Abducted by the CIA

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a Rolling Stone
That's the ending lyric of Bob Dylan's Song Like A Rolling Stone which tells about a person who is alone and lost.

I haven't heard that song for more than 10 years, but yesterday I suddenly start to hum the song once again after reading an article in The Jakarta Globe about the release of Muhammad Saat Iqbal after being detained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for seven years without any Court Trial.
Iqbal, a Pakistani, was suspected by the CIA as member of Al Qaeda capable of making a Shoe Bomb. He was arrested in a joint operation between the CIA and Indonesia's State Intelligence Board (BIN) during his visit to Jakarta on 9 January 2002. Two days later, he was flown to Egypt, then Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay where he was detained for five years. During all those time Iqbal was badly tortured but no criminal charges was made against him. And when he was released in August 2008 he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected and he was dependent on antibiotics and antidepressants. Due to these facts, Iqbal's American Lawyer Richard L. Cys of Davis Wright Tremaine, who visited him in Guantanamo, planned to sue the American government for the unlawful detention of Iqbal.

What happened to Iqbal is terribly awful. No human being can be treated so cruel by another human being, no matter what he/she has done, especially if he/she has never been proven guilty of any crime. I sincerely hope that it would never happen again to anybody else in the future.

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