no...THE INCOMPETENCE COMES FROM THE TOP!...those who WILL NEVER TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR FAILURES
4 Ex-Detainees Sue Rumsfeld, 10 Others
By Charlie Savage
Boston Globe
Thursday 28 October 2004
Plaintiffs allege officials to blame for abuse at base.
WASHINGTON - Four former Guantanamo detainees yesterday sued Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld and 10 others in the military chain of command overseeing the American interrogation prison
in Cuba, alleging that the officials are personally responsible for illegal acts of prolonged arbitrary
detention and torture.
The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind by former detainees who have since been released from
the prison, seeks $10 million for each of the men to be paid by the officials out of their own pockets as
compensation for their role in the alleged abuses.
All four plaintiffs are British citizens who were taken into US military custody in December 2001 in
Afghanistan, and released in March from Cuba. Although they were imprisoned and interrogated for
more than two years, none has been charged with a crime.
"This case is not about the money," Eric Lewis, a lawyer for the detainees, said at a press
conference yesterday. "It is about accountability. Torture is un-American. Arbitrary detention is
un-American. And what these young men have suffered, and continue to suffer, is something for which
we and the American justice system need to hold these people accountable."
Plaintiff lawyers acknowledged that before they can air the merits of their case in court, they will first
have to overcome an anticipated claim that all the officials are immune from being sued because they
were acting on behalf of the government. The lawyers said yesterday that because it is illegal for any
official to authorize torture, they can defeat that defense.
However, Major Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, disputed the basis for the former
detainees' case and said there is no US policy that condones torture.
"These individuals were captured in Afghanistan fighting illegally for Al Qaeda," he said. "They were
properly classified as enemy combatants. Their detention was directly related to this combat activity,
as determined by an appropriate DOD official before they were taken to Guantanamo. There is no basis
in US law to pay claims to those captured and detained as a result of combat activity."
The lawsuit asserts that the four men "never engaged in terrorist activity or took up arms against the
United States." It says that three of the men, all friends from Tipton, England, traveled to Afghanistan in
October 2001 "to offer help in the ongoing humanitarian crisis and were detained in November 2001 by
the Northern Alliance and turned over to the US military.
It claims the fourth, a web designer from Manchester, England, went to Pakistan in October 2001 for
a "religious retreat" and quickly decided to return home, but was kidnapped, taken to Afghanistan, and
jailed by the Taliban as an accused British spy. After the Taliban regime fell, it says, US soldiers took
custody of him.
The four allege that during the course of their 2 years of detention by the US military, they were
continuously interrogated and repeatedly mistreated, including receiving beatings and being held in
isolation.
"They were 'short shackled' in painful 'stress positions' for many hours at a time, causing deep flesh
wounds and permanent scarring," the complaint alleges. "Plaintiffs were also threatened with
unmuzzled dogs, forced to strip naked, subjected to repeated forced body cavity searches,
intentionally subjected to extremes of heat and cold for the purpose of causing suffering."
Shavers said that "US policy is to treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they
may occur, in a matter consistent with all US legal obligations, and in particular with legal obligations
prohibiting torture."
The detainees, however, say the officials conspired to break US legal obligations, citing a series of
formerly top secret memos about coercive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo which have been
made public since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq earlier this year. Many of the
techniques in those memos, which the lawsuits call "illegal," match their account.
"The legal memoranda will go some ways to defeating their claims of immunity because it shows they
knew what the standards were and that they were doing their damnedest to get around them," said
Steven Watt, a senior fellow at Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the lawyers working on the
case.
The lawsuit also says that some of the alleged mistreatment in Guantanamo was "regularly
videotaped" and may be available as corroborating evidence.
The suit is being brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a 1789 US statute that allows noncitizens
to sue human rights abusers for alleged violations of customary international law that have taken place
anywhere in the world.
It alleges that the treatment of the detainees violated the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which
forbids the deprivation of liberty without due process; the Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and
unusual punishment; the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment; and the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration announced in early 2002 that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to the
Afghanistan conflict, sparking intense global criticism. The conventions forbid mistreating wartime
prisoners and require individual status hearings for detainees, which were not given.
Among the plaintiffs is Shafiq Rasul, who was also the named plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court
case earlier this year. In June, the court ruled that Guantanamo detainees may challenge the basis for
their indefinite detention in federal civilian courts, contrary to the position of the Bush administration.
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