Supremes: ‘We will not dignify these charges with justice’

I bet Khaled el-Masri thought this country was through screwing him when he walked down that hill in Albania. Well, after he was convinced his captors didn’t plan to shoot him in the back.

Wrong.

A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.

The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.

El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003.

He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the “salt pit” in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without looking back.

El-Masri’s claims, which prompted strong international criticism of the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. officials acknowledged that el-Masri’s detention was a mistake.

The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri’s account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to el-Masri’s claims “concern the highly classified methods and means of the program.”

El-Masri’s case centers on the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to the program.

President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage in torture.

The story included the following sentence, which I think sums up the Bush administration almost as nicely as does the word “criminal.”

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.

Do you get it yet? What your government up to is none of your friggin’ business, and less so now than at any other time in our nation's history.