On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a major case testing whether torture victims living in the United States can sue their tormentors, who are also living here.
Before there was "Black Hawk down" or pirates preying on ships off Somalia, there was an ethnic war, a military dictator and a brutal regime in Somalia — a regime engaged in torture, abduction, summary executions and large-scale rape. In 1991, when the regime was overthrown, its prime minister, Mohamed Ali Samantar, fled first to Europe and then to the U.S., where he settled down quietly in suburban Virginia.
But some of his victims, granted asylum in the U.S., want to interrupt that peaceful existence and make him accountable. Five of them — tortured or raped, and one who even survived a firing squad under a pile of bodies — sued Samantar for damages.
The lead plaintiff is Bashe Yousuf, a Somali businessman who was doing volunteer work to clean up hospitals in 1983 when he and fellow volunteers were arrested. He was tortured for several months — subjected to electric shocks, trussed up and hung for hours, and waterboarded. And then he was held in solitary confinement for six years. In 1989, he was finally released and granted asylum in the United States, where he is now a citizen.
He is suing Samantar, he says, not because he fears for his safety anymore, but to make the man answer for his crimes.
"It's outraging me," he says, "that somebody like him can live in America. I just need a day in court. I want to hold him up what he did."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124252845We all know the far-reaching legal precedent that could be set, so this part of the story is as predictable as it is disgusting:
"Samantar, the accused war criminal, has an eclectic group of allies on his side. They include the government of Saudi Arabia, some pro-Israel groups and three former Republican U.S. attorneys general. The former attorneys general — Edwin Meese, Bill Barr and Richard Thornburgh — say that if this lawsuit is permitted to go forward, it could expose U.S. officials in other countries to similar suits."
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