CIA accused of detaining innocent man (They knew he was innocent too)

By Lisa Myers, Aram Roston & the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 7:48 p.m. ET April 21, 2005

Last year, the CIA thought it had an important al-Qaida terrorist in custody. CIA agents secretly detained him in Europe and flew him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, in a so-called "rendition." But now senior U.S. officials tell NBC News that CIA realized early on, it had the wrong man — but kept him in prison anyway. They say he was kept in the primitive prison for more than a month after CIA director George Tenet was informed of the case, while officials tried to figure out a way to fix their mistake.

On New Year’s Eve 2003, German citizen Khaled El-Masri says he was kidnapped in Macedonia, and then flown by U.S. officials to Afghanistan where he was held in secret in harsh conditions until May. The mysterious events were seen as a case study in "renditions," or secret CIA operations to move terrorist suspects to third countries, outside U.S. legal authority. snip

Among the details NBC News has learned:

Macedonian officials arrested El Masri first and told the CIA that El-Masri’s German passport was fake. His name set off bells because it matched someone who had trained in Osama bin Laden’s camps.

A CIA "black renditions" team swept into Macedonia and then flew El-Masri to a prison in Afghanistan nicknamed the "Salt Pit."

In February, CIA officers in Kabul began to suspect he was the wrong man, and they raised the red flag. They sent his passport back to the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. In March, sources say, the CIA finally finished checking his passport and found it was not a fake. The Macedonians had been wrong. The CIA realized it had the wrong man, a genuine German citizen, in custody.

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