These are happy days for torturers in America. The Supreme Court has implicitly supported the CIA's black operations and extraordinary renditions program by refusing to hear the ACLU's appeal in El Masri vs. Tenet. While the Roberts court was eager to slap Mr. Bush's wrist over Guantanamo, it will do nothing to protect innocent Muslims from being abducted and tortured by an organ of the US government. As a sort of functional definition, no state secret can be of greater importance than justice.
I understand the idea of a social calculus, and the need to weigh the security of a nation against the rights of an individual and the others whose fates would be judicially linked to his through precedent, but I do not understand how operations that are prima facie violations of international law can be construed as defensible elements of national security.
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