Beaten
and sodomized:
European human rights
court finds CIA guilty of
torture
The
European Court of Human Rights found the CIA guilty of torturing a
terror suspect for the first time ever. A German citizen was
illegally detained, tortured and sodomized by a CIA “rendition
team’ after being mistaken for an al-Qaeda member.
RT,
14
December, 2012
The
Strasbourg-based court has unanimously ruled that German citizen
Khalid el-Masri was tortured by a CIA ‘rendition team’.
The
court also found the state of Macedonia guilty of secretly
imprisoning, abusing and torturing Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen
of Lebanese origin, and ordered €60,000 in compensation to be paid
to the former detainee. The Macedonian government denied any
involvement in the kidnapping.
James
Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative,
told the Guardian that the ruling of the Grand Chamber of ECtHR
should become a wake-up call for the Obama administration and US
courts. For the US Congress to continue avoiding serious scrutiny of
CIA activities is going to be "simply unacceptable",
Goldston said.
Ben
Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and
counter-terrorism, believes the ECtHR ruling is “a key milestone in
the long struggle to secure accountability of public officials
implicated in human rights violations committed by the Bush
adminsitration CIA in its policy of secret detention, rendition and
torture”.
Emmerson
suggested that the US government must issue an apology for its
"central role in a web of systematic crimes and human rights
violations by the Bush-era CIA” and pay voluntary compensation to
Khalid el-Masri. In turn, Germany should seek the US officials
involved in this case to be brought to trial.
Khaled el-Masri (AFP Photo/DDP/Sebastian Widmann)
Masri’s unexpected journey
Macedonian
police arrested Khalid el-Masri in December 2003. In January 2004 he
was taken to a hotel in the airport of the capital Skopje, where for
23 days he was interrogated about alleged ties with terrorist
organizations. The questioning was conducted in English despite the
fact that el-Masri has only a basic knowledge of the language.
Masri
says he was refused any contacts with German diplomats and once his
captors threatened to shoot him after he declared his intention to
leave immediately
The
court maintained that el-Masri was “severely
beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded, and subjected to total
sensory deprivation” by
the CIA rendition team.
The
court also ruled that the torture at Skopje airport had been carried
out “in
the presence of state officials of [Macedonia] and within its
jurisdiction".
Therefore,
the ECtHR ruled “[the
Macedonian] government was consequently responsible for those acts
performed by foreign officials. It had failed to submit any arguments
explaining or justifying the degree of force used or the necessity of
the invasive and potentially debasing measures.”
The
court found out that the measures applied to the detainee were
premeditated, “aiming
to cause Mr Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain
information.”
“In
the court's view, such treatment had amounted to torture, in
violation of Article 3 [of the European human rights
convention],” the
sentence concluded.
From
Skopje airport el-Masri was taken to Afghanistan where he spent four
months in a dirty and dark concrete cell hidden in a brick factory
somewhere near the capital of Kabul. He was beaten and interrogated
on a regular basis, his demands to get in touch with German diplomats
were ignored.
Once
the Americans realized Khalid el-Masri was taken for someone else, he
was taken to Albania, handcuffed and blindfolded, and later
transferred to Germany.
US Congress finds torture fruitless
The
milestone decision of the European court has come into spotlight
together with the final approval on Thursday of a behemoth 6,000 page
report on harsh interrogation techniques prepared by the US Senate's
Select Committee on Intelligence.
In
a specially released written statement, the chairman of the Committee
on Intelligence Senator Dianne Feinstein refused to go into details
,so the exact findings of the report remain classified.
Still,
Feinstein said the decisions allowing the CIA to create a network of
secret prisons where enhanced interrogation techniques were used
were “terrible
mistakes.”
“This
report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our
nation should ever employ coercive interrogation
techniques,” Feinstein
promised.
It
will probably take months or even years before any parts of the
report see daylight, because the Committee will be waiting for
comments from the CIA and the Obama administration, which both will
be provided with a copy of the document, Feinstein said.
Following
that, another vote will have to be conducted on whether to release
any part of the report at all. The CIA is expected to oppose the
move, as it already claimed earlier the details of the interrogation
program are classified and should be kept this way.
The
three-year study of some six million documents describing
implementation of controversial interrogation practices, including
beating, forced nudity, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress
positions and waterboarding, has found out that harsh measures do not
bring intelligence breakthroughs.
The
Democrats-dominated committee gave the green light to the report
after a heated closed-door vote and strong resistance from the
Republican members of the committee.
Allegedly,
the report maintained that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation
techniques did not help to find Osama Bin Laden and sometimes were
even counterproductive for America’s war with Al Qaeda.
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