Our policy is blowing up in our face. The very people who snatched private citizens from the streets in their home countries are now being charged with kidnaping by German prosecutors.
This kidnaping charge stems from the extraordinary rendition of Kaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin who was kidnaped and taken to Kabul, where he was abused and tortured for five months, with no contact with the outside world. The US disappeared him. He was finally let go when the CIA realized that ooops! They had the wrong guy. He’s tried to sue the CIA over this, but was denied because of security concerns. We can’t tell state secrets in courts dont’cha know. Sorry old chap. Terrible mix up, indeed. Do forgive us, chum!
The AP report says that al-Masri was “abused.” That’s a pretty sanitary word considering what was done to him in the name of national security.
He was eventually brought to another room where, according to his affidavit, “I felt two people violently grab my arms. . . . I then felt someone else grab my head with both hands so I was unable to move. . . . Finally they stripped me completely naked and threw me to the ground. . . . I felt a boot in the small of my back. I then felt a stick or some other hard object being forced in my anus. I realized I was being sodomized. Of all the acts these men perpetrated against me, this was the most degrading and shameful.”
For his flight to Afghanistan, Masri was blindfolded, “my ears were plugged with cotton, and headphones were placed over my ears. A bag was placed over my head and a belt around my waist. They put something hard over my nose. Because of the bag, breathing was getting harder and harder for me. . . . I began to panic.”
He spent five months in a filthy secret prison set up by the CIA and guarded by Afghans. He was made to drink water so putrid it made him vomit. He slept on a single blanket, shivered through the cold months and was fed chicken bones and skin. He was beaten and interrogated many times, sometimes by people he believes to be Americans. He went on a hunger strike, lost 60 pounds.
The aftermath was just as bad–Masri was still tied with terrorist groups in news reports (even though he has absolutely no ties to any such organizations). He became fearful. He withdrew. He suffers flashbacks. One of the times he went to the US to attend his court hearing, he received a, shall we say, hostile reception.
The last time Masri tried to come to the United States to listen to his court case, he and his attorney had walked off the plane in Atlanta and found 20 security guards waiting for them, both men said. He didn’t have a visa because German citizens don’t need visas to enter the United States. Instead of letting him in, one of officers drew his gun and threatened to shoot the lawyer if he did not put away his cellphone.
The US put on a more welcoming face the next time he went. Why not, after all? We weren’t going to be held accountable by our own courts. Germany finally had enough of its “ally’s” antics and decided to issue warrants.
I’m sure we’ll hear lots of yelping on the part of the neocons who’ll insist that Germany is overstepping its bounds; that the US is a sovereign nation. Which is exactly my point, and, I suspect, the point of the Germans. If you cannot rouse yourself to respect human rights and dignity, at the very least respect the sovreignity of another country. We do seem to lose track of all that once the scope widens beyond our borders, however. It’s an odd, annoying quirk that leads to disaster all to often.
People love to trot out the usual trope about how much we need torture, that without it, we’d never get the information that is vital to stop terrorist attacks. I call BS on that one. You torture someone, and they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear just so you’ll stop the pain. They’ll tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not. You take a look at police interrogations and how, without extreme torture, they manage to get people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. They don’t even have to use torture to do it–just psychological tactics such as isolation, intimidation, and lying about the evidence they have. People are so invested in authority that they start to believe they must be guilty, they must deserve this.
No, torture has zero to do with security. It has everything to do with keeping everyone in a climate of fear. Americans have shaken off the fear of being blown up by terrorists–it gets tedious after awhile. But targeting foreign nationals, some of whom are outspoken, and outsourcing them for torture is an effective way to silence and intimidate an entire population. Torture doesn’t punish terrorists or protect the people–it punishes the people. Specifically in this case, brown Arab people. You are constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering if you’ll be whisked off to some undisclosed location in the name of protecting America, the all-mighty.
Had this happened to an American citizen at the hands of a foreign power, we’d be spitting nails and getting ready to invade. But we’re Americans! We’re special! The laws of the land don’t apply to us–magic fairy dust makes us immune to such things.
29 Responses to “Extraordinary hypocrisy”
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Wait, wait, just a second… let me turn on my oraculize-ational powers…
The lesson that the US government will take away from this is… a-la-kazaam! Don’t let people go just because they turn out to be innocent!
What do I win?
I’m impressed by the Atlanta cop who told the lawyer to put away the cellphone or he’d shoot the lawyer. Apparently, cell phones have some kind of awesome power that baffles cops (there’s a scene in Die Hard III where a cop pulls a gun on Samuel Jackson and wants to shoot him if he answers a pay phone).
I’m *totally* going to use one next time I get pulled over for speeding.
Though I’ve heard you can’t have a cell phone in the same car as a donut
I came here when Ezra was posting and showed up less and less over time. Imagine my surprise today to find one of the most powerful and lucid pieces I’ve read lately.
Sheelzebub -
I haven’t read your work before as far as I know, but welcome to Pandagon. Good article.
One more thing:
If the appeals court doesn’t reinstate this lawsuit, then Congress should take action to allow such lawsuits, including his.
We need accountability. Punish the kidnappers and torturers.
It hurts our national security to have kidnapping and torture done in our name.
If they confess to something while being tortured, then god makes it all okay (even if what they confess is crap).
Then the US is justified, GWB is proven correct, and our holy quest to subjugate all non-Americans moves further toward its sacred goal.
All is well with the world…
It’s good to be the king…
I’m mostly a lurker but wanted to say this was good post. I look forward to reading more from you.
This isn’t new, my friends. Long before 9-11 the USSC held that American kidnapping of suspects from countries with whom the USA had valid extradition treaties was permissible.
One law for Me, another for Thee is a long-established American legal principle, regardless of who is in power.
While conversely, the US has a law on its books allowing military action against any country attempting to try a US citizen for war crimes, even if that trial is brought through entirely legal and above board means.
Great-if highly disturbing- article.
In a Global War On Terror that made sense. this would be a joint German/US operation. That was the vision everyone–except, obviously, the Bush Administration–had in mind after 9/11.
Instead, we’re the new Soviet Union, complete with KGB hit squads and Stalinist show trials.
Nice.
Great post, Sheelzebub.
How utterly weird. Now the way this is supposed to work is that CIA contacts BfV* and has them snatch up the guy. The Germans are supposed to be our ally. Hey, they’ll play ball if the guy is really a terrorist. The Germans are not incompetent at these sort of things. Actually they have as much or more experience at them than we do.
*German counter-intelligence and such. The translation is, interestingly enough, “Bureau for the protection of the Constitution.”
Herm. I don’t want to argue with you in *effect*. You’re right; the effect of torture is not to increas our security, but to increase the fear of others.
But I do think that the *intent* is to increase our security.
This is *not* an excuse; it’s not even exculpatory. To do something wrong out of fear that, if you don’t, something bad might happen, is called, quite properly, “cowardice”, and many crimes have been committed out of cowardice, and that a person is a coward is no excuse for that person’s crimes.
But understanding the intent is important to fighting the practice.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that the Bush administration wants torture to scare people in exactly the manner you describe. It’s possible, but geez, it’s stupider than the usual for them. It strikes me as more likely that they sincerely believe that if you don’t play by the “nice guy” rules, you get better intel.
OH: by the way, welcome, great article, and you might see me around fairly often. I’m the guy who loves to hear himself talk so much that he sometimes forgets to mention stuff like that.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I look forward to seeing someone else finally get some leverage to (hopefully) force some accountability with the
Neocon FascistBush Adminstration. It’s gone on for too long.Secondly, welcome aboard and while I, too, am a lurker for the most part, I look forward to many more posts like this. Thank you.
I’m impressed by the Atlanta cop who told the lawyer to put away the cellphone or he’d shoot the lawyer.
Cellphones these days have cameras.
Beware of any country where the police are afraid of cameras.
John Palmer: I’m past the point of granting that the Bush Administration sincerely believes anything, or in anything but their own power. I think they torture because they can get away with it. Okay, so, probably too pessimistic today, yeah.
Boy, do we ever need a Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution.
No, a Department.
This ties in with the Italian case where indictments either are or will be handed down in the kidnapping of a sheik off the streets of, I believe, Milan and sending him to Egypt to be tortured. A large number of CIA agents are named in the indictments. Then there was the Canadian man sized while waiting for a connecting flight in New York and sent to Syria for torture. That one has the conservative Canadian government backing off from being to close to Bush and company.
It’s beginning to look like the major accomplishment of the Bush administration will be to make the US THE major pariah state of the 21st century.
Natasha..
And don’t forget the Canadians felt nine-million dollars bad about all that too.
Apparently outlaw thugs live across the northern border too
has_te:
Yeah, our national police force had faulty intelligence on this guy (weak circumstantial evidence), oversold that assessment to the US, then attempted to cover their collective asses when it resulted in his rendition and torture.
We aren’t perfect up here by any stretch of the imagination, but at least there’s still an effort to try for basic decency. The American Republican party leadership ejected Basic Decency as a political liability decades ago.
Sheelz wrote:
“Had this happened to an American citizen at the hands of a foreign power, we’d be spitting nails and getting ready to invade. But we’re Americans! We’re special! The laws of the land don’t apply to us–magic fairy dust makes us immune to such things.”
I have to disagree. I think we are forgetting the most important aspect of the war on terror (aside from socio-economic warfare on one’s own people): racism. If it was a brown American, my guess is that it would raise a stink within activist circles, but generally get a ho-hum, “he COULD have been a terrorist” from most other sources. If it was a white, male, middle class fella, then yes, there would be outrage on all fronts.
What this speaks to, I think, is a level of racial equality in Germany that I think may be lacking in Canada and US (I live in Canada, so though I know I would be outraged, I cannot be sure that my fellow citizens and government would act as uprightly as Germany in this case). YMMV. Having not been to Germany, and having only second-hand reports from friends who live there, or have stayed quite a while, I can only speculate.
We have one of those. It’s called “the Supreme Court.” Unfortunately, it can be stocked with obedient uberconservative appointees just as easily as any other department. And these obedient ubercons are appointed for life.
This is a nitpick, but it’s an extremely important nitpick.
Khalid al-Masri is a Russian-born al-Qaeda member on the loose; Khalid el-Masri is an innocent German citizen that the U.S. kidnapped and raped and tortured (link).
It’s important to keep their names straight for a couple of reasons:
1) the spelling mistake is part of what got el-Masri kidnapped in the first place
2) moron right-wing bloggers are going to accuse you of defending al-Masri, who actually is a member of al-Qaeda.
He’s tried to sue the CIA over this, but was denied because of security concerns. We can’t tell state secrets in courts dont’cha know. Sorry old chap. Terrible mix up, indeed. Do forgive us, chum!
“old chap”? But Americans don’t talk like that, do they… Oh, I get it! You’re pretending to be British! Because all British people are evil! It’s Teh Funny!
Sheelz / Dharmaserf: Unfortunately I think you’re overlooking the fact that similar things have happened to white Americans and been completely ignored when they were committed by hard-right allies. Remember those nuns that got raped and murdered in El Salvador?
I just want ot mention that the german chancellor is good buddies with Bush and that we have quite a huge problem with racists, usually overt only in neonazis, but covert very prevalent, especially against middle eastern people. Other than that we like to do things properly and our sense of sticking to the rules is very well developed, if I may make such sweping generalizations about my country.
cheers the Jester with safety specs.
“Americans have shaken off the fear of being blown up by terrorists–it gets tedious after awhile.”
I don’t believe this to be the case given the reaction of city, state and federal authorities to a publicity stunt for a cartoon show yesterday.
In fact, I think the fear-mongers must be thrilled that a battery-operated LightBright picture of a space invader flipping the bird managed to shut down Boston and freak out paranoid citizens in many cities across the country.
Most of the good guys on TV and in movies are rule-benders and -breakers, but they’re “the good guys” and can do that if they do it “for the right reasons.” The populace is conditioned by a lifetime of action and police dramas featuring an heroic character who would be fired and/or jailed forthwith for using such methods in the three-dimensional world. As long as enough of the citizenry is afraid, the US security apparat can get their freak on in as many rule-bending and -breaking ways as they wish. As long as their methods (while appalling) “get the job done” (or at least appear as if they do).
After all, EL-Masri might have been a terrorist…he’s foreign, isn’t he? If they’d done nothing, somebody somewhere would want to “hold them accountable” (modernspeak for “make them a scapegoat” in all too many cases) for not imprisoning one to protect millions.
Even a secret cabal of totalitarian fanatics (pick a side, any side) can feel the need to CYA.
(my, I do go on, don’t I?)
Had this happened to an American citizen at the hands of a foreign power, we’d be spitting nails and getting ready to invade.
I don’t have time to explain, sir. I work for CTU.