A US federal judge has refrained from accepting a government motion asking for dropping a civil law suit that charges the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was involved in torturing two former American contractors in Iraq. The former contractors Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel were given the go ahead on Friday by District Judge Wayne R. Andersen to follow the civil case on torture, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
Vance and Ertel who were employed in Iraq by Shield Group Security (SGS), alleged in 2006, one year after their arrival in Iraq, that their employer bribed Iraqi Sheiks and trafficked in weapons, activities they worried were illegal.
Upon reporting to authorities in the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and officials at the US embassy in Baghdad, they were denied their identification cards and hence from entering to the Green Zone by SGS, and were finally arrested by the "United States forces" and ended up in US "Getmo-ized" detention facility near Baghdad.
The two men claim that while in solitary confinement, they were subjected to sleep deprivation, long hours of interrogation, blasting music, threats, hunger and a practice known as "walling," in which subjects are blindfolded and walked into walls, all "tantamount to torture" according to the suit.
Ertel was released after a month and Vance after two months, the suit said.
"This is the first time where a court has recognized that the facts were sufficient to potentially hold a secretary of defense personally liable for authorizing torture," said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago attorney who represents the plaintiffs.
District Judge Andersen said his decision "represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting."
"The allegations, if true, would substantiate plaintiffs' claim that Rumsfeld was aware of the direct impact that his newly-approved treatment methods were having on detainees in Iraq," Andersen wrote . He went on to add that "a court might plausibly determine that the conditions of confinement were torturous."
The two men are seeking unspecified damages. The next hearing is set for March 25.