Shame, Shame, Shame

Shame on the CIA, which seized German citizen Khaled el-Masri in Madedonia in 2004, suspecting him of al-Qaeda membership, and flew him to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was tortured for four months, before realising they'd got the wrong man and dumping him in Albania.

Shame on the US Supreme Court for refusing to hear el-Masri's case against the CIA, after the US government intervened to claim that the case should not proceed because state secrets might be revealed. As el-Masri's brief to the court says, this means that, "The privilege as asserted by the government and as construed by the court of appeals ... has permitted dismissal of these suits on the basis of a government affidavit alone—without any judicial examination of the purportedly privileged evidence. Accordingly, a broad range of executive misconduct has been shielded from judicial review after the perpetrators themselves have invoked the privilege to avoid adjudication." Or in non-legal language, the government is entitled to treat its own wrongdoing as a state secret and is therefore immune from accountability for it before the courts.

And shame on the German government for failing to protect its own citizen's rights by dropping its arrest warrants for the CIA operatives involved, after the US government indicated that it would block any extradition request.

Dirty deeds done in the dark, by countries that claim to be civilised - and then they wonder why so much of the Islamic world regards the west as morally bankrupt.