Human rights How to safeguard?

Some right-wing Latin American military dictatorships were notorious for "death squads" who abducted college students, labor leaders and other suspected "subversives" in the night, partly with CIA awareness. The victims often were tortured, murdered and disposed of secretly, putting them in the ranks of the "disappeared."
Bush-Cheney treatment of Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 suicide attacks was much milder, yet it raised some similar human rights questions.
The administration's "extraordinary rendition" policy became an international scandal. CIA agents kidnapped young male Muslims in several nations and shipped them secretly to foreign prisons where they were tortured in a search for information.
The movie "Rendition" told of a German citizen of Lebanese descent who was abducted in Macedonia and handed to CIA agents who stripped, beat, shackled, diapered and drugged him, then chained him to the floor of an airplane that flew him to a hidden Afghan lockup. He was beaten for five months - until U.S. interrogators realized he was innocent. They took him to Albania and left him by a remote mountain road.
German authorities filed criminal charges against 13 CIA operatives, but the Bush-Cheney White House said it wouldn't extradite them to Germany for trial.
The Lebanese-German sued former CIA Director George Tenet and other Washington spooks. But in the federal Fourth Circuit Court at Richmond, former Charleston Judge Robert King led three judges in quashing the suit for "national security" reasons. The U.S. Supreme Court rubber-stamped King's decision.
Now a similar outcome has scuttled an attempt to sue former Attorney General John Ashcroft and ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller in behalf of more than 1,000 Muslims who were mistreated in a Brooklyn prison soon after 9/11. A 2003 Justice Department inspector general probe found "widespread abuse of detainees" there. Several of them have lawsuits pending.
Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistan native working as a cable installer on Long Island, says he was thrown into solitary confinement where, on his first day, guards "picked him up and threw him against a wall, kicked him in the stomach, pushed him in the face and dragged him across the room." He was called a "Muslim killer" by guards who stripped him naked, beat him regularly, performed body-cavity searches and exposed him to chill, he alleged. He lost 40 pounds during six months of confinement. He finally was deported for an immigration violation.
From Pakistan, Iqbal sued Ashcroft, Mueller and numerous other U.S. officials, alleging religio-ethnic discrimination. A U.S. appeals court in New York ruled that his case may proceed, but Bush administration lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court. Monday, five conservatives on the high court said the suit lacked clear proof of prejudice by Ashcroft and In today's era of suicide bombing, when some young Muslim fanatics are eager to throw away their lives to massacre their perceived enemies, it isn't easy to protect Americans without treating every young male Muslim as a potential suspect. However, we hope that some of the current human rights lawsuits succeed in restoring the basic American democratic principle that people are deemed innocent until proven guilty.