"State Secrets"

[icarus]

Now this is downright creepy.

El-Masri v. U.S., 06-1613: Court rejects 'alleged' CIA kidnap victim.

"State secrets" have been invoked in order to block the lawsuit of a German man of Lebanese descent kidnapped through mistaken identity and tortured by the CIA.

I've heard of this guy. He was let go (just dropped off in the middle of nowhere) once the CIA realized he wasn't the man they wanted. Four months later.

The US has a "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. In this case, the German man was picked up in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan.

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.

Free country?

Comments

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

Secretary of State Schilly was informed by the CIA pretty early on and that was still under Chancellor Schröder, who opposed the war in Iraq and made a huge thing about that during his re-election campaign.

El-Masri claims that one of the interrogators in Afghanistan was a Federal Criminal Police Office (German version of the FBI) agent but that has never been proven. It's all hugely complicated, even more so because because El-Masri actually used to be member of an armed fundamental islamic group. Which still doesn't make ok what the CIA did to him.

According to the German wikipedia entry, the district court of Munic issued arrest warrants for the 13 CIA operatives who were involved in the kidnapping and the Federal Ministry of Justice made them into international warrants. Since then Spanish authorities have identified 10 of the agents and if they show up in any of the 186 countries that are members of Interpol (except for the U.S.) they might get arrested and extradited to Germany.