Torture news followers know by now that the Ninth Circuit has upheld the Obama DOJ's request to short-cut a private lawsuit brought by five men who claim they were kidnapped, renditioned, and tortured — a suit brought against the private company ("a Boeing subsidiary", by the way) directly involved in his kidnapping and transportation.
The case is Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan and the winning argument was "state secrets." Incredibly, the DOJ requested, and got, the state secret prohibition placed on the entire lawsuit, not just specific testimony. (And keep in mind, it's a lawsuit, not a criminal case.)
From the L.A. Times on the use of "state secrets" in this case (h/t Scott Horton; my emphasis throughout):
The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a misreading of the law; it’s an egregious miscarriage of justice. That’s obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs’ complaint. One said that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration. A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into his open wounds.So what's going on here? What secrets are being protected? Well, it's back to our old friend, international torture prosecutions. Horton:
The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion—or even in most of the press accounts about it.Horton concludes: "The Ninth Circuit has made a liar out of Uncle Sam and a mockery of its duty to uphold the law proscribing torture."
As always, stay tuned. Drip, drip, drip.
GP
