zubaydah. By 2005, they arrange a enterprise, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, that grew to offer all of the contract guards at the black sites and 80 percent of the company’s interrogators. The USA authorities paid the enterprise $81 million for his or her companies.
Mr. Zubaydah, who has by no means been charged or convicted of against the law, is an indefinite detainee at Guantánamo in the identical jail as Mr. Mohammad and the others. He recently drew sketches of the appliance of the interrogation methods in medical element.
It’s unclear how a lot of the testimony the general public or the defendants will get to see.
The C.I.A., by means of the prosecution, nonetheless controls the categorized data surrounding the black websites — together with their places and the identities of most individuals who labored there, in addition to deciding who can testify and what they will expose.
The Sept. 11 case prosecutors have periodically invoked a nationwide safety privilege to forestall the general public and the defendants from listening to some data. And in closed nationwide safety classes, they’ve invoked the privilege to forestall the choose and the protection attorneys from listening to some data.
The choose, Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force, finally has to determine whether or not the federal government has shielded a lot data it will stop the defendants from getting a good trial and, if that’s the case, how you can present stability earlier than the trial’s begin, which is scheduled for Jan. 22, 2021, with jury selection. Treatments may embody dropping the demise penalty as a risk or dismissing the costs.
Trial attorneys within the case have been getting ready for the high-stakes listening to for months, with protection groups reviewing Dr. Mitchell’s media appearances and his ebook, “Enhanced Interrogation,” and learning the depositions both men gave in 2017 in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit.
“They had been the among the many founding fathers of the torture program,” stated Walter B. Ruiz, the lawyer for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, one of many defendants.