JOYRIDE.(The Talk of the Town)

Among the things that, with only a day's notice, evidently can't be procured in New York--not, anyway, at a price that bleeding-heart-liberal mortals would be inclined to pay--is a for-rent luxury convertible sedan. This truth was revealed recently to Ben Wizner and Steven Watt, staff lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who were determined to help one of their clients, Khaled el-Masri, realize an uncomplicated, if somewhat unlikely, fantasy. On December 30, 2003, Masri, a forty-year-old unemployed car salesman, a Muslim German citizen and the father of four (now of six), boarded a bus in his home town, Ulm, bound for a brief holiday in Macedonia. According to a lawsuit filed on his behalf late last year by the A.C.L.U., the following happened:

At the Macedonian border, Masri's passport was confiscated. For twenty-three days, he was held in a hotel in the city of Skopje, interrogated, not allowed to contact anyone. Next, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, driven to an airport, severely beaten, stripped, anally probed, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, placed on a plane, drugged, and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned for more than four months.

It turned out that Masri's abductors--the Central Intelligence Agency--had apparently mistaken him for an alleged Al Qaeda operative with a similar name. Two months after the C.I.A. recognized its error, Masri, again blindfolded and handcuffed, was flown to Albania and released. Back in Germany, he retained a lawyer, who was contacted by the A.C.L.U. The subsequent lawsuit, El-Masri v. Tenet, alleges violations of United States and international human-rights law and fundamentally challenges the legality of the C.I.A.'s "extraordinary-rendition" policy.

El-Masri v. Tenet hasn't progressed very far through the American court system, however. In May, a federal judge granted the government's motion for a summary dismissal. Late last month, the parties appeared before an appellate court, as the A.C.L.U. argued to reverse that ruling. Masri, who had been denied entry to the U.S. by immigration authorities last winter, managed to attend this proceeding. "I am asking the American government to admit its mistakes and to apologize for my treatment," Masri has said. In an interview with the Washington Post, he expressed a more mundane wish: "I'd like to drive with the top down in a fancy car through New York City and to look up at all the tall buildings."

Which is how Masri found himself, the other day, riding shotgun in a convertible for a drive through lower Manhattan. Because no fancy rental vehicle had been available, the car was a 2005 royal-blue Mini Cooper. (Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.'s executive director, had ...