WASHINGTON - CIA operatives held a German citizen in a prison in Afghanistan for six weeks even after determining he was not an Osama bin Laden associate and despite an order from then-U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, NBC News reported on Thursday.
Authorities in Germany have been investigating complaints by Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German who says he was abducted in Macedonia on New Year's Eve in 2003 and flown to Afghanistan.
Masri said he was beaten and injected with drugs by interrogators, who suspected he had ties to bin Laden's al Qaeda network. He was released in May 2004 in Albania.
The network, citing unnamed senior U.S. officials, said CIA officers concluded Masri was the wrong man after his passport proved legitimate. The network said then-CIA Director George Tenet had been alerted to the error.
But Masri was held at a CIA-run prison dubbed the Salt Pit for another six weeks "while officials debated how to handle the mistake," NBC said.
1) When it comes to detention of al-Qaida suspects, the administration has long told international observers, such as Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross to fuck off please keep their distance. That is, they have not granted any access.
Remember the whole kerfuffle about ghost detainees in Iraq? Well, all al-Qaida suspects in the CIA's secret prison--including Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and elsewhere--are effectively ghost detainees. In other words, there are few institutional safegauards or accountability mechinisms to ward off bad shitting happening, like say the CIA holding an innocent guy incommunicado for six weeks while it works the P.R. angle.
2) The story was broken yesterday afternoon. How come nobody is picking it up, including blogs?
