jeppesen dataplan

The Obama administration just won a round in the lawsuit brought by five alleged torture victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA transport detainees to countries where they’ were interrogated under torture, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

The New York Times’ lead editorial today is a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era efforts to conceal the facts of U.S.-sponsored torture.
Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam [...]

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, may not go over so [...]

After my post yesterday updating the status of the Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to conceal evidence that British resident and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed was tortured, Ed Brayton, a fellow with the Center for Independent Media and author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, asked me whatever happened to that promise [...]

This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in [...]

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder said today that the Justice Department will soon issue its opinion and recommendations regarding the controversial use of the “state secrets” privilege, which the government has been using to conceal information in about 20 pending federal cases.
In three particular cases — Jewel v. NSA, Al [...]

After losing its argument before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the “state secrets privilege” requires the dismissal of a lawsuit by alleged torture victims, the Obama administration today has asked the full Ninth Circuit to re-hear the case, which was the first challenge to the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” [...]

Among the many subjects President Obama addressed at his news conference last night, he gave a brief nod to the increasingly controversial problem of his administration’s broad use of the “state secrets privilege,” which we’ve been following since January.
Here’s last night’s Q & A on the subject:
Q During the campaign you criticized [...]

Despite the Obama administration’s surprisingly vigorous arguments that the case had to be dismissed to prevent disclosure of “state secrets,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today reinstated the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, in which five victims of the CIA’s notorious “extraordinary rendition” (transfer to torture) program sued Jeppesen, a [...]