Truespeak

On January 9, 2005 the New York Times told us the story of Khaled el-Masri.

On the afternoon of Dec. 31, 2003, Khaled el-Masri was on a tourist bus headed for the Macedonian capital, Skopje, where he was hoping to escape the "holiday pressures" of home life during a weeklong vacation.

He said that when the bus reached the Serbia-Macedonia border, he was asked the usual questions: Where are you going? How long will you be staying? El-Masri, a German citizen, didn't think much of it until he realized the border guards had confiscated his passport.

The bus moved on, but an increasingly panicked el-Masri was ordered to stay behind. The 41-year-old unemployed car salesman said that a few hours later he was taken to a small, windowless room and accused of being a terrorist by three men dressed in civilian clothes but carrying pistols.

"They asked a lot of questions – if I have relations with al-Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood," recalled el-Masri, who was born in Lebanon. "I kept saying no, but they did not believe me."

It was the first day of what el-Masri said became five months in captivity. He said that after being kidnapped by the Macedonian authorities at the border, he was turned over to officials he believed were from the United States. He said they flew him to a prison in Afghanistan, where he said he was shackled, beaten repeatedly, photographed nude, injected with drugs and questioned by interrogators about what they insisted were his ties to al-Qaeda.

Of course the blinded-by-their-love-for-Bush wingnuts ridiculed this story as yet another example of the liberal media gone wild. But lo and behold, it turns out el-Masri was telling the truth. According to Newsweek, el-Masri is just one of many.

Like many detainees with tales of abuse, Khaled el-Masri had a hard time getting people to believe him. Even his wife didn't know what to make of his abrupt, five-month disappearance last year. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was taken off a bus in Macedonia in south-central Europe while on holiday on Dec. 31, 2003, then whisked in handcuffs to a motel outside the capital city of Skopje. Three weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was brought blindfolded aboard a jet with engines noisily revving, according to his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Masri says he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane" and was chained to clamps on the bare metal floor and wall of the jet.

Masri says he was then flown to Afghanistan, where at a U.S. prison facility he was shackled, repeatedly punched and questioned about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany. Finally released months later, the still-mystified Masri was deposited on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, where he brokenly tried to describe his nightmarish odyssey to a border guard. "The man was laughing at me," Masri told The New York Times, which disclosed his story last month. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh'."

No one's laughing these days, least of all the CIA. NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing's flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri's tale of abduction. Gnjidic, Masri's lawyer, called the information "very, very important" to his case, which is being investigated as a kidnapping by a Munich prosecutor. In what could prove embarrassing to President Bush, Gnjidic added that a German TV station was planning to feature Masri's tale ahead of Bush's much-touted trip to Germany this week. German Interior Minister Otto Schily recently visited CIA Director Porter Goss to discuss the case, and German sources tell NEWSWEEK that Schily was seeking an apology. CIA officials declined to comment on that meeting or any aspect of Masri's story.

(emphasis mine)

So let me get this whole thing straight. We're flying detainees around the world in order to interrogate them. Why not just interrogate them here? What could possibly be the advantage of interrogating them someplace else?

The answer, of course, is torture. We're taking them someplace where they can be tortured away from prying eyes. Someplace where they can be beaten, water-boarded, humiliated, and shocked. All the while, we condemn the insurgents, the dictators, and the terrorists for doing exactly what we're responsible for. Sure, we may not be the ones actually torturing these detainees, but we're facilitating it. We're moving them to the places where it can be done in secret.

Is it any wonder why the majority of the Muslim world sees us as the terrorists? As we stand atop our mountain of moralistic bullshit, we are, in truth, wallowing in it just like the rest of them. We are such bastards.


BTW - New advisorjim post here.