'A lot got away with it' Men held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq go to court over torture and abuse

The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

- Alice Speri

The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day after photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolise the treatment of detainees in the US "war on terror".

The long-delayed case was brought by Suhail Najim Abdullah AI Shimari, Salah al-Ejaili and As'ad al-Zuba'e, three Iraqi civilians who were detained at Abu Ghraib before being released without charge in 2004 (a fourth man, Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid, was dismissed from the case in 2019). The men are suing CACI Premier Technology, a private company that was contracted by the US government to provide interrogators at the prison.

"This is a historic trial that we hope will deliver some measure of justice and healing for what President [George W] Bush rightly deemed disgraceful conduct that dishonoured the United States and its values," said Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which brought the case.

The suit was filed under the Alien Tort statute, which allows foreign nationals to file cases in US courts for violations of international law. Ejaili will be the first torture survivor to testify about his treatment in US custody from inside a US federal court. The other two men will testify remotely from Iraq as they were not granted visas to travel.

In November 2003, Ejaili was working as a journalist for AI Jazeera and covering an explosion in the Diyala province, north of Baghdad, when he was arrested by US forces and moved to military stations in different districts before being taken to Abu Ghraib.