Pages

April 28, 2009

Appeals court: CIA torture victims can sue

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said five men who alleged CIA torture can sue the government, alleged “national security” claims be damned.

And, with that, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan goes back to U.S. District Court in San Francisco to continue the civil trial process.

Greenwald has in-depth analysis of the ruling. The government can appeal this to the full Ninth Circuit, even while the discovery process at the district level looks at individual documents.

The big thing he notes is that the panel said the state secrets privilege is applicable to specific aspects of a case and cannot be used as a sort of civil pleadings prior restraint.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Your comments are appreciated, as is at least a modicum of politeness.
Comments are moderated, so yours may not appear immediately.
Due to various forms of spamming, comments with professional websites, not your personal website or blog, may be rejected.