The American Civil Liberties Union is suing a unit of Boeing Co., charging that it assisted the Central Intelligence Agency in secretly abducting suspect foreigners to overseas prisons where they were held and interrogated.
The ACLU said it would file a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing unit that provides flight and logistics support to plane operators, later on Wednesday.
The suit, to be filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is on behalf of three people the ACLU said had been abducted by the CIA.
"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."
At least 1,245 CIA flights are alleged to have been made into or over Europe in the four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, a European Parliament report said earlier this year.
Washington acknowledges the secret transfer of suspects to third countries but denies torturing them or handing them over to countries that did. A call to Jeppesen seeking comment on the suit was not immediately returned.
The ACLU also said on Wednesday that it would ask the Supreme Court to review the dismissal of a lawsuit against former CIA Director George Tenet and 10 CIA employees by a German who says he was kidnapped and tortured by the spy agency about three years ago.
In March a U.S. appeals court upheld the dismissal of the suit, brought by Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin, after agreeing with U.S. government arguments that moving forward with the case would pose a risk of exposing state secrets.
El-Masri was arrested in Macedonia in late 2003 and says he was handed over to the CIA, who flew him to Afghanistan and wrongly held him until his release in late May 2004.
