Last week, on the sixth anniversary of the first prisoner transfers into Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, a federal appeals court dismissed a case seeking compensation for a group of British detainees who were released from the prison and sent home to freedom in 2004.
The decision in the case (originally brought under the name Rasul v. Rumsfeld by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm of Baach Robinson & Lewis in Washington, DC) is the latest setback in our attempts to hold government officials accountable for wrongful detentions, torture and religious humiliation of detainees at the base. With the passage of the Military Commissions Act in 2006, the administration claims that the efforts to challenge the detention of men still held at the base through habeas corpus petitions may no longer proceed in federal courts. The same Act purports to grant immunity from criminal prosecution for war crimes or abuses amounting to torture committed by officials responsible for the worst of our detention and interrogation practices over the last six years. If the administration’s arguments on those fronts succeed, civil damages actions after the fact are the last best chance to hold torturers accountable and to compensate men whose lives have been ravaged by their abuse while in prolonged, mistaken detention at the hands of our government.
The plaintiffs in this case, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith, were systematically tortured by the U.S. for more than two years before finally being released without charge. In the course of their detention, they were routinely beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with dogs, strip searched, placed in “stress positions
The claims were brought under several legal theories. Plaintiffs invoked the Alien Tort Statute, one of the oldest laws in American history, passed in 1789 as part of the first Judiciary Act. This law allows noncitizens to sue for torts committed in violations of international law, including torture, arbitrary detention and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and the Geneva conventions. The plaintiffs also claimed violations of the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 1993 law that Congress passed (unanimously in the House, near so in the Senate) to outlaw government practices that unfairly burden the free exercise of religion. RFRA allows “appropriate relief