CIA Rendition and Abuse of Power

Khaled el-Masri was born in Kuwait, but he now lives in Germany with his wife and four children. He became a German citizen 10 years ago. He told 60 Minutes he was on vacation in Macedonia last year when Macedonian police, apparently acting on a tip, took him off a bus, held him for three weeks, then took him to the Skopje airport where he believes he was abducted by the CIA.

"They took me to this room, and they hit me all over and they slashed my clothes with sharp objects, maybe knives or scissors," says el-Masri.

"I also heard photos being taken while this was going on - and they took off the blindfold and I saw that there were a lot of men standing in the room. They were wearing black masks and black gloves."

El-Masri says he was injected with drugs, and after his flight, he woke up in an American-run prison in Afghanistan. He showed 60 Minutes a prison floor plan he drew from memory. He says other prisoners were from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. El-Masri told 60 Minutes that he was held for five months and interrogated by Americans through an interpreter.

"He yelled at me and he said that, 'You're in a country without laws and no one knows where you are. Do you know what that means?' I said yes," says el-Masri. "It was very clear to me that he meant I could stay in my cell for 20 years or be buried somewhere, and nobody knows what happened to you."

He says they were asking him "whether I had contacts with Islamic parties like al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or aid organizations, lots of questions."

He says he told the Americans he'd never been involved in militant Islam. El-Masri says he wasn't tortured, but he says he was beaten and kept in solitary confinement. Then, after his five months of questioning, he was simply released.

At that point, did anyone ever tell him that they'd made a mistake? "They told me that they had confused names and that they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that," says el-Masri. "You can clear up switching names in a few minutes."

He says he was flown out of Afghanistan and dumped on a road in Albania. When he finally made his way back home in Germany, he found that his wife and kids had gone to her family in Lebanon. He called there to explain what happened.

Lawsuit Against CIA Is Dismissed

Mistaken Identity Led to Detention

By Jerry Markon

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page A13

A federal judge yesterday threw out the case of a German citizen who says he was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA, ruling that Khaled al-Masri's lawsuit poses a "grave risk" of damage to national security by exposing government secrets.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria acknowledged that Masri "has suffered injuries" if his allegations are true and that he "deserves a remedy." Sources have said Masri was held by the CIA for five months in Afghanistan because of mistaken identity. Masri says he was beaten, sodomized and repeatedly questioned about alleged terrorist ties.

Khaled al-Masri was not the man with suspected terrorist links. (Thomas Kienzle - AP)

But Ellis said the remedy cannot be found in the courts. Masri's "private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets,'' the judge wrote in dismissing the lawsuit filed last year against former CIA director George J. Tenet and 10 unnamed CIA officials.

~~~Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney defending Masri, said Ellis "was precisely wrong that the judicial branch should not be involved here." He said the case was an opportunity to examine the CIA's program of secretly detaining suspects in one country and moving them to another for interrogation and detention -- a process known as "rendition."

"This is doubly insulting,'' Wizner said. "Everyone knows that Mr. al-Masri was a mistaken victim of the rendition program. He is now a victim of the misuse of the state-secrets privilege."

~~~He was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al-Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," a former CIA official last year said on condition of anonymity.

German investigators have confirmed most of Masri's allegations, which have received extensive publicity in Europe. In December, a senior Bush administration official traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said U.S. officials had told the Germans that Masri was released because the intelligence was insufficient to justify his detention.