The United States Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to seek redress by a German citizen who says he was kidnapped by the CIA and tortured in a secret prison.
The court upheld a lower court's ruling that hearing the case could endanger US national security by exposing state secrets.
The Bush administration has never publicly admitted that Khaled el-Masri was kidnapped by CIA officers as he visited Macedonia on New Year's Eve in 2003. German chancellor Angela Merkel has said, however, that Washington has acknowledged that Mr el-Masri's detention was a mistake.
Mr el-Masri, who was 41 at the time and an unemployed car salesman, says he was stripped, beaten, drugged and chained to the floor of an aircraft bound for Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a secret prison near Kabul known as the "salt pit" where he was interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda.
In May 2004, after the CIA apparently realised they had captured the wrong man, Mr el-Masri was set free in a remote part of Albania.
Earlier this year, German authorities issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA officers allegedly involved in Mr el-Masri's detention, but there is little chance that the US will agree to extradite them.
Democratic congressman Ed Markey, who has introduced legislation to ban extraordinary rendition, yesterday condemned the Supreme Court decision. "The Bush administration reflexively responds with the 'state secrets' defence whenever it is caught bending or simply ignoring the law," he said.
The administration has invoked the "state secrets" defence on 39 occasions since 2001, compared with just six times between 1953 and 1976, at the height of the cold war.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress yesterday took the first steps towards rewriting a hastily-drafted law allowing the administration to eavesdrop on communications between US citizens and foreigners overseas.
The new Bill would continue to allow such eavesdropping, but would introduce greater court oversight and would deny retroactive immunity from prosecution to telecommunications companies that have helped the eavesdropping programme since 2001. The administration said that it would investigate the premature leak of the most recent video by Osama bin Laden, which a private intelligence company - that gave the video to the White House - claims has destroyed a year-old surveillance operation.
The SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure alerted al-Qaeda to a security breach and wrecked an operation the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from al-Qaeda's communications network. "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said SITE's founder Rita Katz.
The company gave the video to US authorities before it was due to be made public, but warned the administration not to pass it on to the media until after al-Qaeda released it. Within hours of the administration receiving it, the video was being broadcast on US television networks.
Senior White House counterterrorism adviser Fran Townsend said: "we here at the White House are unable to conduct an investigation, and I leave this to the director of national intelligence to ascertain what's the appropriate way of dealing with this and understanding what happened, so we can ensure it doesn't happen again."
