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Destroying Your Freedom In Order To Save It

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 10 2007 12:43 AM

Submitted by Zarth. Edited By erin_broadley.

Khaled el-Masri grew up in Lebanon, but he had been a German citizen for nine years when he was detained by Macedonian officials while on vacation in Skopje on New Year's Eve in 2003.

They questioned him for three weeks, for no other very credible reason than that he happened to share the same name as the pseudonym of an allegedly Central Asian al-Qaeda operative who was believed to have been active in Germany in 1999 (little if anything is known about "real" el-Masri).

More consequentially, the Macedonians notified the CIA that they had a "Khaled el-Masri" in custody. When they released him (without charges) in late January of 2004, a CIA team was already standing by to capture him.

The broad outlines of what followed are not seriously disputed. He was bagged, stripped, and flown to Afghanistan, where he was frequently interrogated. El-Masri claims he was tortured and raped - an account that the CIA, naturally enough, will neither confirm nor deny. But the details of his treatment have been independently corroborated by others who have undergone similar experiences.

Moreover, it is known that he remained imprisoned for over a month even after George Tenet (a Medal of Freedom holder) knew for a fact that the CIA was detaining the wrong el-Masri. Tenet, incredibly, recommended that el-Masri just be dropped back in Macedonia without even informing the German government that the United States had wrongfully imprisoned one of their citizens for three months.

Once the mistake reached Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.

"You couldn't have the president lying to the German chancellor" should the issue come up, a government official involved in the matter said.

Senior State Department officials decided to approach [German] Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.

The CIA argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology, according to officials.

On 28 May 2004, he was released on a lonely road in the middle of the night in Albania, without apologies or any money with which to return home.

With predictable difficulties, el-Masri has since been trying to piece his life back together. Part of this has included seeking some kind of justice from the government which indisputably fucked him over.

Today that was finally and irrevocably denied by the United States Supreme Court.

The justices� refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri�s lawsuit on grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.

�We recognize the gravity of our conclusions that el-Masri must be denied a judicial forum for his complaint,� Judge Robert B. King wrote in March for a unanimous three-judge panel. �The inquiry is a difficult one, for it pits the judiciary�s search for truth against the executive�s duty to maintain the nation�s security.�

The ordeal of Mr. Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, was the most extensively documented case of the C.I.A.�s controversial practice of �extraordinary rendition,� in which terrorism suspects are abducted and sent for interrogation to other countries, including some in which torture is practiced.

That the government's arguments of "national security" could possibly hold when the case in question is one of such well-established incompetence is chilling, to say the least. What makes democracy functional - indeed, what constitutes its very essence - is its commitment to accountability and transparency. To be sure, there are legitimate causes for compromising on these principles under extraordinary conditions, but in the absence of an immediate, existential threat any such justification must itself be extraordinary in order to satisfy legitimacy.

The Supreme Court issued no comment in declining to hear the appeal.

Democracy doesn't always die to thunderous applause. Sometimes it just dies with a shrug.

40 Comments

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FearTheReaper

NEWSWIRE

I'm lost

OCT 10, 2007 01:01 AM

Meh.

The Court's refusal to hear the case affirms the decision of the Appeals Court, which ruled against El-Masri on the grounds that allowing him to seek judicial redress would expose state secrets. The court's opinion relied heavily on the precedent of United States v. Reynolds%u2014the 1953 case that legally enshrined the State Secrets Privilege. Though not based in the Constitution, the Reynolds precedent allows the government to withhold evidence from a legal case if its disclosure would endanger national security%u2014a privilege most notably invoked by Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

In Reynolds, the Court held that the widows of three Air Force contractors who died in a 1948 crash could not be compensated, because litigating the case would expose military secrets. But in 2000, the documents related to the crash were declassified, revealing that what the military sought to conceal was not in fact a state secret, but instead evidence of the Air Force's culpability in the men's deaths. The Court ruled without ever seeing these documents, since they were, at the time, classified.

TheAngrySloth

York, ON

September 2003

OCT 10, 2007 01:10 AM

Existential threat? That would be, like, God appearing and saying, "actually guys, you ARE just my imagination."

Heh, but seriously. Just saw this on the news channel, and it's pretty glaring. When are the big wigs going to be held accountable for all the b-s?

freezerburrn

La Habra, CA

May 2004

OCT 10, 2007 01:28 AM

Reading about these kinds of things makes me sick to my stomach. It's all just a fucking game to these big wigs.

jpaul256

Spring, TX

June 2006

OCT 10, 2007 01:43 AM

"The broad outlines of what followed are not seriously disputed."

Funny how criticisms of our government are often reduced to "broad outlines which are not seriously disputed." Why bother with details when we can discuss actual events in "broad outlines". Why bother to engage in serious debate when we can just dilute differing points of view as not being "serious".

The merits of the case brought by Khaled el-Masri are in dispute. A concern regarding the exposure of state secrets was but ONE of the reasons why the case was dimissed. This case has been reviewed at every level of our judicial system and was found at each level to be seriously flawed.

There are enough REAL problems in this world. We don't need to waste our time and resources fighting windmills seen only by those that sit on the left of the political spectrum.