Richmond:
A lawsuit by four former Iraqi detainees who said they were tortured at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq may go forward, a US appeals court said on Monday.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals sends the case back to a US District judge who had ruled that he lacked jurisdiction to hear it because the alleged abuse occurred in a foreign country.
CACI Premier Technology Inc., a Virginia-based military contractor, was hired to interrogate detainees at the US-run prison in Iraq. The detainees said CACI employees conspired to have soldiers torture them to soften them up for questioning. The former detainees say they were subjected to electrical shocks, sexual violence and forced nudity. They are seeking unspecified monetary damages.
In 2004, photos depicting soldiers abusing Abu Ghraib detainees became public, shocking the national conscience and producing "universal condemnation among US political and military leaders," the plaintiffs said in court papers.
The judge ruled last year that a US Supreme Court decision in another case involving a human rights law, the Alien Tort Statute, barred him from hearing the lawsuit. But unlike the case cited, the appeals court said, this one had substantial American ties - the company, its employees and the military that controlled the prison.
CACI could appeal the panel's ruling to the full appeals court or to the US Supreme Court. The company's lawyer, J. William Koegel Jr., declined to comment.
Baher Azmy, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents the detainees, said the ruling is significant even though it does not deal with the merits of the case.
"We hope that the victims of torture at Abu Ghraib finally will get to tell their story in US courts," Azmy said.
The appeals court said the judge will have to gather more evidence about whether the civilian interrogators had some degree of autonomy or were directly controlled by the military.