"The Americans tortured me. The Americans did very bad things to me."

Those words, spoken in broken English in the spring of 2004 by a former Iraqi detainee of the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison, forever changed Troy attorney Shereef Akeel's life.

"I said, 'Abu Ghraib what?'" recalls Akeel, "I'm in Huntington Woods. We didn't have a big law firm. This was before it all came out."

Akeel, 43, is now a founding partner in his own firm ...