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The Wronged Man
Masri, flanked by the ACLU's Anthony D. Romero, left, and Ben Wizner. The CIA maintains a trial in his case against the agency would disclose state secrets.
(By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)
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His deteriorating living conditions were a stress on his marriage. On Dec. 30, 2003, he decided to get away, to take a bus trip to Macedonia to clear his head. To make a very long story shorter, Macedonian police took him off the bus and interrogated him at the Skopski Merak Hotel for 23 days.
This being the Internet age, Masri says in one legal declaration: From the hotel Web site "I can identify the actual room where I was held. . . . I even recognize one of the waiters who served me food during my detention there."
At some point a couple of people who sounded American showed up. On Jan. 23, 2004, things took a bad turn. Current and former CIA officials say Masri was believed to have a fake passport and the same name as someone else they were looking for.
He was eventually brought to another room where, according to his affidavit, "I felt two people violently grab my arms. . . . I then felt someone else grab my head with both hands so I was unable to move. . . . Finally they stripped me completely naked and threw me to the ground. . . . I felt a boot in the small of my back. I then felt a stick or some other hard object being forced in my anus. I realized I was being sodomized. Of all the acts these men perpetrated against me, this was the most degrading and shameful."
For his flight to Afghanistan, Masri was blindfolded, "my ears were plugged with cotton, and headphones were placed over my ears. A bag was placed over my head and a belt around my waist. They put something hard over my nose. Because of the bag, breathing was getting harder and harder for me. . . . I began to panic."
He spent five months in a filthy secret prison set up by the CIA and guarded by Afghans. He was made to drink water so putrid it made him vomit. He slept on a single blanket, shivered through the cold months and was fed chicken bones and skin. He was beaten and interrogated many times, sometimes by people he believes to be Americans. He went on a hunger strike, lost 60 pounds.
Eventually the CIA caught up with its mistake. They argued with the State Department over whether to tell the Germans and eventually agreed they could not lie to such a close ally. So they chose to tell then-Interior Minister Otto Schily because he was thought to be Washington-friendly.
Masri was released in Albania, then flown to Germany, where he made his way home to Ulm. There, he contacted a lawyer and then the German authorities. "What I really want is for them to admit that injustice was done. I'd like an explanation and I'd like an apology," he said.
* * *
Is a state secret still a secret if everyone knows it? That's what the court case boils down to at this point.
Masri's lawyers say no.
They point to President Bush's Sept. 6, 2006, disclosure that the CIA ran secret prisons abroad and conducted covert rendition flights as part of its counterterrorism campaign.
