The American Civil Liberties Union announced yesterday morning that it would sue a Boeing subsidiary in San Jose, Calif., federal court, alleging that the company helped the Central Intelligence Agency with “the forced disappearance, torture, and inhumane treatment” of three men the government suspected of terrorist involvement.

“This is the first time we are accusing a blue-chip American company of profiting from torture,” said ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, who spoke about the case at a news conference in New York.

Since at least 2001, Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., of San Jose, “has provided direct and substantial services to the United States for its so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ program, enabling the clandestine and forcible transportation of suspects to secret overseas detention facilities where they are placed beyond the reach of the law and subjected to torture and other forms of cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment,” the suit alleges.

A spokesman for Jeppesen said: “There isn’t really anything I can say with the exception that I am aware of the suit. We have not been served. I can’t talk specifics about any customers that we might have or the services we might provide for them.”

“Publicly available records demonstrate that Jeppesen facilitated more than 70 secret rendition flights over a four-year period to countries where it knew or reasonably should have known that detainees are routinely tortured or otherwise abused in contravention of universally accepted legal standards,” the suit states.

Jeppesen provided flight and logistical support services to aircraft and crew used in the rendition program “to unlawfully render plaintiffs to detention and interrogation in Morocco, Egypt, and Afghanistan,” adds the suit brought on behalf of three men. They are Binyam Mohammed, a British resident who was taken into custody in Pakistan and is now being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba; Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen, who was first apprehended in Pakistan and is currently being held in Morocco, and Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian citizen, who while seeking asylum in Sweden was arrested by Swedish security police, handed over to CIA agents, shackled, drugged, and flown to Cairo from Stockholm, according to the suit.

ACLU attorneys, including the organization’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said they had obtained information about the rendition program from a variety of sources, including probes in Spain and Sweden and press reports, in particular an article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on October 30, portions of which were quoted in the lawsuit. Ms. Mayer wrote that a former Jeppesen employee told her that at a company board meeting a senior Jeppesen official stated: “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”

The case, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which enables foreigners to sue in U.S. courts for human-rights violations, is expected to be vigorously fought in court not only by Jeppesen but also by the CIA. The agency was not named as a defendant in the case, but it is possible that the agency will ask a federal judge for permission to intervene and seek to have the case dismissed under the “state-secrets” doctrine.

Last March, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., dismissed a case filed by a German citizen who was subjected to extraordinary rendition. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the civil suit filed by Khaled El-Masri could not be reviewed in an American court because of the government’s invocation of the “state-secrets” privilege.