The president cannot avoid trial of a lawsuit brought by five former CIA captives, who allege they were tortured, by proclaiming the entire case a protected state secret, a federal appeals panel ruled today.
Unless I'm missing something here, this could be big.
UPDATE: Sorry I didn't notice this had already been diaried a couple times. Don't know how I missed it (I checked, honest!), but if you all think I should, I'll delete this to allow the other ones to take precedent)
The lawyers [representing both Bush and Obama DOJ] argued that "the very subject matter" of the allegations that U.S. agents kidnapped and tortured terrorism suspects was entitled to the protections of the president's state secrets privilege.
.....
The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the executive privilege claim was excessive and the case could go to trial. The lawsuit by the five alleged torture victims is against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing Co. subcontractor accused of complicity in the men's mistreatment for having flown them to secret CIA interrogation sites after they were nabbed abroad by federal agents.
I'm sure they'll still keep some of the important stuff "secret", but this is sure a lot better than nothing:
"By excising secret evidence on an item-by-item basis, rather than foreclosing litigation altogether at the outset, the evidentiary privilege recognizes that the executive's national security prerogatives are not the only weighty constitutional values at stake," said the unanimous opinion written by Circuit Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, an appointee of President Clinton.
........
Human rights advocates hailed the ruling...
I know I haven't added much of anything to this diary beyond just the news story itself, so I can delete this if you think I've violated "fair use" or something.
The final line of the story:
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, said government lawyers were "reviewing the judges' order."
Let's hope Obama will reconsider his earlier stance. Hopefully now he can just say, "Well, I TRIED to stop this," and then let it go.
(For some reason my "Link" button isn't working. So here's the URL:
http://www.latimes.com/... )