Five men who claim to have been kidnapped and tortured at the direction of CIA agents are entitled to their day in court to expose alleged U.S. government abuse of terrorism suspects, a federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday.
Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama had invoked the state secrets privilege in urging courts to dismiss a lawsuit in which the prisoners described interrogations involving beatings, electric shocks and laceration by scalpel.
While acknowledging that some evidence might be classified and properly shielded from public scrutiny, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the president's powers to protect against intelligence disclosures "are not the only weighty constitutional values at stake."
The ruling sends back for trial the case of Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. -- a suit brought by five men subjected to "extraordinary rendition," in which terrorism suspects were snatched by U.S. and foreign agents and flown to secret CIA interrogation sites.
The U.S. government had intervened to halt the case on state secrets grounds. A Boeing Co. subsidiary, Jeppesen is accused of complicity for having arranged the men's clandestine transport.
Tuesday's ruling was the first to reject a presidential assertion of the state secrets privilege seeking to prevent post-Sept. 11 abuse allegations from going to trial.
"According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law," the unanimous opinion by the appeals panel reads.
Lawyers for the detainees hailed the panel's decision.
"Today's ruling 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," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the men's case.
Citing recent Supreme Court rulings on the rights of detained terrorism suspects, the appeals panel said national security depended not just on protecting intelligence but also "freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint" and from the "gross and notorious act of despotism" that is torture.
