German citizen Khaled Al-Masri has become the poster boy for the campaign against America’s use of “extraordinary renditions” in combating Islamic terrorism. A June 23 report from Spiegel Online’s English-language service dubbed Al-Masri the “human face” of the renditions “scandal” following a recent appearance before a German parliamentary committee. The ACLU site features a photo of him with two of his “five young children,” one perched on his lap. His name appears no less than 140 times in the 67 pages of Council of Europe (COE) Rapporteur Dick Marty’s report [pdf] on the renditions program. Indicative of the report’s tendentiousness, Marty proposes the image of a “spider’s web” as the most appropriate graphic depiction for the program. Masri’s story, the Marty report concludes, is “exemplary”: that “of a person who is evidently innocent – or at least against whom not the slightest accusation could ever be made – who has been through a real nightmare in the CIA’s ‘spider’s web’” (§132).

But numerous features of Khaled Al-Masri’s biography make him hardly an appropriate candidate to play the role of poster boy that the opponents of the renditions program have assigned him....

To continue reading my survey of the evidence of Khaled Al-Masri's connections to Islamic extremism, see here on PJM's Politics Central.