"There's no way to know exactly what happened," Vic Wisner, the prosecutor, told me. "There was evidence that Nasir had threatened suicide in the past. There was evidence he had financial difficulties. Another theory was that he might have done it to get even with his wife, that he had been fighting with her before the incident occurred." During the trial, Wisner said, he hadn't even attempted to promote one specific theory.

"I think it was just an isolated act," he said, "by a man who was cursed by many personal demons and took it out on his poor son."

In any case, after Mohammad Nasir confessed, he retracted his confession. In the later version, he and Osama both were attacked by an intruder, though there was no evidence of forced entry. The assailant, Nasir claimed, was Mexican.

Nasir's wife also made a statement that she retracted. A naturalized U.S. citizen, 30-year-old Zareen Fazilat told investigators the family had been in a state of conflict, and that her husband beat her. Later, at the trial, her hair in a clean white head covering, she took her statements back. What she'd meant, she said in accented English, was that her husband had just pushed her. About the murder she testified, "He could not do that, because he loves his son more than me."

Instead, she said, she believed an intruder killed Osama because of his explosive name.

Ironic, all this -- and how American, I thought. From our predilection for brown bogeymen to our strategies of jurisprudence, the Nasirs learned this culture well.

But justice finally was done. After fewer than two hours deliberating, the jury sentenced Mohammad Nasir to life in prison. Even his attorney praised the trial as fair. Through a fluke, Houston Mayor Lee Brown -- an African-American -- had landed jury duty on this otherwise low-profile case, and he fulfilled his obligation.

"I think having Brown, an African-American, on the jury calmed ethnic concerns," Mohammad Nasir's lawyer told the Houston Chronicle. "We had potential jurors who could not believe a man named Mohammad after 9/11. I wanted Brown in there to head off potential problems like that."

So why was I still brooding over Shireen's half-baked story?

The whole week I spent in Pakistan, I scribbled many more far-fetched assertions. A mullah claimed the Taliban were moderate toward women. Destitute farmers said Israel attacked the World Trade Center. Unemployed young men maintained that the U.S. kept Osama bin Laden in a safe house, because we wanted a pretext to bomb Muslims. At the party with the silk rug on the wall, a doctor whispered that a few more terrorist attacks would level America's economy. His eyes danced when he said it.

All these accounts I dismissed at once. I understood what they were -- expressions of political resentment -- and I understood whom they were coming from. It took me longer to see how such a tale could come from someone like Shireen. Here was someone who could easily research the truth, who had a reputation to defend; someone, above all, with whom I rather identified. She was an outspoken woman in a man's culture. She attended the same graduate school I did! And she had a say in life and death issues, where accuracy -- you'd think -- would count.

It all came down, I decided, to the importance of fine points.

To many people like Shireen, with a list of grievances against us, the details of how Americans may tempt and bulldoze other cultures are finally uninteresting. So I'm wrong on this one, I imagined Shireen thinking. I know I'm right on lots of others.

But for me, fine points signify a lot these days. It's not self-hating to acknowledge the harm Americans have helped unleash pursuing national or corporate objectives: the El Mozote massacres, the Bhopal poison clouds, the Guatemalan coups. To the contrary, willingness to own up to dark acts of our leaders, and sometimes of our fellows, is perhaps this culture's saving trait.

Right now, I'm trying hard to judge which critiques of us are just. It's not easy at a time when America seems so dangerous to others, yet faces genuine perils itself. Maybe this is why I felt that odd, triumphant energy when I learned the truth about little Osama. I knew for sure what Americans do not do. We don't eat sweetmeats, and we don't celebrate when a child is killed. Regardless of his name.

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