A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case. The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets. ... Mr. Masri contended in his suit that he was seized by local law enforcement officials while vacationing in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003. At the time, he was 41 years old and an unemployed car salesman. “They asked a lot of questions — if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood,” Mr. Masri said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.” After 23 days, he said, he was turned over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison in Kabul. There, Mr. Masri said, he was kept in a small, filthy cell and shackled, drugged and beaten while being interrogated about his supposed ties to terrorist organizations. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri said, he was released in a remote part of Albania without ever having been charged with a crime. full story

This is outrageous. The blocking of a trial with spurious claims of "state secrets" is, in my opinion, tantamount to an admission of guilt. This crime is even more blatant by the fact that this German citizen was flown to Kabul — an occupied territory of the United States. Does anyone really doubt who's in charge in Afghanistan or Iraq? The crimes of puppet governments are crimes of the puppeteer. It is a further crime that Khaled el-Masri cannot peruse justice in an American court and it is likely that neither those who kidnapped and tortured him nor those that ordered the kidnapping and torture will ever be extradited to stand trial in Germany.

Bush described his pardon of Scooter Libby as "fair and balanced". I wonder if Fox News will sue him for trademark infringement.

A 50-year-old woman filed a federal lawsuit against Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center yesterday, saying she was forcibly undressed by five male security guards there last year after she refused a nurse's order to take off her clothes. The incident, which hospital officials have defended as necessary to make sure the woman was not hiding drugs or weapons, triggered flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse, according to the woman, Cassandra Sampson. She alleged in the suit that her civil rights were violated under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because hospital officials made no effort to protect her from psychological damage. Sampson said she went to the hospital for treatment of a severe migraine headache, but was moved to a psychiatric unit when she admitted struggling with self-destructive impulses. She said she pleaded to be allowed to keep at least her pants on before the strip search, but the nurse refused. ``Go ahead and rape me; everybody else has," Sampson said she cried out as the guards unbuckled her pants and removed them. ``They left me there with my underwear showing and my johnny up to my chest . . . I was crying, and [the nurse] said, `That's what you get for not listening to me.' " In a letter to Sampson, hospital officials said they were sorry she had such a terrible experience, but stood by their strict policy of searching psychiatric patients for their own benefit. ... A spokeswoman at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester said the hospital never asks psychiatric patients to undress on arrival. If they suspect the patient may be dangerous, security guards perform a clothed pat-down search. Dr. Maggie Bennington-Davis led a successful effort to stop strip searches of psychiatric patients at Salem Hospital in Oregon in 2003. ``We can't be hauling people in here and be doing more harm to them," she said. ``It's very clear that a strip search retraumatizes them." ... Sampson hadn't intended to go to Beth Israel's emergency room on March 25, 2005, according to the lawsuit. But it was a weekend, and her primary care physician said the ER would be the best place to get help for severe migraine headaches that had persisted for three days. However, as soon as Sampson told a nurse that she took psychiatric medications and that she had been battling impulses to hurt herself that week, the nurse said she would need a psychiatric evaluation. Nurse Heather A. Richter then told Sampson that she would need to completely undress, according to the lawsuit. full article

This is absolutely disgusting. How in the world could Beth Israel's staff think it was in any way appropriate to have 5 male security guards rip off a woman's clothing? This story not only illustrates the dangers of being admitted into psych hospital for victims of sexual assault or abuse, it also illustrates the dangers of telling the wrong person about your feelings and thoughts. Note that Sampson only had thoughts of self harm, not suicide. Her life was NOT at risk. Psych wards are at most about safety nowadays. She did not need the babysitting of a hospital and she definitely did not need to be further traumatized. It was only a panicky nurse that caused her to end up there, this did not need to happen at all.