Law Commons^™

Intolerable Abuses: Rendition For Torture And The State Secrets Privilege, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

In Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, dismissed a complaint brought by five men claiming to have been victims of the U.S. government’s extraordinary rendition program, alleged to involve international kidnapping and torture at foreign facilities. Procedurally required to accept plaintiffs’ allegations as true, the court nonetheless dismissed the complaint before discovery had begun based on the state secrets privilege and the Totten doctrine, finding that the very subject matter of plaintiffs’ complaint was a state secret and that the defendant corporation could not defend itself without evidence subject to the privilege. This Article contends …