LAT: One Man’s Claims May Be a Look at a War’s Hidden Side

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-masri12apr12,0,3166818,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Khaled el-Masri says his strange and violent trip into the void began with a bus ride on New Year's Eve 2003.

When he returned to this city five months later, his friends didn't believe the odyssey he recounted. Masri said he was kidnapped in Macedonia, beaten by masked men, blindfolded, injected with drugs and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents. He said he was finally dumped in the mountains of Albania.

"One person told me not to tell this story because it's so unreal, no one would listen," said Masri, a German citizen who was born in Lebanon.

A Munich prosecutor has launched an investigation and is intent on questioning U.S. officials about the unemployed car salesman's claim that he was wrongly targeted as an Islamic militant. Masri's story, if true, would offer a rare firsthand look at one man's disappearance into a hidden dimension of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities have used overseas detention centers and jails to hold or interrogate suspected terrorists, such as at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of the estimated 9,000 prisoners in U.S. military custody were captured in Iraq, but others, like Masri, were allegedly picked up in another country and delivered to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan or elsewhere for months of confinement.

[applegrove]

1. The War's 'hidden side' is THE WAR!! n/t

[Mojorabbit]

2. I am so

burned out. I have been angry so long I am just numb and when I think it can't get worse it does. Sigh.

[UpInArms]

3. I understand those feelings

I'm glad that you found DU - it's my refuge from the unseeing, unknowing, unspeaking that is happening within our society.

:hi:

[UpInArms]

4. somehow all if this

reminds me of the 70s movie, Midnight Express.

:(

[MADem]

5. Not quite the same

...but the feeling of "totally screwed" certainly applies.

[UpInArms]

7. that was the feeling

totally screwed

[KoKo]

6. Well...anyone whose been on DU for awhile will believe this...

most everything unbelievable turns out to be true if one has access to real information. :-(

[leftchick]

8. I believe you Khaled

I also think you are very lucky to be able to tell your story right now. :scared:

[Jamastiene]

9. That reminds me

of something an ex police officer I used to work with in a retail store once said. He said that the local police here had taken a black man that they had no evidence against into a room and sent an officer in there dressed in a pink bunny rabbit costume to beat him until he confessed to something he didn't do (the police thought for sure he did it, must have, he was black, that's their attitude). He said "Who'd believe him if he tried to tell anyone?" That sounds like the same tactic to me.

[DoYouEverWonder]

10. The situation you are describing

happens more often then most people in this country will ever know. Mostly it happens to poor blacks and immigrants, who don't know what their rights are and do not have money or access to lawyers. BTW, if the police don't feel like giving you your rights, like the right to remain silent or the right to have lawyer, forget about it, they will do what they please until you sign that statement or make that confession.

[PsychoDad]

11. Just another example of the continuing crusade....

Against Islam and the Bush administration's "Culture of Lies".

An illegal war breeding illegal tactics, and one's greatest crime may be looking too "islamic"