{"id":180059,"date":"2017-07-26T19:57:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/07\/26\/worst-defense-attorney-lawyers-ever\/"},"modified":"2017-07-26T19:57:00","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T00:57:00","slug":"worst-defense-attorney-lawyers-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/07\/26\/worst-defense-attorney-lawyers-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst Defense Attorney Lawyers Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today in complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy, counsel for the psychologists designed the CIA torture program are attempting to defend themselves against a civil suit by comparing themselves to the manufacturer of Zyklon-B<\/a>, whose product was used in Nazi death camps:<\/div>\n

As the recently departed White House press secretary demonstrated earlier this year<\/a>, making comparisons to the Nazi regime\u2019s murderous use of poison gas is rarely a good idea. That\u2019s one reason it was so surprising that ahead of a crucial court hearing this week, defense lawyers for the two psychologists behind the CIA\u2019s torture program compared their clients to the contractors who supplied the Nazis with Zyklon B, the poison gas used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps to murder millions of Jews and other prisoners in the Holocaust. <\/p>\n

Psychologists James Mitchell and John \u201cBruce\u201d Jessen were the architects of the CIA\u2019s torture program<\/a>. Now, in a groundbreaking lawsuit<\/a>, three survivors and victims of the torture program are seeking to hold Mitchell and Jessen accountable. <\/p>\n

This Friday in federal court in Spokane, Washington, Mitchell and Jessen\u2019s lawyers will argue that they can\u2019t be held responsible for their actions. In an extraordinary legal filing<\/a>, Mitchell and Jessen claim they aren\u2019t legally responsible to the people hurt by their methods because they \u201csimply did business with the CIA pursuant to their contracts.\u201d <\/p>\n

A key part of Mitchell and Jessen\u2019s argument hinges on the claim that poison gas manufacturers weren\u2019t held responsible by a British military tribunal for providing the Nazis with the gas because the Nazi government, not contractors, had final say on whether to use it. They argue that they are like a corporate gassing technician who was charged with and acquitted of assisting the Nazis because \u201ceven if [Mitchell and Jessen] played an integral part of the supply and use of\u201d torture methods, they had no \u201cinfluence\u201d over the CIA\u2019s decision to use them and can\u2019t be accountable. <\/p>\n

In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals that judged the Nazis and their enablers after World War II established the opposite<\/i> rule: Private contractors are accountable when they choose to provide<\/i> unlawful means for and profit from war crimes. In the same case that Mitchell and Jessen cite, the military tribunal found<\/a> the owner of a chemical company that sold Zyklon B to the Nazis guilty \u2014 even though only the Nazis had final say on which prisoners would be gassed.<\/p>\n

The military tribunal made clear<\/a> that \u201cknowingly to supply a commodity to a branch of the State which was using that commodity for the mass extermination of Allied civilian nationals was a war crime, and that the people who did it were war criminals for putting the means to commit the crime into the hands of those who actually carried it out.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a saying among lawyers, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table.”<\/p>\n

These sadistic psychologists are pounding the table here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today in complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy, counsel for the psychologists designed the CIA torture program are attempting to defend themselves against a civil suit by comparing themselves to the manufacturer of Zyklon-B, whose product was used in Nazi death camps: As the recently departed White House press secretary demonstrated earlier this year, making comparisons …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,370,364,481,440,414,372],"class_list":["post-180059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-evil","tag-intelligence","tag-medical","tag-psychology","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}