Last month, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear the case we brought against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan on behalf of five victims of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. Our lawsuit charged that the company knowingly provided direct logistical support to the aircraft and crews used by the CIA for the kidnapping and torture program.
We filed the lawsuit back in May 2007, and while the federal government wasn't named as a defendant in the suit, the government intervened in the case anyway to shield Jeppesen with the "state secrets" privilege, asserting that even allowing the case to be heard in a court of law would jeopardize national security. But as ACLU legal director Steve Shapiro said after the Supreme Court's refused to hear the case: "In a nation committed to the rule of law, unlawful activity should be exposed, not hidden behind a 'state secrets' designation."
Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Amir Meshal, an American citizen who was arrested and secretly imprisoned in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia for four months. He was held in secret, without access to a lawyer or any process to contest his detention, and was never charged with a crime. He endured more than 30 harsh interrogations by U.S. officials during his detention.
Months after Attorney General Eric Holder said he would release the Obama administration's new policy on the use of the state secrets privilege, it's finally out. The thrust of the new rule: Holder must approve any invocation of the privilege.
Well, that's not much different from the Bush administration's policy, which was to invoke the privilege at the outset, before the case even got its foot in the courthouse door.
The U.S. government may have closed without any prosecutions its inquiries into and investigations of CIA involvement in torture, homicide and other gross human rights violations, and convinced courts to dismiss civil accountability suits for such abuses – but across the pond, courts are holding U.S. officials criminally responsible for these very same acts. Yesterday, Italy’s highest court affirmed the convictions of 23 Americans involved in the abduction and rendition to torture of a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, as part of the U.S. government’s notorious “extraordinary rendition” program. This case marks the first time any court anywhere in the world has held CIA officials responsible for torture and other abuses arising out of the program, which was greatly expanded under President George W. Bush and continues to be endorsed, albeit with assurances that international legal obligations will be respected, under the Obama administration.
North Carolina’s Governor Beverly Perdue agreed with us 100 percent, her Policy Director Al Delia told our delegation — “extraordinary rendition” and torture are wrong. However, the Governor would do nothing about rendition flights operated from just outside of Raleigh at Johnston County Airport in Smithfield. During the Bush administration, Aero Contractors, the CIA’s notorious “torture taxi” aviation service, had used its headquarters and hangars in Smithfield and Kinston, NC, to fly dozens of kidnapped men to secret detention and torture. Among those transported by Aero were Khaled el-Masri, Binyam Mohamed, and Abou el-Kassim Britel.
By Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 3:48pm
There are many awful legacies of the Bush administration's criminal embrace of torture in the months and years following the 9/11 attacks. Among the most agonizing — for the torture victims themselves, and for the lawyers who have represented them — is that not a single one of those victims has had his day in court. And not a single court that has been faced with a torture suit has addressed the core question of whether the victims' legal rights were violated.
Today, the English Court of Appeals ordered the publication of previously secret information pertaining to the abuse of Binyam Mohamed, a former British detainee who was held in U.S. custody. Today's decision affirmed an earlier High Court ruling that ordered the release of seven paragraphs that the British government sought to suppress. The paragraphs reveal what the whole world already knew: the British government's complicity with the United States in the torture of Mohamed.
Today, at 10:00 a.m. PST, we'll be in federal appeals court in San Francisco to argue that our lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. for its role in the Bush administration's unlawful "extraordinary rendition" program should go forward. The government has repeatedly misused the state secrets privilege in an attempt to have the case thrown out. To this day, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture policies has had his day in court.
