The Supreme Court has refused to hear a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, Jamal Al-Harith and Asif Iqbal, four British citizens who were suing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top American military officials for being responsible for approving the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that they were subjected to while in U.S. custody. The CCR says that their clients were "subject to repeated beatings, sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, forced nudity, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, religious abuse, and racial harassment."
This case, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, is important not just because of the alleged abuse involved. It's important because civil liberties groups are seeking, as Ben Wizner of the ACLU -- one of the lawyers in the Mohamed, et al. v. Jeppesen rendition case -- said last week, a "binding definitive determination" from the courts that the kind of treatment suspected terror detainees were subjected to under the Bush administration was illegal.
Without one, government-sanctioned torture may make a comeback.The ACLU will be litigating the Mohamed, et al. v. Jeppesen case -- which the Obama administration sought to have dismissed by invoking the state secrets privilege -- in federal district court tomorrow.
UPDATE: Steve Shapiro, the legal director of the ACLU, says that while the court's decision not to hear the Rasul case is disappointing, it's not "a decision on the merits" and shouldn't be taken as such. He also adds that it won't affect “it won’t have any impact on how the 9th circuit resolves the question in the Jeppesen case,” since the heart of that dispute is the administration's use of the state secrets privilege to dismiss the case entirely.
-- A. Serwer
