Michael Kearns, a retired US Air Force captain, used to teach techniques to resist interrogation at the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) school in the 1980s, and worked with Jessen to develop a course called SV-91. Mitchell and Jessen have "taken and reverse-engineered the harsh parts of SERE and turned them into EITs - enhanced interrogation program, brutal techniques," Kearns told RT. The techniques used were "grossly beyond anything at the SERE school standards, in my opinion."

Lawyers for Jessen and Mitchell have prepared in their defense a reference to the Nuremberg Trials, citing the case of a gas technician who worked for a firm that created Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis in World War II concentration camps. That technician was ultimately exonerated. The court noted that even though the technician knew that he played an important role in the transfer of the gas, he was not complicit in how it was used, the Spokesman-Review reported.

"Making comparisons to the Nazi regime's murderous use of poison gas is rarely a good idea," Ladin wrote. "In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals that judged the Nazis and their enablers after World War II established the opposite rule: Private contractors are accountable when they choose to provide unlawful means and profit from war crimes," according to the Spokesman-Review.

The defense made the claim that Congress empowered the US president at the time to respond to threats of terrorism, and he reacted by telling the National Counterterrorism Center to catch and interrogate operatives of Al-Qaida. That is when the CIA hired the psychologists, therefore, lawyers say that the government's immunity should extend to Mitchell and Jessen and the case should be thrown out.

John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower who exposed the torture program, says the two psychologists were hired because the agency wanted to atone for 9/11 by capturing and interrogating terrorists. "The reason Mitchell and Jessen were put in charge of this terrible, this important program was because the CIA simply had no experience in this kind of thing," Kiriakou told RT. "Because they had nobody internally that could do these interrogations, they decided to hire Mitchell and Jessen - at the cost of $81 million - to come in and teach the CIA how to torture people. At the end of the day, Mitchell and Jessen were the ones who flew out to the secret prison site overseas and actually carried out the torture themselves."

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