The Lawfare Podcast · The Lawfare Institute

Lawfare Archive: Accountability for Abu Ghraib

March 21, 2026·53 min·4 clips

Soldiers at Abu Ghraib watched '24' and imitated Jack Bauer's torture methods on prisoners.

This Lawfare Archive episode, introduced by intern Marissa Wong, revisits a December 2024 conversation between Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Michael Posner about the Al-Shammari v. CACI International verdict. The episode opens with context that on March 12, 2026, the Fourth Circuit upheld the jury's $42 million award, finding that CACI conspired with U.S. soldiers to inflict torture at Abu Ghraib. Posner sets the historical stage by describing how the Bush administration, led by Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, created the category of enhanced interrogation techniques after 9/11, which included waterboarding and extreme sensory deprivation. Abu Ghraib held roughly 8,000 detainees at its peak, and the 2004 CBS photos showing soldiers abusing naked, hooded prisoners sparked public outrage. Posner describes recruiting 50 retired generals and admirals to lobby Senator McCain against these techniques, which led to the Detainee Treatment Act. He shares an anecdote about interrogators visiting the writers of the TV show 24, where a young soldier who served at Abu Ghraib told the writers that he and his fellow soldiers had imitated the show's torture scenes on orders from superiors. The discussion then turns to the legal path of the CACI case, filed in 2008 under the Alien Tort Statute, an 18th-century law originally thought to address piracy and diplomatic protection. The plaintiffs, Iraqi detainees and their families, alleged torture, cruel treatment, war crimes, and sexual assault. The 2013 Supreme Court Kiobel decision narrowed the ATS by limiting its extraterritorial application, but the Fourth Circuit found the statute still applied to CACI because it was a U.S. corporation with U.S. citizen employees. CACI raised numerous defenses including forum non conveniens and the political question doctrine, all of which failed. In 2018, the judge dismissed direct liability claims but kept conspiracy and aiding-and-abetting claims alive. The state secrets doctrine created unusual complications, with the government invoking it against both plaintiffs and defendants, leading the court to allow anonymous depositions as a workaround. CACI petitioned for Supreme Court review on this issue but was denied cert in 2021. The first trial ended in a hung jury, but the second jury found CACI liable for conspiring to set conditions for interrogation that resulted in widespread torture. Posner connects the verdict to the parallel Blackwater case involving the Nisour Square shooting. Looking forward, Posner discusses the broader trend toward corporate human rights accountability, noting that the European Union now requires its 27 member states to develop mandatory due diligence laws within two years, and that courts in Spain, the UK, Canada, and Australia are increasingly willing to hear similar cases against corporations.

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