Boeing Has Friends in High Places

Yesterday, Christine Gregoire created the Washington Council on Aerospace, which will basically push for more business-friendly laws, to prevent Boeing from moving to the deep South, where costs are low and labor laws lax. (Last one to the bottom's a rotten egg!) Jokes Joe Turner at the Tacoma News Tribune:

I'm sure the business community would have preferred that she sign an executive order forbidding the Machinists or any other Boeing or aerospace worker union to strike ever, ever, ever again, and denying unemployment benefits for anyone ever laid off by Boeing. But that would have been overstepping her bounds by just a tad.

Now, you may be worried that the council's decisions won't be activated effectively. Well, says the Governor's office, worry no longer:

The governor is also creating an aerospace subcabinet to ensure that decisions made by the council are activated as effectively as possible.

Back to this whole threatening foreign governments thing. You may remember Rick Anderson's story on how Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen was the preferred carrier of non-consenting Muslims for the US Government's extraordinary renditions program, or--in plain language--its torture kidnappings. One Jeppesen passenger, British citizen Binyam Mohamed, filed suit against the company in the US and against the British secret service for its complicity in British court.

Like the Bush Administration before it, The Obama Administration demanded that the American lawsuit be dismissed on "state secret" grounds. (The court declined.) Then the administration allegedly told Great Britain that if it wanted to continue to get military intelligence from the US, it'd better not disclose the facts about Mohamed's torture. Well, "allegedly" no longer: this week, the letter got out (pdf), confirming the threat. (Read more here.) See what happens when go poking around in Boeing's business? (If you don't see any more posts from me today, just assume I had a Jeppesen flight to catch.)