Obama administration continues to hound journalist to reveal sources

US prosecutors have appealed a federal district court decision to limit the scope of a journalist’s testimony in the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Last week the case against New York Times reporter James Risen was taken to the appeals court after lower courts defended his right not to name a source. Risen was originally subpoenaed to give evidence in 2008. The Justice Department were asking Risen to give up his sources for a chapter of his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” Risen refused citing a commitment to confidentiality.

Risen and a colleague won a Pulitzer for a December 2005 article in the New York Times that exposed the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. His book State of War was written a year later and it included explosive revelations about illegal actions taken by President Bush, including the domestic wiretapping program. It also disclosed how Bush secretly pressured the CIA to use torture on detainees in secret prisons, how the White House ignored information that showed Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how the Bush Administration turned a blind eye to Saudi involvement in terrorism.

The chapter that got him into trouble is about the CIA’s efforts to disrupt the Iranian program. The CIA sent a defected Russian scientist to Vienna to give nuclear bomb plans to an Iranian official on the pretext he would provide further assistance in exchange for cash. The CIA deliberately inserted a technical flaw in the designs but the Russian scientist spotted it and told the Iranians. In his book, Risen said the ploy was reckless and may have had exactly the opposite effect than intended. The Bush administration subpoenaed Risen to reveal his source in January 2008. Risen successfully fought the subpoena which lapsed 18 months later. But in April 2010, the New York Times reported the Obama administration was still seeking to compel Risen to testify.

In the meantime US authorities’ suspicions about the identity of the leaker fixed on Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling was a former CIA officer trained to recruit Iranians to work for the CIA in the 1990s. Sterling, who is black, was sacked in 2002 and he claimed racial discrimination. However a court upheld the sacking saying litigation would require the disclosure of highly classified information. Between 2002 and 2004, the FBI claimed it tracked email traffic between Risen and Sterling. Sterling was arrested in January on charges he illegally disclosed national defence information and obstructed justice, but there was no mention of Risen in the warrant.

In July this year, a federal judge ruled Risen did not have to testify in the Sterling case saying prosecutors had not demonstrated his testimony was critical. District Court judge Leonie Brinkema said Risen’s testimony was not necessary because court records say an unidentified former intelligence official has testified that Risen told him Sterling was the source. Prosecutors argued the official's testimony would be inadmissible hearsay, but Brinkema ruled it would not be because statements that tend to prove an individual's guilt may not be hearsay. Brinkema's order restricted Risen's testimony to matters of his authorship and the accuracy of the book.

But now prosecutors have appeal Brinkema’s decision to the US Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia further delaying Sterling’s trial which was due to start yesterday. Prosecutors cited a 1972 US Supreme Court decision Branzburg v Hayes which ruled 5-4 reporters have no First Amendment right to refuse to answer all questions before grand juries if they witnessed criminal activity. However in the years following Branzburg, federal courts nationwide interpreted the “limited nature” of case to give journalists qualified privilege to balance their right to protect the sources against the government’s need for the information.

Reporters Without Borders has urged the Obama administration to withdraw the appeal. “We remind the Obama administration that its role is not to determine what is good coverage of national security issues,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Jeffrey Sterling’s trial has now been suspended indefinitely. Forcing Risen to testify is an attempt to muzzle every journalist who might publish leaked information. It is an attempt to decide what should and should not be in the press.” They had a statement from Risen which said he would press on. “I believe that this case is a fundamental battle over freedom of the press in the United States,” Risen said. “If I don’t fight, the government will go after other journalists.”

India blames Pakistan’s ISI for Kabul embassy blast

Last week National Security Advisor MK Narayanan said the Indian government has good evidence linking Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI to the 7 July embassy bomb in Kabul that killed 56 people. Narayanan refused to elaborate on the nature of the evidence but said “the ISI needs to be destroyed”. Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani earlier denied his country's intelligence service had any involvement in the bombing. 'Why should Pakistan destabilize Afghanistan?” he said. “It is in our interest to have a stable Afghanistan.”

But whether or not the ISI was directly involved in the Kabul bombing, there is little doubt they have played an active role in Afghan affairs. ISI stands for the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. Very little happens in Pakistan or its proxy state Afghanistan without the knowledge of this powerful but shadowy group. The ISI has been crucial in maintaining order and sustaining military rule in an otherwise semi-anarchic state.

Critics now say the ISI is out of control answering to neither the president nor the Prime Minister. Mariane Pearl, writing about the murder of her husband Danny, described the ISI as a “kingdom within a state”. Many in the organisation are ideologically sympathetic to jihadi organisations. The Pearls were both journalists working in Karachi in 2002 when one Jihadi group kidnapped Danny and executed him. Mariane’s account of the incident reached a wider audience with Michael Winterbottom's film version of A Mighty Heart (starring Angelina Jolie). The Pearls had gotten an inkling of official Pakistani views when they interviewed Hamid Gul who accused the “Jews and Mossad” of carrying out the 9/11 attacks.

Hamid Gul was no ordinary conspiracy theorist. He was the director of the ISI from 1987 to 1989 and was considered the architect of the Afghan jihad. Gul masterminded the mujahideen war against the Soviets, financed by the CIA. In the nineties Gul was called “the Godfather of the Taliban”. Gul fell out of power but remains an important background voice. After the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, he told Robert Fisk he was not a Muslim extremist "but I support the implementation of Shari'a and we must be governed by the rules of Allah."

After the Afghan mujahideen war, Pakistan terrorists turned their attention to the “liberation” of Kashmir. By 1995, the ISI engaged the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeM) to raise a Taliban-type force of young Pakistani students to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. But now the Jihadi monster it created has gotten out of control. In 2003, JeM suicide bombers attempted to assassinate President Musharraf. A year earlier Pearl was killed by Sheikh Omar Saeed, a double agent of the ISI and JeM.

The ISI did not like journalists getting too close to their operations. As well as Pearl, they persecuted two Pakistani journalists who dared write about their activities. Ghulam Hasnain, whose work was syndicated to Time and CNN, was investigating Indian fugitive and smuggler Dawood Ebrahim when was arrested by the ISI a day before Pearl disappeared. He was so traumatised when released 36 hours later, he has refused to speak of it to anyone since. They also physically threatened Shaheen Sehbai, the editor of Islamabad’s The News, in a vain attempt to stop him from linking Pearl’s assassin, Sheik Omar Saeed, with the ISI.

Other leading Pakistani journalists such as Kamran Khan have struck a Faustian pact with the ISI in order to continually report freely. In order to maintain a relationship with them he writes as much to please them as about them. Khan freely admits the ISI have funded madrassas which have harboured Al Qaeda operatives. But he said that some of the Islamists are actually double-agents. He explained how it works to PBS Frontline: “the bottom line here is that, ‘Look. Whatever you are doing, whatever you do, we understand. But mind you, we cannot afford to harbour Arabs here. We cannot afford to harbour non-Pakistanis here. So please, please cooperate with us on that count.’ There is a very deep connection between the religious madrassas, and the key religious scholars, and the establishment.”

Given their power, Mariane Pearl could never understand why the ISI took an active interest in her husband’s disappearance. While the investigating police told Pearl that the ISI had been to her house on the day after the kidnap, she was unaware of their presence except the two occasions they sent a sullen, unhelpful and unsympathetic man who gave his name and rank, in possible homage to Catch-22, as “Major Major”. But if Major played dumb, others in the ISI definitely knew more about the killing than they were letting on.

When the Pakistani police finally tracked down Omar, they found he had already turned himself in to the custody of the home secretary of the Punjab state. Brigadier Ejaz Shah gave Omar sanctuary and kept his detention secret a week. Shah was a powerful figure behind the scenes. In the 1990s, he worked for the ISI and was the official “handler” for Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Musharraf appointed him to the Punjab role on taking power in 1999. It is likely the ISI interrogated Omar during that week.

The Pakistanis weren’t the only people interested in Omar. In 2001, the FBI were tracing a link between Omar and 9/11 leader Mohammad Atta. Omar wired $100,000 to Atta in the month before the US attacks and the FBI wanted to know who authorised him to make the money transfer. It seemed the order had come from Omar’s boss: ISI head Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed. But while this might have shocked the FBI, it would have been no surprise to another well-known American agency. Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, told the South Asia Tribune in 2004 it has long been established, “the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA”. Yet this unpalatable truth remains hidden in a patchwork of Byzantine alliances. And as the Indian embassy bombing showed, it remains out of control.

Waterboarding: torture on trial

CIA Director Michael Hayden has admitted his agency’s failures in destroying videotapes showing the use of the waterboarding torture technique. His admission comes after a US government official said the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the orders of the head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service. The tapes showed several prisoners including Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah being restrained while water was poured over their mouths and noses to produce the sensation of drowning. Critics say that by destroying the tapes, the CIA was attempting to head off its own embarrassing version of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Waterboarding is a torture technique beloved of information seekers for over 500 years. It involves strapping down prisoners feet up, covering their mouths with plastic or cloth and pouring water over theirs face. Victims quickly begin to inhale water, causing the psychological sensation of "slow-motion drowning". Its attraction is that although it causes great physical and mental suffering, it leaves no marks on the body. The CIA says its interrogation techniques are in accordance with legal guidance from the Justice Department. They also point to a presidential finding in 2002 legalising the technique.

The history of waterboarding dates back at least to the 16th Italian Inquisition and perhaps even earlier. It was known as "water torture," the "water cure" or tormenta de toca (mouth torment) because a thin piece of cloth was placed over the victim's mouth. But under the influence of the 17th century Enlightenment, the practice was banned as “morally repugnant”. In 1901, the US military sentenced an Army major to 10 years of hard labour for waterboarding a Filipino rebel. In 1968 a soldier was punished after the Washington Post published a photo of him waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.

Despite these punishments, waterboarding has undergone a 20th century revival. It has been used by a succession of Japanese, French, British, Cambodian and Latin American security forces. It got renewed impetus in the US after the CIA cited it as the technique that made 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed talk though there was a proviso that "not all of it [was] reliable”. According to one former CIA agent, waterboarding works. John Kiriakou, a leader of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, said the technique forced Zubaydah to talk in less than a minute.

Conservative commentators such as Greg Gutfeld of Fox News says that the technique’s success in getting Zubaydah to name his accomplices shows that the ends justify the means. Gutfeld admits it is torture but says that “a little simulated drowning” is an acceptable preventative measure. “This new info prevented dozens of attacks,” he said yesterday. “But if we had listened to the Streisands and Afflecks of the world and banned waterboarding, then how many lives might have been lost?” The nub of Gutfield’s argument is that waterboarding is morally justified because the loss of benefit to the individual tortured is less than the loss of benefit to those who might die if torture is not applied.

But Catherine McDonald from Monash University’s philosophy department says all pro-torture arguments are logically flawed and morally implausible. Apart from the possible problem of torturing the innocent, McDonald disputes the evidence that torture is an effective means of gaining information. Its use also undermines civilian support for military activities and can galvanise an otherwise demoralised opposition. She believes that the concept of ‘justifiable torture’ is merely a rationalisation for the current US administration’s political position.

Torture is an international crime. The international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment has been ratified by 130 countries including the US and Australia. It forbids nations from deliberately inflicting ‘severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental…for such purposes as obtaining...information or a confession. The Judge Advocates General (JAGs) of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines agreed in August 2006 that waterboarding violates US law and the law of war. Several JAGs specifically stated that use of this technique would violate the US anti-torture statute, making it a felony offence.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: “torture is senseless violence. Its purpose is not only the extortion of confessions and betrayals; the victim must disgrace himself, by his screams and his submissions, like a human animal”. Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, has no doubt that waterboarding is torture and also says he knows why the CIA destroyed the evidence. "It really shows a mind-set and pattern of lawlessness,” he said. ”Not only to engage in illegal behaviour like torture, but to then destroy the evidence and attempt to cover it up.”

CIA's destroyed tapes renews talks of 9/11 conspiracy theories

US Congress has called for an investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes claiming there may be an illegal cover-up. The call follows an admission by the agency’s Director-General Michael Hayden that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators. But his admission has raised questions about trust and what other evidence the CIA has destroyed.

Because the tapes featured 9/11 suspect Abu Zubaydah, these latest revelations are a boon to those who believe in the 9/11 conspiracy theory. Writing in Time magazine ex-CIA operative Robert Baer says that although he didn’t believe the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives, or that a rocket struck the Pentagon, he says he has “felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists”. But he dismisses the idea as something the CIA were capable of doing. “I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11,” he said. “Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.”

Veteran Canadian political activist and journalist Barrie Zwicker is less certain that Baer knows the truth about 9/11. In 2002, he was one of the first mainstream journalists to question the official word on what happened that day. In 2006 he published the book “Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11” which forensically examines much of the evidence and finds the official record wanting. His book provides 26 exhibits (conveniently labelled A to Z) which he claims provides proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that 9/11 was an inside job. Zwicker calls this a “false flag” operation and in the book he describes many examples of similar operations from history.

The subtitle of Zwicker’s book alludes to the heart of what he sees as the problem: a media cover-up. Zwicker says that the world’s media and their wealthy owners have colluded to prevent discussion of alternative scenarios of what might have happened on 11 September 2001. He claims the three biggest secrets about 9/11 are a) the size of the constituency of non-believers in the official story b) the body of evidence that disputes the official record and c) the fact that the media have steered clear of this evidence, although it is readily available. Zwicker castigates the politically motivated 9/11 Commission report which found that 19 Arabs, funded by Bin Laden and others, organised and planned the operation catching the entire US intelligence, military, political and diplomatic establishment off guard.

Exhibit A in Zwicker’s repudiation is the collapse of the third building, WTC7, at 5:20pm on 9/11. The 9/11 commission report does not describe how the building collapsed but the official story is that the building was struck by debris falling from the collapsing twin towers and then fires made it unstable. Firefighters evacuated the building after they heard creaking sounds. The building collapsed a couple of hours later. The official cause was “loss of structural integrity likely as a result of weakening caused by fires”. Zwicker disputes this. He says the building was the home to CIA and Secret Service offices and the collapse had all the hallmarks of a controlled demolition.

Zwicker’s next five most important pieces of evidence all relate to North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD). He says NORAD did not follow standard operating procedures (SOP) that day. SOP states that in the event of a major problem such as a hijacking, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) contacts NORAD who can scramble fighters to the scene ‘within a matter of minutes’. The 9/11 report says NORAD had just nine minutes notice for the New York attacks and none at all for the others. Zwicker says this is contradicted by evidence from the FAA’s Laura Brown.

Once scrambled by NORAD, the F-15s from Otis air base did not know where to go and were ordered out into the Atlantic in a holding pattern awaiting further instructions. Meanwhile Andrews Air Force Base less than 20km from Washington was unable to protect the capital. The commission claimed Andrews had no fighters on alert but Zwicker cites Aviation Week which said three F-16s were nearby on a training mission. Zwicker also says NORAD has had plans for precisely just such an emergency since the Soviet threat of 1961. Scrambling fighter aircraft had been a routine occurrence for years before 9/11.

Zwicker quotes Michael Ruppert who said in 2004 that the “mysterious and inexplicable failure” of US’s air defences is the “most glaring and gaping hole” in the official story. Barely mentioned in the official testimony is the fact that the US was conducting major war games on the day of the attacks. These included Northern Vigilance, Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior and Tripod II. These games included scenarios of hijacked airplanes in the area where all four attacks actually occurred. The flood of “noise” from these games caused what Ruppert called a “paralysis of fighter response”.

The next five pieces of Zwicker’s evidence (H through L) relate to the Twin Towers. He says the WTC collapse revealed many features of controlled demolitions (including oral testimony from firefighters), and the Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. He also cited evidence from similar out-of-control highrise fires in Los Angeles and Philadelphia that showed steel-framed towers don’t collapse because of them. Finally, Zwicker says the steel from the WTC was removed from the scene before it could be examined which was a federal offence.

Exhibit M looked at President Bush’s immediate response. Zwicker says that Bush’s decision to stay in the Florida classroom for eight minutes after being told of the second attack was inconsistent with official protocol. Zwicker asks why didn’t the Secret Service remove him? His answer is that their behaviour suggested they knew what was going to happen and they did not fear for his life.

The next two points cover the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission claims Pentagon officials did not know about the hijacking of Flight 77 which it says struck the building at 9.38am local time. Again Laura Brown disputes this saying the FAA shared details of all hijacked flights to NORAD. Zwicker also disputes what hit the building saying alleged pilot Hani Hanjour was too incompetent to fly a Cessna let alone a jetliner. He also claims the hole was not big enough to cover the wings and the videotape evidence shows no airplane.

Exhibits P and Q related to Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. Zwicker claims the flight was shot down and parts of the airplane were found scattered over a wide radius. He also disputes the use of cell phones aboard the plane. He claims that cell phones don’t work above 2,500 m and the countryside of rural Pennsylvania has no service anyway. He says the cell phone stories were a “real-time channel for lies necessary to the official story’s ‘Script’”. Presumably Zwicker did not interview relatives of the dead to corroborate this claim.

The next three pieces of evidence relate to the 9/11 Commission itself. President Bush waited 441 days before reluctantly establishing a commission to investigate 9/11 and then starved it of funds (the commission had a $14m budget compared to the $40m available to investigate Clinton’s sex scandals). He tried to put Henry Kissinger in as chair and when that failed he appointed Philip Zelikow as executive director. Zelikow was a member of George Bush Snr’s administration. Their eventually report was “571 page lie” according to David Ray Griffin, who says he has found at least 100 inaccuracies in the report.

Exhibits U through W examined the role of the CIA and FBI. The CIA has long been the training ground for terrorists around the world. According to Michael Springmann, the US consulate in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia was run by the intelligence services. They are also linked to the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency who apparently wired $100,000 to 9/11 leader Mohamed Atta shortly before the attacks. The FBI also provided protection to suspected terrorists and agent Sibel Edmonds who was gagged by Attorney-General John Ashcroft after she queried issues ignored by the 9/11 Commssion.

Exhibit X was the apparent unusual behaviour of Wall St traders in the days before 9/11. The two airlines impacted had “put” options 90 percent greater than normal in the week before. Exhibit Y documented the close connections between Osama Bin Laden and the CIA and the final one, Exhibit Z looked at how the Bush neo-con Project for a New American Century (PNAC) called for a “New Pearl Harbor” as a catastrophic event that would allow the US to play a more dominant role in securing oil in the Gulf.

Zwicker says the original Pearl Harbor was one of many examples of a ‘false flag’ operation. He says that President Roosevelt had advance warning of the attack but deliberately stood by in order to bring the US into the war. Zwicker quotes other examples from history including the Guy Fawkes gunpowder plot which ended the influence of Catholicism in England, Hitler’s Reichstag fire in 1933, the Tonkin Incident which escalated the Vietnam war in 1964 and the Kuwaiti incubator baby deception in 1990 which swung US support around to an invasion of Iraq.

Many of Zwicker’s arguments are demolished in an article in Popular Mechanics which provides valid reasons to support the official cause of the WTC7 collapse, as well as the Pentagon attack and other kinks in the evidence. Nonetheless Zwicker’s book is a useful attack both on the politicised nature of the 9/11 Commission (and its refusal to pin blame on internal incompetence and political interference) and the refusal of the mainstream media to even countenance an argument of the conspiracies on their merits. Zwicker also rightly counsels people to question what they see and read in the media.

Rendition made ordinary

Last week, the European parliament released a report which blasted its own members for its involvement in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. The report said 14 European governments in Europe turned a blind eye to over a thousand CIA flights through their airspace between 2001 and 2005, some of which were used to illegally abduct terrorist suspects for questioning. The report, emerged from a year-long investigation by a special European Parliament committee and named Germany, Britain, Ireland and Portugal as the worst offenders permitting the most number of covert flights.

Italian Socialist MEP Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report’s final conclusions, told reporters that "involvement in detainment amounts to a certain extent to involvement in torture." Although the parliament cannot impose sanctions on its member states, the release is a serious embarrassment to the EU. The report goes to a vote of the full parliament next month.

In US law, rendition means the surrender of persons or property from one jurisdiction to another. However it does not have any validity in the canon of international law. The US describes it as an “extra-legal process”. The history of extraordinary rendition dates back to the Clinton administration. The CIA began an intelligence-gathering program that involved the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where they thought federal and international legal safeguards would not apply.

The process remained a small-time CIA operation until 9/11. From then on, the program expanded dramatically. Non US-nationals suspected of terrorism were transported to interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere. CIA agent Robert Baer described a pecking order of detention centres: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt, “ he said.

It is difficult to get a feel for how many people have been victims of these secret renditions. The EU report named 1,245 flights through Europe alone. But the report’s release may be a sign that the tide is turning against rendition. On 16 February, an Italian judge gave approval for a trial in absentia of 25 CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric four years ago. Meanwhile victims who have escaped the rendition hellholes are also seeking redress in the courts. The two most famous cases known so far are Maher Arar and Khalid El-Masri.

Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian wireless technology consultant. On 26 September 2002, Arar was in transit in New York’s JFK airport when returning to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Likely acting on false information from Canadian police, US officials detained and interrogated him about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Syria. Syrian military intelligence held him in a tiny “grave-like” cell for ten months before they moved him to a better prison. He was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession. He was released after a year. A 2006 Canadian enquiry totally exonerated Arar of any involvement in terrorism. The US did not co-operate with the enquiry and Arar remains on a US watchlist because of "his personal associations and travel history”.

Khalid El-Masri has also suffered brutally in the name of rendition. El-Masri was born in Lebanon and moved to Germany to escape the civil war. There he married a Lebanese and gained German citizenship. In 2003, he travelled from his home in the city of Ulm to Skopje, Macedonia. On arrival at the Macedonian border, he was detained by police who thought his passport was fake. El-Masri’s misfortune was to have a similar name to Khalid Al-Masri who was wanted in connection for his involvement in the Al Qaeda Hamburg cell which carried out the 9/11 attacks. Macedonian police held El-Masri for three weeks before releasing him. They also informed the CIA.

The CIA sent a snatch team to Macedonia and kidnapped El-Masri. They assaulted and drugged him, then flew him out of the country to the infamous “Salt Pit” prison near Kabul in Afghanistan where he was frequent tortured and injected with drugs. After two months US officials concede his passport was genuine and El-Masri was not a terrorist. El-Masri was finally taken to Albania where he was deposited on a desolate road at night with no apology and no money. Suspicious Albanian authorities initially arrested him on suspicion of terrorism. In May 2005, he finally made it home to Germany only to find his wife had gone back to Lebanon, thinking he had left her. One year later a Washington Federal District Judge dismissed a lawsuit El-Masri filed against the CIA explaining that a public trial would "present a grave risk of injury to national security”.

The full truth of extraordinary rendition may never be known.