ACLU Files New Rendition Case.

The ACLU today filed a new rendition lawsuit on behalf of Amir Meshal, an American citizen and New Jersey resident who his lawyers say was captured in Somalia and illegally rendered to Ethiopia, Egypt and Kenya, where he was allegedly threatened with torture. Meshal, his lawyers contend, was detained in secret without being given due process rights or access to a lawyer.

The case, said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, is the first challenge to what the ACLU calls the "U.S. coordinated" interrogations in East Africa in 2007, which Hafetz says were nominally conducted under Kenyan auspices but really done on U.S. behalf. This case is also different because it involves a U.S. citizen being rendered, one who contends it was the FBI who conducted his interrogation and threatened him with death and torture. As I've written recently, the FBI skirted closer to the line on torture than has been previously known.

The lawsuit is probably a likely candidate for the Obama administration's liberal usage of the state secrets doctrine, since that's how it has blocked other renditions lawsuits. Hafetz said that because it was a lawsuit, and not a habeas case, it was unlikely to involve the constitutional issues at heart in the case of Ali Saleh al-Marri, which, had it gone to the Supreme Court, would have challenged the right of executive branch to hold people indefinitely without charge simply on suspicion of being a terrorist.

-- A. Serwer