Judge dismisses Masri torture case
From ABC News
Excerpt: A U.S. judge dismissed on Thursday a lawsuit against former CIA Director George Tenet and several CIA employees by a German of Lebanese origin who says he was abducted and tortured by the American spy agency.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis agreed with government arguments that moving forward with Khaled el-Masri's case would risk national security by exposing state secrets about CIA activities vital to the U.S. war on terrorism. ...

...Ellis said the government provided documents to him that showed "damage to the national security could result if the defendants in this case were required to admit or deny el-Masri's allegations."...

...Masri said Macedonian authorities abducted him on December 31, 2003, and he was held prisoner in a Skopje hotel room for 23 days and beaten, stripped and sodomized.
He said he was then taken by members of a CIA 'black renditions' team and flown by the CIA to Afghanistan, where he was held as a terrorism suspect. Masri said he was beaten in Afghanistan and went on a hunger strike to protest his confinement. On May 28, 2004, Masri was flown to Albania where he was dumped on the side of an abandoned road.
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Labels: CIA, prisoner, torture

Security issue kills domestic spying inquiry
From MSNBC
Excerpt: The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

The inquiry headed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program. ...

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NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
From USA Today
Excerpt: The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews...
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Labels: agency, NSA, privacy