German of Lebanese descent Khaleed al Masri reads German newspapers covering his arrest by the CIA in Stuttgart, Germany, on Dec. 6, 2005. (photo: Thomas Kienzle/AP)
CIA
Knew It Had the Wrong Man, but Kept Him Anyway
By Matthew Schofield,
McClatchy DC
03 July 16
By
January of 2004, when German citizen Khaleed al Masri arrived at the Central
Intelligence Agency’s secret prison in Afghanistan, agency officials were
pretty sure he wasn’t a terrorist. They also knew he didn’t know any
terrorists, or much about anything in the world of international terror.
In
short, they suspected they’d nabbed the wrong man.
Still,
the agency continued to imprison and interrogate him, according to a recently
released internal CIA report on Masri’s arrest. The report claims that Masri
suffered no physical abuse during his wrongful imprisonment, though it
acknowledges that for months he was kept in a “small cell with some clothing,
bedding and a bucket for his waste.” Masri says he was tortured, specifically
that a medical examination against his will constituted sodomy.
The
embarrassing, and horrifying, case of Masri is hardly new. It has been known
for a decade as a colossal example of CIA error in the agency’s pursuit of
terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush.
But
the recently released internal report makes it clear that the CIA’s failures in
the Masri case were even more outrageous than previous accounts have suggested.
The
report is heavily redacted – whole pages are blank – and the names of those
involved have been removed. But enough is there to give a good understanding of
what happened and what went wrong.
Adding
to the sense of injustice: Even though the agency realized early on that Masri
was the wrong man, it couldn’t figure out how to release him without having to
acknowledge its mistake. The agency eventually dumped him unceremoniously in
Albania and essentially pretended his arrest and detention had never happened.
The
release of the report, which is 90 pages long and was written in July 2007,
came in June after a Freedom of Information Act suit by the American Civil
Liberties Union, which is representing Masri in his decade-long attempt to get
an official apology from the United States.
Officials
most responsible were promoted
Assembled
by the CIA’s inspector general, the report provides the clearest official view
to date into the dark, murky world of the Bush administration’s anti-terror
rendition program. Beyond snatching an innocent man and holding him for five
months, the report highlights a shocking lack of professionalism at America’s
top spy agency. The Hollywood cliché of deeply devoted patriots doing their
best to protect the United States appears, in this case, to have been replaced
by a classic bureaucratic mess and individuals most intent on protecting their
own careers.
The
report notes that Masri was “questioned in English, which he spoke only
poorly.”
None
of the Americans involved in Masri’s detention has been held to account, notes
Masri’s attorney, Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties
Union’s Human Rights Program. Indeed, the two men most responsible for the
errors were promoted. Meanwhile, Dakwar said, Masri is haunted to this day by
the psychological torture inflicted by his detention in the CIA’s secret Afghan
holding center and by the stigma of having been snatched in a CIA anti-terror
investigation.
The
tale has important lessons for the country,
where one of the two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump, has
promised to reinstate the use of torture against terrorism suspects and the
Obama administration has declined to punish anyone for the excesses of the
Bush-era rendition program.
“When
you start a program shrouded in secrecy that pushes the line on human rights,
nobody should be surprised that we see this result,” Dakwar said. He added that
the presidential authority given for the program under which Masri was nabbed
required the CIA “to satisfy a very low bar of proof. In this case, they admit
they knew at the time that they didn’t reach even that bar.”
Detention
due to ‘a series of breakdowns’
In the
case of Masri, the inspector general’s report is sweeping in its condemnation
of the failures that took place throughout the agency’s hierarchy, blaming the
mishandling of his arrest and detention on “a series of breakdowns in
tradecraft, process, management and oversight.”
The
report lists the failures: “The lack of rigor in justifying action against an
individual suspected of terrorist connections; the lack of understanding of the
legal requirements of detention and rendition; the lack of guidance provided to
officers making critical operations decisions with significant international
implications; and the lack of management oversight.”
It
offered a particularly harsh judgment of Alec Station, the CIA unit charged
with tracking down Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in
the United States.
“ALEC
Station exaggerated the nature of the data it possessed linking al Masri to
terrorism. After the decision had been made to repatriate al Masri,
implementation was marked by delay and bureaucratic infighting,” the report
says.
The
report notes that all agency attorneys interviewed agreed that Masri did not
meet the legal standard for rendition and detention, which required that a
suspect be deemed a threat. In Masri’s case, it was thought only that he “knows
key information that could assist in the capture of other al Qaida operatives.”
Despite
the fact that the CIA was unable to find any evidence tying Masri to an al
Qaida operative in Sudan, which had been the initial suspicion, two agents
“justified their commitment to his continued detention, despite the diminishing
rationale, by insisting that they knew he was ‘bad.’ ”
None
of the Americans involved in Masri’s detention has been held to account.
In his
response to the report at the time, included in the released document, CIA
acting General Counsel John Rizzo offered a weak defense of the agency’s
actions, saying it was possible officials “simply could have made – during a period
of intense, frenetic activity in CTC – a mistake.” CTC is the agency’s
Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates the CIA’s anti-terrorism activities.
Passport
went unexamined for months
The
inspector general’s recitation of CIA errors begins with the initial decision
to hold Masri without attempting to verify the premise on which he was
detained: the suspicion by Macedonian security agents that he was an al Qaida
operative traveling on a false German passport.
But no
one at the CIA bothered to look at his passport until three months into his
detention, when an officer who’d interviewed Masri found the passport and more
of his personal effects in an unopened pouch on the desk of another officer.
The
official CIA chronology of the detention says the passport was then sent to
agency experts, who “promptly determined that al Masri’s German passport was
genuine.” A short time later, “CIA determined it had no basis to justify the
continued detention of al Masri.”
Yet
Masri’s detention continued for two more months, and it was almost that long
before CIA officers told Masri they planned to release him.
Even
before the agency learned that Masri’s passport was genuine, according to the
report, a CIA officer whose name and title have been redacted from the report
had concluded there was a “lack of compelling intelligence to warrant al
Masri’s continued detention as a terrorist.” The officer “requested ALEC
Station/CTC Headquarters concurrence to release al Masri.”
Instead,
the two units suggested “additional areas of questioning” because they “could
not resolve the issue of his terrorist affiliation.”
The
report notes at one point that the CIA considered transferring Masri to the
U.S. military as a “force protection threat” but decided against it because
without confirmation that he was an al Qaida member, the U.S. military was
likely to release him “within hours.”
Indeed,
throughout the rest of March and into April, while Masri languished: “Agency
components continued to disagree about the exit strategy.” In other words, they
were worried about how to release him.
Top
officials briefed on Masri
It was
not a topic left only to underlings.
In
May, CIA officials including then-Director George Tenet met to discuss Masri.
Later that month, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was briefed, and
said Masri “should be repatriated quickly.”
A
final cable notes they “did not find any information linking him or his
customers with known terrorist individuals or organizations.” It isn’t clear
what the term “customers” is referring to, though Masri had worked as a grocer
and a mechanic.
Agents
in the field were told to tell Masri he was to be released “to help mitigate
his frustration and anger.” They dropped him off in Albania and told him to
make his way back to Germany. Dakwar notes that that is the last official
communication Masri has had with the United States.
Masri
received $80,000 from Macedonia for his mistreatment by its security personnel,
a payment ordered by the European Court of Human Rights. He’s seeking an
apology from the United States before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights.
“This
is the very least President Obama can do . . . before leaving office,” Dakwar
wrote recently on the ACLU’s website.
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
