Supreme Court Protects Torturers, Rejects Lawsuit
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 01:00PM SF GATE
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid Monday by five former U.S. captives to revive their lawsuit accusing a Bay Area flight-planning company of arranging for the CIA to send them to countries where they were tortured.
The men said in their suit that they had been tortured in overseas prisons as terrorism suspects. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the suit dismissed in September, agreeing with the Obama administration that the case could threaten national security.
On Monday, the high court denied a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union asking it to intervene on the grounds that the government had misused the "state secrets" privilege to deny justice to torture victims.
"The Supreme Court has refused once again to give justice to torture victims and to restore our nation's reputation as a guardian of human rights and the rule of law," ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said.
The Obama administration has said it tries to limit state-secrets claims in court cases by requiring a Justice Department committee and Attorney General Eric Holder to agree to each one.
But the ACLU, in its Supreme Court filing, said presidents have increasingly used overblown national security claims to shield "a broad range of official misconduct ... from judicial review."
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