Did Rice say U.S. erred in detaining German?

BUCHAREST, Romania — The Bush administration has admitted it mistakenly abducted a German citizen on suspicion of terrorist links, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

But aides traveling with Rice said she did not concede any errors in the case during her meeting with Merkel. They said they were puzzled by Merkel's remarks and suggested she may have been influenced by media reports.

Rice, addressing reporters in Berlin with Merkel, declined to comment on the case of Khaled al-Masri, but she said she pledged to the German leader that "when and if mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify them."

A senior administration official traveling with Rice confirmed that U.S. officials have previously informed the Germans that al-Masri was released because there was not sufficient intelligence to justify his continuing detention.

The official said al-Masri was seized because his name was similar to a militant leader's and because officials thought his passport was forged. The official declined to say whether the government ever had evidence to justify his detention.

Merkel's statement, relayed by an interpreter, that "the American administration has admitted this man has been erroneously taken" came at a time of intense European scrutiny of the U.S. policy of secretly whisking terrorism suspects to secret detention centers for extrajudicial interrogations.

In the first full day of a weeklong European tour, questions on the issue dominated Rice's news conference with Merkel, which drew dozens of reporters and 27 television cameras. Twelve of 13 questions posed to Rice in an interview with Britain's Sky News referred to prisoner policies.

Rice faced more questions about CIA practices at a later news conference in Romania. She made a three-hour stop there designed to highlight a landmark agreement with Romania, a former member of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, to allow 1,500 U.S. troops to use one of its air bases.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that in May 2004, U.S. ambassador Daniel R. Coats told the German interior minister about the al-Masri case but asked that the German government never disclose what it had been told, even if al-Masri went public.

On Tuesday, al-Masri filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., against former CIA Director George Tenet, three private airline companies and unnamed CIA officials, saying he was abducted in Macedonia and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan. There, he alleges, he was abused and held against his will even though Tenet and other top officials knew he was mistakenly detained.

The complaint, filed by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), asks for damages of more than $75,000. At a news conference in Washington, al-Masri spoke via satellite link from Germany and said he wants U.S. officials to explain "why they did this to me and how this came about." He requested an official U.S. government apology.

Al-Masri attempted to enter the United States over the weekend to speak at the news conference but was turned away because his name was on a Homeland Security watch list. A State Department official said Tuesday the United States has informed the German government the problem has been resolved and al-Masri will be allowed to enter. Like other State Department officials interviewed Tuesday, this one declined to be identified.

At the Berlin news conference, Merkel noted the case "was very much in the public eye today" and said she would refer it to a German parliamentary committee for further investigation.

On Nov. 2, The Washington Post reported that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe as part of a covert prison system that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe.

The Post did not identify the Eastern European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials, who said the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and make them targets of retaliation.

In an effort to calm tensions triggered by that disclosure, Rice began her trip Monday by reading a statement designed to allay concerns in Europe over CIA practices in the war on terrorism. She neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the clandestine prison system. But she said the CIA's interrogations helped prevent terrorist attacks and strongly suggested the questioning took place with the cooperation of European governments.

U.S. aides hope Rice's rebuttal will turn the tables on the criticism by forcing the European public to consider the potentially deadly consequences if its governments fail to combat terrorism.

The Dutch Foreign Minister, Ben Bot, told his country's lower house of Parliament Tuesday that the U.S. statement was unsatisfactory. He said he expected a "lively discussion with Rice and foreign ministers of NATO member states" when they meet Thursday in Brussels, Belgium, the Dutch news agency ANP said.

Friso Roscam Abbing, spokesman for the European Union's justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, said, "we welcome Dr. Rice's strong commitment to fully respecting the rule of law and her zero tolerance for torture. [But] I certainly would not say that we're back to business as usual."

Daniel Keohane, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said "she [Rice] seems to be implying that Europeans were well aware of who's going where in their airspace and in their territory." He suggested European governments "probably would prefer to brush this under the carpet."

The agreement with Romania to permit the stationing of U.S. troops marks a significant advance in the Pentagon's effort to scale down large military bases in Germany, designed to counter Cold War-era land invasions, and create smaller ones in Eastern Europe for leaner units attuned to small-scale wars and counterterrorism. Under the agreement Rice signed Tuesday, the U.S. force at Mihail Kogalniceanu air base on the Black Sea will remain relatively small and troops will frequently rotate out of the country.

Human Rights Watch has cited flight records of aircraft allegedly linked to the CIA to suggest that facilities in Poland and Romania were used as CIA detention centers and has named the Kogalniceanu base as one of four possible Romanian sites. Both countries denied they hosted such prisons, and intelligence officials said many of the flights likely carried CIA officials and were probably not transporting terrorism suspects.

At the news conference in Romania, President Traian Basescu denounced the "speculation about the landing of certain airplanes" and invited any international organization to inspect "any part of Romania, any military base."

Washington Post correspondent John Ward Anderson contributed from Paris. Josh White contributed from Washington. Material from Reuters is included in this report.