{"id":179267,"date":"2018-04-04T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/04\/and-macedonia-achieves-moral-superiority-over-the-united-states\/"},"modified":"2018-04-04T18:01:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T23:01:00","slug":"and-macedonia-achieves-moral-superiority-over-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/04\/and-macedonia-achieves-moral-superiority-over-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"And Macedonia Achieves Moral Superiority over the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is admittedly a <b>VERY<\/b> low bar, but the Balkan nation has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/news\/macedonia-issues-apology-involvement-torture-cia\">apologized for its role in aiding the torture of Khaled El-Masri over a decade ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>From the US, who tortured him unmercifully for months, crickets:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has formally apologized to a man it unlawfully seized, held incommunicado, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 14 years ago, during the secret CIA rendition and torture program which followed the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Macedonian security personnel detained Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, at Macedonia\u2019s border on December 31, 2003, and interrogated him in secret for over three weeks. They then delivered him to CIA agents who flew him to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned for almost four months in inhuman conditions, and then further mistreated him in a notorious CIA facility. In late May, the CIA reverse rendered El-Masri to Europe, and then left him on a roadside in Albania, long after American authorities had concluded that they had mistakenly captured the wrong man.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">On December 13, 2012, in a case brought on El-Masri\u2019s behalf by the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found the FYROM in breach of several provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights and awarded compensation of \u20ac60,000, which the government subsequently paid.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Now, six years later, in a letter to El-Masri dated March 28, 2018, Macedonia\u2019s minister of foreign affairs, Nikola Dimitrov, has expressed his \u201csincere apologies and unreserved regrets\u201d for what he described as the \u201cimproper conduct of our authorities\u201d in 2004. He also noted the \u201cimmeasurable and painful experiences and grave physical and psychological wounds you suffered\u201d as a result.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And the only response of the US, in response to a spectacular bit of incompetence has been to invoke the state secrets privilege in order to prevent his day in court.<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n<p>That sound you hear is Alexis de Tocqueville spinning in his grave at about 10,000 RPM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is admittedly a VERY low bar, but the Balkan nation has apologized for its role in aiding the torture of Khaled El-Masri over a decade ago. From the US, who tortured him unmercifully for months, crickets: The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has formally apologized to a man it unlawfully seized, held incommunicado, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[369,364,394,407,372],"class_list":["post-179267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-espionage","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-justice","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}