Taleb al-Majli effortlessly recites his detainee identification number from Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison, where he was held more than 20 years ago—the numbers forever etched into his memory.
“Every day I still think about what happened to me,” explains the 58-year-old, who says American soldiers tortured and humiliated him in the prison. He is sitting on the hard floor of a small, mostly unfurnished, apartment he rents in Baghdad. “It lives inside me and never leaves me alone. I cannot begin to heal until I get justice for what they did to me.”
The torture and abuse of detainees by United States soldiers in Abu Ghraib made headlines and was broadcast from newsrooms around the world when photographs were released in April 2004 showing a hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his fingers, along with men stripped naked, leashed like dogs, or forced into sexual positions while US soldiers gleefully posed beside them. Majli tells The Real News Network that he appears in one of these images, in which naked detainees with bags over their heads are piled on top of each other in a disturbing human pyramid. Two American soldiers—Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner—are smiling and giving a thumbs up.
“The only thing I could think about at that moment was that I wish I had died before experiencing this,” Majli says, fiddling with his thumbs. “They stole my humanity from me. I still haven’t been able to process what happened to me there.”
For more than two decades, no one from Abu Ghraib—or other victims of torture during the US war on Iraq—ever received compensation from the United States government or its private military contractors. Majli is still among those who have not received redress for what he endured.
But, in November last year, something historic occurred in a Virginia courtroom. In 2008, three former Abu Ghraib detainees who were tortured at the facility sued Virginia-based CACI Premier Technology, Inc, which was contracted by the US military to provide interpretation services at Abu Ghraib. The federal lawsuit, Al Shimari v. CACI Premier Technology, Inc., alleged that CACI participated in a conspiracy to commit unlawful conduct, including torture and war crimes.
After 15 years of litigation, the jury agreed with the defendants, ordering CACI to pay $42 million to the former detainees—marking the first time victims of torture during times of war in the post-9/11 era have received compensation. The case is also the first lawsuit where victims of US torture and cruel treatment held a trial in a US courtroom.
Following this historic win, other former Abu Ghraib detainees hope this case can renew possibilities of getting redress for crimes they faced two decades ago. Rights groups propose that this could be a legal opening for other victims of US torture to come forward against private military and security contractors. Others, however, are doubtful the case could easily be reproduced by others.
During the rule of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, located 20 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. It held tens of thousands of political prisoners at one time. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s toppling, it was transformed into a US military prison.
Majli was detained in October 2003, picked up off the streets while visiting his uncle in Iraq’s western Anbar province. “They were just arresting all the men,” recounts Majli, who was about 36 at this time. “They zip-tied my hands and put a hood over my head. I was innocent and they took me for no reason at all.”
After a few days at the Habbaniyah Camp in Anbar and another unknown location, Majli was transferred to Abu Ghraib, where he remained for 16 months. He was never charged with a crime nor informed of the reasons he was being detained. According to a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, military intelligence officers from the US-led coalition forces in Iraq admitted that between 70% and 90% of Iraqis detained after the US invasion were actually arrested by mistake.
Majli tells TRNN he was kept in solitary confinement for nearly one month, which is prohibited under international law. “All I could think about was suicide,” he says, adding that he tried to use the ceiling light in his cell to electrocute himself. “The American guards told me that behind the [isolation] cell is a shredder that was used during Saddam, so if they wanted they could shred me up and throw my remains in the river and no one will ever know about it.”
Majli recounts being attacked by unmuzzled dogs, ordered to strip naked while soldiers threw freezing water on him during cold winter months, and beaten directly on his genitals with a stick. In addition to the human pyramid, the soldiers forced him into sexual positions with other male inmates while he was naked and blindfolded—although he is not certain whether soldiers took photos of it.
Majli says US soldiers also shot live ammunition at the prisoners. With his own eyes, he saw two inmates killed from this and their bodies removed from the prison in body bags. Majli also developed pneumonia after guards flooded his cell with cold water as a tactic to stop the prisoners from getting rest.
“I never imagined that human beings were capable of such things,” Majli says, lifting his knuckles to his mouth and gnawing on the skin, a nervous tic he picked up in Abu Ghraib. “I felt so scared and nervous all the time in the prison that I started uncontrollably biting my knuckles. Even now, I still bite the skin on my knuckles and arms whenever I remember my time in prison. I can’t help it.”
When Majli was released in February 2005, his ordeal only continued. He was left penniless and psychologically distraught, suffering from nightmares and uncontrollable anger over what he endured.
According to Sarah Sanbar, a researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), owing to the sexual nature of the released photos former Abu Ghraib detainees face extreme stigma in Iraq’s conservative society. Therefore, many survivors of torture are too fearful to go public with their experiences. “A lot of people just don’t want to come forward,” explains Sanbar. “The people who do come forward face marginalization and stigmatization from within the community. Others are also harassed by contractors and soldiers for speaking out.”
“So we don’t actually know how many other victims of torture there are from Abu Ghraib,” she adds.
After Majli went public about his experiences in the prison, his wife filed for divorce and his children faced bullying in their schools, eventually dropping out. He is also forced to move each time his neighbors find out he was detained at Abu Ghraib. “This is the ninth house I have moved to in Baghdad,” Majli tells TRNN, nervously glancing towards the window.
Despite the US government’s attempts to portray the abuse at Abu Ghraib as an isolated incident, human rights experts assert that these abuses were indicative of a grim pattern of torture that characterized the Iraq war and the so-called War on Terror. The only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib was that it was photographed and shown to the world, Sanbar says. But widespread torture and mistreatment of detainees, which was sometimes more extreme than Abu Ghraib, have been documented in numerous US military-run locations throughout Iraq.
Suhail al-Shimari, Salah al-Ejaili, and Asa’ad al-Zubae, the three plaintiffs of the Virginia-based case, were subjected to weeks and months of serious mistreatment, humiliation, degradation, and denial of their humanity while at the “hard site” of Abu Ghraib, where the most severe acts of torture were carried out.
The plaintiffs described being sexually assaulted, electrically shocked, deprived of sleep, forced into stress positions—which resulted in one of the men vomiting black liquid—forced to wear women’s underwear, and threatened with dogs. Shimari was dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. None of the men, however, are in the notorious photos, in which Majli says he appears.
Unlike Majli and other victims of US torture, these three men got their day in court—and won.
US courts have repeatedly dismissed similar cases against the federal government because of a 1946 law that preserves US forces’ immunity for claims that arise during war. Since the US is not party to the Rome Statute, which founded the International Criminal Court (ICC), war crimes are investigated by the US military internally, a process which has continuously failed to provide redress for victims.
In what rights groups say is a rarity, 11 US military officials were convicted of crimes relating to the Abu Ghraib scandal from 2004 onwards—several of whom received prison sentences ranging from a few months to several years. But, “Abu Ghraib is a symptom of a much bigger cancer within the US government,” explains Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT).
“What took place in Abu Ghraib is not isolated, but part of the Bush administration’s War on Terror torture policy. There are innumerable other cases of torture where it was not photographed or caught on film and it never attracted media attention. And those victims were essentially forgotten and the perpetrators never punished.”
Owing to the immunity afforded to the US government, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which filed the lawsuit on the plaintiffs’ behalf, decided to sue CACI in US courts through the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows for non-US citizens to bring civil actions before US federal courts in cases concerning violations of international law. Over the years, several Supreme Court decisions have greatly limited the reach of ATS.
While two of the plaintiffs testified from Iraq, Ejaili, a former Al Jazeera journalist who is now living in Sweden, traveled to the US to testify. “He basically entered the Empire’s court and stood firmly and demanded that they be heard,” explains Baher Azmy, the legal director of CCR. “And this jury agreed.”
CACI is appealing the decision and will likely try to take it all the way to the US Supreme Court, according to Azmy.
Human rights experts hope this case can pave the way for other victims of US torture to seek redress from private military and security contractors. “I hope we see more people filing under the ATS,” says Rizvi, from CVT. “I hope this creates a [legal] precedent and shines some light on those who have been waiting for justice for a long time.”
Majli tried to obtain compensation from the US government for years after his release, requesting assistance from the Iraqi Bar Association in Baghdad; however, they informed him that they did not deal with such cases. He also reached out to the Iraqi Ministry for Human Rights, but other than providing him a letter confirming he was in their system as a former prisoner of Abu Ghraib, they were not able to help him.
Since then, he has been stuck, without any legal avenue in Iraq to seek redress from the US government for the abuses. “Myself and all the other Iraqis abused in Abu Ghraib deserve financial compensation so we can heal and rebuild our lives,” Majli tells TRNN. The news of the historic legal win in November has given Majli a glimmer of hope, wondering if this could be a new avenue of getting justice for the abuses that continue to haunt him.
But, according to experts, this court win would likely not be helpful to other victims of torture at Abu Ghraib. While ATS does not have a specific statute of limitations within the law itself, conventionally courts consider it to be 10 years. Therefore, a US court accepting cases from more than 20 years ago would be very unlikely.
According to Sanbar, from HRW, there are also limitations for other, more recent victims of torture to emulate this case. “The context in which a lot of this torture occurs is that you’re picked up off the street and sent to a detention facility,” Sanbar explains. “You don’t speak the language of your captors. You’re not able to recognize the different insignias or uniforms. And you don’t actually know in a lot of cases who is the one torturing you.”
CCR’s case was helped immensely by the fact that the US government conducted extensive investigations into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the reports of which were released to the public, and specifically identified CACI’s role in the torture and abuse. In other cases that did not attract the outrage that Abu Ghraib did, information is not shared publicly. “In future cases, it will be very easy for the government to deny access to information on the grounds of national security,” Sanbar says.
The US government has also long issued gag orders against detainees at Guatanamo Bay, which has become a symbol of torture, rendition, and indefinite detention without charge or trial. Most recently, it was revealed that part of the plea deal of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, includes a lifetime gag order on speaking about aspects of his torture by the CIA. Moreover, Congress has constitutionally divested the federal courts of jurisdiction over suits for damages by former Guantanamo detainees.
Despite these barriers, the court win is still extremely significant, not least because it sends a message to private security contractors that they can be held accountable for abuses they commit abroad. “This essentially puts all other military and security contractors around the world on notice—no matter what theater or conflict they are operating in,” Sanbar tells TRNN. “They can and will be held accountable for their actions abroad should they engage in mistreatment, torture, or war crimes.”
But Sanbar emphasizes that this court win should not distract from the fact that the US government has an obligation under national and international law to provide redress and reparations for harm it has committed “both in terms of holding its own soldiers accountable and providing redress to victims.”
“There is currently no legal avenue for people who claim they were tortured or mistreated by US officials to have their cases heard or for them to apply for compensation,” she adds.
“My heart cannot heal without justice,” says 50-year-old Abdelrahman Muhammad Abed, who was detained by US soldiers in December 2005, nearly two years after the first photos from Abu Ghraib were released to the media, sending shockwaves throughout the world.
The public indignation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 did not deter US soldiers from abusing and humiliating Abed immediately upon his arrest, during which Abed, along with his brother and nephew, were beaten by the soldiers, including with the butt of their guns; they were also forced to strip down to their underwear.
They were transferred to a US-run military camp, where a party among soldiers was underway. “There was a DJ and the men and women were dancing together,” Abed recounts, anxiously shaking his leg up and down while seated on a chair at his home in Baghdad. “The soldier threw me on the ground and started dancing, kicking sand and dust into my face and mouth.”
According to Abed, the three men, who were still only in their underwear, were then forced to stand in front of freshly dug holes in the ground, resembling graves. “The translator working for the soldiers told us they will now execute us so we should say our last words.” They were forced to stand in front of the graves for about an hour, while celebratory music blared around them. Then soldiers beat them again, Abed says.
He was detained without charge or trial for a year and a half in Camp Bucca, once referred to as “Iraq’s Guantanamo Bay,” and Abu Ghraib, where he was held for two months. “For weeks in [Abu Ghraib], they were beating me constantly. On my hands, legs, and back, with their fists, feet, and their guns,” Abed tells TRNN.
Abed abruptly stops speaking as he chokes back a wave of tears. “Most of us don’t like to talk about our experiences because it’s too painful,” he says, slowly regaining his composure.
“I deserve compensation from those who abused me—not because I want money. Even if they paid me $1 million for each day I was unfairly detained, it would not be enough. But I want recognition for what happened to me.”
For years after his release, Abed says he lived in constant fear that US soldiers would come for him again. “If I even heard a noise outside—like a rustling of leaves—I would become terrified, worried it was the Americans,” he explains.
“The Americans just saw all Iraqis as terrorists. They made us feel like we were not human. Since I was a child, I heard about America and the Western world and how they respect human rights and democracy. But the truth is the opposite.”
Jaclynn Ashly is a freelance multimedia journalist who has worked in various countries, mostly in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. She is an in-depth storyteller, focusing on topics such as human rights, culture, religion, migration, and the environment.
Photo: Jaclynn Ashly via The Real News Network
