Chalk one up for the police state
The Bush Administration's use of torture got a big boost from the US Supreme Court today. This afternoon, the court refused to hear the appeal of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen whom the CIA mistook for someone else, kidnapped, and sent off to Afghanistan to be tortured. After five months of torture and confinement, the CIA realized they had the wrong guy, so they unceremoniously plopped him on an abandoned hillside in Albania. He sued the US government, and rightly so, for the irreparable damage his torture and wrongful imprisonment caused.
The Supreme Court refused to let el-Masri's case go forward, on the grounds that doing so would reveal state secrets. Of course, these secrets aren't secret at all, and especially so in his case: kidnapping, "rendition," torture, all under the name of fighting Bush's "war" on terror.
In effect, today's refusal means that "state secrets" now covers anything that would embarrass the Bush Administration and expose its members to war crimes charges in The Hague.
If this case had happened in some Third World country, people in this country would have been outraged. The punditry would have been justifiably furious at the notion that a country's highest court rubber-stamped the use of torture by its military and intelligence services.
If this can happen to some random guy like el-Masri, it can happen to you or me. The Supreme Court's dereliction of their duty also means that other countries can now point to our own legal system as justification when torture is used against American soldiers and civilians abroad.
We reap what we sow, and the harvest from this debacle will be toxic.
The continued use of torture by this government befouls the meaning of our Constitution, it defiles the memory of anyone who ever served in uniform to defend this country, and it places the US government on the same deranged level as Idi Amin or Augusto Pinochet.
Bush's crusade to turn this country into a pale, tin-pot shadow of its former self continues apace.