Extraordinary Rendition Read Online Free PDF

text, he was baffled. He kept returning to earlier pages, reading out loud, underlining passages, and sometimes putting question marks in the margin. And now he had taken to writing down sentences and paragraphs. What did the words mean? The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood . In the two hours Byron was now allowed to spend with Ali Hussein on his trips to Miami, Ali had quoted the passage from memory, and it had taken Byron two days to find it. When he did, it was precisely as Ali Hussein had recited. Ali had even recalled the numbers of the separate books of the Koran , the chapter numbers within each book, and the numbers of the verse lines within each chapter that he repeated from memory.
    The mosque’s interior was not as ornate as the outside walls and the bronzed, glinting dome. The inside was plain, almost utilitarian, with cinderblock walls, like a public high school cafeteria. Byron, carrying nothing, followed Hussein down a hallway. There seemed to be no other men in the building. Byron, when he had asked Hussein to make arrangements for a visit to the Imam, imagined for some reason that there would be as many guards protecting the Imam as Louis Farrakhan always seemed to have. Certainly Byron never imagined that he could simply walk through a door into the almost bare room in which the Imam sat at a simple wooden desk.
    He was smaller and younger than Byron expected, probably no older than thirty-five. When Ali Hussein, at their meeting a week earlier in Miami, told Byron that he was certain his brother could arrange a meeting with the Imam (“Please do this for me, see him and convey my respects to him,” Ali had said), Byron had cruised through the miraculous Internet to search for more information about him. He easily located many entries, mainly copies of news articles and pictures of the man. The photographs were not posted by the Imam or anyone around him; instead, they were pictures posted by people Byron assumed were right-wing American men, who added messages such as “Is this bin Laden’s brother?” and “Put a hole-a-in-the-Ayatollah.”
    The man was in a robe. He wore heavy glasses. He had a beard. Somehow he had the look and demeanor, Byron thought, of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Byron nodded slightly, respectfully, not knowing if this was the proper way to greet a Muslim holy man. He waited for some signal that he should sit. Khalid translated the words the Imam spoke, “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Johnson?”
    Byron was surprised that Khalid translated. On one of the Internet sites devoted to the Imam, Byron had seen and heard a video, obviously surreptitiously made, of him speaking in clear English to an audience. In that Internet video, the Arabic translation of what he was saying ran across the lower screen.
    Although his face was somber, his voice almost had a lilt, was almost in fact effeminate. Khalid translated, “You have seen our brother Ali?”
    Byron was uncomfortable. This was a strange setting—a bare room in a mosque. These men were also strange: a brooding man in typical American clothes and an Arabic-speaking Imam in a robe. This mosque, too, was for Byron otherworldly. He tried to convey nothing of his discomfort, but he was aware of the quaver in his voice. He wondered whether the other men detected it.
    “Ali isn’t happy. And I can’t say that he looks healthy.”
    And then the soft voice spoke, followed immediately by Khalid’s abrupt-sounding, harsh translation. “The people who did this to our brother are not good people.”
    “It’s not those people who concern him,” Byron said. “Ali is very concerned about his wife and children.”
    It was Khalid who answered, not the Imam. “They are well taken care of.” Khalid seemed to resent the question.
    “But he wants to know where they live, what they’re doing, what’s happened to them.”
    Khalid translated Byron’s words, listened to the Imam, and then translated. “You can