BERLIN — The world’s two most powerful women had hoped to showcase their similarities during their first meeting yesterday, but the treatment of a former U.S. detainee in Afghanistan clouded the start of their relationship.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most senior U.S. official to meet with the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel, resisted pressure from her host to acknowledge that the United States had made a mistake in the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri.
Mr. el-Masri sued the CIA yesterday, after he was abducted from Macedonia on Dec. 31, 2003, and held incommunicado in Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured, before his release five months later.
Also yesterday, in Bucharest, Miss Rice signed a defense agreement with Romania that for the first time provides for U.S. troops to be stationed in a former Warsaw Pact country.
“This agreement brings Romania into the mainstream of global security,” said Romanian President Traian Basescu.
Mrs. Merkel brought up the issue of Mr. el-Masri both in her meeting with Miss Rice and during their press conference.
“We actually talked about that one particular case and that the American government has admitted that this man had been erroneously taken, and that, as such, the American administration is not denying that it has taken place,” Mrs. Merkel said.
But U.S. officials traveling with Miss Rice took issue with the chancellor’s comment, denying that the secretary or anyone else in the Bush administration had admitted a mistake or apologized for Mr. el-Masri’s detention.
“We are not quite sure what was in her head,” one senior official, referring to Mrs. Merkel, told reporters on Miss Rice’s plane as she flew from Berlin to Bucharest, the Romanian capital.
Washington only informed Berlin of Mr. el-Masri’s capture and then his release, when “we no longer had evidence or intelligence to justify his continued detention,” the official said.
He declined to say whether the United States had ever had evidence to hold Mr. el-Masri. But he acknowledged that Mr. el-Masri was originally arrested because of a suspicion that he had a fake passport and because his name was the same as that of a wanted militant.
At the press conference, Miss Rice refused to comment on the case, citing the litigation process, although she made a rare acknowledgement.
“I did say to the chancellor that when and if mistakes are made, we work very hard, and as quickly as possible, to rectify them,” the secretary said.
Mr. el-Masri’s legal complaint, which was filed on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union in federal district court in Alexandria, describes his time in Afghanistan as “constituting prolonged arbitrary detention, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
He traveled to the United States Saturday to present his case in person but was not allowed in the country by immigration officers in Atlanta.
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