As the Obama administration, the CIA and a Senate committee prepare to release a landmark torture inquiry, a Yemeni hotelier’s reputation hangs in the balance of one of the lines within it that may never be released.

Mohammed Abdullah Saleh al-Asad spent nearly a year and a half inside undisclosed CIA prisons before an unceremonious release in 2005. Nearly a decade later, he wants an apology from the country that handed him to the United States. Unless it is publicly named in the Senate intelligence committee’s report into CIA torture, expected for partial release as early as Tuesday, he may never get it.

Asad believes Djibouti, a major US counter-terrorism ally, is responsible for his ordeal, citing flight records, international investigations and even an earthquake. Djibouti fervently denies any role in the affair. Asad’s attorneys last week asked the quasi-judicial African Commission on Human and People’s Rights to reverse its decision this summer to dismiss his case.

That appeal, they believe, will turn on the report. As originally written, the document reportedly confirms Djibouti’s involvement. But the public version of the report may keep that involvement hidden behind black ink.

“If we has had the [Senate] report unredacted, we would have a slam-dunk case. I think it’s a real travesty that we don’t have that,” said Meg Satterthwaite, a law professor and director of New York University’s Global Justice Clinic who represents Asad.

Asad is not looking to see his name in the high-profile report, only a reference to Djibouti as a participant in the CIA’s Bush-era “rendition, detention and interrogation” program. A 2010 UN report on secret detentions cited Djibouti’s involvement with the infamous CIA effort. Journalist Jason Leopold, citing US officials, reported that the Senate report identified Djibouti as hosting CIA “black-site” unacknowledged prisons.

Months of tussle over so-called “redactions” – the voluminous portions of the report that the CIA has worked to censor from public release – have made the transparency issue seem impersonal, bureaucratic or abstract. For Asad, it has real, human consequences.

Asad’s ordeal began in December 2003, when he was living in Tanzania, where he ran a tire trading company in Dar es Salaam. There, he had long rented space in a building he owned to men from the al-Haramain Foundation, which the US Treasury Department would designate as connected to terrorism a decade later, and served as a local trustee. Asad would later tell the African commission that all he knew of the group was its charitable work, and he hoped his association with it would “enhance my social standing”.

On 26 December 2003, Tanzanian police accosted Asad at his home. Instead of arresting or charging him, they drove him to an unfamiliar apartment for an hours-long interrogation, and then took him to an airport, where a plane would take him on a pre-dawn flight to a country he believes is Djibouti.

Critically, Asad cannot cite direct confirmation that he was in Djibouti. He was blindfolded, and his interrogators were less than forthcoming about his location.

Yet a habeas corpus petition later filed by al-Asad’s father identified his flight’s destination as Djibouti, and a UN report from 2010 states it flatly. A prison guard told Asad the same; and a photograph on the wall showed Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, Djibouti’s president. Asad’s legal team even traced his recollections of what he thought was an earthquake to a contemporaneous 5.0 tremor that shook the country’s capitol.

In what he believes to be Djibouti, Asad was confined to a concrete cell which he would only leave for interrogation sessions. One of his interrogators was a white woman who “identified herself as an American”, but without specifying which branch of the US government employed her. Most questions concerned Haramain. At times interrogators told Asad he would only be detained a few days. But on one occasion, he recalled in his commission filing, the American woman’s interpreter grew angry and told him that his children would soon be orphans.

Yet Asad would only spend about two weeks in Djibouti. Early in January 2004, guards blindfolded and restrained him, to take him once again to an airfield. But instead of returning him to his family in Tanzania, they stripped, diapered, hooded and chained him, put him in a jumpsuit and placed him on a plane to the first of what he estimates are four secret prisons, two of which Satterthwaite believes were CIA black sites in Afghanistan. He would remain in them until May 2005.

Asad told the commission he was “horribly abused” in US captivity. His account is consistent with others given by people held at US black sites: Asad says he was kept in isolation in cold cells and subjected to “horribly loud, constant, thumping music, 24 hours a day” in the second of his US prisons. Despite the treatment, Satterthwaite said, people identifying themselves as US officials visited him and said he was “at the top of our list” of detainees to release.

After 16 months, US officials sent Asad to Yemeni custody, without explaining what he was supposed to have done wrong. He eventually pleaded guilty to forging travel documents and was set free in March 2006. Reunited with his family, Asad now runs a hotel in rural Yemen. He has spent years seeking to compel Djibouti to acknowledge and apologize for its role in his detention, which it denies.

“He provided no proof that he was ever in Djibouti. He provided no proof that any Djiboutian officials knew about his situation or participated in any of the treatment he alleges that he suffered. I think his real claim is against the United States,” said Paul Reichler, a Washington DC lawyer who represented Djibouti before the African commission.

Djibouti is among America’s most important counter-terrorism partners in Africa. Since 2003, a refurbished base, Camp Lemonnier, has served as a launch pad for drone strikes, special operations raids and other military missions; in May, the Obama administration signed a 20-year lease on the facility. Satterthwaite believes that Djibouti offered up Asad to the US to curry favor with its new, powerful patron.

Satterthwaite acknowledged the difficulties of Asad’s appeal. Should he prevail, the commission itself is powerless to compel Djibouti to apologize, as it can merely recommend that outcome.

The task is magnified by the looming censorship. The CIA has strenuously resisted identifying its rendition partners, much as it has rejected public identification of its own agents involved in torture. Should the public excerpts of the Senate torture report not identify Djibouti, Asad’s legal team will have no choice but to “forensically try to piece together” the evidence of his rendition once more, she said.

“There are innocent victims of the program. We all know that. They’re still out there. They deserve to have the truth told about their cases, and they deserve some form of apology. I think if the report were made public without all of the redactions, that in itself would be an enormous piece of justice for people whose lives were turned upside down by this program,” Satterthwaite said.