Lieutenant Anthony 'Tony' Zeoli spent nine months trying to find traces of people - alive or dead - among the rubble after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
He led the longest-serving volunteer unit on Ground Zero - Team Romeo, a squad staffed by 12 already-retired police officers who put on their uniforms again in a desperate bid to recover the 2,606 missing people ('Romeo' signified 'R' for 'retired').
Exactly 16 years later, he is opening up for the first time about the horrors they experienced, publishing a book called Rising From The Ashes.
But now, he and the surviving members of his unit are all suffering from a new kind of horror: cancers, PTSD, lung diseases, sleep apnea, digestive diseases and - in some cases - death, all as a result of inhaling the toxic cocktail of mercury, jet fuel, asbestos and more.
These are not "Unlawful Combatants", as the Bush regime characterized these men; they are prisoners of war, and as such, should be afforded all the rights and priveleges afforded by the Geneva Conventions, to which, I believe, the US government is still (allegedly) a signator.
What the Geneva Conventions said about the treatment of Prisoners of War
They should be either tried for their alleged crimes, or released to a country willing to take them in; it is just that simple.
But what the US military must be terrified about, once these men die from the consequences of their self-induced starvation, are their autopsies getting out, which will most likely demonstarate that for some of them, water boarding was not the only torture they endured.