After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, insurance lawyer Shereef Akeel said more Muslim clients from Iraq who were discriminated against came to him for legal help.
Akeel, a 1996 graduate and member of the Center for Constitutional Rights, traveled to Iraq to begin interviewing Iraqi detainees. He gathered research on the tortures at Abu Ghraib - a prison where detainees were stripped, beaten, sodomized and abused by U.S. soldiers.
"You would lose your appetite after listening to (detainees') stories," Akeel said.
After his research, Akeel filed a lawsuit against groups he felt had perpetrated the torture. One of those groups included The Titan Corp., a civilian contracting company that works in Abu Ghraib.
The suit uses the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law more than 200 years old, that expands the jurisdiction of federal courts for overseas claims that violate international law.
Akeel shared his stories this week at the MSU College of Law in a lecture titled, "The Case Against Torture in Iraq." Philosophy visiting Assistant Professor C. Michael Liberato was with Akeel and also spoke against the torturing of prisoners and detainees in Iraq.
Through interviews, Akeel found out raids would take place at Abu Ghraib between midnight and 3 a.m., and everyone there was taken to jail, hooded and beaten.
Akeel said he kept apologizing to the detainees while listening to their stories.
"Not all Americans are like this," he said he told them.
"After I left Iraq, I felt very dismayed and embarrassed," he said.
The suit was filed in San Diego, home to The Titan Corp., but was sent to Virginia, where U.S. officials and the Pentagon are located. The lawsuit is currently pending.
Titan spokesman Wil Williams said the U.S. government never alleged the company had done anything wrong at Abu Ghraib, and he believes Akeel's group does not support the Bush administration.
"All of this hype these organizations are putting into it, there is nothing to it," Williams said. "It's a shame they go into these lectures, and there's nobody to say, 'Wait a minute, that's not the truth.' It's an exaggeration. Let the legal system do its job; if a person is charged it shouldn't be up to a political movement up in the headlights."
Akeel questioned how human beings can treat each other in such a way.
Liberato discussed the intrinsic and extrinsic values of human beings while incorporating an answer for Akeel's questions.
"The human being has an intrinsic self which isn't earned, it just is," Liberato said. "Is it assigned by others or is the value inside?"
Liberato elaborated on intrinsic values by breaking them down into two categories based on dignity.
"Each human has dignity rooted in humanity ... and are more important than social institutions," he said. "Each person has rights and responsibilities that flow from dignity - rights to live and things required to live."
