After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

[Solly Mack]

In 2010, Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston University School of Medicine, a physician, a Navy reservist and an expert on torture, was asked by Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based group, to evaluate Mr. Salim.

She was shocked by what she found. Mr. Salim, who is 6-foot-2, was emaciated “like a skeleton,” Dr. Crosby said in an interview. In her assessment, she wrote that “he is plagued by profound distress, inability to eat and inability to sleep.”

“He describes himself as a ghost walking around the town,” she added. She noted other symptoms: flashbacks, short- and long-term memory loss, distress at seeing anyone in a military uniform, hopelessness about the future and a strong avoidance of noise. “He reports that his head feels empty — like an empty box,” she said.

Dr. Crosby concluded that Mr. Salim showed many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression. He appears, she wrote, “to have suffered severe and lasting physical and psychological injuries as a result of his arrest and incarceration by U.S. forces.”

Time does not heal all wounds. To forget is to condone.

[Solly Mack]

1. Thank you, elleng. For still caring.