Ex-detainees sue Abu Ghraib contractor over notorious torture
12/18/2007 @ 11:19 am
Filed by Jason Rhyne
Alleged torture victims faced no charges; were later released
More than 250 former detainees from Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison have filed an amended lawsuit against a private US military contractor they say participated in a conspiracy to commit torture. The head of a human rights group involved in bringing the case told RAW STORY that unchecked abuses of contractors in Iraq are tantamount to a "license to kill."
The class action lawsuit, submitted Monday to a Washington, DC, federal court, asserts that employees from contractor CACI International Inc. routinely tortured, threatened and humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other US-run facilities. The complaint is an revised version of a suit first brought against CACI and another contractor, the Titan Corporation, in 2004.
A US district judge in November dismissed the plaintiffs' case against Titan in a summary judgment.
"Plaintiffs are 256 persons among the tens of thousands of persons swept up in the military raids for no reason other than shortage of military interpreters and interrogators," the official complaint states. "They were all eventually released without any charges being brought against them."
According to a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a group involved in bringing the complaint, the plaintiffs allege that they were "repeatedly sodomized, threatened with rape and harm to their family members," by CACI personnel, and were "kept naked in their cells, chained and handcuffed to the bars of their cells, forced to wear women's panties on their heads and bodies, subjected to electric shock, subjected to extreme heat and cold, attacked by unmuzzled dogs, subjected to serious pain inflicted on sensitive body parts, and kicked, beaten and struck."
For its part, CACI on Wednesday dismissed the new suit as unfounded.
"CACI totally rejects and denies all of the plaintiffs' allegations and claims in their amended legal filing of Dec. 17, 2007," reads a statement from the contractor. "These accusations and allegations in their latest and ever-changing lawsuit are a rehash of their original baseless submissions...The plaintiffs are attempting to prosecute the same restated, reformulated, and related claims that were frivolous when first filed and which remain to this day frivolous and maliciously false."
CCR president Michael Ratner, however, told RAW STORY by email that the complaint was part of an attempt to hold contractors accountable for their actions.
"This suit against CACI, a private contractor, may be one of the few ways we in the US can get legal accountability for the horrendous torture that was carried on in Iraq," he said. "A situation where private contractors are unaccountable is like giving a license to torture."
The former prisoners allege that two specific CACI interrogators directed the use of torture techniques so severe that Cpl. Charles Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick -- both of whom were subsequently convicted for abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- refused to carry them out. The suit purports that the employees also told US soldiers to dole out "special treatment" for some prisoners, a code for making them crawl naked over concrete until bloody and incapacitated.
In addition to the Center for Constitutional Rights, plaintiffs in the case are represented by the law firms of Burke O'Neil LLC and Akeel & Valentine, PLC. The same legal team brought suit against private security firm Blackwater USA for firing on Iraqi civilians in a September incident.
"Hopefully, this suit -- and the precedent it will set -- will send a strong message to those who would violate fundamental rights," Ratner told RAW STORY. "The time is long past when we need to get off the page of torture and on to the page of rights. We cannot do so until and unless we investigate and bring to justice the torturers."
More information about the suit is available at CCR's website here.