Supreme Court Remands Gitmo Torture Damages Case

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, Myers, et al., in which 3 British citizens held at Guantanamo sued for torture and violations of their religious rights.

They vacated the dismissals of the Circuit and Appeals court, and sent the case back to the circuit for review with instructions to review it under the precedent of Boumediene v. Bush.

An interesting bit here:

In January, the federal appeals court decided that even if all their claims are true, the US officials are immune from suit because, even though torture, physical abuse and humiliation of prisoners violate domestic and international law, the officials were doing all this “within the scope of their employment” and so aren’t personally responsible. They were also immune, the court added, because it wasn’t clear when they authorized the torture that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had rights. As for the men’s religious rights, the court decided that as foreigners, they were not “persons” entitled to the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Note that the inimitable Janice Rogers Brown, who claimed that God's law trumped the constitution when she was a judge, by which she meant that every zygote was a person no matter what the Supreme Court said, is now saying that the detainees were not "persons" entitled to the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which means I guess, that Moslem fetuses are not people to her.

It should be interesting how it goes.