Al Masri: The CIA Made Him Do It

Remember the Al Masri case - the Lebanese-German who travelled to Macedonia for a vacation (his explanation) where he was caught under suspicion of terrorist ties and flown to Afghanistan, presumerably by the CIA?

His behavior has struck us as weird on more than one occasion, and John Rosenthal wrote several pieces on his disturbing Islamist leanings. Still, he become the German media's poster child (more here) as a "victim" of sinister CIA activities.

Now he ran into a different kind of trouble:

Former CIA Detainee Arrested For German Arson Attack

A German citizen of Lebanese descent who claims he was kidnapped by the CIA and tortured in an Afghanistan prison was arrested Thursday in Germany on suspicion of arson, police said.

Khaled el-Masri, 43, was taken into custody after a fire caused major damage to a wholesale market in the southern German town of Neu-Ulm during the night, a police spokesman said.

A statement by the police said el-Masri was "under urgent suspicions of setting fire" at the entrance of a wholesale market after having destroyed the glass door.

A judge ordered that el-Masri be held in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital pending investigations into the blaze, which caused damage worth 500,000 euros ($675,000).

You know who is behind Al Masri's somewhat deviating behavior? You guessed it.

Masri's lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said Thursday that his client's
act had been a gesture of despair after a dispute with the store
concerned had got out of hand. He said Masri had still not received proper psychological counselling for the torture he said he had suffered.

Headline in the online version of n-tv: "Masris Verzweiflungstat" ("Masri's desperate deed").

No doubt, the CIA made him do it...

Comments

[WhatDoIKnow]

From now on whatever Al Masri does it won't be his fault, it will be Guantanamo. He could have tried to lead a more productive life after his release, like some of his former Guantanamo comrades who are now fighting (again) American troops. Instead, he became a petty criminal. What a waste of talent...

[FranzisM]

This man is doing attention-whoring because he understands that he is in the epicenter of a cultural controversy over the role of espionage in society.

If anyone else said that he had an encounter with the CIA, this would be a pretext for a psychotherapist to put him on chemicals that would prevent him from expressing any coherent statement. With Khaled el-Masri, this standard reaction is not possible, it would not make any sense to try to convince him or the public that his CIA encounter had been a hallucination, and in addition to that it is blatantly obvious that this pretext would make no sense.

In a broader context, it appears that the spy entities are determined to sacrifice any development in the West that may lead to genuinely open results on the altar of their flawed doctrine of "plausible deniability." How many individuals in Europe who are not terrorists, or even only Muslims, were attacked by them, either physically or with surveillance, just because the would-be-know-it-all´s believed they could get away with their meddling?

That sums up the role into which the spies have been putting themselves: By pushing their hallucination of unlimited power from which there was nowhere to hide, the spy entities have made it ever more difficult for their subjects to get a rational grasp on the reality outside of the West. Everything that happens to individuals pioneering into the semantic no-man´s land off the beaten tracks of their native culture may be a conspiracy.

In America espionage has become an integral part of the culture, and for an outsider it is difficult to tell whether Hollowood controls Langley or vice versa. This is one of the reasons why many in the world despise all things American, because they conclude allowing that culture to get a foot on their ground could only lead to attempts of assimilation by its "intelligence" hydrocephalus. How can we be sure until the spy archives are opened?

Meanwhile, on both sides of the pond, one political party is stuck on enhancing liberty abroad for the cost of undermining it at home, and the other one favors the same thing the other way round. Either way, picking a side of the political spectrum is a quid pro quo choice, and a combination thereof is more likely to undermine than to enhance liberty in both dimensions. This is because trust is the very fabric of a healthy society, and the possibility of espionage is poison to it.

And now Khaled el-Masri has burned down the "don´t ask don´t tell" attitude around this problem.

[Pat Patterson]

And all this time I thought Jacques Derrida was dead.

[John Rohan]

Hey David, great web site.

I also live in Germany and wrote about this case:
http://shieldofachilles.blogspot.com/2007/05/hoodwinked.html

Basically, the lawyer's excuses for this man are ridiculous. Even if he was tortured as he claims (and I don't believe he was), there are thousands of asylum seekers in Germany who were tortured in their home countries. There are thousands of German Veterans and women who were tortured/raped after WWII. I don't recall any of them burning down a building and using the "abuse excuse".

[FranzisM]

I wonder whether el-Masri ever got to read this: Pilots traced to CIA renditions

The Times identifies three fliers facing kidnapping charges in Germany related to a 2003 counter-terrorism mission.