Opinion ID: 174989
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Effect on the Proceedings

Text: Having determined that the privilege applies, we next determine whether the case must be dismissed under the Reynolds privilege.10 We have thoroughly considered plaintiffs’ claims, several possible defenses and the prospective 10 As noted earlier, the district court did not conduct a detailed analysis of plaintiffs’ several claims because it concluded that the subject matter of the entire case is a state secret and therefore dismissed under the Totten bar. One option, vigorously urged by the dissent, would be to remand to the district court for that court to conduct a more detailed analysis in the first instance. As the case has developed during these en banc proceedings, however, we find remand unnecessary because our own Reynolds analysis persuades us that the litigation cannot proceed. Although it would have been preferable for the district court to conduct this analysis first, we now have had to do it ourselves and it makes no sense to suspend our own judgment that — given the record before us and the nature of plaintiffs’ claims — this case realistically cannot be litigated against Jeppesen without compromising state secrets. There is thus no point, and much risk, in remanding to the district court to go through the Reynolds analysis as the dissent would prefer. We accept and respect the principles that motivate the dissent, but those principles do not justify prolonging the process here. MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN 13547 path of this litigation. We also have carefully and skeptically reviewed the government’s classified submissions, which include supplemental information not presented to the district court. We rely heavily on these submissions, which describe the state secrets implicated here, the harm to national security that the government believes would result from explicit or implicit disclosure and the reasons why, in the government’s view, further litigation would risk that disclosure. [13] Given plaintiffs’ extensive submission of public documents and the stage of the litigation, we do not rely on the first two circumstances in which the Reynolds privilege requires dismissal — that is, whether plaintiffs could prove a prima facie case without privileged evidence, or whether the privilege deprives Jeppesen of evidence that would otherwise give it a valid defense to plaintiffs’ claims. See Kasza, 133 F.3d at 1166; supra Part III.B.3.11 Instead, we assume without deciding that plaintiffs’ prima facie case and Jeppesen’s defenses may not inevitably depend on privileged evidence. Proceeding on that assumption, we hold that dismissal is 11 As noted before, see supra n. 7 and related text, at least some of plaintiffs’ claims would require proof of an agreement or covert relationship between the government and Jeppesen. These claims might well be barred under Totten and certainly would fall even under a Reynolds analysis. The dissent, however, suggests that plaintiffs could establish a prima facie case for at least two of their claims without relying on privileged evidence and perhaps without any discovery at all — namely, that Jeppesen recklessly provided flight and logistical support for rendition flights while it knew or should have known its support was being used for forced disappearance and torture. See Dissent Appendix. Although our holding does not require us to resolve this question, we are not so sure. Plaintiffs’ reliance on information set forth in the dissent’s Appendix would have to overcome evidentiary and other obstacles, such as hearsay problems and the fact that the vast majority of the media reports cited as putting Jeppesen on notice were published after Jeppesen’s services were alleged to have occurred. In any event, our own analysis under the third aspect of Reynolds persuades us these “knew or should have known” claims must be dismissed as well. 13548 MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN nonetheless required under Reynolds because there is no feasible way to litigate Jeppesen’s alleged liability without creating an unjustifiable risk of divulging state secrets. See ElMasri, 479 F.3d at 312 (coming to the same conclusion in a related and comparable case), cert. denied, 552 U.S. 947 (2007).12 12 In El-Masri, the Supreme Court declined to review the Fourth Circuit’s dismissal of similar claims against the various United States government and corporate actors alleged to be more directly responsible for the rendition and interrogation programs at issue here. Nothing in the Supreme Court’s state secrets jurisprudence suggests that plaintiffs’ claims here, against an alleged provider of logistical support to those programs, should proceed where claims against the government and corporate actors who plaintiffs allege were primarily responsible failed. As the dissent correctly notes, we have previously disapproved of ElMasri for conflating the Totten bar’s “very subject matter” inquiry with the Reynolds privilege. See Al-Haramain, 507 F.3d at 1201. We adhere to that approach today by maintaining a distinction between the Totten bar on the one hand and the Reynolds privilege on the other. See Tenet, 544 U.S. at 9 (explaining that Reynolds “in no way signaled our retreat from Totten’s broader holding that lawsuits premised on alleged espionage agreements are altogether forbidden”). Maintaining that distinction, however, does not mean that the Reynolds privilege can never be raised prospectively or result in a dismissal at the pleading stage. As we explained in Al-Haramain (as do we in the text), the Totten bar and the Reynolds privilege form a “continuum of analysis.” 507 F.3d at 1201. A case may fall outside the Totten bar because its “very subject matter” is not a state secret, and yet it may become clear in conducting a Reynolds analysis that plaintiffs cannot establish a prima facie case, that defendants are deprived of a valid defense or that the case cannot be litigated without presenting either a certainty or an unacceptable risk of revealing state secrets. When that point is reached, including, if applicable, at the pleading stage, dismissal is appropriate under the Reynolds privilege. Notwithstanding its erroneous conflation of the Totten bar and the Reynolds privilege, we rely on El-Masri because it properly concluded — with respect to allegations comparable to those here — that “virtually any conceivable response to [plaintiffs’] allegations would disclose privileged information,” and, therefore, that the action could not be litigated “without threatening the disclosure” of state secrets. El-Masri, 479 F.3d at 308, 310. MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN 13549 [14] We reach this conclusion because all seven of plaintiffs’ claims, even if taken as true, describe Jeppesen as providing logistical support in a broad, complex process, certain aspects of which, the government has persuaded us, are absolutely protected by the state secrets privilege. Notwithstanding that some information about that process has become public, Jeppesen’s alleged role and its attendant liability cannot be isolated from aspects that are secret and protected. Because the facts underlying plaintiffs’ claims are so infused with these secrets, any plausible effort by Jeppesen to defend against them would create an unjustifiable risk of revealing state secrets, even if plaintiffs could make a prima facie case on one or more claims with nonprivileged evidence. See Kasza, 133 F.3d at 1170; Black, 62 F.3d at 1118 (“[P]roof of ‘the factual allegations in the Amended Complaint are so tied to the privileged information that further litigation will constitute an undue threat that privileged information will be disclosed.’ ”) (quoting and affirming the district court); Bareford, 973 F.2d at 1144 (“[T]he danger that witnesses might divulge some privileged material during crossexamination is great because the privileged and nonprivileged material are inextricably linked. We are compelled to conclude that the trial of this case would inevitably lead to a significant risk that highly sensitive information concerning this defense system would be disclosed.”); Fitzgerald, 776 F.2d at 1243 (“In examining witnesses with personal knowledge of relevant military secrets, the parties would have every incentive to probe dangerously close to the state secrets themselves. In these circumstances, state secrets could be compromised even without direct disclosure by a witness.”); Farnsworth Cannon, 635 F.2d at 281 (“[T]he plaintiff and its lawyers would have every incentive to probe as close to the core secrets as the trial judge would permit. Such probing in open court would inevitably be revealing. It is evident that any attempt on the part of the plaintiff to establish a prima facie case would so threaten disclosure of state secrets that the overriding interest of the United States and the preservation of its state secrets precludes any further attempt to pursue this 13550 MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN litigation.”); see also In re Sealed Case, 494 F.3d at 152-54 (acknowledging the appropriateness of dismissal when unprivileged and privileged matters are so entwined that the risk of disclosure of privileged material is unacceptably high, although concluding that the case before the court did not fall within that category). Here, further litigation presents an unacceptable risk of disclosure of state secrets no matter what legal or factual theories Jeppesen would choose to advance during a defense. Whether or not Jeppesen provided logistical support in connection with the extraordinary rendition and interrogation programs, there is precious little Jeppesen could say about its relevant conduct and knowledge without revealing information about how the United States government does or does not conduct covert operations. Our conclusion holds no matter what protective procedures the district court might employ. Adversarial litigation, including pretrial discovery of documents and witnesses and the presentation of documents and testimony at trial, is inherently complex and unpredictable. Although district courts are well equipped to wall off isolated secrets from disclosure, the challenge is exponentially greater in exceptional cases like this one, where the relevant secrets are difficult or impossible to isolate and even efforts to define a boundary between privileged and unprivileged evidence would risk disclosure by implication. In these rare circumstances, the risk of disclosure that further proceedings would create cannot be averted through the use of devices such as protective orders or restrictions on testimony. [15] Dismissal at the pleading stage under Reynolds is a drastic result and should not be readily granted. We are not persuaded, however, by the dissent’s views that the state secrets privilege can never be “asserted during the pleading stage to excise entire allegations,” or that the government must be required “to make its claims of state secrets with regard to specific items of evidence or groups of such items as their use is sought in the lawsuit.” Dissent 13560, 13565. MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN 13551 A case may fall outside the Totten bar and yet it may become clear during the Reynolds analysis that dismissal is required at the outset. See Al-Haramain, 507 F.3d at 1201 (explaining that the Totten bar and the Reynolds privilege form a “continuum of analysis,” and that in some cases “the suit itself may not be barred because of its subject matter and yet ultimately, the state secrets privilege may nonetheless preclude the case from proceeding to the merits,” even without “await[ing] preliminary discovery”). Here, our detailed Reynolds analysis reveals that the claims and possible defenses are so infused with state secrets that the risk of disclosing them is both apparent and inevitable. Dismissal under these circumstances, like dismissal under the Totten bar, reflects the general principle that “public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential, and respecting which it will not allow the confidence to be violated.” Totten, 92 U.S. at 107.