MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A U.S. jury has awarded three survivors of the Abu Ghraib prison $42 million.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The abuse of detainees by American troops there is one of the lasting legacies of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The photos of that abuse published in 2004 are shocking. And a warning to our listeners - this story contains graphic descriptions of the torture of prisoners in U.S. incarceration. Last year, NPR's Ruth Sherlock spoke with a former detainee, Talib al-Majli.
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TALIB AL-MAJLI: (Through interpreter) They torturing us. They making us naked. Sometimes they threw, like, sound grenades on our cells, and sometimes they used the shotguns. And they used dogs to terrifying us. They flooded our cells with water.
MARTÍNEZ: He was not involved in this court case, but the three plaintiffs in this lawsuit brought against a private U.S. military contractor detailed similar abuse.
MARTIN: NPR's Ruth Sherlock is with us now to tell us more about this. Good morning, Ruth.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Could you just tell us more about this case?
SHERLOCK: Yeah. Well, the jury said this U.S. military contractor, CACI or Caci, could be found guilty because the interrogators it supplied to Abu Ghraib conspired with U.S. soldiers there to torture and mistreat the three plaintiffs. The jury said CACI interrogators were liable because it said they actually instructed military police officers to, quote, "soften up" the detainees. You know, CACI denies this characterization. It says its employees were not responsible for, nor took part in, the abuse committed by military police in Abu Ghraib. But just after the verdict, I reached Baher Azmy, the lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs. He's with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and he told me this verdict - it's the culmination of a 16-year-long effort by the plaintiffs to tell their story to an American jury.
BAHER AZMY: That struggle has lasted 16 years, multiple trips to the Court of Appeals, surviving two dozen attempts for CACI to dismiss the case and every obstacle you could imagine.
SHERLOCK: So this is the second trial. The first trial ended in a mistrial when the jury couldn't reach a verdict on whether CACI or the Army could be held responsible.
MARTIN: Does this court victory pave the way for compensation for other Abu Ghraib detainees?
SHERLOCK: Well, Michel, you know, the short answer is no. The case is specifically about these three plaintiffs. I think actually, what this case shows is just how hard it is for victims of U.S. military abuse to get any kind of redress. It's the first time that a civilian jury has heard accounts directly from detainees of torture and mistreatment that has happened, you know, in this post-9/11-era detentions. Talib al-Majli, the Abu Ghraib detainee we spoke to, told us how American soldiers stripped him naked, poked at his genitals, set snarling dogs on inmates, fired live ammunitions into cells. They flooded his cell with cold water, he says, and he got pneumonia. He spent 20 years searching for a way to get compensation, or even just an apology from the U.S. military. But ultimately, he hasn't been able to find a mechanism for that redress.
MARTIN: So as we mentioned earlier, this verdict is against a private military contractor, but has the U.S. military paid compensation to victims?
SHERLOCK: This is the really important point. You know, after the photos showing the abuse of survivors in Abu Ghraib were published in 2004, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the time told Congress that a way should be set up to compensate the victims. But when we looked into this, reporting the story of Talib al-Majli, we couldn't find any examples where the U.S. military had compensated Abu Ghraib survivors. Human Rights Watch then followed up with a detailed investigation. And they also found that to this day, the U.S. government hasn't paid compensation, or even set up a mechanism for these cases to be heard.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Ruth Sherlock. Ruth, thank you.
SHERLOCK: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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