November, 06 2013, 03:39pm EDT
U.S. Courts Can Hear Cases of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Experts Argue
Retired Military Officers, UN Special Rapporteurs, Survivors of Human Rights Violations, Scholars Urge Court to Allow Abu Ghraib Contractor Case to Go Forward
Richmond, VA
Today, in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and co-counsel on behalf of four Iraqi men who were tortured at Abu Ghraib, six amici parties urged the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the case, which was dismissed by the district court in June. Plaintiffs in the case, Al Shimari v. CACI International Inc., brought claims including torture and war crimes under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against private contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc. ("CACI"), which U.S. military investigators concluded participated in torture, the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In dismissing the torture victims' claims, the district judge did not suggest that the plaintiffs' allegations were unfounded, but instead ruled that the recent Supreme Court decision in Kiobel v. Shell/Royal Dutch Petroleum barred lawsuits based on conduct that occurred outside the U.S.
"In Kiobel, the Supreme Court specifically held that U.S. courts could hear cases that 'touch and concern' the United States 'with sufficient force.' This case, where U.S. citizen-employees of a U.S. corporation are alleged to have conspired with U.S. soldiers, who were punished in U.S. court martials, to commit one of the most notorious and internationally-condemned episodes of torture in U.S. history, inside a U.S.-controlled prison, within a country occupied by the U.S, is just such a case" said CCR Legal Director Baher Azmy.
The six amicus briefs filed today were submitted by retired military officers; past United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Torture and current Rapporteur Juan Mendez; a group of human rights survivors who successfully sought redress in U.S. courts under the ATS, including Dolly Filartiga, plaintiff in the first modern use of the ATS to obtain accountability for human rights abuses; a group of civil procedure professors; international law and civil procedure scholars; and historians of international law. All argued that Al Shimari is not only permitted under Kiobel, but also that international law requires the U.S. to provide a forum for seeking accountability and redress for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Said Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson and Dean Emeritus University of New Hampshire School of Law, "This case raises important questions regarding the reputation of the United States as a country that values the rule of law. It is important for our courts to provide remedies for torture and war crimes committed by U.S. actors on U.S. controlled territory, especially if we wish to keep U.S. citizens safe when they operate abroad. This country should not tolerate prisons that are beyond the law."
Said Juan Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, "States have an obligation to ensure that a remedy exists for victims of torture. There has been little meaningful accountability with respect to the notorious instances of torture and serious abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison against contractors. Allowing impunity to continue could undermine the anti-torture framework which I am charged to oversee, and to which the United States has committed itself on becoming a party to the Convention Against Torture."
Al Shimari is one in a series of cases brought by CCR and co-counsel seeking accountability for torture at Abu Ghraib; last October, Al-Quraishi v Nakhla and L-3 was voluntarily dismissed following settlement. Inside the prison, plaintiffs were subjected to electric shocks, sexual violence, forced nudity, and broken bones, and deprived of oxygen, food, and water. U.S. military investigators concluded that several CACI employees serving as interrogators directed abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners in order to "soften" them up for interrogations.
Read today's filings here.
Plaintiffs' appeal brief was filed on October 29th. Co-counsel in the case are Shereef Akeel of Akeel & Valentine, P.C. in Troy, Michigan, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, and George Brent Mickum IV.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCR is committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
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'Their Blood Is on Gene Block': UCLA Students Injured in Violent Police Raid
Officers in military gear fired flash-bang munitions and used batons to clear a nonviolent encampment calling for an end to Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza.
May 02, 2024
Los Angeles police wearing riot gear launched a violent attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA early Thursday, using flash bangs and firing impact munitions at students demanding an end to their university's complicity in Israel's war on Gaza.
Video footage posted to social media by reporters present at the scene shows officers firing multiple "less lethal" munitions and sound-concussive devices at student demonstrators as they closed in on the encampment, which UCLA's leadership has declared unlawful.
Police reportedly arrested dozens of students as they advanced on the encampment.
"They'd rather shoot kids than stop this genocide," said one observer.
Police fire multiple impact munitions at protestors. 4:38am pic.twitter.com/960I4iVMtt
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) May 2, 2024
Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science and member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, told the university's student newspaper early Thursday that police officers "violently dragged" students from the Gaza solidarity encampment and that some demonstrators were "visibly injured."
"Their blood is on Gene Block and the UC administration's hands for a series of catastrophic decisions over the last two days," said Blair, referring to UCLA's chancellor. "It did not need to be this way."
Blair said UCLA professors inside the encampment "plan to be arrested alongside students who have done nothing but talk about a genocide taking place in Palestine."
Matt Barreto, a professor of Chicano studies and political science, told the Los Angeles Times that "our job is to stand up for their First Amendment rights, their rights on their own campus."
Police arrest protestor 4:55am pic.twitter.com/udgS0Terc9
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) May 2, 2024
The police raid came 24 hours after Los Angeles officers and campus security stood by as a pro-Israel mob violently attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Dozens of students were reportedly taken to hospitals for treatment following the assault.
The Daily Bruin, whose student journalists were on the scene, reported Thursday that police "continued to detain protesters in the encampment as the clock struck 4:00 am, marking one week since the initial erection of the solidarity encampment by the UC Divest Coalition and Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA."
"At 4:05 am, a slew of loud noises presumed to be flash bangs went off," the newspaper added. "Dozens of protesters exited the encampment by climbing through the bushes near Powell Library onto the Janss Steps lawn. Protesters chanted, 'Gene Block, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide' and, 'We are students' as smoke from the presumed flash bangs thickened above Dickson Plaza."
The police crackdown at UCLA is part of a broader wave of police repression on campuses nationwide as universities refuse to grant their student's calls for divestment from companies profiting off Israel's assault on Gaza. More than 1,000 student demonstrators have reportedly been arrested across the U.S. so far.
"It is no accident that this indefensible police crackdown comes in service of an indefensible war," The Intercept's Natasha Lennard wrote in a column Wednesday following the violent police raid at Columbia University in New York. "The very extremity of protest repression speaks to desperation on the part of institutions of the American establishment."
"Israel's decimation of Gaza has—at least for millions more people—given lie to the redemptive myths of the post-World War II political liberal order," Lennard added. "Young people, even the children of the elite, even children of Zionists, are standing with Palestine. Their peaceful acts of protest count as disruptive because they count as un-American—which should be a badge of honor amid a U.S.-backed genocide."
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'Tragic and Unjust': Trump Judges Grant Biden DOJ Request to Toss Youth Climate Case
"We will keep fighting for climate justice," said one plaintiff, "but this is another dark day for protecting young people from climate harm imposed by their government."
May 02, 2024
A panel of three Trump-appointed judges on Wednesday granted the Biden Justice Department's request to have a landmark youth climate case dismissed, another setback for a long-running effort to hold the U.S. government accountable for damaging the planet and violating the rights of younger generations.
The order handed down by a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel instructs an Oregon district court to toss Juliana v. United States for lack of standing, siding with the Justice Department's emergency petition for a writ of mandamus—which the DOJ itself describes as "an extraordinary remedy" that "should only be used in exceptional circumstances of peculiar emergency or public importance."
Julia Olson, co-executive director of Our Children's Trust, a public interest law firm backing the youth plaintiffs, said in a statement Wednesday that "the Biden administration was wrong to use an emergency measure to stop youth plaintiffs from having their day in court."
"The real emergency is the climate emergency," said Olson. "This emergency was not created by these young people, who have just been stripped of their fundamental constitutional rights by one of the highest courts in our country. Children deserve access to justice."
Calling the 9th Circuit decision "tragic and unjust" and "wrong on the law," Olson said the legal fight is "not over" and stressed that President Joe Biden "can still make this right by coming to the settlement table."
"We will keep fighting for climate justice, but this is another dark day for protecting young people from climate harm imposed by their government."
Juliana v. United States was brought in 2015 by 21 young Americans who argued the federal government has violated their "fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property" by continuing to allow the extraction of fossil fuels despite knowing their central role in destructive planetary heating.
Three consecutive administrations have worked aggressively to prevent a trial, deploying emergency legal tactics to delay and derail the youth-led case even as climate impacts became increasingly devastating in the U.S. and around the world.
Mat dos Santos, general counsel of Our Children's Trust, warned last month that "it's a mistake" for the Biden administration to "take this position in an election year, especially when young voters continue to be more and more disenchanted with the current administration and the permitting of big fossil fuel projects."
"This is an opportunity for the administration to do right by young people," he added.
Earlier this year, just before parties to the case were set to receive trial dates from a federal judge in Oregon, the Biden Justice Department filed a motion to stay the case and then another to have it tossed, drawing outrage from the youth plaintiffs. Dozens of members of Congress have weighed in on the side of the plaintiffs, arguing they should be allowed a trial to present their arguments and evidence.
Avery McRae, one of the plaintiffs, said in response to the 9th Circuit order on Wednesday that "every time we get a decision as devastating as this one, I lose more and more hope that my country is as democratic as it says it is."
"I have been pleading for my government to hear our case since I was 10 years old, and I am now nearly 19," said McRae. "A functioning democracy would not make a child beg for their rights to be protected in the courts, just to be ignored nearly a decade later. I am fed up with the continuous attempts to squash this case and silence our voices."
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57 House Dems Call On Biden to Prevent Israeli Assault on Rafah
"An offensive invasion into Rafah by Israel in the upcoming days is wholly unacceptable."
May 01, 2024
Dozens of U.S. House Democrats on Wednesday joined Congresswomen Pramila Jayapal and Madeleine Dean in pressuring President Joe Biden to prevent a full-scale Israeli assault on Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip that's now full of over a million displaced Palestinians.
"We write with urgency to say: an offensive invasion into Rafah by Israel in the upcoming days is wholly unacceptable," states the letter from Jayapal (D-Wash.), Dean (D-Pa.), and 55 other members of Congress. "We welcome your administration's efforts to dissuade the Israeli government from this military operation, which would deepen both the humanitarian catastrophe for people in Gaza and the strategic challenges that regional and global stakeholders face in this conflict."
"We now urge you to enforce U.S. law and policy by withholding certain offensive weaponry or other military support that can be used for an assault on Rafah, including the offensive weaponry and aid already signed into law," the letter continues.
The Democrats highlighted how Israel's retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack has impacted the city:
Rafah has become one of the most overcrowded places in the world. With shelters too full and insufficient, many families now live on the streets. The collapsed health infrastructure, in addition to sewage overflow and the scarcity of food, water, and medicine, has accelerated the onset of severe malnutrition and the spread of communicable diseases. Acute food insecurity is endemic in Rafah, even as the international community circulates credible reports that famine is setting in elsewhere in Gaza—all as a result of six months of military operations that you have described as "indiscriminate." In addition, we know in fact that Israeli strikes on Rafah have already occurred, including one on April 20th that killed 18 people, including 14 children.
Across the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces have killed 34,568 people and wounded another 77,765—mostly women and children—while leaving thousands more missing in the rubble of bombed buildings, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Biden has resisted mounting global pressure to limit or fully cut off military aid to Israel, which the International Court of Justice in January concluded is "plausibly" committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. That case is ongoing.
"In addition to the catastrophic civilian toll—and risk to as many as 130 hostages, including as many as six or more Americans—an offensive in Rafah would ultimately undermine the Israeli and U.S. governments' strategic interests," the Democrats argued. "Israeli and U.S. military bases in the region have recently been the targets of repeated drone and missile attacks—a dangerous indication of how unstable the Middle East has become as a result of the Gaza war."
"An Israeli offensive in Rafah risks the start of yet another escalatory spiral, immediately putting the region back on the brink of a broader war that neither Israel nor the United States can afford," they warned. Along with calling on the president to withhold aid to Israel to protect civilians in Rafah, the lawmakers urged Biden to keep working "toward achieving a lasting cease-fire that will bring hostages home and build a path toward safety and security for all."
They also said that "it is of the utmost importance that both Hamas and Israel immediately come to the table with the international community for a mutually agreed ceasefire deal that can secure the safe return of hostages, full resumption of humanitarian aid, and the space for a negotiated, long-term peace in the region."
The letter comes a week after Biden signed a foreign aid package that included $26 billion for Israel and passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. Jayapal and three dozen other Democrats opposed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which ultimately passed.
In a joint statement last month, the Washington Democrat and 18 of her colleagues said that "our votes against H.R. 8034 are votes against supplying more offensive weapons that could result in more killings of civilians in Rafah and elsewhere."
Israeli Prime Minister "Benjamin Netanyahu appears willing to sacrifice the hostages while inflicting extraordinary suffering on the people of Gaza. He is willing to expand this conflict to preserve his power at the expense of Israel's safety," they continued, noting concerns about an invasion of Rafah. "When faced with the question of whether to provide offensive aid to further this conflict, we believe there is a moral imperative to find another path."
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