By the way, in case you missed it, the New York Times is also trying to damage the CIA’s formerly secret “rendition” program. Here’s a gushingly sympathetic portrait of an Algerian detained in Afghanistan after being expelled from Tanzania: Algerian Tells of Dark Term in U.S. Hands.

The case of one of them, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was held as part of the United States’ antiterrorism rendition program, was revealed last year, and German and American officials have acknowledged that he was erroneously detained by the United States. But the tale of the other, an Algerian named Laid Saidi, has never been told before, and it carries a new set of allegations against America’s secret detention program.

A new set of allegations made by … the New York Times, of course.

Notice the highly incriminating connections the Times has to sail right past in order to promote their attack on another anti-terrorism effort:

In May 2003, Mr. Saidi was expelled from Tanzania, where he ran a branch of Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international charity based in Saudi Arabia that promoted the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam and has since been shut down after being accused of financing terrorist groups. Tanzanian newspapers reported on Mr. Saidi’s expulsion at the time, but nothing was known about where he went.

In a recent interview, Mr. Saidi, 43, said that after he was expelled he was handed over to American agents and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held for 16 months before being delivered to Algeria and freed without ever being charged or told why he had been imprisoned. He acknowledged that he was carrying a fake passport when he was detained, but he said he had no connection to terrorism.

And Saidi’s disavowal of terror connections, in spite of the fact that he ran the Tanzanian branch of the Al Qaeda-linked filthy-to-the-core Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, is enough to get him a clean bill of health from the New York Times.

Wearing a white robe and a white skullcap in his lawyer’s office here, he held up two white shoes he said his captors gave him before setting him free in August 2004. The only other physical evidence he offered of his imprisonment were fading scars on his wrists that he said were from having been chained to the ceiling of a cell for five days.

“Sometimes I cry and shake when I think about this,” he said in his first interview about his imprisonment. “I didn’t think I would see my family again.”

While Mr. Saidi’s allegations of torture cannot be corroborated, other elements of his story can be.

While his allegations can’t be corroborated, that doesn’t stop the Times from reporting them in full, including this bizarre scene:

After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle [If he was in a prison cell, how does he know they arrived in an SUV? —ed.]: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.

The Malawians blindfolded him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a disposable diaper on him before dressing him.

Many released terror suspects, when they begin telling their stories of torture and abuse, seem to throw in these weird psychosexual embellishments. For example, Guantanamo prisoners have alleged that guards had sex in front of them, or that female guards smeared menstrual blood on them. Maybe the CIA has a good reason for using butt plugs on Islamic terror suspects, but my BS detector is beeping like crazy.

Here are some past LGF posts about the Al Haramain Foundation; note that in addition to possibly being involved in 9/11, and definitely being involved with Osama bin Laden, Al Haramain was a principle source of funds for the Indonesian terrorist gang Jemaah Islamiah who perpetrated the Bali nightclub bombings:

lgf: Saudis Linked to Bali Bombing
lgf: Berkeley ME Studies Linked to Terror Groups
lgf: Saudi Funds Linked to US Sleeper Cells
lgf: Crackdown on Al Qaeda-Linked Charity
lgf: The War is Not Over