LAHORE, Pakistan — When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military 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 Mr. 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 United States government.
As today’s New York Times piece mentions, we are only now really beginning to hear the stories of these men who’ve been held at Gitmo and/or other locations under American control or from US rendition. Of course, we’ve had pretty clear ideas of what their stories would tell. And we’ve known that many will have been arrested and held for acts or statements such as what seems the case here.
All of that is horrid enough. But this makes it even worse:
Mr. 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.
Overcrowding determined his freedom. Not justice, not empathy, not regret at the level of cruel and inhumane punishment levied against the man for so little an offence. A mere matter of impersonal administrative convenience gained the man his liberty.
This seems nearly unimaginable in two respects. First, that America has fallen to such depths of immorality and injustice such that prisoners would be held perhaps forever and be tortured while held. Second is the unbalanced proportionality between 9/11 and America’s response to it.
Will those responsible suffer consequences? We’ll see what happens over the next four or eight years. Certainly, it will be a good and necessary thing for partisan rancor to give way to a saner and more cooperative mode of governance in the US. But that is a goal which, if it trumps any real accounting for what has happened, then the rest of the world might justly conceive that policy as typical of American selfishness, arrogance and narcissisism and so completely amoral as to be unacceptable.
