The Justice Department represents federal officials when they’re sued over how they’ve performed their duties, and when former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was sued by two American civilians in 2006, Justice replied that Rumsfeld’s conduct was not for the courts to judge.
This was just one of the arguments for cutting Rumsfeld loose.
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In 2006 Vance and Ertel were working for Shield Group Security, a firm providing security services in Iraq during the war. Their story is that they began feeding information to an FBI contact in Chicago, Vance’s hometown, and to American officials in Baghdad about criminal behavior at SGS, including “massive illegal arms trading, stockpiling of weapons, kickback schemes, bribery, [and] fraudulent contract procurement.” They said they’d heard an American colleague brag that he’d committed “brutal acts of violence” against Iraqis.
The Americans “who caused them to be detained—U.S. officials stationed in Iraq, including State Department officials”—knew they were innocent, the suit asserts. And of course they knew that Nance and Ertel, as Americans themselves, were “entitled to the liberties and protections of the United States Constitution.” For his part, Rumsfeld “approved and, at times, ordered the use of interrogation tactics [against them] that are universally condemned as torture,” continuing to use them even after Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to forbid “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
The government’s argument to cut Rumsfeld loose amounted to this: a lecture to Judge Andersen that a war is hell, it’s chaotic, it’s ad hoc, and it’s no place for the judiciary to be playing schoolmarm.
And as for yet another point raised in Rumsfeld’s motion to dismiss, that the U.S. Constitution lacks jurisdiction away from American soil, Andersen flatly rejected it. “American citizens do not forfeit their core constitutional rights when they leave the United States, even when their destination is a foreign war zone.”
