I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

“Go on, tell them,” Bouchachi said.

  Saidi said that at some point he’d lost his Algerian passport and began using fake Tunisian identity documents. He showed us a document bearing the name Ramzi ben Mizauni ben Fraj.

  “Why did you use a fake passport?” Craig asked him.

  Saidi said he had been afraid of going to the Algerian embassy while the country was at war with Islamists. He denied that he had been active in any of the groups declared terrorist organizations by the Algerian government, but he explained that his religiosity would have been enough to make people at the embassy suspicious. That, he said, was the sole reason he’d adopted a false identity.

  On May 10, 2003, shortly after he left his home in Tanga, Tanzanian police surrounded his car and brought him to a jail in Dar es Salaam. At first he thought they were arresting him for using a false passport, but three days later, he was taken to the border with Malawi and handed over to a group of Malawians in plainclothes and two middle-aged “white men, like your colleague,” he told me in Arabic. “They were also wearing jeans like him and T-shirts.”

  I could hear the anxiety in his voice. “Please don’t worry,” I told him. “You can trust us, as Khaled el-Masri already has done.”

  “The white men, they spoke English to the Malawians,” he said. “I was handed over, and I understood that something very bad was going to happen.”

  Saidi told us how the Malawians held him for a week before handing him over to five men and a woman. What happened then was similar to what el-Masri had described: His eyes were covered with cotton and tape, his feet and hands shackled. His clothes were cut off, and he heard the clicks of what he believes were cameras. They drove him to an airport and loaded him onto a plane.

  After a long flight, they took him to a dark prison. “The lights were almost never turned on, and there was awfully loud and deafening Western music,” he said. One of his masked interrogators told him through a translator, “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are. No one is going to defend you.” He described being chained by one hand to the wall in his cell.

  After a week, he was taken to another prison. “There, they put me in a room, suspended me by my arms, and attached my feet to the floor,” he told us in a low voice. “They cut off my clothes very fast and took off my blindfold.” A young woman with shoulder-length blond hair and an older man entered the room and interrogated him for two hours, using a Moroccan translator. It was then that Saidi learned why he was there.

  The interrogators asked him about a phone conversation he’d had with his wife’s family in Kenya. “They said, you were talking about airplanes, and I said I never talked about airplanes.” He was left chained up, without clothes or food, for five days, he said. “They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me, and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink. The American man told me I would die there.”

  He described how extended, forced standing, with his wrists bound to the ceiling, had caused his legs and feet to swell. After his return to the “dark” prison, a doctor used a syringe to pump a liquid into his legs. He spent a night there before being moved to another holding area, where the Afghan guards told him he was outside Kabul. The basement area consisted of two rows of six cells, each of which had a small opening in the door through which prisoners could glimpse one another as they were taken into and out of their cells.

  They could also talk sometimes, mainly at night. It was there that he’d met el-Masri. He was later handed over to the Algerian government, which released him without charges. He later learned that the phone conversation for which he’d been jailed was in fact about car tires. He had used the English word “tire,” which sounds like the North African Arabic slang word for “planes,” and whoever had listened to his conversation had thought he was talking about airliners.

  Like el-Masri, Saidi wanted to bring to justice those responsible for what happened to him. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told me. “What right did those people have to take me or Khaled el-Masri? What they did to us will haunt us for the rest of our lives.”

  We asked the U.S. intelligence services about Saidi, but they refused to comment.

  I thought that now there was a witness who could play an important role in el-Masri’s case against his tormentors, someone who had actually seen him in a prison in Afghanistan. After our stories and all the other media attention el-Masri had received, I was certain that the courts would listen to him, and now to Saidi, and investigate the miscarriage of justice that had indelibly marked their lives.

  But I was mistaken. As we learned from documents declassified much later, the CIA informed the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2007 that it “lacked sufficient basis to render and detain al-Masri,” still misspelling el-Masri’s name in the way that had led to his detention. According to the executive summary of the committee’s declassified report, the CIA director decided that no further action was warranted against the officer who advocated for el-Masri’s rendition: “The Director strongly believes that mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty and that, when they result from performance that meets reasonable standard, CIA leadership must stand behind the officers who make them.”

  However, a 2007 CIA inspector general’s report on el-Masri paints a darker picture. “This Report concludes that there was an insufficient basis to render and detain al-Masri and the Agency’s prolonged detention of al-Masri was unjustified,” it notes. “His rendition and detention resulted from a series of breakdowns in tradecraft, process, management, and oversight.”

  The CIA’s inspector general referred el-Masri’s case to the Department of Justice for prosecution, but in May 2007 the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to pursue the case. Apart from an “oral admonition” given to three CIA attorneys, the ACLU would later note, no one has been held accountable for el-Masri’s ordeal.

  I wondered what cases like Saidi’s or el-Masri’s said about Western society and its commitment to human rights and the rule of law. How could we, and especially our political leaders, still point fingers at other countries, when U.S. government agencies behaved like this? Was there a rule of law for some and the rule of the jungle for others?

  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.

  It was in Syria that we learned about one such militant leader: Shaker al-Abssi. A Palestinian born in the West Bank town of Jericho in 1955, he’d given up his medical studies to become a fighter pilot for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization. He later staged attacks on Israel from a base he established in a Palestinian camp in Syria. From 2002 to 2005, the Syrians imprisoned him on terrorism charges. When he was released, he crossed over to Lebanon, where he began plotting against Americans in Jordan. Abssi wasn’t deeply religious, but he understood that Islamist militancy was the order of the day. His primary area of interest was Palestine, but he used the anger that built in the region after the invasion of Iraq to recruit fighters to his cause.

  Abssi also drew our interest because he was a longtime associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and a gigantic presence in the jihadi world. Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh in 1966 in Zarqa, Jordan, Zarqawi was a high school dropout, delinquent, and street thug whose radicalization began when he traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, returning to Jordan in 1993. With his religious mentor, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was inspired by the 1979 siege of Mecca, he founded a Salafist group called Bayat al-Imam (Loyalty to the Imam). “Salafism” derives from the Arabic expression as-salaf as-salih, generally translated as “the righteous ancestors,” which refers to the first three generations of Muslims, who are believed to have practiced a “pure” Islam. In the traditional sense, Salafists are people who recognize only the Koran, the Sunnah, and the practices of these ancestors as the correct way to practice Islam. Zarqawi and others in the group were imprisoned for plotting attacks in Jordan in 1994 and gained a following through writings that were smuggled out of prison and published in Salafist media.

  Zarqawi was freed in a 1999 general amnesty. After his release, he helped plan the so-called Millennium Plots, a set of Al Qaeda–engineered attacks timed to occur on about January 1, 2000. But the intended attacks in Jordan never got off the ground, and Zarqawi fled to Afghanistan, where he met with Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader gave Zarqawi support for establishing a training camp for foreign fighters, where he would focus his attention on the “near enemies”: Jordan and Israel. Zarqawi also hated the Shia and saw them as rivals.

  After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Zarqawi was injured in a U.S. bombing in Kandahar and moved his headquarters to northern Iraq. He gained fame in the West when Secretary of State Colin Powell named him in the speech to the United Nations that laid out what was later found to be the flawed American case for war against Saddam Hussein, claiming that Zarqawi was working in close collaboration with the Iraqi dictator. In fact, he was not. After the United States invaded Iraq, Zarqawi’s group, initially called Jama’at al-Tawhid wa’al-Jihad, whose name means Unity and Jihad, emerged in the vanguard of the insurgency, carrying out suicide bombings and assassinations, killing civilians, and inciting sectarian conflict. He was linked to the August 2003 bombs at the Jordanian embassy and the UN office in Baghdad, as well as to an attack on a Shia mosque in Najaf.

  In January 2004, Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden proposing a formal alliance. Their negotiations culminated in an October announcement that Zarqawi’s faction had sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda, and it came to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.

  Zarqawi described his espousal of extreme cruelty in a book, The Management of Savagery, which was distributed online. His starring role in a horrific video of the beheading of the American businessman Nick Berg established his fame as the “sheikh of the slaughterers.”

  Zarqawi’s assaults escalated in Iraq, and his group continued to operate in Jordan as well. In November 2005, suicide attackers from Al Qaeda in Iraq set off bombs in three Amman hotels, killing more than fifty people, including a wedding party. Although Zarqawi claimed that the intended victims were American intelligence officers, the deaths of so many civilians, including Sunni women and children, an
gered King Abdullah and sparked protests in Zarqawi’s hometown. His own family denounced him, and bin Laden’s operational leader, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, wrote that Zarqawi was required to seek approval for any new major operation.

  But just three months later, on February 22, 2006, gunmen loyal to Zarqawi blew up the Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the most important shrines in Shia Islam. Although there were no casualties, the attack set off fighting between Sunnis and Shia that resulted in more than thirteen hundred deaths. Zarqawi celebrated by starring in a video, appearing for the first time in public without a mask.

  U.S. and Jordanian intelligence wanted Zarqawi dead. Human sources and drone reconnaissance traced him to a location near Baqubah, Iraq, and on June 7, 2006, a U.S. Delta Force team and F-16 fighter jets were sent in to kill or capture him. The commandos arrived at the site of a building destroyed by two American bombs just in time to watch Zarqawi die. Some politicians and analysts thought that with the ringleader’s death his network would disappear. They were wrong.

  Shaker al-Abssi was one of the militants who had taken up Zarqawi’s mantle. Both men had been sentenced to death in absentia for the 2002 assassination of the American diplomat Laurence Foley, a senior administrator in Jordan for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Foley had been leaving his home in Amman when he was shot at close range by a man who had hidden in his garage. The Jordanian government alleged that Abssi had helped the gunman with money, logistics, and weapons and explosives training, while Zarqawi had contributed ten thousand dollars to fund the assassination, as well as thirty-two thousand dollars for additional attacks.

  During the winter of 2006–7, we heard that Abssi was living in Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where he ran a new group, called Fatah al-Islam. Declaring himself the restorer of religion to the Palestinian cause, he had taken control of three compounds belonging to a secular Palestinian militant organization and raised Fatah al-Islam’s black flag over them. Michael and I wanted to investigate the connection between Fatah al-Islam and the Al Qaeda mother ship.