i-eclectica.org

Yesterday, the US supreme court provided the CIA and the US administration with impunity for torture (and anything else). The court’s most likely rationale: national security. This decision factually suspends Human Rights in the US in cases that otherwise would be flagrant violations of the Declaration to which the US is a signatory.

The case which the court had to decide on is that Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, who accused the CIA of kidnapping him on Dec. 31, 2003 in Macedonia after he was confused with a Sept. 11 terror suspect, then transporting him to Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and tortured for four months before being released in Albania. The United States has never admitted that it played any role in el-Masri’s detention. A German court in southern Munich in January issued arrest warrants for 13 suspects in el-Masri’s alleged kidnapping, but federal officials in Berlin said in September that they would not pursue the suspects’ extradition to Germany (which makes you wonder how much the German government knew about the rendition program and el-Masri’s abduction).

El-Masri’s accusations sparked outrage in Germany and drew worldwide attention to the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which transported terror suspects to secret prisons in third countries for interrogation. Human rights groups, as well as several European governments and the European Union have criticized the program. Both the German government and the European Parliament had launched inquiries into the program to find out what their authorities may have known about the US rendition program.

The US high court apparently did not give an explanation for its decision on Tuesday, Oct. 9, to refuse el-Masri’s appeal, but US administration officials had called on the court to reject the case on national security grounds, arguing a public trial would reveal state secrets, a ‘privilege’ argument that the Administration had already asserted in an effort to dismiss the lawsuits over the warrantless domestic spying program that Bush created after the Sept. 11 attacks. El-Masri’s lawyers turned to the Supreme Court to clarify the limits of state secrecy after suits in two lower US courts were rejected. The attorneys argued that, in the past, courts had limited evidence to what could be legally presented instead of completely stopping cases dealing with national security. “The central facts of this case are not state secrets and do not become so simply because the government insists otherwise,” Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in the appeal. It looks like, the Bush stacked court sided, not surprisingly, with the government, thus giving the CIA and its political masters free hand to violate Human Rights.

In el-Masri’s case alone, 12 out of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights might have been breached, which of course is in line with US history since the inception of that nation - even if their commitments, pledges and propaganda might suggest otherwise. For example, 60 years ago the Germans were torturing American soldiers, Jews and anybody else who didn’t agree with their worldviews. Back then the Americans called it fascism, despotism, megalomania and tyranny (despite their own practices by then against the native inhabitants of what is the US now, their conquest of the Philippines and parts of Mexico, etc.). Fast forward to Vietnam or Iraq or the many other violent historical events shaped by US interventions, and the same actions are now considered part of an eternal campaign to protect liberty or establish democracy. No wonder the US is the probably most reviled nation in the world - which is quite tragic for those in that country trying to forever battle the evil empire.