Extraordinary Rendition Read Online Free PDF Page A

riots in Newark, yet the corner of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard still looked devastated. Byron remembered the grainy televised images from 1968 when, at a hamburger joint on Nassau Street while he was still at Princeton, he watched news footage of burning storefronts and overturned cars in Newark during the days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In the fuzzy, black-and-white images on the screen, National Guard troops ran chaotically back and forth. Black men stood on the sidewalks and streets, apparently unconcerned with the presence of the tense, obviously frightened soldiers. There were trash fires, smashed store fronts, and burning police cars.
    Byron traveled to Newark on the PATH train from Penn Station in Manhattan to Penn Station in this old, eternally decaying city. From the station, he walked to the intersection of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard. The Al Sunni Mosque glowed brilliantly in the early afternoon sunlight. The crescent-moon symbol fixed at the top of the dome glinted like a curved sword, dazzling.
    He saw Khalid Hussein standing near the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the mosque. Just above Khalid was a horizontal screen, at least twenty feet long, on which sentences in English were electronically displayed, moving from left to right like a zipper-message strip in Times Square. Thewords All are welcome to worship Allah slid across the display board again and again.
    Khalid was in a business suit, a somber, heavy-set man noticeably different in appearance and presence from his brother. Now that Byron had seen Ali Hussein three times, he believed there was a possibility that these two men were half-brothers.
    Byron knew from his first meeting with Khalid in the diner in Union City that he didn’t shake hands. So Byron didn’t offer his hand as he said, “It’s good to see you, Khalid.”
    “How is my brother?”
    Byron had also learned that Khalid had zero interest in pleasantries. “Your brother’s a very unhappy man.”
    Khalid’s voice was much heavier, far more determined than his brother’s. “Wait until we go inside to tell me more. I want the Imam to hear this.”
    Without speaking, Byron walked at Khalid’s side toward the ornate entrance to the mosque. Khalid slipped an identity card through a slot on the fence, and the gate made a magnetic clicking noise as it disengaged from the frame. Between the fence and the mosque’s circular wall was a lush lawn, totally unique in this area of the city, where every bleak surface was either cement or tar. There were fresh, newly planted weeping willows on the lawn. As he walked, Byron touched in his pocket the piece of paper on which the night before he had written words from the ninth chapter of the Koran , words he had found himself reading several times on the train from Manhattan here: Those who were left behind rejoiced at sitting still behind the messenger of Allah, and were averse to striving with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way. And they said:Go not forth in the heat! Say: The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood .
    Every night for the past several weeks Byron had steadily read three pages of the Koran , and from time to time he wrote down passages for no particular reason. Ali Hussein had recently been allowed, because Byron had persisted in asking permission for it, to have a paperback copy of the Koran , in English only because the government wanted to know precisely what its prisoner was reading. Byron wasn’t interested in books that interpreted or explained Islam, a subject to which he had never paid attention beyond what he’d read from time to time over the years in newspapers and magazines. Always with the instincts of a genuine student, he decided to read the Koran itself, without guidance, without preparation for what he might expect, and without any external explanation. What was it, he wanted to know, that this book said? More than two hundred pages into the