 constitutional rights and in particular its longtime leader, departed leader Michael Ratner have been involved in efforts to curtail the U.S. role in Iraq for decades. Going back to the 1980s when the U.S. was bombing Iraq for a variety of made-up reasons and at the same time at home trying to justify them by misdeeds that were happening abroad all the while positioning itself in terms of trying to get access to and control of Iraqi oil positioning itself with respect to within Soviet Union and the battles that were going on in the region. CCR has been very actively involved and we've been involved primarily as a legal organization and the value is looking at the political context which we all share as people that care about humanity and care about what happens to folks but also looking at the rules that have been broken, the lies that have been told, the bill of goods that have been sold to the American people in order to justify really what is essentially aggressive war without end. George Bush took the position that he could invade or bomb or do any type of action against Iraq that he wanted but he was famous for a quote that said that he didn't need to go to some old goat in Congress to ask permission to get Sudan Hussein out of Kuwait and I think what's interesting about that is what he was referring to was the 1973 war powers resolution that required that the president get the Congress to be able to declare war as opposed to being able to take these types of war actions by itself. There's a long history in the United States of people using courts as a place as a almost like a town center where the questions of morality of humanity and law come together and so even when the government and the president is moving forward in ways that are illegal and unconstitutional it's our duty and our obligation to raise that in the streets, to raise that in our legislative bodies but also to raise it in the courts and that's what we were trying to do. After 9-11 we of course continued that fight but things began to shift a little bit because we also began to find particularly in Iraq that the US government because it was so unpopular to be sending troops to Iraq that the US government was employing private military contractors to do some of the dirty work in Iraq which presented an interesting problem and what the way that I think about this and the way that we thought about it here at the center was this is essentially corporate complicity in human rights violations by the executive branch and by the United States government so we've always known that there has been a economic incentive that moves forward military actions but this is one of the first times that we've seen an economic incentive for corporations to actually participate on the ground in those types of things. So we filed a number of lawsuits a couple of them I want to mention because I think they're important for the Obama administration and moving forward one of them was a case against the military contractor called Blackwater and we filed two cases there Eric Prince who was the founder of Blackwater and whose sister incident and incidentally is being considered for a cabinet position under the Trump administration interestingly enough but Eric Prince and these private military contractors were making billions of dollars off the Iraq war and they were contracted with the Secretary of State to provide security. In Nisr Square in Iraq there was a confrontation where they essentially shot up I believe it was 20 shot and killed 17 or 22 people as military contractors not held accountable whatsoever by the US government the Iraqi government had no power over them and so it kind of fell to civil society to do something about it so we filed a series of lawsuits against the Blackwater Corporation those lawsuits were settled and that the families of the people the families of the people who were killed did get financial settlements out of those cases but again we were not successful in the larger question which was really trying to limit severely the use of military contractors. One of the theories being that the US can't afford to do the type of wars that it wants to do without either our permission and when they don't have our permission they subtract some subcontract out a lot of those functions so many of our of the people that were over in Iraq and Afghanistan were private military contractors it was really kind of a standard. The other case I want to bring up is a case that's actually still being argued right now it's a case called al-Shamari versus khaki CACI which is a California based corporation and this happened after 2002 after the invasion and people were then swept up and put into these military hard sites one of them being Abu Ghraib these private military contractors were contracted to do interrogations and to do interviews of these clients but they participated and moved forward in torture so the lawsuit against them is challenging these corporations for torturing at the behest of and in conjunction with bush policy in Abu Ghraib. There were two cases one of them actually settled in it is the only case on record where people were tortured post 9-11 where they got a financial settlement this is one of the good success stories in the context of Iraq and torture certainly and the other one is actually still moving forward it's been bouncing back and forth through the courts but most recently just several weeks ago we got a ruling from the court of appeals down in Virginia where the khaki corporation was saying that they shouldn't be held liable for acts that essentially the government was contracting with them to do. The fourth circuit really taking on this question of presidential authority essentially said that presidential authority to do the things like torture there's no there's no circumstance in which a president can authorize something like that and that's a distinctly post 9-11 ruling for the past 15 years we haven't heard much about things like that but we're beginning to see those things now and so what I think that brings us to in terms of the current administration or the Obama administration and the Trump administration is number one the Trump the Obama administration has to do what it can to lock down the question of accountability we've been after the Obama administration for since the first day in office to hold members of its own administration and Bush administration figures accountable for torture for abuse for war making for crimes against humanity understandably that's not something that any president is going to roll does present an opportunity now as we move into what I think is a much more dangerous era one in which whatever you think about president Obama at least he thinks about some of these issues even if he doesn't act I think we're having a president now that's going to act without thinking and so really what we're what we're facing I think in the next era is going back to some of these questions and having courts readdress the issue of whether the rules that have been put in place in Congress the rules that we abide by in the United Nations should be applied to reduce and to cabin in the presidential power from this particular president in this country that really is still deploying its resources to be able to have strategic position over natural resources very important for us to continue to push for accountability for all of the people that committed these crimes in our name that we're contributing international and domestic law that's where we need to be putting our efforts over the next four years