Reuters, file

U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie, 23, speaks through a megaphone to an Israeli army bulldozer on the day she was killed in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003.

HAIFA, Israel -- An Israeli court rejected on Tuesday accusations that Israel was at fault over the death of American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by an army bulldozer during a 2003 pro-Palestinian demonstration in Gaza.

Corrie's family had accused Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their 23-year-old daughter, launching a civil case in the northern Israeli city of Haifa after a military investigation had cleared the army of wrongdoing.

In a ruling read out to the court, judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident," but said the state was not responsible because the incident had occurred during what he termed a war-time situation.

At the time of her death, during a Palestinian uprising, Corrie was protesting against Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"I reject the suit," the judge said. "There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages."

He added that the soldiers had done their utmost to keep people away from the site. "She (Corrie) did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done."

Oliver Weiken / EPA

Rachel Corrie's parents Craig and Cindy and her sister Sarah, left, are seen prior to the announcement of the verdict at the Haifa district court on Tuesday.

Mom: 'I am hurt'
Corrie's death made her a symbol of the uprising, and while her family battled through the courts to establish who was responsible for her killing, her story was dramatized on stage in a dozen countries and told in the book "Let Me Stand Alone."

"I am hurt," Corrie's mother, Cindy, told reporters after the verdict was read.

Corrie's mother Cindy told a news conference after the court's decision that the bulldozer personnel had the "ability" and also an "obligation" to have seen that her daughter was in its path.

NBC station KING5: 'Rachel Corrie' aid ship boarded by Israelis

She said she hoped the lawsuit would help change Israel's policies regarding the demolition of Palestinian houses.

Cindy Corrie said that previously a senior Israeli soldier had said there were "no civilians in war."

"Rachel was in Gaza because there were and are civilians there, those who have rights and deserve protection," she added. "Rachel's right to life and dignity were violated by the actions of the Israeli military."

She said her daughter was a "rich thinker and a beautiful person" from "Olympia, Washington, USA," her voice breaking as she spoke.

The family's attorney, Hussein Abu Hussein, said that the court's decision was so close to the Israeli government's position that the state's lawyers could have written it themselves, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Corrie was with a group of international activists acting as human shields against the demolition of Palestinian houses.

"She was standing on top of a pile of earth," fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, U.K., said at the time, according to the Guardian. "The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."

Few Israelis showed much sympathy for Corrie's death, which took place at the height of the uprising in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of Israelis died in suicide bombings.

Getty Images / Getty Images, file

Rachel Corrie speaks during an interview with MBC Saudi Arabia television on March 14, 2003 in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza strip.

Corrie was from Olympia, Washington, and was a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Senior U.S. officials criticized the original military investigation into the case, saying it had been neither thorough nor credible. But the judge said the inquiry had been appropriate and pinned no blame on the army.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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BOSTON -- An East African gay advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against Massachusetts evangelist Scott Lively, alleging he has waged a decade-long campaign to persecute gays in Uganda and likened them to Nazis.

The suit was filed in federal court in Springfield against the minister under a statute that Sexual Ministries Uganda says allows non-citizens to file U.S. court actions for violations of international law.

Lively has dismissed the the legal action as "absurd" and "completely frivolous."

Frank Mugisha, who heads the advocacy group, said it was singling out Lively for "helping spread propaganda and violence" against Uganda's gay people.

"We hope that he will be held accountable for what he did in Uganda," Mugisha, who won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award last year, said. "We want to send out a clear message to him and to others."

Lively, of Abiding Truth Ministries, is one of a handful of American pastors whom Ugandan gay activists accuse of having helped draft the original version of the African nation's anti-homosexuality bill.

The bill called for the death penalty for certain homosexual acts such as when gay people with AIDS were caught having sex. It has since been revamped to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment as a maximum sentence.

Gay people likened to Nazis
The suit against Lively, whose Springfield church is known as Redemption Gate Mission Society, is part of wide-ranging legal action Ugandan gay groups are considering against individuals they consider hostile to the rights of homosexuals.

The complaint claims Lively issued a call in Uganda to fight against a "genocidal" and "pedophilic" gay movement, "which he likened to the Nazis and Rwandan murderers."

Gay activist on newspaper's 'hang them' list killed

About 70 protesters marched Wednesday about a half-mile from the U.S. District Court in Springfield to Lively's business, the Holy Grounds Coffee House.

They dressed in black and beat drums, carrying signs with the names of persecuted Ugandans and coffins to symbolize death allegedly due to persecution. The group spent about 10 minutes in front of the coffee house, leaving white flowers there.

Islamic, African countries walk out on UN gay panel

The suit asks for a judgment that Lively's actions are illegal and violate international law and human rights.

“According to Lively’s own admissions, his influence and work in Uganda date back at least a decade when he visited Uganda twice in 2002 to coordinate with his Ugandan counterparts …. To implement his strategies to dehumanize, demonize, silence, and further criminalize the LGBTI (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) community,” the lawsuit says.

Canada: Marriages of foreign gays are invalid

It adds that Lively and another anti-gay activist later described the effect of their actions as like a “nuclear bomb.”

The lawsuit says Lively’s work in the country “ignited a cultural panic and atmosphere of terror that radically intensified the climate of hatred in which Lively’s goals of persecution could advance.”

Lively: Comments 'selectively edited'
Lively said in his email that his words have been taken out of context.

"Most of the ostensibly inflammatory comments attributed to me are from selectively edited video clips of my 2009 seminars in Kampala," he said. "I challenge the plaintiffs and their allies to publish the complete footage of the seminar on the Internet. They will not do this or their duplicity would be exposed."

The New York-based group Center for Constitutional Rights filed the suit on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda. Center attorney Pam Spees said it also seeks monetary damages.

“While Lively has half-heartedly tried to distance himself from the death penalty provision of the bill, he still considers it the ‘less of two evils’ as compared to recognizing the humanity of LGBTI individuals or permitting their speech or advocacy.”

Lively said Wednesday the legal action was "absurd" and "completely frivolous."

He said in an email to The Associated Press that he has never advocated violence against homosexuals. He said he has preached against homosexuality but advised therapy for gays, not punishment.

Lively also told the AP in November that he advised the Ugandan parliament "to focus on rehabilitation and not punishment."

He said he didn't oppose the criminalization of gays but said imprisonment and the death penalty are too harsh. He was among U.S. evangelicals who visited Uganda in 2009, after which debate began about the bill.

World leaders including President Barack Obama have condemned the Ugandan bill. But the draft legislation is popular in that country, where pastors frequently preach against homosexual behavior.

The Ugandan government said in a statement last month that it didn't support the bill, but that debate about it is allowed under the constitution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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U.S. Navy guards escort a detainee after a "life skills" class held for prisoners at Camp 6 in the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010.

A new lawsuit seeks to force the U.S. government to make public “extremely disturbing” videotapes of a Saudi national whose abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison has been called “torture” by a former Bush administration official.

The suit, filed in New York federal court on Monday, comes 10 years after the first prisoners in the United States’ global war on terror arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The prison, within a U.S. Navy base, was considered by Bush administration lawyers outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The controversial prison was ordered closed within a year by President Barack Obama when he took office, but stiff resistance in Congress over housing detainees in the United States and trying them in civilian courts has left most of 171 detainees in limbo as the base remains open.

Indeed, 46 of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have been designated as too dangerous to be released at all by the Obama administration and have been assigned for indefinite detention without charges or trial. Through the years, 779 detainees have been incarcerated there with Bush releasing more than 500 and Obama 67.

“Sadly, Guantanamo is becoming a fixture,” Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees, told msnbc.com. “We come to think that during wartime that there are these blips of decreased civil liberties, but eventually we restore ourselves to normalcy. That dynamic 10 years on is not happening now. …The president who so eloquently criticized it has accepted its existence.”

The Obama administration disputes that characterization. A State Department spokesman told NBC News that it has made clear that closing Guantanamo is in the interest of national security and is continuing its efforts to close the facility.

Benjamin Wittes, of the conservative-leaning Brookings Institute, has suggested that Guantanamo has changed since the Bush years.

"Alone among facilities used by the military to detain enemy forces in the war on terror," Wittes wrote, "detentions at Guantanamo are supervised by the federal courts in probing habeas corpus cases. Detainees there, unlike at any other detention facility, have access to lawyers. Their cases are followed closely by the press, and many hundreds of journalists have been to Guantanamo."

Harsh interrogation techniques
In their lawsuit filed Monday, Lawrence Lustberg and Sandra Babcock seek to shed light on the treatment of their client Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 and was whisked to Guantanamo Bay, where government investigators later identified him as a man who had planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The case of Qahtani first came to light in 2005 when Time magazine published secret log files from Guantanamo that detailed harsh interrogation techniques on the Saudi suspect.

In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder, but on May 11 of that same year those charges were dropped. The reasons at the time were not made public.

• Slideshow: Life goes on in Guantanamo

In 2009, a Bush administration official revealed the reason to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

"We tortured Qahtani," Susan J. Crawford said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Now, Qahtani's attorneys, who have been to Guantanamo, seek to shine more light on what happened nearly a decade ago.

"It’s important at this juncture for the public to have access to visual images of what happened at Guantanamo,” Babcock told msnbc.com. “I think people have become desensitized to the plight of the men that came to Guantanamo. They don’t see them as human anymore. It’s easy to distance yourself to what happened."

• From Oct. 2006: Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo

The tapes remain classified, according to Lustberg and Babcock, but the lawyers have viewed them and say the government should release them.

"I can’t tell you what’s in the tapes," Babcock told msnbc.com, citing their secrecy. "But I can tell you that they are extremely disturbing and I think they could change the tenor of the debate in this country about our nation’s interrogation and detention practices."

Lustberg points out that "the Army field manual still allows our government to engage in some of the same abuse that was visited on Qahtani. We think that when this sort of thing goes on, detainee abuse should continue to be a robust debate."

The lawsuit says Qahtani's treatment included severe sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations and isolation. It also cites threats by military dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures and religious and sexual humiliation.

A spokeswoman for government lawyers told The Associated Press that there would be no comment. 

Other cases at Guantanamo are still pending. Five prisoners accused of helping to organize the Sept. 11 case are expected to be arraigned at the base in 2012 in what would be the most high-profile U.S. war crimes tribunal since the World War II-era. The five, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are facing charges that include murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

There is no judge yet in the Sept. 11 case.

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