By Carol Grisanti and Fakhar ur Rehman
NBC News
Updated 1/18/2011 6:19:28 AM ET
Courtesy Of "MSNBC"
LAHORE, Pakistan — Saad Iqbal Madni looks decades older than his 33 years when he shuffles into the room, head down and eyes averted.
"There are a lot of times I start to cry. I still feel like I am in Guantanamo," he says, his voice cracking and hands trembling. "I have memorized the torture. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming."
It has been two years since the Pakistani Islamic scholar left Guantanamo Bay. After six-and-a-half years of imprisonment as a suspected enemy combatant he was released without being convicted and without an explanation. According to accounts by Madni and others, his experience involved torture, extraordinary rendition across several continents and five years at the U.S. prison in Cuba.
Mohammed Burki, Madni's physician in Pakistan, describes his patient as a deeply troubled man who is "still far far away from being normal again."
Madni now suffers from a catalogue of ailments, including migraines, paranoia, depression, panic attacks and temper tantrums, Burki told NBC News.
"Before I could treat any of those, I had to try and get him off the morphine," says Burki, who treated Madni for two years after his release. "The Americans had made an addict out of him."
The CIA and the U.S. military did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Madni's detention and subsequent release. The United States has explicitly denied torturing detainees.
While it is impossible to independently corroborate much of Madni's story, experts say it stands up to scrutiny.
"His account is so precise and so detailed and there are enough documents to back up everything he says," says Sultana Noon of Reprieve, a U.K.-based charity that represents prisoners who have been rendered and abused around the world.
Madni was part of wave of men scooped up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. His story sheds further light on international counterterrorism efforts, when suspected terrorists were transported around the globe, held without trial and allegedly tortured at the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.
Some contend these practices continue.
"Anyone who is sporting a beard is a vulnerable target for the intelligence agencies to pick up," says Pakistani human rights activist Amina Masood. "We are talking about gross violations of human rights in this U.S. war on terror, disappearances, arrests, no courts to hear one's pleas."
"We are dealing with human beings here," she says.
Madni, who was employed to read the Koran during prayer times and religious holidays for the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, says he was picked up by Indonesian authorities during a visit to Jakarta in 2002.
Shoe bomb Madni says he was told by the officials who detained him that they were acting on CIA instructions after he told an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb. Madni denies the charge, saying that nobody ever even questioned him about the alleged comment during his detention.
Even American officials in Jakarta questioned the case against Madni, saying he was a braggart, a "wannabe" and should be let go, according to a New York Times article from Jan. 6, 2009.
Quoting two senior American officials, the newspaper reported there was no evidence that Madni ever met Osama bin Laden or had been to Afghanistan.
"But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr Iqbal (Madni) was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation," the newspaper reported.
Madni says he felt his life was over as soon as Indonesian intelligence officials took him from his prison cage to the airport.
"A person from Egyptian intelligence come, kicked and grabbed me and threw me against the wall," he says. "That's when I got a perforated ear drum and started bleeding from my ear, nose and throat."
Madni identified his captors as Egyptian immediately from their accents. He is fluent in nine languages, including Arabic, which he believes made him suspect.
"They stripped me naked, beat me and kicked me," Madni told NBC News. "I was shackled from my neck to my feet and taken to a plane. They put me inside a wooden box, on top of the box is a plastic sheet. My legs were up on my chest and I had to stay like that for an 18-hour flight to Diego Garcia. They didn't allow me to go to the bathroom. They put me in diapers and said, 'your bathroom is with you'."
Diego Garcia is a British territory used by the U.S. military.
Madni says he kept track of the passage of time because he recited the Koran by heart. Anyone who reads the Muslim holy book professionally knows exactly how long it takes to recite each verse.
In Egypt, Madni says his captors put him in a room that he describes as "smaller than a grave, so small I could not even lie down."
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