Al-Qaeda directs prisoners always to allege that they were tortured. And denied the right to practice Islam? That picture is seriously at odds with the widely reported touching-the-Qur’an-only-with-kid-gloves dhimmitude of American military personnel.
“Court throws out Islam-based Gitmo claims,” by James Oliphant in the Chicago Tribune’s Swamp blog (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
A federal appeals court today tossed a lawsuit brought against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials by four released British prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, who alleged that they were tortured and denied the right to practice Islam.
The British detainees–Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith–spent more than two years in Guantánamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.
They brought claims under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law passed in the 1990s to prevent government interference with religious practices, arguing that officials at Guantanamo actively prevented worship of Islam by, among other things, tossing a copy of the Quran into a toilet.
They also say they were tortured, beaten and humiliated. They had sought $10 million in damages. A federal trial judge dismissed most of the claims saying U.S. officials couldn’t be sued for actions taken in wartime, but the religious act claim and some other claims survived. (A story here in the Tribune took a closer look at the case.)
But in an opinion released Friday Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson of U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington wrote that the religious freedom act does not apply to the Guantanamo detainees because they are not “persons” for the purposes of U.S law.
The three-judge panel also held that the U.S. officials were immune from the torture claims because “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military”s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” And the panel found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantánamo had any constitutional rights…