State secrets

„In speeches, President Obama likes to quote something that Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say: that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Yesterday, after the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that people claiming to be torture victims of a U.S.-run intelligence program could get no day in court, it was hard not to feel that the short arc of the Obama Administration has bent, in this instance, toward injustice.

An eleven-judge panel sided, 6-5, with lawyers working for Obama’s Justice Department, which essentially claimed that protecting state secrets is more important than protecting human rights. Amazingly, the Justice Department argued successfully that the entire subject of extraordinary rendition—dispatching torture suspects to other countries to be interrogated harshly—was so sensitive that it had to be hidden from the American public, to the point of barring its victims from seeking redress in court. The court accepted this logic even though Hollywood has already released a high-profile movie about the subject—Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon—and countless articles have been published about the controversial practice. Particularly troubling, the government was not merely intent on hiding sensitive facts in the case—such as agents’ names, or liaison countries’ identities—but, rather, on placing a legal shroud over the entire C.I.A. program.”