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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 3rd,
2009 - Govt Lawyers Seek to Quash Rendition Lawsuit |
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Govt Lawyers
Seek to Quash Rendition Lawsuit By William Fisher Inter Press Service November 3, 2009 New York - The long road to
the proverbial day in court just got longer for five men who claim they were
"disappeared" and tortured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The men, who say they were
victims of the extraordinary rendition programme conducted during the
administration of President George W. Bush, have been trying since 2007 to
get their cases heard on the merits. But it is now far from clear
that the merits of these cases will be heard any time soon - if ever. The
reason is that the Department of Justice - first through Bush administration
lawyers, now through Barack Obama administration lawyers - has invoked the
so-called "state secrets" privilege, claiming that a public trial
would endanger U.S. national security. The latest development in
the case came last week, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals set aside an
earlier ruling by three of its own judges and said a majority of its judges
had voted to refer the case to an 11-judge panel for a new hearing. The
request to rehear the case, now scheduled for Dec. 15, came from the Obama
administration. That decision put on hold
the earlier findings of the three-judge panel, which had reinstated the
Mohamed suit in April. That 3-0 ruling rejected arguments by the Bush and
Obama administrations that the case concerned secrets too sensitive to
disclose in court. In its tortuous journey
toward justice, the Jeppesen case has taken on many aspects of an
international spy thriller - involving high courts, senior diplomatic
officials in two countries, prisoner abuse and threats to withhold
intelligence-sharing among allies if the abuse was publicly disclosed. The case is known as Mohamed
et al v. Jeppesen Dataplan. The Mohamed is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian
citizen and British resident who, while in CIA custody in 2002, was stripped,
blindfolded, shackled, dressed in a tracksuit, strapped to the seat of a
plane and flown to Morocco where he was secretly detained for 18 months and
interrogated and tortured by Moroccan intelligence services. In January 2004, Mohamed was
once again blindfolded, stripped, and shackled by CIA agents and flown to the
secret U.S. detention facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Kabul,
Afghanistan, where he was again tortured and eventually transferred to
another facility and then to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,
from which he was released without charge in February. The Jeppesen Dataplan named
in the case refers to a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, located in the
California Bay Area, which is alleged to have knowingly provided the CIA with
logistical support for the chartered aircraft used to "render"
terror suspects to countries where they were disappeared and tortured. A Council of Europe report
in 2007 described Jeppesen as the CIA's aviation services provider. In a
court declaration, a former employee quoted a company official as telling
staff members in 2006 that Jeppesen handled the CIA's "torture
flights". And, according to published
reports, Jeppesen had actual knowledge of the consequences of its activities.
A former Jeppesen employee informed Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine
that, at an internal corporate meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated,
"We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the
torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way." The three-judge appeals
court panel said the government and Jeppesen could take steps to protect
national secrets as the case proceeded. The judges said the administration's
argument, if accepted, would "cordon off all secret government actions
from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its contractors from the
demands and limits of the law." Ben Wizner, an attorney with
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represents the plaintiffs,
told IPS, "Much is at stake in this case. If the CIA's overbroad secrecy
claims prevail, torture victims will be denied their day in court solely on
the basis of an affidavit submitted by their torturers." "This case is not about
secrecy. It's about immunity from accountability," he said. "To
date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this
case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets'
here. And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this
issue. This is a betrayal of the rule of law. It is not the standard we
expected from the Obama administration." Six of the Appeals Court's
27 judges have disqualified themselves from the case, for reasons that were
not disclosed. The six included Judge Jay Bybee who, as a Justice Department
lawyer in the Bush administration, wrote a March 2002 memo saying the
president could legally transfer captives to foreign custody. Of the five plaintiffs, two
are still imprisoned in Egypt and Morocco, and the other three were released
without U.S. charges. Binyam Mohammed, the
best-known of the five, was flown back to Britain from Guantanamo in
February. He had been on a hunger strike there for several weeks and British
government officials had visited him to determine that he was physically fit
to return to Britain. He claims that up until the
time of his release, he was being asked to agree to a no-disclosure agreement
in return for charges not being brought against him. In the past, the U.S. has
received "diplomatic assurances" from countries on the receiving
end of the extraordinary rendition trips that their new "guests"
would not be tortured. However, these assurances have proved to be largely
worthless. The Jeppesen case has also
caused a furor in Britain and a problem for the U.S. State Department. In a
separate case brought on behalf of Mohamed, who is a legal British resident,
Britain's High Court expressed dismay that a democracy "governed by the
rule of law" would seek to suppress evidence "relevant to
allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically
embarrassing though it might be". In its latest ruling, the
British High Court found that while Mohamed, a British resident, was in U.S.
custody, the CIA told British intelligence agents how he was being treated.
The High Court ruled that Mohamed has the right to obtain those documents
from the British intelligence service in order to prove that statements he
made to the CIA were the byproducts of coercion. External link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49116 |