The US Supreme Court let stand on Monday the dismissal of a lawsuit claiming a Boeing Co subsidiary helped the CIA fly foreign terrorism suspects to secret prisons abroad for interrogation and torture. The justices refused to review a federal appeals court ruling that threw out the lawsuit against Boeing's Jeppesen Dataplan Inc after the US Justice Department said the case would reveal state secrets.
The high court rejected an appeal by five foreign nationals who claimed they had been unlawfully kidnapped, locked up in secret prisons overseas and tortured as part of the CIA program adopted after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The Bush and Obama administrations have invoked state secrets to block lawsuits into the treatment of foreign terrorism suspects and warrantless spying on Americans, saying the cases could damage US national security.
President Barack Obama's administration had urged the justices to reject the appeal. It said the appeals court reviewed highly classified materials and correctly ruled that the state-secrets privilege required the lawsuit be dismissed. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit in 2007 in federal court in California, seeking unspecified damages from the San Jose-based Jeppesen.
The lawsuit claimed Jeppesen provided flight and logistic support to the CIA with at least 15 aircraft on more than 70 flights that transported suspects to overseas prisons. The US government has acknowledged that secret transfer of suspects to third countries, but has denied torturing them or handing them over to countries that did. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the heart of the case involved allegations of covert CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals, a subject matter that qualified as a state secret.
A US appeals court agreed and dismissed the lawsuit by a 6-5 vote. The ACLU appealed and urged the Supreme Court to hear the case. "The government has no privilege to violate fundamental human rights and evade judicial review," said ACLU attorney Steven Shapiro. Jeppesen also opposed the appeal. It said the five plaintiffs have not sued the CIA, any foreign government or any of their officers or agents, and do not contend that Jeppesen engaged in any acts of mistreatment. The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal without any comment. It marked the latest in a series of cases the court has declined to review over state secrets and foreign citizens claiming torture overseas.