Rendition Revisited

The Secretary of State last week had to tour Europe fending off charges that the United States is illegally kidnapping and torturing suspects in the war on terror.

But most everywhere Condoleeza Rice went, she was peppered with questions about the man you're about to hear from.

Kalid al-Masri is a 42-year-old car salesman from Germany. His incredible story of kidnapping, imprisonment and interrogation has helped expose a secret U.S. tactic now known as "rendition." A CIA unit called the rendition group has used a fleet of unmarked planes to snatch suspects around the world. Well over 100 people have disappeared this way.

But a number of these suspects have been flown to prisons notorious for torture. And some, like Khalid al-Masri, may have been rendered by mistake.

Correspondent Scott Pelley reports.

Al-Masri told 60 Minutes he was on vacation in Macedonia when he was snatched off a bus and ended up in the hands of a group of silent masked men.

"They took me to this room, and they hit me all over and they slashed my clothes with sharp objects," says al-Masri.

How did they cut off his clothes?

"Maybe knives or scissors. I also heard photos being taken while this was going on – and they took off the blindfold and I saw that there were a lot of men standing in the room, they were wearing black masks and black gloves," he says.

Al-Masri says after his clothes were removed, the men pulled a hood over his head, put a diaper on him, shackled him on the plane and injected him with drugs. He had been "rendered" in a program developed in part by former CIA officer Michael Scheuer.

"The option of not doing something is extraordinarily dangerous to the American people," says Michael Scheuer, who until last year was a senior CIA official in the counterterrorist center. Scheuer created the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and helped set up the rendition program during the Clinton administration.

"Basically the National Security Council gave us the mission, take down these cells, dismantle them and take people off the streets so they can't kill Americans. They just didn't give us anywhere to take the people after we captured them," says Scheuer.

So, the CIA started flying suspects to Egypt and Jordan. Scheuer says renditions were authorized by Clinton's National Security Council and officials in Congress, and all understood what it meant to send suspects to those countries.

"They don't have the same legal system we have. But we know that going into it. And so, the idea that we're going to suddenly throw our hands up like Claude Raines in Casablanca and say, 'I'm shocked that justice in Egypt isn't like it is in Milwaukee,' there's a certain disingenuousness to that," says Scheuer.

Scheuer admits Egyptian justice can be rough and that he assumes that officials there use torture.

Doesn't that make the United States complicit in the torture?

"You'll have to ask the lawyers," says Scheuer.

Is it convenient?

"It's convenient in the sense that it allows American policy makers and American politicians to avoid making hard decisions," says Scheuer. "Yes. It's very convenient. It's finding someone else to do your dirty work."

The indispensable tool for that "work" is the fleet of executive jets authorized to land at all U.S. military bases worldwide.

Scheuer wouldn't talk about the planes that are used in the operations, since that information is classified. The CIA declined to talk about it but it turns out the CIA has left plenty of clues, out in the open, in the public record.

The tail number of one Gulfstream jet was first reported by eyewitnesses to a rendition in Pakistan in 2001. In public records, the tail number came back to a company called "Premier Executive Transport Services," with headquarters listed in Dedham, Massachusetts. But Dedham is a dead end. Premier appears to be a CIA front company. The address is a law office on the second floor of a bank. There was one thing in the records that did lead somewhere: a second tail number.

That number belonged to an unmarked Boeing 737 jet, the plane 60 Minutes found in Scotland. Using the Web and aviation sources, 60 Minutes was able to find 600 flights to 40 countries. It appears the number of flights increased greatly in the Bush administration after 9/11.

The planes have been based in North Carolina. They usually fly to Dulles Airport outside Washington before heading overseas. Major destinations read like a roadmap to the war on terror: 30 trips to Jordan, 19 to Afghanistan, 17 to Morocco, 16 to Iraq. Other stops include Egypt, Libya, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The flight log shows one flight took the 737 to Skopje, Macedonia, from there to Baghdad, and finally to Kabul, Afghanistan. It's a flight that matches the date Kalid al-Masri says he was taken.

"When I opened my eyes in the cell, I saw some writing in Arabic on the walls… And the inmate in the cell next to me told me we were in Kabul and the guards who guarded us all the time were Afghani so it was clear that it was Afghanistan," says al-Masri.

He showed 60 Minutes a prison floor plan he drew from memory. He says other prisoners were from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Al-Masri told 60 Minutes he was interrogated by an American through an interpreter.

"He yelled at me and he said that 'You're in a country without laws and no one knows where you are. Do you know what that means?' I said 'Yes,'" al-Masri says.

What did it mean to him?

"It was very clear to me that he meant I could stay in my cell for 20 years or be buried somewhere and nobody knows what happened to you," he says.

Al-Masri says he was asked whether he had contacts with Islamic groups like al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood, or aid organizations.

Al-Masri says he told the Americans he had never been involved in militant Islam. He says he was beaten and kept in solitary confinement.

"The whole time was bad. We were mistreated, humiliated, we were treated worse than animals. The food they gave us were leftover bones or chicken skin and the like," says al-Masri.

Al-Masri says he was questioned for five months, then released just as mysteriously as he was taken, put back on
By Graham Messick