Escaping a Painful Past To Find a Shaky Future

Except that he doesn't.

Since his release, he has lived with a friend in a bare townhouse in Vienna, furnished with two white plastic chairs and a TV. The laundromat doesn't want him anymore. Because of his immigration status, the community college he had hoped to attend will not take him. He doesn't eat, except for coffee and nibbles of junk food, such as the packets of Oreos and Mentos strewn on the floor of his room among piles of legal papers. His bed is a sheet on the floor, his pillow a rolled-up winter jacket.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he is seized with the notion that he must see the ocean. He goes to Atlantic City. He watches the waves. He doesn't understand what is happening to him.

"It's like I destroy my life."

A Setback in a U.S. Court

Some people have believed al Zaidi. A doctor at George Washington University concluded that al Zaidi "did indeed suffer the torture and abuse that he claims." And a psychoanalyst diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, writing that "he has suffered a process of brutal human degradation."

In February 2001, he told his story on the stand in U.S. immigration court in Arlington. Al Zaidi said he had been drafted into the Army, like all other Iraqi men, and served as a mail clerk during the Iran-Iraq war.

His first arrest, he said through a translator, came in 1991 for participating in an uprising against Hussein after the Persian Gulf War. When his mother tried to bar police officers from their home, they hit her in the head, he said, and killed her.

He said he was arrested in 1996 for having writings of a Shiite cleric in his house. In 1999, he said he was arrested after he and other Shiites shouted anti-Hussein slogans after their leader, cleric Mohammed Sadeq al Sader, was assassinated.

Prosecutors had relatively minor questions about the case. "You still hopeful you can reach agreement in this case?" Judge Joan Churchill asked prosecutors, according to a court transcript -- meaning that they would agree to asylum.

"Yes," the prosecutor answered.

Then, in March, Churchill received an anonymous note that said that while al Zaidi was in Iraq, he was "working as secret service" for Hussein and that he was sent to the United States to kill high-level officials.

A new prosecutor submitted pages from "Saddam's Bombmaker," a book by Iraqi exile Khidhir Hamza, who claimed to have run Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Hamza wrote that during the Iran-Iraq war, Hussein used Shiite soldiers as human mine detonators. Therefore, prosecutors said, al Zaidi must have had special ties to get a desk job.