You’re minding your own business one day, when you’re summarily kidnapped, abused, and detained for months without access to anyone. Of course, when you are eventually freed, you’d certainly hope to seek some sort of justice against your captors – even an unintentional mistake causes real harm for which reparations should be obliged. Of course, when your captor is the State, it needs only invoke it’s trump-card, by refusing to hear your case. And if you can’t get a day in court, what good is any system of justice? First, a little background:

At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.

The “state secrets” rule, if you will, permits the State to tell the Courts (which it owns and finances, and whose rulings it enforces) that if a certain case goes to trial, vital national secrets will be brought out into the light of day which just might prove disastrous to the “national interest,” or something like that. Therefore, the court shall refuse to hear such cases which might prove detrimental to the interest of the nation State. Of course, even the courts don’t get to see that information (which is the only way a rational determination of the case’s potential impact can be calculated) on account of it being an alleged “state secret” from which it follows that no such secret need ever exist. Sound like a tin-foil conspiracy theory? In fact this has happened before:

[In 1953 t]hree widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.

And if what el-Masri says is true – that he was kidnapped, shackled, diapered, and thrown into a clandestine military prison for four months, outside the purview of any semblance of a justice system or humanitarian oversight – someday in the distant future when nobody remembers the name or the circumstances, the “Top Secret” label might be removed from the file, at which time we’ll find no evidence of any wrongdoing, only the implication that there was a fuck-up somewhere in the chain of military intelligence.

For what it’s worth, the perennial thorn-in-the-side German government has issued arrest warrants for the agents alleged to have partaken in the abduction. Of course it then becomes a matter of diplomacy and not of justice. The spurious “state secrets” policy is an absolute abomination – it is the antithesis of justice which allows the accused to present an “argument for secrecy” as a positive defense – it doesn’t even play the charades of a “secret tribunal” where at least, ostensibly, the merits of the allegation of secrecy can be debated and in theory affirmed or denied. It is absolute and unchecked deference to tyranny, and absolute impotence for the people and their judiciary.

Sometimes the State apologists argue that “If you haven’t done anything wrong, what have you got to hide?” Well, it’s high time to flip that fucking script on them.

It is yet another instance in the ever-growing list of instances which support Spooner’s thesis, that the Constitution “has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”