Torturing an innocent man

Denied justice by the Americans who tortured him, Khaled el-Masri has finally been vindicated.

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.”

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