The Salim lawsuit was the civil action brought against the two contract psychologists who designed the CIA’s interrogation programme, by Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud — two survivors of it — together with the family of Gul Rahman, who froze to death at a CIA site in Afghanistan. When a federal judge cleared it for trial in 2017, John Kiriakou’s reaction was pleasure mixed with disbelief that it had been allowed to get that far: “I’m thrilled about this lawsuit, and frankly I can’t believe that both the Obama administration’s CIA leadership and the Trump administration CIA leadership have allowed this case to go forward.”[1][2]
The Zyklon B defence
What he singles out is the argument the defence had advanced in the weeks before.[2]
“One of the things that’s truly sickening about this case is that the psychologists Mitchell and Jessen, just in the last two weeks, used the example of scientists in Nazi Germany who developed Zyklon B gas that was used to gas Jews in concentration camps as part of their defense. They said that at Nuremberg the inventors of Zyklon B weren’t prosecuted, so they shouldn’t be prosecuted, because they only taught the CIA how to torture.”
His rebuttal is that the analogy fails on its own facts: “that’s just simply not true. The scientists that invented the Zyklon B were not prosecuted — but Mitchell and Jessen not just created this torture program, they went overseas to the secret site, to the secret prison, and they were the ones who actually carried out the torture.”[3]
The settlement, and why he was disappointed by it
The case never reached trial. It settled on undisclosed terms with the two surviving plaintiffs and the family of the third, and Kiriakou — interviewed the same week, and against the reaction of the ACLU and of Salim himself, both of whom called it justice served — said he was disappointed in it, for three reasons he set out in order.[4]
The first is secrecy. “The decision is sealed, so we really don’t know if justice has been served. We don’t know what the terms of the agreement are. We don’t know if there is any kind of deterrent that has been written into the decision.” A settlement nobody can read, he argues, “at least in part defeats the purpose.”[4]
The second is that the defendants did not pay it. Mitchell and Jessen had been indemnified by the CIA in 2001, before the programme began, so the agency paid for their attorneys and then for the settlement itself — “the CIA is paying for everything. And when I say the CIA pays, I mean that you and I are paying for it, the American taxpayers are paying for it.” His conclusion follows directly: “there’s no actual hurt to Mitchell and Jessen.”[5]
The third is the discovery that a trial would have forced. “This, had it gone to trial, would have exposed CIA documents related to the torture program that we otherwise will never have access to, and we’re going to lose that now.” Whatever had not surfaced in the Senate Torture Report and could have surfaced here, he said, “will not come out, and we’ll just never know what the truth is behind this case.”[6]
Who the plaintiffs were
Kiriakou describes the two survivors as men the programme had no business holding at all. Suleiman Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud “were tortured mercilessly, and at least” — the caption breaks here — “they had nothing to do with terrorism. They were scooped up in the so-called fog of war.” They were sent to the secret prisons and then to Guantánamo, and were held for years. “It turns out they were the wrong guys.”[7][8] The third plaintiff family is that of Gul Rahman, whose death in a cold cell Kiriakou says was overseen by the two defendants and for which “there’s no justice.”[9]
What the settlement did achieve
Asked whether he could take any comfort from it, Kiriakou gave two answers. The money is one: he expects the settlement runs to “many millions of dollars,” and doubts Salim “would have even said that justice had been served without a provision of millions of dollars. So in and of itself that is a great thing.”[10]
The other is definitional, and is the point he puts the most weight on: “with this agreement the CIA has effectively admitted that it had a torture program — not an enhanced interrogation technique program, not an interrogation program, but a torture program. So at least we have that.” He closed on a hope rather than a prediction: “I hope that the organization can learn from its past mistakes, its past atrocities, and not ever carry anything out like this again.”[11]
He closes on the forum rather than the verdict: “I think frankly that Mitchell and Jessen are very, very fortunate in that this is not a criminal trial, because their actions are a violation of the federal torture act and a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. So they’re lucky, I think, that this is only a civil suit.” The date he attaches to the statute — 1946 — is preserved as spoken; the auto-caption is unreliable on numbers.[12]