Expect The Lawsuits To Start Coming In After The Release Of The U.S. Senate's CIA Torture Report

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein discusses a newly released Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's anti-terrorism tactics, in the U.S. Senate in Washington, Dec. 9, 2014. Reuters

Lawyers Believe Torture Report Will Help Prosecution of CIA Agents in Europe -- Vivienne Walt, Time

The Senate Committee's explicit description of US torture may facilitate legal action

The lawyers of those who’ve spent years in U.S. detention centers like Guantánamo Bay did not expect any surprises in the Senate’s torture report, which described the CIA’s tactics as “brutal”; the prisoners’ lawyers have already heard hours of grim testimony about what their clients endured.

Yet even so, they say, the Senate report could be a breakthrough in cases that have dragged on for years in the U.S. and Europe — and could pave the way for fresh legal action against the CIA’s top officials for permitting torture. “The gaps have been between the CIA agents involved and the higher-ups conducting this policy,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, a lawyer and director of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, which has brought criminal cases against the U.S. military and CIA agents in Germany, Switzerland, Spain and France. Kaleck says lawyers will now study the Senate report for signs that the coercive tactics were a policy directed from the agency’s top levels, rather than simply the actions of errant employees. “It would hopefully allow us to argue for command responsibility for torture,” he told TIME on Tuesday.

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My Comment: I can hear the claims for compensation right now .... but if the U.S. does not cooperate with Europe's legal institutions .... I have trouble seeing how such a case can move forward.