The released photos documenting torture of prisoners at the United States government’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the Iraq War disgusted many people who could look beyond the war propaganda to feel sympathy for their fellow human beings. Even if it was assumed that all the people pictured in the midst of their torture were themselves guilty of heinous crimes — an assumption that lacked foundation, the torture was a breach of civilized behavior.
Two decades later, some accountability has been meted out by a jury in Alexandria, Virginia. The jury decided Tuesday that the military contractor CACI Premier Technology Inc. is liable to pay a total of 42 million dollars in damages to Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili, and Asa’ad Zuba’e — three former detainees at Abu Ghraib in the 2003 through 2004 time period who had brought a lawsuit against the company whose employees worked as interrogators at the prison.
Reporting at the Associated Press on the jury’s decision, Matthew Barakat wrote:
The $42 million fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs, [Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Baher Azmy] said. It’s also more than the $31 million that the plaintiffs said CACI was paid to supply interrogators to Abu Ghraib.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which aided the plaintiffs who won the case, indicated in a press release regarding the jury’s award of damages that the outcome of the case suggests liability may be imposed on other companies as well for US government torture activities:
The first case of its kind to make it to trial, Al Shimari, et al. v. CACI delivers a rare measure of justice to survivors of the U.S. government’s post-9/11 torture regime, which extended from Guantanamo to Iraq and Afghanistan to secret prisons around the world. It also brings a new degree of accountability to the shadowy realm of security contractors at a time when employees of private companies, integral to the U.S. “war on terror,” have often been implicated in human rights abuses across the globe.
Still, the primary torture culprit — the US government and its employees — continues to evade liability for its activities at Abu Ghraib and other torture sites around the world.
