How do you become your own worst enemy? Basically by doing the same things you accuse your enemy of doing. That is the paradox that the CIA is facing now, as it has become clear that they are using very questionable methods in the war on terror. Abduction, torture, keeping people in prisons without any trial (Guantanamo Bay): it’s just a short list of all the things the USA is doing. Dana Priest from The Washington Post has literally pulled the lid of some covert operations with her article on November 2nd called “CIA holds Terror Supects in Secret Prisons”. After this story a lot of European countries started investigating all kinds of covert CIA flights from and to their countries; even in the Netherlands we had some CIA planes landing. And now we have the latest horror-story: the CIA has wrongfully imprisoned a German citizien, Khaled Masri, for five months in 2004 and tried to keep it a secret. Once again Dana Priest from The Washington Post had the scoop in het article calld “Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake”. The story reads like a cheap cloak-and-dagger story, but it’s not. When Condoleeza Rice comes to Europe tomorrow, she will have a lot of explaining to do.
She writes:
(Ambassador) Coats informed the German minister (in May 2004) that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
Apparantly the German government (and the CIA) did try to keep the whole thing a secret: but that backfired on them. It seems that the CIA department called the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, has it’s own methods of snatching someone:
To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.
Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own covert prisons — referred to in classified documents as “black sites,” which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.
According to the article “The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.”
One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.
“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.
The same treatment was applied to Masri according to his story. Off course he holds a grudge againt the US:
Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. “I have very bad feelings” about the United States, he said. “I think it’s just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws.”
My only asessment of this whole mess is, that the US, in it’s pursuit of terrorists has become that what it is trying to battle.