BEWARE THE GIFT OF POISON FRUIT In Germany, there was also a government commitment that executive agencies should continue to use torture-tainted information. In 2005, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said: “It would be completely irresponsible if we were to say that we don’t use information where we cannot be sure that it was obtained in conditions that were wholly in line with the rule of law. We have to use such information.” 11 The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has documented several cases of torture in Europe as part of their ’10 years after 9/11 publication series’.12 They note that Murat Kurnaz, Mohammed Zammer, and Khaled El Masri were all tortured by or at the behest of American agents and that German agencies obtained information during interviews by the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, with each of the men. In each case, information was collected, received and shared between the BND and American agents. A parliamentary commission of inquiry, established to investigate Germany’s secret co-operation with the USA and other states in countering international terrorism in 2006, was unable to conclude to what extent information passed by the German BND was responsible for the treatment of the men, but it did consider that the intelligence shared was not checked for reliability prior to its transfer, and that information shared with the US led directly to the arrest of at least one of the men, Khaled El Masri. The extraordinary rendition of Khaled El Masri Khalid El Masri, a German citizen, was abducted at the SerbianMacedonian border in 2003. El-Masri was first detained incommunicado and tortured by Macedonian agents for nearly a month, before being handed over to the US Central Intelligence Agency. In a welldocumented process of rendition, El Masri was transferred to a facility in Afghanistan where he was regularly interrogated, subjected to physical abuse, and humiliated. “The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled, and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository – in CIA parlance, subjected him to 'capture shock' – as Macedonian officials stood by. The CIA drugged him and flew him to Kabul to be locked up in a secret prison known as the 'Salt Pit', where he was slammed into walls, kicked, 11 12 12 D. Crossland, ‘Germany Talks Torture, and Finds Hypocrisy’, Spiegel Online, 20 December 2005. ECCHR, Torture and the Use of Information in Countering Terrorism, Berlin, 31 October 2011.