{"id":8642,"date":"2013-01-29T16:53:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T23:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/?p=8642"},"modified":"2013-01-29T17:15:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-30T00:15:08","slug":"european-court-of-human-rights-condemns-us-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/european-court-of-human-rights-condemns-us-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"European Court of Human Rights Condemns U.S. Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

TORTURING THE WRONG MAN<\/h1>\n
by\u00a0Amy Davidson<\/a><\/cite><\/div>\n
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\"Khaled-El-Masri.jpg\"<\/div>\n
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A\u00a0judgment<\/a>\u00a0issued on Thursday by the European Court of Human Rights contains an account of the treatment of a man who, after some detective work by a foreign police force, was handed over to the C.I.A. as a suspected member of Al Qaeda:<\/p>\n

Upon arrival, still handcuffed and blindfolded, he was initially placed in a chair, where he sat for one and a half hours\u2026.Then, two people violently pulled his arms back. On that occasion he was beaten severely from all sides. His clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife. His underwear was forcibly removed. He was thrown to the floor, his hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus\u2026.He was then pulled from the floor and dragged to a corner of the room, where his feet were tied together. His blindfold was removed. A flash went off and temporarily blinded him. When he recovered his sight, he saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. <\/em>[editor’s note: The righteous always wear masks.]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Four months, two hunger strikes, and a sojourn in more than one secret prison<\/strong> later, the man, Khaled El-Masri, who had been picked up in Macedonia in 2003, was simply dumped by the side of the road near an Albanian border crossing. Along the way, he\u2019d had a gun held to his head as an interrogator berated him, demanding that he admit his connection to Al Qaeda. Why would someone with such dangerous connections be released? What about the casual information he might have that could unravel some devious plot?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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The answer is simple: after a couple of months, the C.I.A. figured out that they had picked up not a shadowy terrorist, but a car salesman from Bavaria who happened to have a similar name. Even then, they kept him prisoner for several weeks while trying to figure out their next move. There is now no dispute that this was a case of simple mistaken identity. (I asked Jose Rodriguez, who was part of the C.I.A.\u2019s interrogation program, about El-Masri\u2019s case\u00a0when I interviewed him this summer<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

When El-Masri first got back to Germany\u2014the Albanians put him on a plane to Frankfurt\u2014he had trouble getting people to believe him. His wife had gone back to her family. But the story slowly came out, thanks, in part, to El-Masri\u2019s hair. (From the judgment: \u201cScientific testing of Mr El-Masri\u2019s hair follicles\u2026 is consistent with Mr El-Masri\u2019s account that he spent time in a South-Asian country and was deprived of food for an extended period of Time.\u201d) The A.C.L.U. tried to bring a case for him in U.S. courts, but the government got it thrown out by asserting its state-secrets privilege; another suit has stalled. In 2006, El Masri came to New York, and was the subject of\u00a0a Talk of the Town story<\/a>, in which he drove through Manhattan with\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0Mark Singer in a convertible\u2014the portrait of a free man. Since then, he has struggled, getting into legal trouble in Germany, unable to find his footing again; his lawyer has spoken of his fits of paranoia. He was put in jail after going into a rage and assaulting his town\u2019s mayor, and then had his sentence extended when he punched a guard. Just because you\u2019re a Hitchcockian character doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s over when the light comes on. Today\u2019s judgment was on a complaint he brought against the government of Macedonia, asking for damages for his \u201csuffering, anguish and mental breakdown,\u201d and there is, sadly, evidence of all three. The court found that he had been tortured, and that Macedonia indeed bore responsibility for having \u201ctransferred him knowingly into the custody of the C.I.A.\u201d when it had reason to believe that he might be. The court awarded him sixty thousand euros.<\/p>\n

It sounds like something from a bad movie\u2014or maybe, in a week in which cinematic portrayals of the same sorts of cells El-Masri found himself in are very much a part of the national conversation, a good one. \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d a movie by Kathryn Bigelow that opens next week, has raised questions about whether it properly portrays torture\u2019s role in the search for bin Laden, and the extent to which it offers a justification for the torture of terrorists. Those are arguments worth confronting (and ones that I\u2019ll join in as soon as I see the movie; meanwhile, see\u00a0Dexter Filkins\u2019s Talk of the Town story\u00a0<\/a>in this week\u2019s issue). But there are others.<\/p>\n

How do we even know that people who are never brought into court\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0terrorists? Between the wrong man and real guilt there is the realm of people we talk ourselves into thinking could be useful to us. The temptations and delusions of torture and indefinite detention interact terribly. Do we trust torturers to pick the people they want to drag into a dark room? We may find that we are mistaken not only about the identity of some blindfolded men but also about who we are, and what we value.<\/p>\n

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORTURING THE WRONG MAN by\u00a0Amy Davidson A\u00a0judgment\u00a0issued on Thursday by the European Court of Human Rights contains an account of the treatment of a man who, after some detective work by a foreign police force, was handed over to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8642"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8653,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8642\/revisions\/8653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}