"I told my wife that for the first time I felt like a man again, tasting things, picking things up in my fingers, eating lunch with my wife and my two daughters," Boumediene said Monday just after the meal that marked his release from doctors' care.

Boumediene, 43, had been in a French military clinic under observation since his arrival in Paris on May 15 - in shackles - aboard a U.S. government aircraft.

In what he describes as an ugly mistake by U.S. authorities, Boumediene, an Algerian, had spent seven years as terrorism suspect No. 10005.

Later he became the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene vs. Bush, that in June 2008 gave Guantanamo detainees the right to seek judicial review of their imprisonment.

Ordered released by a U.S. district judge in Washington, he is representative of dozens of prisoners whom the U.S. government needs to release but is finding it hard to, because most other countries won't take them in and most Americans do not want them on U.S. soil.

At the Obama administration's request, France agreed to take in Boumediene.

Boumediene's version of events is impossible to verify. He describes himself as collateral damage in the sweeps that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. He was a Red Crescent aid worker in Bosnia wrenched from his life, he said, and interrogated endlessly about something about which he had no knowledge.

Boumediene was arrested in Bosnia in October 2001 along with five other Algerians accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and British Embassies in Sarajevo, charges that were later withdrawn.

In January 2002, the six were turned over to U.S. officials and flown to Guantanamo, despite rulings by several Bosnian courts that there was no reason to deport them.

U.S. interest was high because one of the six Algerians, Belkacem Bensayah, was accused by U.S. investigators of being an al-Qaeda operative in Bosnia.

Boumediene, in the interview, said that he did not know Bensayah well but that, as a fellow Algerian, Bensayah had come to Boumediene's Red Crescent office seeking help for his family.

In addition, he said, Bensayah's wife sought assistance after her husband's arrest, and Boumediene provided money for a lawyer. Boumediene said U.S. officials concluded that those connections linked him to al-Qaeda's activities in Bosnia.

Boumediene said a stint in Pakistan in the early 1990s also aroused the suspicions of U.S. investigators and may have landed his name on a watch list shared by Algerian security services with their U.S. counterparts.

He said his time in Pakistan had nothing to do with madrassas, or religious schools, where future fighters were indoctrinated. He said he was a proctor at a Kuwaiti-financed school for Afghan orphans.

Boumediene said he was interrogated more than 120 times during his stay in Guantanamo's Camp Delta, mostly about Arabs and other foreign Muslims in Bosnia.

"At first I thought they were honest, and when I explained they would see I was innocent and would release me," he said. "But after the first two years or so, I realized they were not straight. So I stopped cooperating."

During one 16-day period in February 2003, he said he was questioned day and night. Sometimes he was lifted roughly from the chair he was strapped in, making the shackles dig into his flesh.

The interrogators, some in military uniforms and others in civilian clothes, were assisted by Arabic interpreters who seemed mostly to be from Egypt and Lebanon.

"They were dogs," Boumediene said of the interpreters, in his only show of anger.

On Christmas 2006, Boumediene said, he began a hunger strike to press his innocence. Twice a day he was strapped to a chair and force-fed through a tube in his nose.

"I have no idea why this happened to me," he said. "I'm a Muslim like any other. I pray and I observe Ramadan. But I don't have any hatred against anybody."

Growing Number Back in the Fray

Fourteen percent of the 534 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay prison and

sent abroad are suspected of returning to terrorism or confirmed to have done so, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.

The Defense Intelligence Agency said 27 former detainees had engaged in terrorist acts and

47 were suspected of doing so. Some of the confirmed cases involved detainees relocated

in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, and Morocco, the

report said.

The figures released by Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman are based on the number of detainees transferred through April 7. The latest recidivism rate is up 3 percentage points from the 11 percent rate the Pentagon reported Jan. 13 based on data collected through Dec. 31 and twice the 7 percent rate during the previous 31/2 years.

Obama in January ordered Guantanamo shut in a year. The United States is reviewing the cases of 240 the detainees

still held there.

- Bloomberg News