CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: Statist insanity continues: Abu Ghraib Torture Victims Ordered To Pay U.S. Contractor’s Legal Fees Sun Sep 15, 2013 11:43 pm | |
| A federal judge on Wednesday ordered four Iraqis who were imprisoned at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to pay nearly $14,000 in legal fees to defense contractor CACI, an Arlington, Va.-based company that supplied interrogators to the U.S. government during the Iraq War.
The decision in favor of CACI stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the former prisoners in 2008, alleging that CACI employees directed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The suit was dismissed in June, when U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee ruled that because the alleged acts took place on foreign soil, CACI was “immune from suit” in U.S. court.
Lee did not, however, directly address the question of whether CACI employees took part in the mistreatment of prisoners. The treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib exploded into an international scandal in 2004, when shocking photos emerged of prisoners being stacked on top of each other, threatened with dogs, and sexually abused.
A little over a month after winning the dismissal this summer, CACI requested that the former prisoners be ordered to pay $15,580 to cover the company’s legal expenses.
Lawyers for the Iraqis disputed that their clients should pay CACI’s bills, partly because the Iraqis had “very limited financial means, even by non-U.S. standards, and dramatically so when compared” to CACI, according to a court filing. Moreover, they wrote, the initial claims against CACI, involving “serious claims of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and war crimes were dismissed on very close, difficult — and only recently arguable — grounds.”
Attorneys for the Iraqi prisoners have said they plan to file an appeal of the June dismissal this fall.
http://www.popularresistance.org/abu-ghraib-torture-victims-ordered-to-pay-u-s-contractors-legal-fees/ _________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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