'Correct a black mark in US history': former prisoners of Abu Ghraib get day in court

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 14 Apr 2024 07.00 EDT


The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day that the photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed to the public, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolize the treatment of detainees in the US “war on terror”.

The long-delayed case was brought by Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and As’ad Al-Zuba’e, three Iraqi civilians who were detained at Abu Ghraib, before being released without charge in 2004. (A fourth man, Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid, was dismissed from the case in 2019.) The men are suing CACI Premier Technology, a private company that was contracted by the US government to provide interrogators at the prison. The company has fought for 16 years to get the case thrown out, ultimately losing its last appeal in November.

“This is a historic trial that we hope will deliver some measure of justice and healing for what President Bush rightly deemed disgraceful conduct that dishonored the United States and its values,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, which brought the case on behalf of the former detainees.

The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign nationals to file cases in US courts for violations of international law; the plaintiffs are seeking damages. Al-Ejaili, who now lives in Sweden, will be the first torture survivor to testify about his treatment while in US custody from inside a US federal court. The other two men will testify remotely from Iraq as they were not granted visas to travel.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/apr/14/abu-ghraib-iraq-torture-abuse

[Easterncedar]

1. About damn time

Now do Gitmo

[Backseat Driver]

3. including the oath-sworn military psychologist/psychiatrist experts in trauma who abandoned their clients here

at home and there, post 9/11, and got deployed to serve at Gitmo? They had to know about the torture going on to actually help those soldier sisters and brothers in arms having coping issues with what WAS going on, far over the top of orders and officer oversight and discipline. OK, one can dream but sacrifice to a greater American good,...the truth in self-documented photos for souvenirs did come out--eventually. Wow, the problem of karma's application of justice sure is troubling...

[sueh]

2. Finally. I hope these men receive the justice they seek.

I will never forget the horror of their treatment.

[jaxexpat]

4. How do such knuckle-dragging animal rapers ever get into a position where they could perform this shit?

We got way too many sub-humans walking about and, unimaginable though it may be, actually voting. This home-schooling shit needs to be confined to homes without psychopathic parent/instructors. I don't think it's coincidental that the degrading of public schools' and their budgets via "home schools" occurred at around the same time "conservatism" became a talk radio format targeting rural America. Open microphones and offers of airtime to any quack and psyche ward escapee who called was, of course, all for "entertainment" value and something cheap to fill airwaves where few were listening. Until it wasn't. In 2000 this misbegotten child started stretching its crooked little legs. Within 3 years we were a nation of "war by contract" monsters.

[NanaCat]

7. This behaviour is not new

It was going on long before radio, TV or homeschooling existed, here and abroad.

War often dehumanizes the enemy by its very nature, and no army is bereft of sadistic people who will act on that dehumanization.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[ShepKat]

6. the buck stops with bush the dumber... and/or unca dick

his lawyers justified it and all the chickenhawks got woodys thinking about the process. Yes it was disgraceful- and sadistic. He was, after all, surrounded by the 'best' people. Ol slam dunk tenet... sickeningly despicable. Along with Rumsfeld, Armitage, so many more.. were defended.