Al-Jazeera - The El-Masri Case (2021)
Al-Jazeera - The El-Masri Case (2021)
In 2004, while on a bus trip close to the Macedonien border, German citizen Khaled El Masri disappeared. He was kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a secret prison near Kabul. Five months later, he was released in a forest in Albania.
El Masri was an innocent man. His case was the main reason why the CIA’s worldwide “rendition programme” came to light. Its agents were forcibly taking suspected terrorists to secret locations and torturing them in order to extract confessions and obtain information.
It then became clear that ever since the attacks on September 11, moral categories within the US intelligence services had shifted and that the extent of violence used during the CIA operations was out of control. With the support of human rights lawyers in Europe and the United States, El Masri spent the years after his abduction trying to restore his moral and legal integrity and to obtain a formal apology – so far in vain.
In September 2020, he made a statement in the extradition procedure against Julian Assange, regarding the question how wikileaks contributed to revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan. In this political thriller, we tell the story of a man who fell victim to a government intervention and was caught up in geopolitical power interests that eventually destroyed his and his family’s life.
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Snippet from Wikipedia: Khalid El-Masri
Khaled El-Masri (also Khalid El-Masri and Khaled Masri, Levantine Arabic pronunciation: [ˈxaːlɪd elˈmɑsˤɾi, -ˈmɑsˤɾe], Arabic: خالد المصري) (born 29 June 1963) is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, whom the CIA captured from 2001 to 2005, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks.
In May 2004, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Daniel R. Coats, convinced the German interior minister, Otto Schily, not to press charges or to reveal the program. El-Masri filed suit against the CIA for his arrest, extraordinary rendition and torture. In 2006, his suit El Masri v. Tenet, in which he was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, based on the U.S. government's claiming the state secrets privilege. The ACLU said the Bush administration attempted to shield its abuses by invoking this privilege. The case was also dismissed by the Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit, and in December 2007, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
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