A Boeing Co. unit was joined by the Obama administration in opposing reinstatement of a lawsuit claiming Douglas County-based Jeppesen Dataplan falsified flight plans to disguise the CIA’s delivery of suspected terrorists to secret prisons where they were tortured.
A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union urged a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday to revive the case after it was dismissed last year by a lower-court judge.
Under former President George W. Bush, the government argued national security would be jeopardized if the suit, filed in 2007 against Boeing’s Jeppesen, were allowed to proceed. The administration of President Barack Obama hasn’t changed position on that issue, Douglas Letter, a Department of Justice attorney, told the judges.
“Today, these lawyers were representing the current administration, and unfortunately they took the position that the United States will continue to stand in the way of torture victims having their day in court,” Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the ACLU, said after the court hearing.
The ACLU alleged that Jeppesen helped transport terrorism suspects on more than 70 flights to countries where they weren’t protected by U.S. law and were tortured during CIA interrogation.
Leon Panetta, Obama’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency, said Thursday that the U.S. wouldn’t send terrorist suspects to countries that might torture them or to secret prisons where they could be held indefinitely.
Panetta said such transfers, as well as detainment in so-called “black sites,” would violate an executive order Obama signed last month ordering the closing of secret prisons and directing all interrogators, including those at the CIA, to follow the Army Field Manual’s guidance banning the use of threats and physical abuse.
The ACLU sued on behalf of five foreigners who it claims were transferred from their homes and interrogated or tortured in different countries.
