A german citizen was kidnapped, “*rendered”, and interrogated aggressively for 5 months.
(*this being Germany, prudence dictates a reference to the term of art:“To render a suspect” over into the hands of some other government. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the extraction of useful lipids from their colloidal intermixture with flesh)
Unfortunately, some ignorant airport employee mistook one arab name for an entirely different one.
Bad enough, you say?
Once snatched by mistake, it’s not easy to get released…
For two extra months, he continued in confinement, while the agencies in question tried to figure out how best to handle the coming shitstorm.
If you defend “extraordinary rendition” please compare and contrast YOUR model program with this reality. Does this history affect your committment to American Exceptionalism, (the doctrine that we are not obliged to follow the rules that bind lesser powers, because of our inherent goodness, nd the responsibilities of being world cop)
Look, we’re Amurricans. Real Amurricans not like them Communo-Amurricans in the blue states. And we can’t be expected to get all teary-eyed over the friendly hi-jinks (not torture, just ask Condi Rice) we engaged in with some German with a suspiciously arabic name who knows the location of the atomic bomb that will blow up a major Amurrican red-state city in the next 24 hours, just because he’s not the right guy and didn’t know. If he’d been any halfway decent sort of terrorist, he SHOULDA knowed all this stuff. As it is he’s an Arab, so he’s kinda used to being tort … er, hi-jinked. You can’t destroy terrorism without breaking eggs. And legs.
A nitpick: This doesn’t concern the US’ policy of “extraordinary rendition” because the rendition in this case was from Macedonia to the US. The usual cases of extraordinary rendition that were the subject of debate these last years were *from * the US’ custody to states with sufficiently flexible policies on torture.
When the reality is that a citizen of another country was kidnapped, tortured, held for two months even though he was known to be the wrong guy and then abandoned in the middle of Albania the correct response is outrage not ‘nitpick’.
I think Condi sorta let the cat outta the bag when she apologized to Andrea Merkel for al-Masri’s kidnapping. I mean, if we didn’t do it, why was she apologizing?
That’s right. The whole world is kidnapping people and holding them in Afghanistan whilst pretending to be Americans.
As well as nitpicking - wilful denial and obtuse legalising when the facts are known to anyone who really wants to know is also not an appropriate response.
And let’s not forget Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, who was dispatched to Syria and tortured thanks to INS. He was released a year later after somebody figured out he was innocent.
Sorry if I gave the impression of casting this as an occasion for quibbling, but - why the outrage, now? The case was in the German press in January, with occasional updates on the prosecutors’ progress (not surprisingly they didn’t get any names of people to indict yet), and diplomatic inquiries to the US for the rest of this year. Cases of innocent people being sent to Gitmo and other US installations, and cases of extraordinary renditions e.g. to Syria, obviously for purposes of torture, were public knowledge for years. Why is this an issue now when nothing has changed?
The rest of the world doesn’t make this fine distinction between “in US custody, within the US” and “in US custody, in an US installation outside of the US”.
The guy’s name is Khaled al-Masri, and he was detained because his name sounded similar to that of a wanted terrorist. Now the stupid part - Khaled is a very common Arabic name, and al-Masri is either a very common Arabic name or a very common identifier of origin used in the place of a name (literally meaning “the Egyptian”). It’s the Arabic equivalent of John Smith.
That is, they detained a guy based on his name, which was an incredibly common one, with no other reasons to do so.
What kind of pathetic attempt at an argument are you trying for? Whose CIA exactly took the guy to Afghanistan? Bricker, you’re smarter than this.
Let’s also remember Mamdouh Habib, an Australian, rendered to Egypt and tortured, then falsely imprisoned in Guantanamo for two - three years, before being released with no charges laid.
Yes, that’s true. I’m suggesting that the evidence for the CIA’s involvement is slight: this guy claims they were CIA. He doesn’t say how he knows they were CIA.
He could be lying. Or he could be telling the truth as he knows it, but the people that abducted him could be lying.
There is no indication of what he based his sense that they were CIA agents on.
Oh, they’re known to anyone who wants to know, eh?
Well, bucko, this is a message board devoted to fighting ignorance. So let’s start with my ignorance of this topic that everyone knows.
Direct me, please, to the evidence that proves what you’re saying, the stuff that everyone knows.
I don’t see an admission there as regards al-Masri. I see a statement that it’s happened in general, but that torture wasn’t involved. I accept that.