After spending six months in U.S. custody in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, he founded a nonprofit group in Jordan for fellow former detainees.
`I lost my left hand because American doctors and soldiers refused to operate on an old wound. ... But what`s worse is the wounds they inflicted on my soul, the wounds of humiliation. They tried to destroy my pride. This, no doctor nor time can heal,` al-Qaisi said, sobbing.
He said his captors suspended him by the arms for several hours or days, and forced him to remain naked for weeks at a time. He was regularly subjected to electric shocks, he said.
`Men were forced to urinate on each other, or to sleep naked in piles on top of each other, with women wardens sodomizing male prisoners,` al-Qaisi said.
A lawyer for Iraqi detainees, Susan Burke, confirmed that al-Qaisi was cited in the report; Physicians for Human Rights used pseudonyms for privacy reasons.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based group investigates abuse and advocates for global health and human rights. Its report followed standards and methods used worldwide to document torture.
Image: In this February 2, 2002, file photo, a detainee from Afghanistan is carried on a stretcher before being interrogated by military officials at Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner is one the detainees whom U.S. officials say have war wounds inflicted before they were captured in Afghanistan. Years after being released by the U.S. military, former detainees held in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base are suffering debilitating injuries and mental disorders from their interrogation and alleged torture, according to a new report by a human rights group.
