A lawsuit accusing former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld of personal responsibility for US forces allegedly torturing two US whistleblowers who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm will be allowed to move forward, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday.
The ruling from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago comes just days after a similar decision by a US federal judge in Washington that gave the green light to a US veteran — who also alleges he was tortured in Iraq — to sue Rumsfeld for damages.
Monday’s ruling rejected arguments that Rumsfeld should be immune from such lawsuits for work performed as a Cabinet secretary.
The US Supreme Court sets a high bar for those suing a top government official, mandating that they show the acts in question are tied directly to a violation of constitutional rights and that the official clearly understood they were violations.
“There can be no doubt that the deliberate infliction of such treatment on US citizens, even in a war zone, is unconstitutional,” US Circuit Judge David Hamilton wrote in Monday’s opinion.
An attorney for Rumsfeld blasted the ruling.
“Having judges second-guess the decisions made by the armed forces halfway around the world is no way to wage a war,” David Rivkin said in a written statement. “It saps the effectiveness of the military, puts American soldiers at risk, and shackles federal officials who have a constitutional duty to protect America.”
In their lawsuit, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel claim US forces detained them in 2006 after they alleged illegal activities by the Iraqi-owned company they worked for, Shield Group Security.
Among the methods of torture used against them during several weeks in military camps were sleep deprivation and a practice known as “walling,” in which subjects are blindfolded and walked into walls, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges Rumsfeld personally participated in -approving the methods for use by the US military in Iraq, making Rumsfeld responsible, it argues, for what happened to Vance and Ertel.
Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz, welcomed the ruling, saying the court faced a choice between “protecting the most fundamental rights of American citizens in the difficult context of a war or leaving those rights solely in the hands of politicians and the military.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS