Supreme Court rejects torture suit

Link.

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.

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What do you guys think about this? Does this dismissal make it seem like the company's guilt is being implicitly exposed? If they are innocent of the claims made against them, is it likely that "state secrets" would have to be revealed, in order to show that they really had nothing to do with this?

A couple of other questions to consider:

1. Should torture victims be allowed to have their lawsuits heard by federal courts?

2. Should there be limits to what information the government can conceal by invoking "state secrets"? Or in other words, is there any type of concealment that would cross a line, so to speak.

Other thoughts?

William Haskins said:

when i saw the phrase "torture suit", i thought to myself, "it may be uncomfortable, but i bet it looks bad-ass."

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When you think about it in that way, it makes me wonder why the court would reject such a thing.

Diana Hignutt said:

Personally, I think this back-door method of legalizing torture is a greater danger to our national security than anything that would be revealed in a potential lawsuit. But that's just me.

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The other thing that I usually wonder about with these kinds of cases is whether there's really anything to hide, in the first place. For example, if the state secret is that this company and the CIA really did this to these people, then the cat may already be out of the bag, so to speak, once the government tries to get the case dismissed on state secrets grounds (rather than on the grounds that the goverment didn't actually torture anyone, or some other grounds).

It may be that instead of protecting actual substantive secrets, the Obama administration is mainly just trying to avoid the possibility that a court might ultimately restrain them from using torture in the future. But I don't know. It could be both, since the two aren't really mutually exclusive.