Historic victory for three victims of torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

The contractor company accused of torturing Abu Ghraib prison inmates has been ordered to pay damages of 42 million

Ten years after the scandal of Abu Ghraib one arrived historic ruling:for the first time, a federal jury he thought a'US contractor company complicit in torture in the infamous Iraqi prison during the Second Gulf War.

The jury found the Caci Premier Technology responsible for its role in the torture of detainees during the US war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and then in Iraq and sentenced the company to pay a total of $42 million to the plaintiffs.The monetary damages for the plaintiffs include $3 million each in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.The verdict stands a rare victory for plaintiffs seeking to bring to justice U.S. companies that took part in the so-called war on terror in the Middle East.

The historic Abu Ghraib torture trial

The case was filed 16 years ago, but it is stranded several times in procedural obstacles, as Caci attempted more than 20 times to dismiss the case.At the beginning of November a new process in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, taking up the case for which the judge had declared null and void proceedings in April due to jury deadlock. Already then the case It was considered a historic moment because for the first time a US jury heard directly from the victims of Abu Ghraib.

This time, however, the reopening of the trial led to one victory for the three victims. The plaintiffs – Suhail Najim Abdullah Al-Shimari, principal of a middle school, Asa'ad Hamza Hanfoosh Al-Zuba'e, greengrocer fruit, and Salah Hassan Nusaif al-Ejaili, Al Jazeera journalist – had testified that they had suffered sexual abuse and harassment, as well as being beaten and threatened with dogs in the Abu Ghraib prisons during the US occupation of Iraq.There Caci, hired by Washington, was considered responsible for conspiracy together with US soldiers.

The case was based largely on the legal definition of conspiracy, which does not require an overt act, but may also include cooperation with other people who practice torture, he told The Intercept Stjepan Meštrović, professor of sociology at Texas A&M University and expert witness in several courts-martial of soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib.

Is the government or the contractors responsible?

The whole defense of Caci was based on the assumption that the responsibility for torture occurred inside prisons is to be attributed to the United States, given that contractor companies have entered into contracts directly with the government.The plaintiffs and the jury found Caci responsible for creating the conditions which led to the torture suffered.Even theinvestigation of the general Antonio Taguba concluded that at least one CACI interrogator should be held accountable for instructing military police to establish conditions that amounted to physical abuse.

This ruling opens the door to the possibility of future investigations into responsibility for the commission of war crimes among civilian contractors and other auxiliaries of military forces

Stjepan Meštrović, professor at Texas A&M University 

Determining responsibility for torture is itself difficult because the prison management did not have a traditional structure, there was no real chain of command.Nobody knows where civilian contractors fit into the command structure, this has been the legal problem in these years of proceedings against Caci. According to the defense, the contractors are responsible for their actions regardless from their role in the management hierarchy of Abu Ghraib.

This is not the first time a defense contractor has been sued in connection with its work at Abu Ghraib.In 2013, Englity, formerly known as L-3 Services Inc., he paid more than $5 million in a settlement to 71 former detainees at Abu Ghraib and other US-run detention centers in Iraq, but it is the first time a conviction has been received.

The attention paid to contractor civilians constitutes just a small part of what happened at Abu Ghraib.Only about a dozen American soldiers have been convicted in connection with detainee abuse, no one was tried and convicted for the prisoners' deaths, no CIA agent or contractor. A Senate report published in 2008 suggested that the responsibility was as high as the former SSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior United States officials.According to Human Rights Watch, the US government has not yet compensated the victims of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib.

This ruling, however, it is an important precedent.Now, private military and security contractors are aware of the possibility of being held accountable when they violate the most basic protections of international law, such as the prohibition on torture.