I’m bouncing this post back at SSRD. She pointed out this chilling article on Slate that reported how Alito* would condone the CIA’s recent admission
(another link from SSRD) that it mistakenly kidnapped Khaled Masri, a
German citizen of Lebanese decent, and then secretly detained him for
five months before realizing its mistake:
In one memo, Alito signed off on an FBI plan to collect
fingerprint cards of Iranian and Afghan refugees living in Canada. He
suggested that the program was constitutional because these refugees
were nonresident immigrants of another country, thus freeing the FBI
from abiding by court decisions that barred the agency from spreading
“stigmatizing” information about U.S. citizens. Alito simply feels
that nonresident immigrants of other countries have no due process
rights under the Constitution. The Washington Post last week
quoted Martin Redish, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern
University Law School, arguing that Alito’s logic would likely support
the Bush administration’s current policy of CIA interrogations in
secret European prisons as well.
This is especially frightening in light of the fact that as WaPo
reported, the CIA has tried (and for the most part suceeded), in
getting the German government to remain quiet about its disclosures to
it:
While the CIA admitted to Germany’s then-Interior Minister Otto Schily
that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of
Masri’s case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to
verify or debunk Masri’s claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of
the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained
publicly silent.
While Alito may not believe that Masri has any rights, he’s suing the US of A for torturing him during his wrongful imprisonment:
He claims he was beaten and injected with drugs before being
taken to Afghanistanand held for five months.
Mr Masri says that once there, he was subjected to
“coercive” interrogation under inhumane conditions.
*Alito is starting to scare me more than Scalia,
so I am ditching the Scalito nickname. If I continued it’s use,
however, I think that “Scary” is more appropriate, than “Scalia” as the
reference for the first two letters.