Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith, four former Guantánamo Bay detainees, filed suit in 2004 in the United States District Court in Washington, DC against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They charged that illegal interrogation tactics were permitted to be used against them by Secretary Rumsfeld and the military chain of command. The plaintiffs each sought seek compensatory damages for torture and arbitrary detention while being held at Guantánamo.[1]
Some aspects of the case were dismissed at the District Court level, and the Appeals Court overturned the lower court ruling on coverage of religious protections. In 2008 the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated the judgment, and remanded the case to the Court of Appeals based on the intervening Boumediene v. Bush (2008), which ruled that detainees and foreign nationals had the habeas corpus right to bring suit in federal courts.
On April 24, 2009, the Court of Appeals dismissed the case again, on the grounds of "limited immunity". It ruled that the courts at the time of the alleged abuses had not yet clearly established prohibitions against the torture and religious abuses suffered by the detainees. On December 14, 2009, the US Supreme Court declined to accept the case for hearing.