In December 2003, Khalid El-Masri travelled from his home in Germany to Skopje, Macedonia for a holiday, leaving behind his wife and five children. He was detained at the border by Macedonian security officials who mistook him for an Al-Qaeda operative that used the pseudonym Khalid Al-Masri.
We must jealously guard against any attempts to diminish our commitment to neutrality and peace
He was denied access to a lawyer or the German Embassy and instead held incommunicado for 23 days in a hotel room until Macedonian forces handed him over to the US Central Intelligence Agency.
In CIA custody, El-Masri was beaten, sodomised and drugged before being fitted in a sensory deprivation jump suit and flown (‘rendered’ in official doublespeak) to a secret prison in Afghanistan.
Despite pleading his innocence and going on hunger strike for 37 days, during which time US agents force fed him as they are doing to countless prisoners at Guantanamo Bay today, he was never allowed to contact his family who had no idea of his whereabouts.
Following months of detention without trial in conditions that the European Court of Human Rights unanimously declared tantamount to torture, El-Masri was unceremoniously dumped on a rural road in Albania.
El-Masri’s case and those similar to it, that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, for example, read like a horror story.
While a European Court of Human Rights decision in December 2012 concluded that El-Masri’s treatment in both Macedonian and CIA custody amounted to torture, he is yet to receive compensation or even an apology from the US authorities.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration established a global ‘spider’s web’ of secret prisons, kidnappings, detentions and transfers of suspected terrorists to countries, such as Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, in which torture and imprisonment without trial were common.
According to the European Parliament Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners, a number of European Nato member states cooperated wilfully in this covert system, widely dubbed the Extraordinary Rendition Programme. Scant information is available in the public realm regarding the Extraordinary Rendition Programme thanks in part to “strict observance of confidentiality laid down in the Nato framework” as well as the Obama Administration’s continued assertion of the State secrets privilege in US courts.
Nonetheless, a number of recent court decisions across Europe have shed light on the detention and torture of innocent individuals and a growing body of evidence suggests Maltese complicity in the Extraordinary Rendition Programme.
To circumvent national restrictions on the use of military aircraft, the CIA, in complicity with the US Department of Defence, used charter services and private companies to render suspects around the world.
Thus, the transfer of detainees within the extraordinary rendition system was outsourced to shady military contractors (like Blackwater, now Academi) and CIA shell companies.
According to the European Parliament Temporary Committee’s working document no. 8, at least six different suspected CIA rendition aircraft stopped over at Malta International Airport between 2001 and 2005.
A number of these stopovers occurred en route to or from “suspicious locations” such as Amman, Tripoli and Cairo. In fact, the very plane (N313P) used to render El-Masri to Afghanistan and identified by Human Rights Watch as the “plane that the CIA used to move several prisoners to and from Europe, Afghanistan, and the Middle East” spent some time in Malta in December 2003.
We may never know whether detainees were actually on board those CIA rendition aircraft that landed on Maltese soil. However, we can be sure that, for years, the Nationalist government compromised Maltese national security and our constitutional commitment to neutrality (article 1, section 3) by failing to prevent covert CIA operations on our sovereign territory.
European member states have both a moral and legal obligation to investigate their own participation in the Extraordinary Rendition Programme.
The new Labour government should immediately open an inquiry into the violation of Maltese neutrality by CIA contractors and shell companies.
Moreover, our complicity in the Extraordinary Rendition Programme, and that of other European member states, provides a sobering reminder of the value of Maltese neutrality.
As the new Labour government moves toward updating the language of the Constitution to reflect a post-Cold War international system, we must jealously guard against any attempts to diminish our commitment to neutrality and peace.
Daniel Mainwaring is a Maltese-American historian.