Detainees barred from challenging torture, abuse
Ruling in a case of four Britons who formerly were detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the D.C. Circuit Court decided Friday that the prisoners have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for allegedly torturing them and defiling their religious beliefs while they were held at the military prison. The Court applied several different legal theories in rejecting all of the claims of abuse and arbitrary imprisonment, but the end result was that there was nothing left of the detainees’ legal challenge.
The four Britons are Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmedand Jamal Al-Harith. They sued former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, top generals, and several Army colonels or lieutenant colonels. They contended that Secretary Rumsfeld had approved harsh interrogation techniques for Guantanamo prisoners, leading “systematic and repeated” torture at the military prison on the island of Cuba throughout their two years in captivity as lower-ranking military personnel carried out Rumsfeld’s authorization. They were released from Guantanamo in March 2004, and returned to Britain. They then sued in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute, the Geneva Conventions on treatment of military prisoners, the U.S. Constitution, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Which hopefully will end emotion filled posts like this by the Kossacks, but of course that would require some sense of reason.
The ruling reaffirmed as it had ruled last year, and in other detainee cases, that those at Guantanamo have no constitutional rights, they are not covered by RFRA because they are not “persons” in the constitutional sense.
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