Snatched, hurt and innocent … a life ruined

Khalid al Masri is a broken man. A decade after the CIA snatched him by mistake, flew him halfway around the world in secret and questioned him as part of its detention and interrogation programme, he is yet to recover.

He has abandoned his home. He is no longer part of the lives of his wife or children. Friends can't find him. His attorneys can't find him. German foreign intelligence will only say he's "somewhere in a Western-leaning Arab nation".

When his Ulm attorney and confidant Manfred Gnjidic last saw him, he was broke, unkempt, paranoid and completely alone. He'd been arrested twice and sent once to a psychiatric ward, once to jail. He needed extensive psychological counselling.

Masri's case is one of the 26 instances detailed in the Senate report when the CIA snared someone in its web of secret dungeons by mistake, realised its error after weeks or months of mistreatment and questioning, and then let them go. But the report does not recount what that mistake meant to Masri's life.

"I was stunned by the torture report," Gnjidic said. "They had known and privately admitted for years that they had made a mistake regarding Khalid," who is a German citizen.

And yet the CIA, which realised its error within weeks of Masri's January 2004 detention, remained silent - as did the Senate Intelligence Committee, which learned of the mistake in 2007.