He was only 8 years old and his little brother was barely 6 months when Iraqi goons kidnapped their pharmacist-father from Kuwait and began torturing the man. It was a case of mistaken identity, Iraqi officials admitted years later.

But it was too late for Abdul Sattar Al-Sabunchi. After eight months in one of Saddam’s gulags the pharmacist died, the family learned in 1974.

A year later, the family was forced back to Iraq because the dead man’s application for Kuwaiti citizenship was a moot point.

The boy’s mother, a geologist, was an Iraqi teaching at a high school in Kuwait. She would have to provide for her children in Iraq. But a family whose head of household had been killed by Iraq’s dictatorial government was sure to face many hardships, and theirs did.

Kussay “Gus” Al-Sabunchi tells me all of this in an effort to explain where his pain comes from today.

“I lived in Iraq for seven years after we went back. I could not stand living there. I could not stand the regime, the dictatorship. It was terrible,” he said Wednesday.

He left during the Iraq-Iran war, a 17-year-old student who was able to miss mandatory military service, which started at age 18, and get to Canada to study. Then, the college student sought political asylum, and his father’s tortured death certainly helped Al-Sabunchi get such protection from Canada.

The IBM computer engineer, a family man who has Canadian citizenship and entered this country legally, now faces deportation because of overzealous U.S. government officials in this post Sept. 11 New World Disorder. All because in 1997 Al-Sabunchi sent his now ex-wife flowers when there was a restraining order for him not to contact her — an order Orlando federal court Judge G. Kendall Sharp called “tainted” by the woman’s relationship with a police officer who pressured her into making a stink where none should have existed.

Sharp cleared Al-Sabunchi of any criminal wrongdoing this year, but that hasn’t stopped federal officials from spending taxpayers’ money and critical time better spent on tracking real terrorists to instead continue to pursue Al-Sabunchi.

Al-Sabunchi forgot to include his no-contest plea in the flowers “crime” on his application for U.S. permanent residency a couple of years later, and that’s the case federal officials have against him today. Big whoop.

Last month, an immigration judge cited a backlog of 6,000 cases to delay Al-Sabunchi’s hearing for 11 months. Makes one wonder: How many other immigration cases hang on a bare thread of a technicality?

Al-Sabunchi was not among the Arabs with student visas or other visitor status to have to register with the U.S. government after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, because he has permanent U.S. residency. As a naturalized Canadian citizen, he was not among the 10,000 Iraqis living in the United States who were targeted for “questioning” by the government as President George W. Bush prepared to go to war against Iraq. But Al-Sabunchi’s new wife, an Iraqi who lived in Kuwait before getting U.S. permanent residency, was on that hit list.

The knock on the door of Al-Sabunchi’s Hunter’s Creek, Fla., home came in March. Two U.S. agents, including one from the U.S. Postal Service (yeah, that’s what the man’s business card says!), wanted Al-Sabunchi’s wife to answer some standard questions. When the agents realized Al-Sabunchi also was born in Iraq, they interviewed him, as well.

Everything seemed fine until a few weeks later. On April 21, agents with their guns drawn banged on his door as Al-Sabunchi showered before work that morning. They pulled him out half dressed, and in front of his wife and son they handcuffed him and pushed him out to the squad cars. His wife, about eight months’ pregnant at the time, almost had a miscarriage from the stress of that incident, he says.

Later, she would turn to him and say, “For a moment, I thought we were still living in Iraq.”

His 11-year-old son still has difficulty sleeping, Al-Sabunchi says, and sometimes the boy gets angry at his father and asks, “Why are you Iraqi? That’s bad.”

The federal government has stopped requiring people from countries designated as terrorist hotbeds to register, but the damage to Al-Sabunchi’s family already has been done without ever requiring him to register. His crime, it seems, is one of association — his place of birth must make him a suspected terrorist.

He may have to appeal his case all the way up, and for what? Are we any safer today?

Welcome to the New Normal, as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights has dubbed the federal government’s actions since Sept. 11. Constitutional principles and basic criminal procedures have been conveniently swept under the White House rug of executive privilege, giving federal agents powers that used to be the purview of dictatorial regimes.

Let’s go after terrorists, by all means. Let’s catch them before they kill us. Let’s just stop treating innocent people who send flowers as if they’re terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. It’s un-American.

Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address

is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.