federal lawsuit brought by Iraqi torture survivors that appears to finally be heading to trial, after a federal judge refused to dismiss the case. The Center for Constitutional Rights and four Iraqi men are suing the U.S. military contractor CACI, which was hired to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where the men were tortured by U.S. guards. The lawsuit was first filed in 2008, 15 years ago. Since then, CACI has attempted 18 times to have the case dismissed.
This is one of the plaintiffs in the case, Salah al-Ejaili, speaking on Democracy Now! almost a decade ago, talking about what he endured at Abu Ghraib in November of 2003. He was working as a journalist for Al Jazeera, had traveled to Iraq’s Diyala province to report on the U.S. invasion. It was there that U.S. soldiers detained him. He said when he asked what he was being taken in for, their response was “You know the reason.” He was ultimately transferred to Abu Ghraib. When I spoke to him a decade
so, we represent, in this case, four detainees. We had prior cases, representing nearly 200 individuals, that was thrown out by a D.C. federal appellate panel, and in the majority was Kavanaugh, and in dissent was Garland. We brought another case on behalf of 71 Iraqi citizens against a translation company. That’s the Al-Quraishi case. That settled favorably. And this case is on behalf of now three — regrettably, one of the four plaintiffs was dismissed — individuals who were in the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib. This is against CACI specifically. And all three plaintiffs were swept up in the chaos after the occupation, ultimately found their way to Abu Ghraib and suffered the range of tactics, interrogation tactics and violence tactics, that cumulatively amounted to torture, so sleep deprivation, forced nudity, sexual
— source democracynow.org | Aug 08, 2023