Imagine for a second that something like the following has happened to you. You are abducted, taken to some far off place, beaten, treated badly, tortured, and not told why or by whom.

Then lets imagine you are then dropped in some other country and told “It was all a big mistake.” Well this has actually happened to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri.

Mr el-Masri says he was picked up in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he alleges torture.

The judge did not rule on the truth of the allegations, but said letting the case proceed might endanger security.

Rights group the American Civil Liberties Union brought the case on behalf of Mr el-Masri – who was never charged with any terrorist offenses.

Besides Mr Tenet, the case named 10 other CIA employees, as well as three other companies and their employees.

However, the district court judge in Virginia rejected the challenge, saying Mr el-Masri’s “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets”.

So your picked up, tortured, held in secret for months, and when its all over you are not even able to sue, because your law suite would reveal state secrets. Kafka would be proud.

Lets follow this logic, we are going to scoop up people we think are terrorists (to protect our people and preserve freedom), we are going to torture them (to get the information out of them, to protect our people and preserve freedom), then when we mess up we wont even let them take the case to court (to protect our people and preserve freedom).

In order to keep people safe, to protect there freedom, we make them unsafe, and take away there freedom. We destroy freedom, to protect it. We abduct them, take them to another country, beat them, inject them with drugs, make them were diapers and shackle them. Then when we realize it was all a mistake we wont let them have there day in court because we are afraid that it will “reveal state secrets.”

But perhaps the case is being dismissed not for state secrets but because the Bush administration does not want the details of this highly illegal program to come to light.

“It’s simply not possible to believe the case involves state secrets,” Wizner told the judge. “The government’s moving to dismiss this case … on the basis of fiction.”

…

The Bush administration based its dismissal argument on affidavits from Porter Goss, who was CIA director before announcing his resignation last week, that officially assert the executive branch of government’s state secrets privilege. The privilege is a legal precedent that gives President George W. Bush the right to protect U.S. military and state secrets.

“By their very nature, clandestine intelligence activities are not acknowledged by the United States,” Goss said in a public affidavit. He also filed a classified affidavit with the court.

“The denial of CIA involvement may, by itself, provide the informed intelligence analyst useful information about the CIA’s capabilities and the scope and thrust of CIA activities,” the document said.

Goss also warned that public exposure from the case could undermine U.S. relations with foreign countries.

The governments position can be classified as such. “We cant let the guy who we tortured illegally to go to court because then everyone will know that we tortured him illegally, and also the fact that we tortured him illegally will make other countries, whose citizens we are torturing illegally, mad at us”

In America a lawsuit like this would be seeking millions of dollars in damages and perhaps years of imprisonment for the culprits. Masri only wants…

$75,000 but has said he would consider settling in exchange for an apology from Tenet.

Perhaps this is what they are really afraid of, being forced to say they are sorry.

This guy was a German citizen but what is to keep the same thing from happening to an American (for all we know it already has)? There is no oversight, no monitoring of these programs, we don’t know what is happening.

We have let this go too far, you can not destroy freedom to protect it. You can not remove human rights in order to preserve them, you can not become a monster to stop one.