State Secrets Rule Trumps Public's Right To Know

Any time the Bush Administration feels its security policies are about to come in for serious public scrutiny, it invokes a national security defense and wraps everything in a cloak of secrecy. The result is that access to information is locked down, court hearings are held in camera and the public’s right to know is crushed.
It should therefore have come as no surprise to ACLU lawyers and journalists when a federal court in Alexandria, Va. was recently told by Justice Department lawyers that the federal government believed that allowing a lawsuit to proceed against a member of the CIA for illegally imprisoning and torturing a German citizen would endanger US national security. Such a lawsuit, they argued, would expose US secret and intelligence methods to the enemy.
ACLU lawyers, acting for the plaintiff, Khalid-el-Masri, saw the move as a familiar one to silence public debate and to obscure questionable methods used by the CIA. They told the court the CIA owed their client an apology and money damages for kidnapping him off the street in Macedonia and secretly transporting him to a CIA interrogation center in Afghanistan. While there he was inhumanely treated before being released months later without charge when the CIA discovered they had the wrong man. They flew him back to Europe, dumped him on a hillside in Albania and told him to make his own way home.
The illegal arrest, detention and ill-treatment of the German, in what has become known as the CIA’s “Rendition Program”, has never been disputed by the US. As in most reported renditions, he was stripped naked, placed in a diaper and drugged before being strapped to the floor of one of three private jets rented by the CIA.
Germany’s new Chancellor Angela Merkel made one of her first priorities a discussion with the US about the El-Masri case and was told by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice that it was a mistake. Rice also told European leaders the US would never render suspects to countries that used torture. That is not, however, accurate since suspects have been secretly transported for interrogation to countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Afghanistan and Syria, all of which are listed on the State Department’s own website as serial human rights abusers.
The ACLU case, which may likely never proceed beyond this latest hearing, alleges human rights violations against former CIA Director, George Tenet and four aviation firms from which the CIA leases aircraft for renditions. The US government’s legal argument is that all of the defendants are covered by a “state secrets” privilege rule and the case should be dismissed. While the federal judge in Alexandria considers that motion, most observers feel it will be granted because that has been the tendency of the federal courts under this administration.
But, even if this case is made to go away as it were, the CIA’s rendition policy will continue to be a lightning rod for critics of the Bush Administration throughout Europe. In Germany there is an ongoing parliamentary enquiry into the El-Masri abduction while, at the same time, the EU continues to review it and other cases for which there is considerable evidence of CIA wrongdoing. In Italy, there is a similar investigation and the European Commission has not completed its report on the story of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. Another case which is likely to shine a light into rendition and interrogations methods is the one in which four former Guantanamo detainees have been given the right to sue the US in British courts.
For the Bush Administration, a nightmare scenario is that, at some time in the future a CIA operative, or someone else up the US military or civilian chain of command will be arrested in the airport of a country that is a signatory to the International Human Rights Court in The Hague. That person will then be transferred to The Hague to answer for abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or some secret interrogation site, or for the renditions that are extensively documented. Such a possibility does not seem far fetched when one looks at a recent incident when Scotland Yard planned to arrest an Israeli general as his plane from Tel Aviv touched down at Heathrow airport outside London. Scotland Yard officers were standing by with warrants charging him with international crimes for bulldozing the homes of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The Scotland Yard strategy was to seize him the moment he exited the plane and later pass him over to the court in The Hague. However, he was tipped off and never got off the plane, knowing if he stayed on board he had diplomatic immunity because the interior of the plane was deemed to be foreign soil.