Miami, May 10 (RHC)-- A former U.S. intelligence linguist in Florida says U.S. organizations are standing up to Washington's "imperialism and tyranny."  Scott Rickard made the remarks in an interview with Press TV after a U.S. judge allowed a lawsuit against the psychologists, who designed the CIA's brutal torture program and helped the agency to implement it.

The decision by District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush was a major achievement in the fight to hold CIA individuals responsible for conducting a program that according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) resulted in the torture of at least 119 men between 2002 and 2008.

The case is seeking damages of up to $75,000 for the three victims, all of whom underwent torture in CIA "black sites" in Afghanistan.  Scott Rickard said: "It's good to see the ACLU have some success with prosecuting the torturers in the CIA operation."  He added that CIA psychologists "received $80 million for this particular operation to set up the torture environment."

The CIA employed brutal techniques like waterboarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and anal penetration performed under cover of "rehydration" to interrogate terror suspects imprisoned after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  These torture techniques migrated from the CIA's undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to U.S. military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

In October of last year, on behalf of former CIA prisoners Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, the ACLU filed the suit against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, former U.S. Air Force trainers, in a federal court in Washington.