[geocentrism] Privilege invoked 39 times since 2001
- From: Neville Jones <njones@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 11:01:37 -0800
I don't know whether this man had a case or not, but the interesting thing about it is how so-called democratic governments are rapidly (rabidly?) becoming unaccountable.
They remain fully accountable to God, though.
High court rejects alleged CIA kidnap victim
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The highly publicized case of Khaled el-Masri against the U.S. government had been dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based on the Bush administration's claim that airing it would reveal state secrets.
If the justices had taken up el-Masri's petition, it could have clarified the breadth of the government's privilege to withhold information about its tactics in a post-Sept. 11 era. The privilege, as the high court explained in a major 1953 case, allows the government to withhold information if "there is a reasonable danger" that disclosure would threaten national security.
El-Masri said he was kidnapped in December 2003 as he boarded a bus in Germany for a vacation in Macedonia. He said he was beaten, drugged, bound and blindfolded as he was transferred to a prison in Afghanistan. There, he said, he was tortured and interrogated. He was released after five months, apparently the victim of mistaken identity. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2005 he had been "erroneously taken.")
In suing for U.S. constitutional and international law violations, el-Masri insisted that the numerous news reports about his situation should have exempted it from the "state secrets" privilege. But the 4th Circuit said the information already in the public record "does not include the facts that are central to litigating his action. Rather, those central facts — the CIA means and methods that form the subject matter of el-Masri's claim — remain state secrets."
El-Masri's ACLU lawyers urged the court to hear the appeal, saying the government should not be able to avoid judicial accountability by declaring its methods a state secret.
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.
Contributing: Associated Press
Neville
www.GeocentricUniverse.com
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