广播听力：US Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Lawsuit against CIA

The US Supreme Court has terminated a lawsuit from a German man who claims he was abducted and tortured by the CIA.

The move effectively endorses arguments of the administration that state secrets will be revealed if the case is allowed to proceed.

Forty-four-year-old Khaled el-Masri alleges that he was kidnapped by CIA agents in Europe and held in an Afghan prison for four months in a case of mistaken identity.

The administration has not publicly acknowledged that el-Masri was detained.

Ben Wizner is an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing El Masri.

"When we deny an innocent victim of our anti-terror policies his day in court, we don't make America safer, we make it less likely that other governments will want to cooperate with us in investigations and we show ourselves to be weak and not strong."

The case has again aroused public attention to the government's use of the state secrets privilege.

A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says at the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, US presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, but the Bush administration has used it 39 times since 2001.