Freed from Guantanamo, a poet pleads for lost verses

bostonglobe: ''Please help," said Dost, who says he penned 25,000 lines of verse during his long imprisonment on the southern tip of Cuba. ''Those words are very precious to me. My interrogators promised I would get them back. Still I have nothing."

The lost poems are the final indignity for Dost, 44, a cultured and soft-spoken man who was flown back to his native Afghanistan with 16 other detainees last year, apparently after military officials believed his pleas of innocence.

Three years earlier, however, nobody seemed to be listening. Dost, an Afghan native who was living in Peshawar, a city in northern Pakistan, was whisked from his home in November 2001, and transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, accused of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. Five months later he was shackled, blindfolded, and flown to Cuba.

In the difficult days and months that followed, the gemstone dealer and part-time poet crafted his escape through verse.

''I would fly on the wings of my imagination," he recalled in a recent interview in his home here. ''Through my poems I would travel the world, visiting different places. Although I was in a cage I was really free." Read more