Albanian Designs

I’ve heard this story numerous times but it’s worth quoting as I’m still surprised about the fact that this guy was just dumped by the CIA in Albania:

Khaled el-Masri was vacationing in Macedonia when he was abducted by local police. Mr. el-Masri was then beaten, drugged, and interrogated at gunpoint in a Skopje hotel room. After 23 days of incommunicado captivity, Mr. el-Masri was taken to the airport and turned over to masked CIA rendition agents. He was shackled and also diapered, and flown to a CIA-run secret prison near Kabul, Afghanistan.

Once Mr. el-Masri was in Afghanistan, CIA officials soon realized they had made a mistake: Mr. el-Masri was not the man they were looking for; nor was there reason to suspect he was a terrorist. The U.S. nevertheless secretly jailed Mr. el-Masri for five months before deciding to deposit him, without explanation, on a hilltop in Albania.

During six years of the so-called "war on terrorism," we have grown disturbingly used to stories like this one. What is most frightening about Mr. el-Masri’s ordeal, however, is not the news that U.S. officials may have conspired in torturing and imprisoning an innocent man for months on end. Instead, it is the news from a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, last month that U.S. officials cannot be held accountable for engaging in such conduct.