Americans ‘Stole My Life from Me’

Tweet Portion below; read the rest of Amer's story here: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080504/FOREIGN/450459787/1002/NEWS
via Uruknet.info

DAMASCUS // Amer Samara’ae hates Americans. Not some Americans, not American soldiers, not American mercenaries, not the US president. He hates all Americans, something he learned to do during a year inside their Iraq prisons.

“I was innocent and they took me and they stole my life from me,” he said. “I’m not a religious extremist; I never was. I hate them because they took everything. Do they think you’re just going to forget?”

The Iraqi, who is 36, was not caught up in any of the headline-grabbing torture scandals and did not fall under the sway of radical Islamists. His story of life inside the US internment camps is more mundane: sitting in his Damascus flat, where he now lives as a refugee, he speaks of humiliation, of casual inhumanity.

“I was arrested in Baghdad while visiting a friend and then I was taken into the system,” he said. “They didn’t have any charges against me and one day in an interrogation they decided that I was giving weapons to the insurgents. I don’t think they knew what they were doing.

“I was made to stand around naked sometimes, I was handcuffed and I had to walk to the toilet chained to a heavy tyre. That was normal.”

Waiting for one interrogation session to start, Mr Samara’ae said he was made to kneel on a hard floor in front of the US flag for two hours.

“The Americans are making enemies for themselves,” he said. “In my case, I was made to kneel in front of an American flag, with my hands tied behind my back. Now whenever I think of America, whenever I see that flag, I’m angry. I hate all Americans, and I hate their flag, I hate it.”

Before the war, Mr Samara’ae, a Sunni from the city of Samarra, worked as an officer in Saddam Hussein’s feared security services, then took job as a maintenance man with the Red Cross. After the US invasion he set up a small firm with a contract to maintain Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital. The business became successful until he was arrested and it collapsed.