The appeal of the United States to ordinary Iranians goes almost entirely unnoticed, and therefore unexplained. Many Iranians regard the American ideal, at least as they perceive it, as a symbol of all they want their own society to be -- free, prosperous, "great" -- but isn't. Iranians I've encountered from all strata of society express an eagerness to exalt the country they have been conditioned to view as the "Great Satan." And yet, thousands of miles away, the vast majority of Americans are totally unaware of their Iranian admirers.

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He spotted me strolling through the gardens surrounding the Naranjestan-e Ghavam, the Qajar-era pavilion in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. It was a late November morning. There had been a light rain the night before, leaving the grounds damp and the air cool. The moisture released the scents from the flower beds and stands of cypresses, the aroma of late autumn filling the air. In my expensive athletic shoes and nylon jacket, I stood out as a foreigner, likely a Westerner. With bright eyes and a smile to match, he asked me where I was from. I told him.

"I thought so," he said.

I asked how.

"I can tell," he replied. "I just love Americans."

Then he told me his story.

His name was Akbar and he had moved to the U.S. in 1976 on a student visa, three years before the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the onset of the Islamic Revolution, the social and political cataclysm that would turn Iranian society upside-down for a generation. At the time, there were over 50,000 Iranian students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the United States, a number that has shriveled to about 2,000 today. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi then still held a firm grip on power, backed by his hated Savak, the CIA-trained security force, and a series of American administrations that found favor with his pro-Western policies that stood as a reliable bulwark against Soviet adventurism.

After graduating from the University of Texas, Akbar got married, had a son, and lived a pleasant, relatively uneventful life in West Texas. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The following year he had "gotten into a little trouble with the IRS," as he put it, and so in late 2001 his bank accounts were audited, and early one morning an FBI SWAT team raided his house. Soon afterward he was arrested and charged with "lending material support for terrorist organizations," including al-Qaeda, even though al-Qaeda is exclusively Sunni and Akbar, like almost all Iranian Muslims, is Shi'ite.

The U.S. government seized all of Akbar's assets, he says. "They cleaned me out," as he put it. For one year Akbar was held in a Texas federal prison before being moved to another facility in Louisiana. In a few months he was transferred again, this time to a CIA prison in Big Springs, Tennessee. He spent the next four and a half years there and claims he was tortured, for what reason and to gain what information he still doesn't know. His son, just out of college, had several federal job offers pending, which were quickly withdrawn. His wife, a high school principal in the San Marcos School District, was passed over for a promotion. In 2008 he agreed to be deported back to Iran and relinquish any possibility of returning to the United States. He's now working with a human rights lawyer through the International Court of Justice to receive compensation for his losses.