[Photo: Amer Samara’ae was held for a year in US prisons in Iraq without any charge.] Amer Samara’ae hates Americans. Not some Americans, not American soldiers, not American mercenaries, not the US president. He hates all Americans, something he learned to do during a year inside their Iraq prisons. "I was innocent and they took me and they stole my life from me," he said. "I’m not a religious extremist; I never was. I hate them because they took everything. Do they think you’re just going to forget?" The Iraqi, who is 36, was not caught up in any of the headline-grabbing torture scandals and did not fall under the sway of radical Islamists. His story of life inside the US internment camps is more mundane: sitting in his Damascus flat, where he now lives as a refugee, he speaks of humiliation, of casual inhumanity. "I was arrested in Baghdad while visiting a friend and then I was taken into the system," he said. "They didn’t have any charges against me and one day in an interrogation they decided that I was giving weapons to the insurgents. I don’t think they knew what they were doing. "I was made to stand around naked sometimes, I was handcuffed and I had to walk to the toilet chained to a heavy tyre. That was normal."