A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against a San Jose flight-planning company that allegedly helped CIA transport suspects overseas for torturing them, arguing that it could expose state secrets.

According to Justice Department attorney Michael Abate, the five victims of the CIA's so-called "extraordinary rendition" program, the plaintiffs, can’t demonstrate that Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary based in San Jose, submitted them to wrongful treatment before showing them that the company helped the CIA and that the rendition program treated them brutally. Any of these allegations are linked to classified information which can’t be released in court, he said.

Abate told U.S. District Judge James Ware: "Without the information in question, this case cannot be litigated," San Francisco Chronicle reports.

He added that if the government keeps its secrets it can be a “harsh” result, but according to the state secrets doctrine recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1953, "private parties bear that burden on behalf of society."

After the hearing, Ware didn’t issue a rule and said that some of the positions of the government were a little extreme.

The lawsuit, filed a year ago, says that the company was guilty of making 70 flights since 2001, as part of CIA’s program that is of transporting terrorist overseas to foreign prisons for interrogation and detention.

The suit says that three of the plaintiffs that are still in prison were tortured in Morocco and Egypt.

The Bush administration acknowledged the program, but said that it had never taken prisoners to foreign countries to torture them.

The government intervened in the case and moved for its dismissal.

Ben Wizner, the plaintiffs' lawyer, told the judge that the case is based mainly on information already public.

He cited a declaration of a former Jeppesen employee Sean Belcher, who said that in August 2006 his former employer, director Bob Overby, told his staff that they were handling "all the extraordinary rendition flights ... the torture flights."

According to him, if the case if dismissed, “no court will ever be able to say whether the program is legal.”