The unanswered questions were frustrating for us, but they were devastating for el-Masri and Saidi, both of whom told me they needed answers and an apology so they could move forward with their lives. They are still waiting.
In the years that followed his ordeal, el-Masri would be arrested and jailed for arson and assault. “I have asked several times from the beginning for psychological help, but without any luck,” his lawyer, Gnjidic, told me after el-Masri set fire to a department store in his hometown. “The very ironic thing is that he will get psychological help now, after he committed a crime, and as a torture victim didn’t get it before, when he asked for it.”
El-Masri tried to find work but couldn’t. His wife and children moved back to Lebanon. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that he had been a victim of rendition and torture because security officials mistook him for someone else. He was awarded €60,000 in compensation, but the money didn’t reach him until several years later. By that time, he had moved to Vienna. Still unable to find work, he lived in a homeless shelter for a time and sometimes stayed with friends and acquaintances.
In September 2015, I met him at a hotel in Vienna. His hair was shorter and whiter, and he had bags under his eyes. I asked if he had considered joining the Islamic State, as some German papers had recently reported. He smiled sarcastically.
“That’s something I will keep to myself,” he told me. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I will talk about it when the time is right. I don’t allow anyone to tell me what I can or can’t do or where to go or not. Not after what they have done to me.”
He said something else that stuck with me: “People in the West are the last ones in the world that should talk about human rights,” he told me. “Look what they have done to me and others. There have been no consequences for those responsible. On one hand, they are great at pointing at others and criticizing them, but then they don’t want to look inside and have accountability for violations of human rights.”
El-Masri’s case was a landmark in our understanding of U.S. rendition policy and the War on Terror; it was the first time we could prove that an innocent man had been kidnapped and tortured by a Western government in the name of fighting terrorism. It was also one of those cases that put the values we say we all stand for on trial. If we are to be true to those values, our political leaders must be willing to acknowledge mistakes, and there must be consequences. Otherwise our systems lose their legitimacy.
In the years since I first spoke to him, I’ve often wondered how the West might win back the trust of a man like el-Masri. What will his children think of the United States and Germany when they’re old enough to understand what happened to him? These questions haunt me. I fear we haven’t heard the end of his story or those of many others like him.
5
Even If I Die Today or Tomorrow
Lebanon, 2007
I did not return to Iraq, but the war was never far away. Like the searing memories and feeling of dread I brought home from Baghdad, the war’s characters and wicked problems stayed with me. I seemed unable to escape them.
The invasion of Iraq and the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as well as the jihadists’ growing facility with the Internet as a means of spreading their message, had given Al Qaeda a foothold in places where it had previously lacked a presence. In March 2004, a group of North African Islamists and criminals orchestrated the bombings in Madrid that killed nearly two hundred people and wounded more than eighteen hundred. In July 2005, bombs exploded on three underground trains and a bus in London. The perpetrators lived in and around the gritty English mill town of Leeds and were all Britons, though one had been born in Jamaica.
We saw an increase of potentially moderate Sunnis, who were beginning to embrace Al Qaeda or at least to quietly support its goals. They were outraged by the bogus justification that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had used for the war—the need to destroy Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist—along with the lack of accountability for the invasion and the torture and other abuses that occurred. The rise of Shia militias in Iraq and the growing regional influence of Iran also played key roles. Many Muslims I spoke to, whether in Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa, told me they believed the West was at war with Islam.
After the el-Masri story, I visited the New York Times headquarters and met my editors and many U.S.-based colleagues in person for the first time. One of the reporters I got to know was Michael Moss, a friendly silver-haired Californian now living in Brooklyn. Michael was in his early fifties, more than twenty years my senior. During the years we worked together, he would become a sort of older brother figure to me and a close friend. He taught me a lot about building stories from different angles and where to dig for information; I appreciated his deep sense of humor and ability to laugh at himself. He was very down to earth—a result of his West Coast upbringing, he claimed.
Michael worked for the investigative unit, to which I was also attached. He was reporting two stories about Sunnis who had been detained and tortured by Shia militias in Iraq—militias that sometimes collaborated with the U.S. military. Michael and I worked on the stories together, traveling to Syria to talk to former detainees who had fled there.
The men we met in Syria had been brutalized. We felt sure that the treatment they had endured would only encourage more hatred against the West and create a larger rift between Sunnis and Shia, not just in Iraq but also throughout the region. And indeed the violence of the Shia militias and the abuse that many Iraqi Sunnis suffered in Iraqi and U.S. military prisons galvanized a new generation of jihadists. Another inspiration for the Sunnis was the Palestinian struggle. Among the new jihadi groups were some that used Al Qaeda’s methods and resources to fight for the Palestinian cause.