“A judge is allowing an Army veteran who says he was imprisoned unjustly and tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq to sue former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld personally for damages. The veteran’s identity is withheld in court filings, but he worked for an American contracting company as a translator for the Marines in the volatile Anbar province before being detained for nine months at Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility near the Baghdad airport dedicated to holding ‘high-value’ detainees. The government says he was suspected of helping get classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces enter Iraq. But he was never charged with a crime and says he never broke the law. …Chicago attorney Mike Kanovitz, who is representing the plaintiff, says it appears the military wanted to keep his client behind bars so he couldn’t tell anyone about an important contact he made with a leading sheik while helping collect intelligence in Iraq. ‘The U.S. government wasn’t ready for the rest of the world to know about it, so they basically put him on ice,’ Kanovitz said in a telephone interview. ‘If you’ve got unchecked power over the citizens, why not use it?’ “
– Nedra Pickler, “Judge Allows American to Sue Rumsfeld Over Torture,” Associated Press, Aug. 4, 2011