It’s hard to imagine what, at this point, needs to be kept secret, other than the ways in which the administration behaved irresponsibly, and quite possibly illegally, in the Masri case.

A post on Boingboing drew my attention to this case, in which a German man was rendered to Afghanistan and tortured because his name sounded like someone the CIA was after. Rattle noticed the case last year but otherwise I'm not sure it was discussed on MemeStreams. This case seems to couple totally incompetent intelligence work (they apparently rendered this guy based entirely on the fact that his name is similar to someone they were looking for without any further confirmation) with the almost limitless scope of the state secrets privilege as a consequence free environment for administration actions.

One would like to see the new Administration investigate cases like this, not as a way to seek political retribution but out of a basic sense of justice. Some sort of reparation is absolutely appropriate here if the facts are as they seem. But even if the Administration addresses this, the structural problem remains.

The government seems to have concluded, broadly, that the law does not apply to its actions. Therefore our freedom appears to be entirely the consequence of the benevolence of the kings we're electing. I have a very hard time reconciling that observation with the complaints that have been raised about warfare being over-lawyered. The lawyers appear to have added institutional overhead without actually adding justice. Its the worst of both worlds.