If Congress won't step into the breach to protect human rights in the United States, at least there are some non governmental organizations that will. Today, the ACLU is initiating legal action against a subsidiary of Boeing, Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc:
The lawsuit, which the ACLU planned to file today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of the men to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
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"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."
The intent of the lawsuit (at least what I derive from this brief news article) is to hold accountable American corporations that participate in illegal activities at the behest of the American government as a tool to dissuade them from doing so in the future. This is one way to make it more difficult for the American government to conduct these activities. I love my country, so I hope the suit is successful and achieves this goal.
The cases involve the alleged mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, in July 2002 and January 2004; Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen, in May 2002; and Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian citizen, in December 2001.
Mohamed is currently being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Britel in Morocco and Agiza in Egypt, the ACLU said in a statement.
The hyperlinks in the blockquote lead to Google searches of the named men; the wealth of information available on these people, including amicus briefs from the SCOTUS' Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and rendition flight logs, is unbelievable. The evil acts have been thoroughly documented. Some samples below...
Binyam Mohamed
An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.
Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.
Elkassim Britel
Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel was reportedly arrested in Pakistan in March 2002 by the Pakistani police and interrogated by US and Pakistani officials. He was subsequently rendered to Morocco and has been detained ever since, reportedly in the detention facility 'Temara'. Preliminary criminal investigations were opened against Abou Elkassim Britel but were reportedly closed in September 2006 due to lack of evidence. In a letter sent by Abou Elkassim Britel to amongst others the Italian president and the Italian foreign minister, he describes being subject to ferocious torture in detention in Morocco.
Ahmed Agiza
Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the US asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their refugee communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that run by Mohammed Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the September 11 attacks. Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian asylum seeker who had been living in Sweden with his wife and children for three years. Hanan, Agiza's wife, told us how on December 18 2001 her husband failed to return home from his language class.
"The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he'd been arrested and then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed was being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead." Agiza and his family had fled Egypt in 1991, after years of persecution, and in absentia he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said, "I called my mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to see Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had happened."
On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a request from the US. They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm's Bromma airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their clothes. Suppositories were inserted into both men's anuses, they were wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.
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Mohammed Zarai, former director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor clean.
It's truly reprehensible the way these people were treated and if you paid taxes in the US, you paid for this and Boeing profited from it. Anything that can be done to stop this from happening must be supported. Thank you ACLU for taking this action and shame on you Boeing for participating in this evil.