These officials then released him, because they discovered they had nothing on him. But they released him to CIA custody — and by this, we mean they took him back to the airport, claimed they were sending him for a medical examination and then CIA officials cut off all his clothes and put a bag on his head and spirited him away. This handoff had to go this way because it was not exactly legal. The CIA next flew him to a then-secret prison in Afghanistan, known as the Salt Pit.
Over the next four months, the CIA subjected El-Masri to intense CIA stuff (sodomy, rectal suppositories, putting stuff in his butt, etc.). A few months in, they realized they had the wrong guy. The passport was real, his history was thoroughly documented and he could not be the man suspected of talking to the 9/11 hijackers. They kept him in the Salt Pit anyway. It took an extended hunger strike, during which he lost 60 pounds, for El-Masri to get higher-ups to pay attention and finally release him. He went on to try to sue the United States, unsuccessfully, and to sue Macedonia, which did result in a victory and a settlement.
Obviously, it’s terrible that the CIA did this to the wrong guy, and we could spend much more time than this describing everything that happened to El-Masri. But it’s also worth noting that if the CIA did have the right guy, doing all this would still have been wrong? If they really had evidence against him, they could have legally extradited him and charged him through normal means. As for the months of torture, even ignoring such matters as “the law” and “morality,” torture’s simply not a very effective way of opening up suspects. Even when a tortured suspect does give up useful intelligence, you get military experts later saying, “Hey, you would have gotten the same info faster through smarter interrogation techniques.”