Give Torture Victims Their Day in Court
Today, we sent a letter to a federal appeals court in San Francisco in our extraordinary rendition case against Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Data Plan, Inc. As you may recall, the government (under both the Bush and Obama administrations) has consistently and inappropriately asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing that allowing the case to go forward would be a threat to national security.
Because much of the evidence needed to hear the case has already been revealed to the public, we've never seen any merit to that argument. And, in light of the torture memos that the Justice Department released last week in another ACLU case, we think that argument has even less merit.
In our letter, we explain:
The government's invocation of the state secrets privilege in this case is predicated on an October 18, 2007 declaration by former CIA Director Michael Hayden. General Hayden's declaration asserts that, "[w]hile the President [Bush] acknowledged the existence of the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program, the details of the program remain highly classified."… General Hayden insisted that disclosing specific interrogation techniques "would degrade the effectiveness of the United States' intelligence gathering activities by, for example, providing terrorists information about interrogation methods that would assist their interrogation resistance programs"…
That rationale no longer exists — because the methods are now public, and because they have been expressly prohibited. As President Obama explained upon declassification of the memos:First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program — and some of the practices — associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time.
It is long past due that the plaintiffs in the case Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen — five men who were kidnapped and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture — get their day in court. The lawsuit seeks to hold Jeppesen accountable for their knowing participation in the illegal extraordinary rendition program — and specifically the provision of critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly disappear these five men to detention and interrogation. To date, no victim of the extraordinary rendition program (in this case or any other) has been granted their day in court, let alone been afforded any kind of redress from the U.S. for their injuries. Some are still detained.
In a statement we issued after the filing today, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner states, "The CIA and its contractors have used false claims of secrecy to avoid any judicial scrutiny for grave human rights violations. The notion that the extraordinary rendition program could be discussed everywhere in the world except in a U.S. courtroom has always been absurd.Now that the CIA's detention and torture program has been publicly confirmed and officially terminated, there is no basis whatsoever for denying its victims their day in court."
Apr 21st, 2009 at 5:20pm
Thank you, for all that you do, for all of America.
Apr 22nd, 2009 at 11:14am
ATLEAST THEY HAVE THERE LIVES AND THERE HEADS!!!!
Apr 22nd, 2009 at 12:30pm
ACLU: PLEASE ADDRESS DOMESTIC TORTURE!
http://nowpublic.com/world/bush-torture-memos-oked-rad iation-weapon-use-americans-too
OR (if links are tortured):
http://NowPublic.com/scrivener
Apr 22nd, 2009 at 1:40pm
State secrets. We certainly wouldn't want the world to know that we torture, or that we move people around so we can torture them somewhere else.
Allowing the indiscriminate and overuse of the state secrets act should be controlled. There has to be a mechanism whereby a neutral body hears the evidence and rules on the state secret validity.
What we have now is the Fox declaring he can't say if he was stealing from the hen house because then everyone will know how he steals from the hen house.
Open government seems to mean you can now visit the White House.
Apr 23rd, 2009 at 11:28am
You stupid assholes,waterboarding saved 1000s of lives . I guess if they were sending a plane to kill everyone in your family and you only had 2 hours and waterboarding was the only thing that would work quick enough to save them .you would gladly sacrifice all your family for a killer. How dumb you have become in your atempt to protect bad people that only want you and me dead.They do not want to talk they want to kill and you are going to help them do it.I hope it is not your or my family that pays for that.This is not a war where everyone plays by the rules stupid
Apr 23rd, 2009 at 12:35pm
RE: POLITICAL CRONYISM OF ATTORNEYS IN DOJ AND THE JUDICIAL BRANCH: Collusion among Lawyers and Judges To Killed the Rule of Law to Permit “Torture.”
Greetings:
As an independent and nonpolitical federal civil litigation attorney I have for the past three decades sued the government for malfeasance under both Republican and Democratic Administrations.1 This is because I know that history has shown that Democracies such as ours are precarious institutions. Constant vigilance must be maintained to preserve our Nation from undue government encroachment authorized by lawyers and judges.
Recall the sorry behavior of German judges and lawyers during Nazi era.
“Legal scholars are still perplexed to explain how a highly developed and sophisticated legal system – German law and jurisprudence under the Weimar Republic – became so readily corrupted and how legal actors – German judges and other judicial officials, lawyers, and law professors – could so easily become willing accomplices in this process. The sad fact is that legal sophistication did not inoculate German law and German legal actors from actively participating in the perverse changes being made to the German legal system during the Nazi era, including the legal exclusion of German Jews from the concept of “citizen,” and the Nuremberg Race Laws, which gradually transformed the non-citizen Jew into a subhuman not worthy of life. By the time the gas vans came and the human slaughter factories were built in Auschwitz and the other death camps, the murder of the six million Jews and other persecuted minorities was done completely within the framework of German law.” Yad Vshem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes Remembrance Authority, 2004.
More than 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson stated that, "[t]he germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary, an irresponsible body - working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall render powerless the checks of one branch over the other and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
Thus, we must make certain that we as a Nation, faced with the threat of terrorism, do not transform ourselves into legal tyrannies permitting government officials immunity for acts outside of their scope of employment, judicial capacity, or jurisdiction (see http://www.liamsdad.org/others/isidoro.shtml).
Consequently, the evidence confirms that the issue of “torture,” is only a subpart of the larger issue of the abuse of Congress’ delegations under the Rules Enabling Act and the Judicial Conference Act by DOJ and the Judicial Branch. Therefore, I again write to request that the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Judicial Branch be investigated by Congress for malfeasance.
Isidoro Rodriguez, Esq., Member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court since September 11, 1992 , 7924Payton Forest Trail, Annandale, Virginia 22003-1560
Telephone: 571.423.5066;E-Mail: isidoror@EarthLink.net
1See Martinez v. Lamagno and DEA, 515 U.S. 417 (1995)(A FTCA suit I filed against a negligent DEA agent who caused an accident while driving drunk and having sex. There DOJ argued that there was no liability based on the"James Bond Defense").
2 In summary, the evidence is that the Executive and Judicial Branch have conspired to unilaterally declare themselves absolutely immune from suit for either criminal or tortious acts. They have conspired to usurp the legislative authority of Congress and assume away Constitutional restrictions and prohibitions on them. To this end the Courts have denied access to an impartial judiciary to abuse their discretion so to deny the right to jury trials for malfeasance. The Courts have refused to enforce the rights of citizens under the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution by implementing a policy of not recognizing Constitutional restrictions on government power (http://home.earthlink.net/~isidoror).
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