Khaled Betar, 34, is a happy-go-lucky blue-eyed bachelor from Amman, Jordan, whose friends know him as a bit of a womanizer. Radical Islam holds no attraction for him -- he's an agnostic who tends to see both his Arab and Muslim identity as an accident of birth. The first time he prayed to Allah was when he was thrown in prison by FBI agents who accused him of membership in al-Qaida.

Before arriving in America, Betar spent time working in both South Africa and Hamburg, Germany. He traveled to America in April 2001 for the same reason many immigrants do -- to earn money. A Jordanian family he knew owned a gas station in Stony Point, N.Y., and they gave him a job that paid around $2,000 a month -- nearly 10 times what he could make at home.

Betar had a six-month tourist visa that was still valid in late September 2001, when FBI agents showed up at his apartment to question him. "They asked me if I know any people who give speeches in the mosque, if I'm religious or not," he says. "They spoke to me for, like, half an hour and they asked me about my passport. I showed them my visa." The visa would expire in a week.

Knowing that, the agents waited 10 days before visiting Betar again. When they returned, there were two immigration agents with them. "They told me, your visa expired and you have to go with us to the detention," he says.

Betar would spend the next nine months in Passaic County Jail, where he was held as a material witness to the Sept. 11 attacks. "He was never charged with terrorism, never charged with being a threat to national security," says his attorney, Sin Yen Ling of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "There were never any formal charges."

But there were many interrogations. Seven of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers spent time in Hamburg, a city with a Muslim population of 130,000. Betar had lived there, too, and investigators were convinced there was a connection.

During his first interview, there were four FBI agents. They showed him pictures of some of the hijackers, and asked if he knew them. "They told me one of the hijackers was in Germany," he says. "They said, 'How come you are Muslim and you don't know this guy?' That's what they told me! I told them, man, I can't know every Muslim!"

A few weeks later, the agents asked him if he would take a polygraph. He readily agreed, but after hours of questioning, he was told that he failed (he's never seen the transcript, and it wasn't given to his attorney). Several days later, he was given a second polygraph. Again, he was told that he failed, and he was taken to the hole. The guard told Betar he was acting on the FBI's orders.

"I was in a small cell. It's closed. There was an iron bed and mattress and blanket, that's all that you have. I stayed there 24 days. All the time, they keep the light on. Every day they came with dogs. The dogs made noise. Every day they took me from the room to search me. I'm in the room, how can I get anything?"

When he returned to the prison's general population after 24 days, "It was like a paradise for me," he says. "You can't imagine. The hole is terrible. It was the worst 24 days of my life. They make you crazy, really."

There was pressure, he says, to admit to some role in Sept. 11. "They just want me to say I know one of these people," he says. "They want anybody. If you are innocent, it doesn't matter for them. They just want to put anybody in the jail, to show people that they are working. If this happened in Syria, Iraq, it's normal, but in America it's different, really."

Eventually, though, the FBI cleared Betar of any terrorist ties, and he was deported back to Jordan.

A resilient man, Betar seems to have largely put his ordeal behind him. "Now, I'm all right," he says in Amman, where he and a friend have started a business selling nuts. "Sometimes you remember, you get depressed, but I'm normal now. I'm OK."

Maddy, who's found a job as an Internet marketing manager for a Cairo tourism company, hasn't done as well. He has memory lapses and trouble concentrating. "Sometimes at my job, it goes in my mind, everything that happened in the USA. I get nervous and have to leave what I'm doing. Never I forget. Everything's like videotape. I remember even when I'm sleeping. I don't feel safe when I'm sleeping. I don't feel good about my life." He wants to sue the Justice Department, but knows little about the American legal system, and isn't sure where to look for a lawyer to represent him pro bono.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, something further seemed to break in him. Shortly after the first pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis were published, he fired off an uncharacteristic message full of profanity and rage. "How much the American people hate the Muslim people!" he writes. "[W]e hate the stupid Bush and I will be happy when he go to the hell in November and I want tell him go, not come back. Fuck you Bush and your government."

Two days later, he was mortified by his outburst. "I would like to express my apology for using an inappropriate language, but I have bitter feelings that squeeze my heart and soul," he writes in a second e-mail. "It sounds like it is a policy for the American government to treat Arabs, especially Muslims, as bad as they can, and it is totally untrue that the behavior was individual incidents carried [out] by several guards."

"What I have saw with the Iraqi people made me feel very sick. It was really disgusting and made me review all that happened to me," he says.

Maddy wasn't terribly religious before, but in prison he moved closer to God, he says. Now, he fantasizes about suing the United States for what it put him through, and using the money to build a big mosque, white, with a green light shining from the minaret.

But first, he says, "I will give some money to my sons, so they don't need to go to the USA."

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