Pressure on Barack Obama over CIA rendition of innocent car salesman "It would stand in striking contrast to the US courts that have denied Mr Masri and other victims their day in court, and show that Europe's Human Rights court remains open for justice," said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative, "Although the European Court has no jurisdiction over the US, a favourable ruling from the court would heighten pressure on the US to issue an apology in Mr Masri's case," she added. However the closest that the US has come to admitting involvement in the case came in 2005, when the German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had accepted that an "error" had been made in Mr Masri's case. The ECHR ruling comes on the same day that the US Senate intelligence committee votes on whether to approve a 6,000-page report on the use of torture by the CIA and whether so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' produced valuable information in the fight against al Qaeda. John McCain, the senior Republican senator who was himself tortured while serving in Vietnam, has urged that the report be made public, despite anticipated resistance from the White House and the intelligence community who will review its findings in the coming months. "Absolutely it should be made public," Mr McCain said earlier this week, reiterating his belief that Georg W Bush's sanction of enhanced interrogations did not help in the killing of Osama bin Laden. We did not get any meaningful information unclassified, we did not get any meaningful information by torturing people. The subject of the CIA's use of techniques the UN designates as torture has returned to the headlines after some critics found that Zero Dark Thirty, a film on the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, had implied that waterboarding had been crucial to discovering the whereabouts of the al Qaeda leader. However Bigelow rejected that characterisation of her film yesterday, saying that it was "preposterous" to suggest that the film was in any way pro-torture. We're trying to present a long, 10-year intelligence hunt, of which the harsh interrogation programme is the most controversial aspect. And it's just misreading the film to say that it shows torture leading to the information about Bin Laden," she told Hollywood website, The Wrap. If you actually watch the movie, the detainee doesn't say anything when he's waterboarded. He gives them some information that's new to them over the civilised setting of a lunch - and they go back to the research room and all that information is already there.