Former Iraqi detainees who were stripped and beaten at Abu Ghraib prison have filed a lawsuit alleging that a Santa Clarita man conspired with others to torture them.

   The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Diego, accuses John B. Israel, 48, of Canyon Country, as well as Steven Stephanowicz of Philadelphia and Adel Nakhla of Maryland, of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment upon detainees last fall at the prison outside Baghdad.
    Co-defendants are the companies that provided the three civilians to the Army’s 205th Military Intelligence Brigade — Virginia-based CACI International Inc. and San Diego-based Titan Corp., whose spokesman termed the lawsuit frivolous.
    Filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and four other law firms, the 52-page lawsuit claims that Israel, Stephanowicz and Nakhla “conspired with certain United States officials to engage in a series of wrongful and illegal acts, including but not limited to summary execution, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, arbitrary arrest and detention, assault and battery, false imprisonment and intentional interference with religious practices.”
    It doesn’t identify the “certain United States officials.”
    The lawsuit accuses Titan and CACI of violating federal racketeering laws on grounds that the two publicly traded companies profited from their employees’ wrongful acts.
    It further alleges that the so-called “torture conspirators” violated two applicable Geneva conventions and several amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
    The lawsuit was filed on behalf of seven named and two unnamed Iraqi citizens who were held at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq. It seeks class-action status on behalf of as many as 1,000 additional ex-detainees.
    The lawsuit identifies Israel as an associate of CACI, but Israel’s employer is SOS Interpreting Ltd., a subcontractor to Titan.
    Israel was accused in an Army report of sharing overall responsibility for the abuse of prisoners and of contradicting witness statements about interrogations. Stephanowicz, a CACI interrogator, was accused of instructing prison guards to soften up detainees for questioning, while Nakhla, a Titan translator, was listed as a suspect in abusive incidents. Titan subsequently fired Nakhla.

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