A federal court said on Tuesday that “rendition” victims could sue a company involved in their detainment, rejecting government pleas that the case should be halted on national security grounds.
The 3-0 ruling by a panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates a suit brought by five men, who say they were kidnapped and sent to secret overseas sites for interrogation and torture.
A federal judge originally threw out the suit, based on arguments by the administration of former US president George W. Bush.
Though US President Barack Obama’s administration has condemned the interrogation techniques authorized by Bush, he has angered civil rights activists by maintaining the same position in this case.
Unless the Obama administration succeeds in getting Tuesday’s ruling overturned, a lawsuit could proceed against California-based Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, which is accused of knowingly providing services that enabled rendition flights for the CIA.
Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who argued the case in February, welcomed the ruling.
“It demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed ‘secrets’ in a court of law,” Wizner said.
“Our clients, who are among the hundreds of victims of torture under the Bush administration, have waited for years just to get a foot in the courthouse door. Now, at long last, they will have their day in court,” he said.
US Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment, saying the department was reviewing the court’s ruling.
“Extraordinary rendition” involved abducting suspected criminals and terrorists without legal proceedings, and then taking them to foreign countries or CIA prisons. The Bush administration claimed it never took a prisoner to a foreign country without first being assured no torture would be used.
Judge Michael Hawkins wrote in Tuesday’s ruling that “the subject matter of this lawsuit is not a state secret” and said that the government could take steps to protect legitimate secrets as the case proceeds.
Two of the five men who brought the suit are still imprisoned, one in Morocco and one in Egypt, while the three others were released without charges from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
One of the men, Bisher al-Rawi, praised the ruling. He was released from Guantanamo last year.
“We have made a huge step forward in our quest for justice,” Rawi said in a statement released by the ACLU.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS