The Supreme Court agreed with the Bush administration that a man mistakenly abducted and then tortured could not try his case in the courts because it might divulge state secrets:
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 US is all about justice. But, you see:
In this case, they argued in asking the court to take the case, “the entire world already knows” the information the government said it is seeking to protect.
But government lawyers said comments from officials are different from the specific details the administration would need to expose in order to litigate the case. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement called it an “extravagant request” that would overturn the precedent set by the court more than 50 years ago in denying a lawsuit brought during the Cold War about a downed war plane.
and the downed war plane kept important secrets, right?
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.
Wait, the government lied by saying it was about state secrets so they wouldn’t have to have the case tried? What a surprise. Also, note that the number of such cases is much higher now:
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.
I bet all of these cases involve important state secrets now.
Filed under: Supreme Court, World, civil liberties, justice, nation, politics, security
