Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn has lost many things over the course of the disastrous US “war on terror.” As one of the thirty-nine remaining detainees in Washington’s extralegal prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he has lost touch with the outside world for nearly two decades.

Presumably, too, he has lost some sense of well-being, and not merely for the psychological and physical distress that imprisonment provokes by design. He was the first prisoner to be subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program at an agency black site, making his legacy distinctly sinister among his cohort.

His case is thus notorious among the 780 men and children who have been held at Guantánamo. He was the first to be waterboarded, subjected to forced nudity, deprived of sleep for days on end, and held in a box no larger than a human coffin for long stretches of time.