El-Masri's Case Dismissed

You might've heard of this guy. He's the person that CIA personnel allegedly kidnapped, detained for months, tortured, and then dumped in a field after they figured out they had the wrong guy. He subsequently brought suit against the CIA seeking monetary damages and an apology. Citing concern for national security, U.S. District Judge T.S. Elias III dismissed his case on Friday:

The ruling was a victory for Justice Department prosecutors, who had invoked the once rarely cited state-secrets privilege to argue for dismissal. Created in the 1950s, it allows the government to urge courts to dismiss cases on the grounds of damage to foreign policy or national security. The privilege has been used far more frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Can there by any doubt what they are seeking to protect in invoking this privilege? Any desire to protect operational details of the super-secret extraordinary rendition program is secondary to the desire to protect the CIA and our government in general from the extreme embarassment of having it revealed in court how horribly they botched things in abducting El-Masri on the basis of a mis-identification that it took them months to figure out. Our super-secret super-duper renditioning program, supposedly protecting us from all those baddies out there, would then be known largely for how it chewed up and spit out an innocent man in a most insulting and degrading fashion. Will the CIA or anyone in our government even bother to apologize to El-Masri? Maybe give him a few hundred thousand dollars to just hush up and go away? Don't count on it. That, and allowing this case to go forward, would be admitting a mistake. And the "war on terror" means never having to say you're sorry.