CIA kidnapped and tortured the wrong guy, and now SCOTUS says he can’t sue.

Secret prisons in the name of national security…what nation is this? What ideals does this policy protect? Freedom?

from the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court declined [Tuesday] to open U.S. courts to a German citizen who said he was abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA because he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist.
[...]
Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, has said he was detained by Macedonian police while on vacation on Dec. 31, 2003, and handed over to the CIA a few weeks later under a secret program that transfers terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation. He said he was taken to a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan and physically abused before he was flown back to the Balkans without explanation in May 2004 and dumped on a hillside in Albania.

The government had invoked its “state secrets” privilege and said there was no way for Khaled el-Masri to bring his lawsuit, or for the government to defend itself, without the disclosure of information that would endanger national security.

from MSNBC:

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. (emphasis mine)

We had nuclear missiles pointed at us and “state secrets” was invoked 6 times in 23 years. Now it’s been used 39 times in 6 years. You know that old aphorism “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide?” The Bush Administration has been doing nothing but hide ever since it descended upon this country.