The Justice Department is urging a federal appeals court in Washington to strike down a ruling that said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld can be held personally liable for the alleged torture of an American contractor detained in military custody in Iraq.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear the case, Doe v. Rumsfeld, on Monday morning. DOJ lawyers said in court papers that the suit impermissibly intrudes on foreign detention policy and conduct in a combat zone.

The government wants the appeals court panel to overturn a ruling from U.S. District Judge James Gwin, who said last August that the suit can proceeding in Washington's federal trial court. Gwin rejected the government's effort to dismiss the litigation.

DOJ Civil Division attorney Henry Whitaker, who will argue for Rumsfeld, said in a brief that Congress has not crated a damages action for detainees who allege they were injured or abused in military custody.

Congress, the department’s legal team said, crafted an administrative claims process that caps any award at $100,000. The plaintiff, identified in court papers as John Doe, was a civilian contractor and Army veteran who provided Arabic translation services to U.S. marines.

“The question here is not whether provision of a damages action, in this context, is good policy,” Whitaker said. “Rather, it is who should decide those policy issues.”

Whitaker said the suit, filed in 2008, would cause the federal courts to evaluate detention policy—from the creation and implementation of the policy to whether “any of those actions up and down the chain of command violated the Constitution.”

DOJ contends the case doesn’t hinge on the contractor’s U.S. citizenship but instead on separation of powers concerns that the government says should prohibit the court from allowing the suit to move forward.

The allegations, Whitaker said, “implicate critical military sensitivities”—detention and interrogation policy in a combat zone.

Whitaker also said the contractor’s complaint fails to establish a link between the general detainee policies Rumsfeld created for use at the Guantanamo Bay facility and the specific mistreatment the plaintiff alleged he endured in military detention in Iraq.

An attorney for the contractor, Michael Kanovitz of Chicago’s Loevy & Loevy, said in court papers that his client was “a loyal American citizen who served his country courageously and honorably” in Iraq. Beginning in November 2005, U.S. officials detained the man for nine months in a military prison in Iraq.