Obama follows Bush in attempting to Quash rendition lawsuit.

So far only an Italian lawsuit has been able to try and convict anyone involved in rendition and there were quite special circumstances there that made the suit possible. Even so the Italian govt. certainly did not help the inquiry.

Intelligence operatives are quite unaccountable for their actions. Whenever a suit is launched the first defence is state secrets. In some cases no doubt there are legitimate concerns about this but as a judge notes in this article, in many cases each bit of evidence can be scrutinised to see if it involves a national security problem. However, the defence is used as a blunderbuss weapon to kill any suit. Maher Arar's recent US suit was dismissed for exactly the same reason-- again the Obama administration following in the footsteps of Bush.

Note that Boeing not only earns profits on the sale of aircraft to the military but the airline listed in the suit is a subsidiary of Boeing and was contracted for rendition flights.

Antiwar.com -

Govt Lawyers Seek to Quash Rendition Lawsuit

Posted By William Fisher

The long road to the proverbial day in court just got longer for five men who claim they were "disappeared" and tortured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The men, who say they were victims of the extraordinary rendition program conducted during the administration of president George W. BushGeorge W. Bush, have been trying since 2007 to get their cases heard on the merits.

But it is now far from clear that the merits of these cases will be heard any time soon - if ever. The reason is that the Department of Justice - first through Bush administration lawyers, now through Barack ObamaBarack Obama administration lawyers - has invoked the so-called "state secrets" privilege, claiming that a public trial would endanger U.S. national security.

The latest development in the case came last week, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals set aside an earlier ruling by three of its own judges and said a majority of its judges had voted to refer the case to an 11-judge panel for a new hearing. The request to rehear the case, now scheduled for Dec. 15, came from the Obama administration.

That decision put on hold the earlier findings of the three-judge panel, which had reinstated the Mohamed suit in April. That 3-0 ruling rejected arguments by the Bush and Obama administrations that the case concerned secrets too sensitive to disclose in court.

The case is known as Mohamed et al v. Jeppesen Dataplan.

In January 2004, Mohamed was once again blindfolded, stripped, and shackled by CIA agents and flown to the secret U.S. detention facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was again tortured and eventually transferred to another facility and then to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from which he was released without charge in February.

The Jeppesen Dataplan named in the case refers to a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, ..

The three-judge appeals court panel said the government and Jeppesen could take steps to protect national secrets as the case proceeded. The judges said the administration's argument, if accepted, would "cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its contractors from the demands and limits of the law."

.....

"This case is not about secrecy. It's about immunity from accountability," he said. "To date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets' here. And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this issue. This is a betrayal of the rule of law. It is not the standard we expected from the Obama administration."

Binyam Mohammed, the best-known of the five, was flown back to Britain from Guantanamo in February. He had been on a hunger strike there for several weeks and British government officials had visited him to determine that he was physically fit to return to Britain.

He claims that up until the time of his release, he was being asked to agree to a non-disclosure agreement in return for charges not being brought against him.

In the past, the U.S. has received "diplomatic assurances" from countries on the receiving end of the extraordinary rendition trips that their new "guests" would not be tortured. However, these assurances have proved to be largely worthless.

The Jeppesen case has also caused a furor in Britain and a problem for the U.S. State Department. In a separate case brought on behalf of Mohamed, who is a legal British resident, Britain's High Court expressed dismay that a democracy "governed by the rule of law" would seek to suppress evidence "relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be."""

In its latest ruling, the British High Court found that while Mohamed, a British resident, was in U.S. custody, the CIA told British intelligence agents how he was being treated. The High Court ruled that Mohamed has the right to obtain those documents from the British intelligence service in order to prove that statements he made to the CIA were the byproducts of coercion.