Ex-Detainee Describes Struggle for Exoneration

Source: Washington Post

Ex-Detainee Describes Struggle for Exoneration
In France, Algerian Savors Normal Life

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 26, 2009

PARIS, May 25 -- When the nightmare finally ended -- seven years at Guantanamo Bay, two years of force-feeding through a tube in his right nostril, the long struggle to proclaim his innocence before a judge, and finally 10 days of hospitalization -- Lakhdar Boumediene celebrated with pizza for lunch in a little Paris dive.

"When we were at the restaurant," Boumediene said Monday, shortly after the meal that marked his release from doctors' care and reentry into normal society, "I told my wife that for the first time I felt like a man again, tasting things, picking things up in my fingers, eating lunch with my wife and my two daughters."

Boumediene, 43, had been in a French military clinic under physical and psychological observation since his arrival in Paris on May 15 aboard a U.S. government aircraft that carried him -- in shackles -- away from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In what he describes as an ugly mistake by U.S. authorities, Boumediene, an Algerian citizen, had spent seven years there as terrorism suspect No. 10005. Later he became the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, that in June 2008 gave Guantanamo detainees the right to seek judicial review of their imprisonment.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502263.html?hpid=topnews

:kick:

I cannot even imagine being falsely imprisoned in gitmo, tortured, no lawyers, no trial, no nothing.

This was never supposed to be something that happened by America's hands.

This is what "evil-doers" do, not us.

May God forgive us; no one else is likely to.