Friday January 14, 2005
The Guardian

A man is walking alone along a mountain path in the darkness. He is carrying a suitcase. He seems frightened, tired and confused. He has long hair and a long beard, but they are untidy, as if he did not grow them voluntarily. He turns a bend and meets three men carrying Kalashnikovs.
The man shows them his passport. It indicates that he is a German citizen, born in Lebanon, called Khaled el-Masri. Using poor English, he tells them that he does not know where he is. They tell him that he is on the Albanian border, close to Serbia and Macedonia, and that he is there illegally since he doesn't have an Albanian stamp in his passport.

Time to re-up my annual membership.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/ACLU_files_s...ition_1206.html

From the article...

The American Civil Liberties Union will file a lawsuit today against former CIA director George Tenet and three American contractors challenging the CIA’s abduction of a foreign national for detention and interrogation in a secret overseas prison...

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an German citizen later found innocent who was victimized by the CIA’s policy of “extraordinary rendition.”

My comment...

The ACLU always seems to fight the good fight...

This sick injustice continues...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/washingt...qDnLJ6s8BS88/0g

From the article:

A lawyer for a German man who was abducted while on vacation in Macedonia and said he was tortured while in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan urged a federal appeals court on Tuesday to reinstate his lawsuit against the agency, which had been dismissed for national security reasons...

A judge Friday indicted 26 Americans and five Italians in the abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect on a Milan street in what would be the first criminal trial stemming from the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

The judge set a trial date for June 8, although the Americans, who have all left the country, almost certainly will not be returned to Italy.

Prosecutors allege that five Italian intelligence officials worked with the Americans to seize Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr on Feb. 17, 2003.

Nasr was allegedly transferred by vehicle to the Aviano Air Base near Venice, then by air to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and on to Egypt, where his lawyer says he was tortured. Nasr was freed earlier this week by an Egyptian court that found his four years of detention in Egypt "unfounded," and he is at a family home in Alexandria...

The CIA declined to comment Friday on the case, which has put an uncomfortable spotlight on its operations...

Even if a request is made for their extradition _ a move bound to further strain U.S.-Italian relations _ it was unlikely that the CIA agents would be turned over for trial abroad...

On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA's overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaeda leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other "ghost prisoners" who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA.

Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die...

Little about the conditions of Bashmilah's incarceration has been made public until now. His detailed descriptions in an interview with Salon, and in newly filed court documents, provide the first in-depth, first-person account of captivity inside a CIA black site. Human rights advocates and lawyers have painstakingly pieced together his case, using Bashmilah's descriptions of his cells and his captors, and documents from the governments of Jordan and Yemen and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to verify his testimony. Flight records detailing the movement of CIA aircraft also confirm Bashmilah's account, tracing his path from the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again while in U.S. custody.

Bashmilah's story also appears to show in clear terms that he was an innocent man. After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.

The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights - despite repeated earlier assurances that the U.S. had not.

U.S. officials have sought to quell the fallout by apologizing to Britain for what they said was an "administrative error." The admission, however, might reopen a bitter debate between the United States and its allies over how the fight against terrorism should be conducted and compromise future cooperation.

"Mistakes were made in the reporting of the information," said Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman for President Bush. Johndroe insisted that cooperation between the U.S. and Britain would not be affected.

Adam Zagorin in a story at Time magazine and the BBC’s "Newsnight" have today given fresh ammunition to the long-held view of human rights advocates and European investigators that the United States has used and may be continuing to use the British-owned atoll of Diego Garcia and its territorial waters as a rendition hub and detention center for suspected terrorists. Whether suspects have been tortured there remains unknown, but this also is widely suspected...