Abu Omar: To Hell and Back

On March 13 2005, the Washington Post revealed:

A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.

Abu Omar has since resurfaced. After his CIA kidnapping-- now the subject of a large scale Italian investigation-- he was rendered to Egypt. Omar talks about his torture in Egypt in a powerful piece in Spiegel Online:

"In the first few months I was locked in a solitary cell and had no contact with lawyers or my family. I was totally shut off from the outside world. Every couple of days I got taken to be interrogated. Egypt's government did what it always does: carry out Washington's orders. The dirty work to get me to talk was to be done here. That's why they tortured me, hooked up electric wires to my genitals, hung me on the wall in a solitary cell for days, subjected me to unbearably loud music through headphones."

"In the first 14 months I would have confessed to anything they wanted to hear -- but I knew nothing about any plans for attacks in Italy or anywhere else. During every interrogation they showed me photos of suspects I didn't know. Several times one of the men in uniform told me I was in a place no one knew and where no one could help me. I kept having to sign documents after the interrogations. I read the first ones, they confirmed that I had not been tortured. Afterwards I just signed everything they put in front of me. I didn't care. I had already tried twice to kill myself. Both times they found me too soon. I didn't want to carry on living in this hell."

"I'm a broken man. I suffer from severe back pain and can hardly move. My joints have stiffened because I was tied up for so long. My kidneys are so damaged that I can scarcely hold my water. I am 46 years old and feel like a pensioner who hasn't got many more years to live. Freedom is a relative thing in Egypt, especially for someone like me, an Islamist and CIA victim. I am not allowed to speak to the press. And I don't have a passport, I'm under house arrest. Every step I take is monitored."