German businessman Khalid El-Masri's movie-worthy story began when he stepped off a bus in Macedonia on New Year's Eve of 2003. Before he had so much as taken a breath of fresh Macedonian air, he was tackled by police, taken to a hotel, and locked in a room for 23 days, during which the only interaction from his captors was to barge in and wail on him while ordering him to admit he was an agent of Al-Qaida. But, El-Masri was nothing, if not honest -- he refused to make said admission, seeing as how he was not, in actuality, an agent of Al-Qaida.

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"Which is exactly what he would say if he was an Al-Qaida agent!"

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After his all-expenses-paid hotel stay, El-Masri was taken to the Skopje airport, where Macedonian officials admitted the whole thing was a huge misunderstanding and released him into the loving arms of his family. Just kidding -- he was handed over to CIA agents, who "stripped, hooded, shackled, and sodomized" him, before flying him off to Afghanistan to be locked away in a secret prison known as the "Salt Pit." There, he would be deprived of food, beaten, and tortured for nearly five fucking months before an agent thought to ask, "Wait, what did you say your name was again?"

See, officials had confused Khalid El-Masri with Khalid Al-Masri, a suspected Al-Qaida operative. One tiny letter had caused El-Masri to become an unintended victim of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, in which they whisked those suspected of having ties to terrorism to a third country to have the shit tortured out of them. Once they realized they had made an oopsie, the CIA apologized to El-Masri -- and by "apologized," we mean they chained and blindfolded him, flew him to some godforsaken corner of Albania, and literally dumped him on the side of a road, in the middle of nowhere, and without any fucking explanation whatsoever. Presumably their entire plan was to tell the world, "Who you gonna believe: the CIA, or some crazy guy on the side of the road? Huh?"