Good.
Because people, the treatment he said he received is sickening.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 – A German citizen who says he was abducted, beaten and taken to Afghanistan by American agents in an apparent case of mistaken identity in 2003 filed suit in federal court today against George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and three companies said to have been involved in secret flight operations.
The suit came three days after Khaled el-Masri, a 42-year-old Lebanese-born former car salesman, was refused entrance to the United States after arriving Saturday in Atlanta on a flight from Germany with the intention of appearing at a news conference today in Washington. He spoke instead by video satellite link, describing somberly how he was beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs during five months in detention in Macedonia and Afghanistan.
People, I want to win the war on terrorism, and I think that we ultimately will. But I’m extremely ashamed that this happening in my country’s name. A torture policy such as ours provides a tragic opportunity for innocent people who have done nothing wrong to fall through the cracks and end up being scared for life.
The costs of war? Apparently so, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep doing what we’ve been doing.
Hearts and minds people, hearts and minds. We won’t win them until we stop torturing people.
Here’s more about our administration’s hypocrisy.
Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U. said the lawsuit was an attempt to counter the “culture of impunity” in the Bush administration for human rights violations and to force the C.I.A. to abandon practices in conflict with American values. The organization has obtained 77,000 pages of government documents on detention and interrogation under the Freedom of Information Act that have been the basis for thousands of news reports.
Mr. Romero took issue with a statement Ms. Rice made on Monday before leaving for Germany denying accusations of human rights violations and declaring that “the United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture.”
“Unfortunately, as our lawsuit shows today, those statements are patently false,” Mr. Romero said.
Few things are as clear to me than this issue. Stop torturing now or run the risk of alienating the world for decades.
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