Torturing an innocent man

Denied justice by the Americans who tortured him, Khaled el-Masri has finally been vindicated, said Wolfgang Janisch in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). The European Court of Human Rights has ruled unanimously in his favor in the suit he filed against Macedonia. The German citizen of Lebanese origin suffered a nightmarish ordeal when he was arrested in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve in 2003, interrogated for weeks at the behest of the U.S., and then handed over to the CIA at Skopje airport. While still on Macedonian territory, el-Masri was blindfolded, beaten, stripped naked, and thrown to the floor. “His hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back,” the verdict reads. “He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus.” Men in ski masks put him in a jumpsuit, hood, and shackles, then threw him onto a plane bound for Afghanistan. There he was tortured for five months before the CIA, finally realizing that it had the wrong man, dumped him on a roadside in Albania. The U.S., having “abandoned any semblance of adhering to the rule of law” since 9/11, has yet to apologize to el-Masri. “Luckily things are different in Europe.” The court has ordered Macedonia to pay el-Masri $79,000 in damages.

It’s “small consolation” for his trauma, said Steffen Hebestreit in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany). Since his abduction, el-Masri, 49, has had anger issues and has been arrested in Germany twice, once for arson and once for punching a German mayor. He gets out of jail for that assault next year. “He is a broken man” who has not been able to recover from “the psychic wounds of torture.” Still, at least the court denounced his treatment, said the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (Germany) in an editorial. This long-overdue verdict makes it “clear that there can be no exceptions to the ban on torture—not even for the war on terror.”

It fell to the Europeans to render this judgment, said Darryl Li in AlJazeera.com, because U.S. courts refuse to hear cases brought by torture survivors. The U.S. threw out el-Masri’s case on “state secrets” grounds. This is how the U.S. empire works: “by getting other countries not only to do its dirty work but also to take responsibility for it as sovereign states.” The extraordinary rendition program is a case in point. “The CIA got its man, and Macedonia was stuck in court taking the blame.”

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Still, the U.S. isn’t entirely off the hook, said Amrit Singh in The Guardian (U.K.). The court, in Strasbourg, France, unanimously found that the evidence corroborated el-Masri’s entire story. That makes it “the first court to comprehensively and specifically find that the CIA’s rendition techniques amounted to torture.” Macedonia, of course, is but one of the 14 European countries that cooperated with the U.S. in its illegal and immoral doings. The U.K., too, was involved. “The time has come for European governments to stand up to the United States and break the conspiracy of silence, regardless of the diplomatic consequences.”