Court: CIA Tortured Wrongly Detained Terror Suspect

Posted on Dec 13, 2012

AP/Fritz Reiss

Khaled el-Masri.

The European Court of Human Rights has unanimously ruled that Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen suspected of having ties to a terrorist organization, was unlawfully detained, sodomized and beaten up in front of Macedonian state police. In its landmark ruling, the court determined that Macedonia was also guilty of secretly imprisoning, abusing and torturing el-Masri.

This marks the first time the panel has deemed the CIA’s treatment of a suspected terrorist as torture.

The Guardian:

“The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment,” said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

He described the judgment as “an authoritative condemnation of some of the most objectionable tactics employed in the post-9/11 war on terror”. It should be a wake-up call for the Obama administration and US courts, he told the Guardian. For them to continue to avoid serious scrutiny of CIA activities was “simply unacceptable”, he said.

Jamil Dakwar, of the American Civil Liberties Union, described the ruling as “a huge victory for justice and the rule of law”.

The use of CIA interrogation methods widely denounced as torture during the Bush administration’s “war on terror” also came under scrutiny in Congress on Thursday. The US Senate’s select committee on intelligence was expected to vote on whether to approve a mammoth review it has undertaken into the controversial practices that included waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity, beatings and sleep and sensory deprivation.

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