A newly released internal CIA report has revealed how the agency arrested, imprisoned and interrogated German citizen Khalid El-Masri at a secret prison in Afghanistan, even though the CIA knew he was not the man they had been looking for. The report chronicles how the CIA seized El-Masri after Macedonian agents accused him of being a member of al-Qaeda traveling on a false passport. Yet no one from the CIA even looked at El-Masri’s passport for the first three months of his imprisonment, at which point agents determined his passport was real and that there was, as CIA agents wrote, “no basis to justify the continued detention of al-Masri.” Yet the agency continued to hold El-Masri for months because it could not decide on an “exit strategy.” Finally, CIA agents dumped him in Albania and told him to go home. El-Masri says he was tortured while imprisoned by the CIA. He is seeking an apology from the U.S. government.
— source democracynow.org | 2016
