Amjad tried to keep up with translating as I furiously wrote notes. Though I remember the faces of the men telling the stories, I can't match them to the stories themselves. Too much information too quickly. I planned to stay as long as I needed to to check out the stories more thoroughly. Not all of them were entirely consistent and I wanted to weed out exaggeration. I wanted to speak to the old Bedouin woman who still had a hand on Amjad's arm and had begun quietly crying.

As I took down the stories, the man on the platform continued to read numbers. He would announce a date a few months down the road and read the sequence numbers of the prisoners who could be visited that day.

I had been at the prison a little under half an hour, and hadn't had a chance to talk to the old Bedouin woman yet, when suddenly an American voice behind me hollered, "What the hell is going on here?" Iraqis parted to make way for a beefy M.P. in his 40s who appeared at my shoulder. Another M.P., a tall young guy in aviator sunglasses, stood a few paces behind. "Who gave you permission to be here? Did I give you permission to be here? Did you clear it with anyone?" Iraqis I had been speaking with began to fade away from me. While they couldn't understand the words the M.P. was speaking, his bulldog tone of voice provided translation.

I told the M.P. I didn't realize I needed permission to be outside the prison. I was just part of the crowd. "You can't be here," he said. "You have to leave now." When I told him I'd like to get his name first he said, "My name is Sergeant." His helmet identified him as Sgt. Reyes. I asked him what channels I needed to go through to return to the prison, perhaps even to interview him. He told me to speak to the public affairs officer (PAO) for the 16th M.P.s at BIAP (which stands for Baghdad International Airport) -- a military base nearby. But he had no phone number or e-mail for the PAO and no civilian gets onto BIAP without a prearranged escort.

I began slowly walking in the direction of the parking lot. Iraqis who had wanted to talk to me tagged along and I took notes as I walked. Sgt. Reyes popped up at my shoulder again. "I asked you nicely the first time," he said. He may have even believed it was true. He glued himself to my shoulder and we both ambled down the dirt expanse leading toward the parked cars. "Where are you from?" he asked. I was pretty sure he was asking what news organization I worked for. "America," I said. He lowered his voice and began acting conspiratorially chummy. "Listen," he said. "This isn't a good time to be here. We're expecting an attack." Abu Ghraib prison regularly gets hit by mortar shells. In fact, the previous evening the prison had been briefly bombarded. But at that moment, I felt certain that the sergeant was bullshitting me to encourage a hastier retreat. And if he wasn't bullshitting me, he was endangering the lives of the hundreds of Iraqis still lingering in front of the prison by not passing along that information to them.

As it turns out, Sgt. Reyes had every right to give me the bum's rush off the property. When I finally tracked down a military public affairs officer by e-mail and inquired about the policy for press outside the prison, I got this response: "I can confirm that the area you referred to is considered part of the grounds of Abu Ghuraab [sic] and is therefore under military control for the purpose of security and force protection." In the past week, I've spoken to other reporters who've gotten the boot from outside the prison as well -- for the purpose of security and force protection. But there seems to be no consistency in the policy toward journalists outside the prison. A few days after my trip, another reporter I know went to Abu Ghraib. She interviewed Iraqis in roughly the same place I had and never encountered a single soldier. After two hours, she left of her own volition.

Iraqi security detainees do not have the right to representation by an attorney. They do not appear before a judge. After someone has been arrested as a security detainee, he is shunted through a system that is 100 percent U.S. military. I had heard that some security detainees, those considered "high risk," do not have any visitation rights whatsoever. I contacted a military PAO via e-mail and asked for confirmation about this policy. When I didn't hear back, I tracked the PAO down at his office inside the Green Zone convention center. He told me he had made inquiries and been informed that the military would not comment on issues of policy. In other words, the policy is not to discuss policy. I thanked him for his time and walked one flight down to the Iraqi Assistance Center where I posed the same question. The woman I spoke to there confirmed that some security detainees do not have visitation rights. This is a simple fact that gets conveyed to the relatives of those particular detainees. It's not a military secret.

Obfuscation by the military regarding its detention and justice policies is not confined to Iraq these days. What's happening here has strong parallels to the situation of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Obviously, both there and in Iraq, many detainees are, in fact, guilty. But the justice system they encounter has little in common with the ordinary American standard of investigation and trial. Of course, wartime justice is never going to be identical to peacetime justice, and counterinsurgency tactics are not for the faint of heart. But that is no consolation to detainees and their families in U.S.-occupied Iraq -- many of whom are innocent.

"This situation is like Guantanamo on steroids," said Stewart Vriesinga of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a faith-based peace group. CPT has been interviewing former detainees and their families to try to shed some light on what happens to security detainees. I spoke to Vriesinga, who was also in Baghdad, over a crackling phone connection. (Land lines in Iraq are still virtually nonexistent. People communicate using satellite phones, U.S.-area code cellphones, or the new oversubscribed Iraqi cellphones. Heavy static and frequent disconnection are the norm with all three.)

Vriesinga said that former detainees regularly describe being hooded, handcuffed and left outside for hours on end (sometimes in the rain) at bases where they are initially taken for interrogation. Accusations of beatings during interrogations are also common. Given the mantle of military secrecy over the entire process, CPT fears that the stories they hear are just the tip of the iceberg.

It's hard to know what to make of the allegations of abuse. I've met many soldiers who I'm sure would never think of abusing their power as members of an occupying force. But the military operates with nearly total impunity in Iraq, and there are an awful lot of soldiers here right now. Many of them are young, and not trained to deal with the situation they find themselves in. They are scared and pissed off by the ongoing attacks on American troops, which kill and maim their buddies and comrades. It's easy to see how those feelings might translate into abuse of men allegedly responsible for the attacks.

A few days ago, I met a man who told me his story of incarceration. When we sat down to talk, he said he had promised his mother he would not reveal his name -- she feels afraid all the time he will be arrested again -- so I'll call him Ali. Like all the other detainee stories that I heard, it was impossible to verify, but it was strikingly similar to many others and, to me, had the ring of authenticity.

Last July, based on a tip that Ali's father was working with the resistance, around 40 American soldiers raided Ali's house in the middle of the night. They broke the door down and cuffed Ali, his two brothers and a cousin using the plastic rip-tie cuffs that have become standard issue for soldiers. They wanted to know where Ali's father was hiding. As it happens, Ali told me, his father died in 1975. (A lifelong neighbor of Ali's family confirmed this was true.)

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