Reporter Jailed Six Years at Guantánamo to Sue Fmr. Pres. Bush
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Sami al-Haj, a reporter working for TV news network al-Jazeera, was jailed for six years at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, before being cleared and released. He is now setting up a team to file suit against former Pres. George W. Bush and other officials within his administration for damages related to his imprisonment.
Al-Haj says torture is still ongoing at Guantánamo Bay and that the entire facility exists beyond the rule of law the United States Constitutional system requires. His lawyers say Pres. Obama must close the camp immediately in order to avoid continuing the violations of US law that began under the last administration.
The lawsuit will be a joint legal action, possibly under class-action rules, aimed at singling out those individuals who planned and ordered both the mass detentions without legal process and the abusive treatment allegedly received by a large number of those detainees during their prolonged detention at the prison camp.
The case will be initiated by the Guantánamo Justice Centre, a new organisation open to former prisoners at the US base, which will set up its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month.
“The purpose of our organisation is to open a case against the Bush administration,” said co-founder Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera reporter from Sudan who was illegally detained by US authorities for over six years. He was freed in May 2008.
The legal action is likely to be staged in Europe, at the urging of al-Haj’s attorneys. Al-Haj admits there is no legal authority for the European courts to force extradition of former US officials for civil suit, but he says the suit would bar travel for some officials to Europe, as they might be detained and forced to attend trial, should the suit go through.
Al-Haj says he was twice interrogated by British intelligence officers, once in Kandahar, in 2002, and once at Guantánamo Bay. He says he was not mistreated by the British agents, but that they urged him to “cooperate” with American interrogators and if released to serve as spy for the US intelligence agencies. That al-Haj now appears to have been cleared of any suspicion and was simply functioning as a journalist, has his legal team seeing a clear and deliberate campaign of coercive interrogation as responsible for his detention.
It would be another innovation in international legal process for European courts to allow a civil lawsuit against Bush administration officials, and the same arguments made by Bush administration lawyers against such a proliferation of legal venues for seeking to punish US officials for their policy actions might be made by Obama lawyers as well, who might fear “venue shopping” aimed at targeting US officials, regardless of wrongdoing.
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