Philadelphia lawyers fight to hold military contractors accountable...

[uberblonde]

For torture in Iraq.

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=11995

Burke and her team are well aware of the likely stand the defendants will take.

"They had a contract with the government, so therefore they should be entitled to something called the 'government contractor defense,'" Burke explains. "You're not liable because the government wouldn't be liable. The government has a lot of immunity from tort suits. So if all you're doing essentially is acting as an arm of the government, then you have some immunity too."

As a legal entity, she says, the United States is prohibited from torturing people, and that clouds that argument.

"The difficulty for them is that this stuff was illegal, so the government cannot legally order that it be done," Burke says. "They're in a bit of a fix in trying to prove that all they were doing was following government orders."

The class action suit doesn't directly fault the United States government or the military-a tactical move, according to Burke.

"We know there were some high-level people involved in this-Rumsfeld and others," she says. "Although our case is against two companies and the individual torturers, it's a conspiracy case. All these people worked together and formed a conspiracy and did torture these people. Naming them makes it more likely we'd embarrass the government into stepping in to try to shut the case down."

The lawsuit refers to government officials, military officials, soldiers and contractors equally as "torture conspirators."