[DEBATE] : Fwd: US Justice

[Sean Jacobs]

>
> Supreme Court Refuses Torture Case
>
> Tuesday October 9, 2007 11:46 PM
>
>
> By MARK SHERMAN
>
> Associated Press Writer
>
> WASHINGTON (AP) - A German man who says he was abducted and tortured 
> by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his 
> final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.
>
> The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled 
> el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that 
> state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.
>
> El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was 
> mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and 
> was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year's Eve 
> 2003.
>
> He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged 
> and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. 
> He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the 
> ``salt pit'' in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
>
> After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was 
> dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without 
> looking back.
>
> The lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet, unidentified CIA 
> agents and others sought damages of at least $75,000.
>
> ``We are very disappointed,'' Manfred Gnijdic, el-Masri's attorney in 
> Germany, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his 
> office in Ulm.
>
> ``It will shatter all trust in the American justice system,'' Gnijdic 
> said, charging that the United States expects every other nation to 
> act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility for its own 
> actions.
>
> ``That is a disaster,'' Gnijdic said.
>
> El-Masri's claims, which prompted strong international criticism of 
> the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. 
> news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. 
> officials acknowledged that el-Masri's detention was a mistake.
>
> The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri's 
> account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the 
> facts central to el-Masri's claims ``concern the highly classified 
> methods and means of the program.''
>
> El-Masri's case centers on the CIA's ``extraordinary rendition'' 
> program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign 
> countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to 
> the program.
>
> President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on 
> terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage 
> in torture.
>
> El-Masri's lawsuit had been seen as a test of the administration's 
> legal strategy to invoke the doctrine of state secrets and stop 
> national security suits before any evidence is presented in private to 
> a judge. Another lawsuit over the administration's warrantless 
> wiretapping program, also dismissed by a federal court on state 
> secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.
>
> Conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec said the Bush White House 
> uses the doctrine too broadly. ``The notion that state secrets can't 
> be preserved by a judge who has taken an oath to protect the 
> Constitution, that a judge cannot examine the strength of the claim is 
> too troubling to be accepted,'' said Kmiec, a law professor at 
> Pepperdine University.
>
> The court has not examined the state secrets privilege in more than 50 
> years.
>
> A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says the 
> Bush administration has used the state secrets privilege much more 
> often than its predecessors.
>
> At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the 
> former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege 
> six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 
> 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to 
> unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.
>
> The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling 
> that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even from the court, 
> details about a military plane's fatal crash.
>
> Three widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died 
> aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming 
> that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high 
> court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades 
> later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.
>
> The case is El-Masri v. U.S., 06-1613.
>
> ---
>
> Associated Press Writer Thomas Seythal in Frankfurt, Germany, 
> contributed to this story.
>