BERLIN _ By January of 2004, when German citizen Khaleed al-Masri arrived at the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prison in Afghanistan, agency officials were pretty sure he wasn't a terrorist. They also knew he didn't know any terrorists, or much about anything in the world of international terror.
In short, they suspected they'd nabbed the wrong man.
Still, the agency continued to imprison and interrogate him, according to a recently released internal CIA report on al-Masri's arrest. The report claims that al-Masri suffered no physical abuse during his wrongful imprisonment, though it acknowledges that for months he was kept in a "small cell with some clothing, bedding and a bucket for his waste." Al-Masri says he was tortured, specifically that a medical examination against his will constituted sodomy.
The embarrassing, and horrifying, case of al-Masri is hardly new. It has been known for a decade as a colossal example of CIA error in the agency's pursuit of terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush.
But the recently released internal report makes it clear that the CIA's failures in the al-Masri case were even more outrageous than previous accounts have suggested.
The report is heavily redacted _ whole pages are blank _ and the names of those involved have been removed. But enough is there to give a good understanding of what happened and what went wrong.
Adding to the sense of injustice: Even though the agency realized early on that al-Masri was the wrong man, it couldn't figure out how to release him without having to acknowledge its mistake. The agency eventually dumped him unceremoniously in Albania and essentially pretended his arrest and detention had never happened.
The release of the report, which is 90 pages long and was written in July 2007, came in June after a Freedom of Information Act suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing al-Masri in his decadelong attempt to get an official apology from the United States.
