Obama Backs Bush Policy, Invokes "State Secrets"

The Obama administration is backing an anti-terrorism policy of President George W. Bush, urging a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit that accuses a Boeing Co. unit of helping the CIA fly suspects overseas to be tortured. The American Civil Liberties Union, based in New York, criticized the Obama administration’s position and urged a three- judge appeals court in San Francisco to revive the Boeing case. Under Bush, the government argued national security would be jeopardized if the 2007 suit against Boeing’s Jeppesen Dataplan is allowed to proceed. Jeppesen was accused of falsifying flight plans to disguise the Central Intelligence Agency’s delivery of suspected terrorists to secret prisons where they were allegedly tortured. “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in a statement yesterday. “This is not change. This is definitely more of the same.” Holder, who took office last week as attorney general in the new Democratic administration, believes “it is vital to protect information that, if released, would jeopardize national security,” said the Justice Department’s Miller...From Bloomberg