Outrageous

An outrageous federal appeals ruling coinciding with the sixth anniversary of Guantanamo:

In what appears to be the first federal appeals court ruling on the legality of harsh interrogation techniques used by U.S. agents on terrorism suspects, the Circuit Court ruled that torture and abuse that was used while individuals were in detention in a military prison as part of interrogations to gather intelligence or information were “the type of conduct the defendants were employed to engage in….The alleged tortious conduct was incidental to the defendants’ legitimate employment duties” — that is, running a military prison and conducting interrogations there. “It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably ’seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants,” Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the Court’s main opinion, joined in by Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph and in most parts by Circuit Judge Janice Rodgers Brown.