On impunity – Muzayen Al-Youssef and Martin Knobbe in Der Spiegel:

‘In 2003, the CIA abducted Masri, a Kuwaiti with Lebanese parents and German citizenship. He was on a bus to Macedonia at the time but was detained at the border and spent 23 days in a darkened hotel room in Skopje. After that, Masri says, he was brought to the airport and handed to a group of Americans cloaked in black. He says they forcibly stripped him, then photographed and tortured him before putting him on a jet blindfolded, with plugs in his ears.
He was taken to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was made to undress and beaten. He says he had objects inserted into his rectum and was force-fed during a hunger strike. As a suspected terrorist, he was the subject of constant interrogation.
Masri experienced these things nearly 20 years ago and has spoken about them many times. But few people know about how this man, who has faced so many torments and fears, is doing today. How he is coming to terms with the injustices he faced and the question of why this happened to him, of all people. It's a question that has troubled him for two decades now. Along with the question of how it has changed him. Clearly not for the better.’

(…)

‘Back when he was in captivity, the CIA operatives took two months to determine that Masri's German passport was genuine. They had mistaken him for someone with the same name, believing they had caught a high-ranking al-Qaida terrorist. It took nearly three more months for Masri to be released, in the middle of the night in a forest in Albania. Until the last moment, he feared his captors would shoot him in the back.’

(…)

‘At the café, Masri recounts the days of his release: He had to promise the Americans that he wouldn't speak to the authorities or the press. But he did turn to a lawyer who had been recommended to him – Manfred Gnjidic, a criminal defense lawyer from the southern German city of Ulm. Gnjidic took him to the police, where Masri gave a statement. Almost three years later, the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office issued 13 arrest warrants for CIA employees suspected of involvement in Masri's abduction. It was a minor sensation, but one that also brought satisfaction for Masri.
Short-lived satisfaction.’

(…)

‘In 2006, he could be seen in Washington, D.C., alongside his American attorneys Steven Watt and Ben Wizner, who were trying to push through a lawsuit against the CIA with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a human rights organization. Masri demanded an apology from the U.S. government but attempts to obtain judicial success failed in all instances. A public trial, the top judges argued, would compromise state secrets.
That same year, a committee of inquiry in the federal parliament looking into Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, met in Berlin to investigate several incidents at the agency, including whether German authorities had been involved in the Masri case. The answer didn't arrive until three years later. The committee of inquiry concluded that "German agencies were neither directly nor indirectly involved in Masri's arrest and abduction." To this day, though, Masri has doubts about this finding. He also has his reasons.
When he was released from the torture jail in 2004, he was initially handled by a man who introduced himself as "Sam" and spoke fluent German, Masri claims. The suspicion is that the man was linked to a German authority.’

(…)

‘Anyone who listens to Masri today can sense how fresh the experiences still are in his mind today. His eyes water and his voice cracks as he speaks. When, for example, he describes his release from prison after his term of four and a half years for the attack on the mayor and another assault – and how his wife and children had fled to his former home country, Lebanon, out of fear that she might lose custody of her children.
Masri sought out a new place to live, which took him to Vienna. Completely destitute, his only option was homelessness. Later, he moved on to Graz, where he saw his family again after eight years. When his sons walked past him at the airport, he says, he didn't recognize them at first.’

(…)

‘Marlene Moss is probably the only person who hasn't yet given up fighting for Masri's cause. She stumbled onto his story at a lecture she attended. Today, the 73-year-old, who has a degree in education, regularly protests in front of the constituency office of Luise Amtsberg, a Green Party politician and the German government's human rights commissioner.
"The assumption is that there is no torture in Germany, and that's why there are no laws to compensate torture victims," Moss says. The Masri family, she says, is still suffering today from the consequences of the kidnapping and that they need to be provided with support. "There's the matter, for example, of entitlement to normal pension benefits," which Masri is ineligible for because of the consequences of torture.
Currently, Masri's older sons support their parents financially, but more help is urgently needed, Moss says. "It is a crime how Germany is dealing with Mr. Masri," Moss finds. "They sacrificed him for the sake of relations with the United States."’

(…)

‘"Masri is a pretty famous precedent that proves that the CIA can commit human rights violations, declare them a state secret and escape any responsibility based on that declaration alone," says Ben Wizner of Masri's legal team. "Masri did not lose the case in the sense that the courts didn't find his claims credible."
"I don't have the strength to pursue it any further," Masri says today. "My body is no longer cooperating. I lie in bed like a mummy."’

Read the article here.

I’m afraid the CIA is not the only secret service that can and will trample human rights with impunity. Of course, an empire is an empire so the CIA has resources and protection that some others agencies don’t have.

Also, the US hates to apologize. Other countries love to apologize, but they don’t like to pay.

Khaled el-Masri’s abduction was clearly a mistake, but the fighters of the war against terrorism cannot be bother with human rights, as we all know.
Usually, human rights are for the happy few.

Even nation state privilege (i.e. a German passport in this case) is not enough to protect you from the arbitrary decisions, to say it politely, a state is making in order to win unwinnable wars.