Mr. Salim was a Tanzanian fisherman who was sold by pirates in March 2003 to the Americans in Somalia. He was taken to a secret prison in Afghanistan that was run by the CIA. He was held there for fourteen months. During that time, he was tortured regularly; torture which included anal penetration, mock execution, being doused with icy cold water, and waterboarding. In July 2014, the CIA turned him over to the US military, who placed him in Bagram prison outside Kabul.
In August 2008, Suleiman Salim was released with a paper which stated that there were no charges against him and that he had been “determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan.”
In other words, he was a completely innocent man. Held unlawfully for five years and tortured, by Americans.
In October 2015, the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, and two other CIA torture victims, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who was a Libyan exile from Muammar Gaddafi’s regime; and the estate of Gul Rahman, an Afghan refugee who froze to death while being "interrogated" (tortured).
The lawsuit named as defendants two CIA contract "psychologists", James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, who were independent contractors of the CIA. For their "services'', these two men billed the CIA between $75 million and $81 million.
From the day he was sold to the Americans, Suleiman Salim was a dead man walking; the fact that he's alive today is remarkable. There are Americans (at least two of them) wishing, now, that they'd "disappeared" him when they had the chance.
Americans didn't violate Suleiman Salim's "civil rights". He had no such rights or any expectation of humane behaviour. What was violated in Afghanistan was not anyone's "civil right"; what was violated were core American principles of behaviour. Before Americans violated anyone's rights; before a single person was tortured or held without trial; Americans violated their own principles; they betrayed their own honour. And there's a price to pay for that demonstration of weakness.
Americans need to accept the fact that the worst violations of American principles have not been of any prisoners' legal or human rights (indeed, the US has declared that "detainees" essentially have no such rights) ... the worst abuses have been of American principles of justice, morality, and of the standards that define "civilized behaviour."
Americans betrayed themselves.
No people who are guilty of that deserve our respect. Ever. It's an irredeemable violation of honour.
Let history record it so.
Update: Salim v Mitchell was scheduled to go to trial before a jury in Spokane Washington on 5 September 2017. The lawsuit was settled out-of-court (for an undisclosed amount). Despite that, the lawsuit brought out into the open hundreds of pages of previously classified documents about the planning and operation of the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition" program, and produced an evidentiary record of over 4,000 pages.
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