"When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in U.S. custody, including five at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.
In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems, and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white plastic shopping bag.
The maladies, said Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the U.S. government.
The incoming Obama administration is weighing whether to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which many critics have called an extralegal system of detention and abuse.
But the full stories of individual detainees like Iqbal are only now emerging after years in which they were shuffled around the globe under the Bush administration's system of extraordinary rendition, which used foreign countries to interrogate and detain terrorism suspects in sites beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison's population.
"I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period," Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore, with The New York Times, whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune."
Continue reading this piece, from the IHT [NY Times originally] here.
In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems, and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white plastic shopping bag.
The maladies, said Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the U.S. government.
The incoming Obama administration is weighing whether to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which many critics have called an extralegal system of detention and abuse.
But the full stories of individual detainees like Iqbal are only now emerging after years in which they were shuffled around the globe under the Bush administration's system of extraordinary rendition, which used foreign countries to interrogate and detain terrorism suspects in sites beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison's population.
"I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period," Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore, with The New York Times, whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune."
Continue reading this piece, from the IHT [NY Times originally] here.
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