Saidi looked at me and then at his lawyer.
“Go on, tell them,” Bouchachi said.
Saidi said that at some point he’d lost his Algerian passport and began using fake Tunisian identity documents. He showed us a document bearing the name Ramzi ben Mizauni ben Fraj.
“Why did you use a fake passport?” Craig asked him.
Saidi said he had been afraid of going to the Algerian embassy while the country was at war with Islamists. He denied that he had been active in any of the groups declared terrorist organizations by the Algerian government, but he explained that his religiosity would have been enough to make people at the embassy suspicious. That, he said, was the sole reason he’d adopted a false identity.
On May 10, 2003, shortly after he left his home in Tanga, Tanzanian police surrounded his car and brought him to a jail in Dar es Salaam. At first he thought they were arresting him for using a false passport, but three days later, he was taken to the border with Malawi and handed over to a group of Malawians in plainclothes and two middle-aged “white men, like your colleague,” he told me in Arabic. “They were also wearing jeans like him and T-shirts.”
I could hear the anxiety in his voice. “Please don’t worry,” I told him. “You can trust us, as Khaled el-Masri already has done.”
“The white men, they spoke English to the Malawians,” he said. “I was handed over, and I understood that something very bad was going to happen.”
Saidi told us how the Malawians held him for a week before handing him over to five men and a woman. What happened then was similar to what el-Masri had described: His eyes were covered with cotton and tape, his feet and hands shackled. His clothes were cut off, and he heard the clicks of what he believes were cameras. They drove him to an airport and loaded him onto a plane.
After a long flight, they took him to a dark prison. “The lights were almost never turned on, and there was awfully loud and deafening Western music,” he said. One of his masked interrogators told him through a translator, “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are. No one is going to defend you.” He described being chained by one hand to the wall in his cell.
After a week, he was taken to another prison. “There, they put me in a room, suspended me by my arms, and attached my feet to the floor,” he told us in a low voice. “They cut off my clothes very fast and took off my blindfold.” A young woman with shoulder-length blond hair and an older man entered the room and interrogated him for two hours, using a Moroccan translator. It was then that Saidi learned why he was there.
The interrogators asked him about a phone conversation he’d had with his wife’s family in Kenya. “They said, you were talking about airplanes, and I said I never talked about airplanes.” He was left chained up, without clothes or food, for five days, he said. “They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me, and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink. The American man told me I would die there.”
He described how extended, forced standing, with his wrists bound to the ceiling, had caused his legs and feet to swell. After his return to the “dark” prison, a doctor used a syringe to pump a liquid into his legs. He spent a night there before being moved to another holding area, where the Afghan guards told him he was outside Kabul. The basement area consisted of two rows of six cells, each of which had a small opening in the door through which prisoners could glimpse one another as they were taken into and out of their cells.
They could also talk sometimes, mainly at night. It was there that he’d met el-Masri. He was later handed over to the Algerian government, which released him without charges. He later learned that the phone conversation for which he’d been jailed was in fact about car tires. He had used the English word “tire,” which sounds like the North African Arabic slang word for “planes,” and whoever had listened to his conversation had thought he was talking about airliners.
Like el-Masri, Saidi wanted to bring to justice those responsible for what happened to him. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told me. “What right did those people have to take me or Khaled el-Masri? What they did to us will haunt us for the rest of our lives.”
We asked the U.S. intelligence services about Saidi, but they refused to comment.
I thought that now there was a witness who could play an important role in el-Masri’s case against his tormentors, someone who had actually seen him in a prison in Afghanistan. After our stories and all the other media attention el-Masri had received, I was certain that the courts would listen to him, and now to Saidi, and investigate the miscarriage of justice that had indelibly marked their lives.
But I was mistaken. As we learned from documents declassified much later, the CIA informed the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2007 that it “lacked sufficient basis to render and detain al-Masri,” still misspelling el-Masri’s name in the way that had led to his detention. According to the executive summary of the committee’s declassified report, the CIA director decided that no further action was warranted against the officer who advocated for el-Masri’s rendition: “The Director strongly believes that mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty and that, when they result from performance that meets reasonable standard, CIA leadership must stand behind the officers who make them.”
However, a 2007 CIA inspector general’s report on el-Masri paints a darker picture. “This Report concludes that there was an insufficient basis to render and detain al-Masri and the Agency’s prolonged detention of al-Masri was unjustified,” it notes. “His rendition and detention resulted from a series of breakdowns in tradecraft, process, management, and oversight.”
The CIA’s inspector general referred el-Masri’s case to the Department of Justice for prosecution, but in May 2007 the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to pursue the case. Apart from an “oral admonition” given to three CIA attorneys, the ACLU would later note, no one has been held accountable for el-Masri’s ordeal.
I wondered what cases like Saidi’s or el-Masri’s said about Western society and its commitment to human rights and the rule of law. How could we, and especially our political leaders, still point fingers at other countries, when U.S. government agencies behaved like this? Was there a rule of law for some and the rule of the jungle for others?