Thursday, December 20, 2012

We tortured Khaled el-Masri

That's what the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.  Mr. el-Masri was mistaken for a wanted terrorist and was arrested when he crossed the Yugoslav border back in 2003.  Yugoslav 'authorities' interrogated him for three weeks in a hotel roomwhere he was
severely beaten by disguised men. He was stripped of his clothes, then sodomised with an object and later placed in a nappy and dressed in a tracksuit. Shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation, he was forcibly taken to an aircraft, which was surrounded by Macedonian security agents.and then handed him over to a CIA rendition team which took him to Afghanistan.  There our agents did the following to him:  When on the plane,
he was thrown to the floor, chained down and forcibly tranquilised. According to Mr El-Masri, his treatment before the flight at Skopje Airport, most likely at the hands of a rendition team of the CIA, was remarkably consistent with a subsequently disclosed CIA document describing so-called “capture shock” treatment.

According to his submissions, he was kept for over four months in a small, dirty, dark concrete cell in a brick factory near Kabul, where he was repeatedly interrogated and was beaten, kicked and threatened. His repeated requests to meet with a representative of the German Government were ignored.

The court decision, which became final with the US Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case in October 2007, stated in particular that the State’s interest in preserving State secrets outweighed Mr El-Masri’s individual interest in justice.
And Obama wants to "move forward", not backward to investigate what we have done to our fellow men in the name of protecting ourselves.

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