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rendition case rejected

Disenchanted

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Court Rejects Alleged CIA Kidnap Victim

By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Tuesday terminated a lawsuit from a man who claims he was abducted and tortured by the CIA, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if the case were allowed to proceed.

Khaled el-Masri, 44, alleged that he was kidnapped by CIA agents in Europe and held in an Afghan prison for four months in a case of mistaken identity.

The administration has not publicly acknowledged that el-Masri was detained, and lower courts dismissed his suit after the administration asserted that state secrets would be revealed if the lawsuit was not blocked. The justices rejected his appeal without comment.

The case had been seen as a test of the administration's legal strategy to stop it and several other national security lawsuits by invoking the doctrine of state secrets. Another lawsuit over the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, also dismissed on state secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SCOTUS_CIA_LAWSUIT?SITE=PAPIT&SECTION=NATIONAL&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

So I guess something labeled state secrets is more important than the Constitution and whether or not he and others have been tortured.
 
This is not a criminal trial, but a civil one.

Yes, accidental and wrongful detaining is bad.

Yes, (claims of) government lying after the fact is bad.

Yes, the government using national security as a lie (it is claimed) to cover up its wrongdoing is bad.

No, the right to a civil lawsuit does not trump national security.

No, the courts have no way of determining if the government is telling the truth or not, without revealing said confidential information.

Don't like it? Talk to your Congressman at the next election.
 
Beerina said:
This is not a criminal trial, but a civil one.

Yes, accidental and wrongful detaining is bad.

Yes, (claims of) government lying after the fact is bad.

Yes, the government using national security as a lie (it is claimed) to cover up its wrongdoing is bad.

No, the right to a civil lawsuit does not trump national security.

No, the courts have no way of determining if the government is telling the truth or not, without revealing said confidential information.

Don't like it? Talk to your Congressman at the next election.
Click to expand...

Any detaining without probable cause and/or a warrant is bad.

Any form of torture is bad.

There should be a penalty when the government violates someones right when they do something like this. A civil lawsuit could be some form of penalty.

The Constitution, which is suppose to represent peoples' rights should trump national security.
 
So what recourse do you have if the US government mistakently abducts you and ships you to another country for months of imprisonment and torture? Now even the US Supreme Court is saying "None". All the government has to do is play the "state secrets" card and you can do nothing about it.

This is outrageous. We should be terrified of what our government has become. What the hell has happened to America? :mad:

By the way, the state secrets card was played just five times from 1953 (when the court ruling that set the precedent was made) to 1976. It was then used 59 times from 1977-2001. The Bush Administration has used it 39 times in six years. When documents from the 1953 case were finally made public fifty years later, it was found that the government was lying about "state secrets" in the first place. A plane crashed due to negligence. (source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-siegel16sep16,0,4846280.story) Yet our courts let them wave the "state secret" flag whenever the hell they want.
 
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