The soldiers transported Ali and his relatives to a military camp and made them lie on the dirt ground, still cuffed, until the following day (Ali estimates 12 hours). Eventually, soldiers rousted the men, gave them water for the first time, and recorded some basic information. Next, they transported Ali and all the other men picked up during the night to another military installation located in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, called "Scania" because it occupies a former Scania company factory. At Scania, Ali was taken into a bare room where a soldier and Iraqi translator interrogated him. The soldier told Ali that he knew he had attacked American troops. He said there was a witness and film shot from a satellite. The soldier demanded to know whether Ali had been paid by Saddam Hussein or was working with al-Qaida. He yelled at Ali, repeatedly calling him a motherfucker. He forced him to kneel, then jumped on his knees and beat him on his head. After about an hour of harassment, the soldier suddenly changed tactics. He told Ali that he knew he was innocent and, if he gave up a name -- someone involved in the resistance -- he would let him free. Ali had no names to give him.

After the interrogation, Ali had the chance to speak to his cousin and one of his brothers who had been interrogated by a different soldier who had treated them with kindness and respect. Later that day, those two were sent home while Ali and his other brother officially entered the security detainee system. They were moved to another camp at BIAP and then, a week later, yet another in Nasariya. On the bus trip to Nasariya, with the late summer temperature nearing 130 degrees Fahrenheit and the bus's air conditioning broken, the soldier on guard in the bus refused the internees water, according to Ali. A young man died of heat stroke, Ali told me, and was taken from the bus halfway through the trip. After a week in the Nasariya camp, Ali was on yet another bus, this one headed for Abu Ghraib. During the trip, a diabetic man died. Though the soldiers on the bus treated the detainees kindly, Ali said they took souvenir snapshots of each other with the prisoners -- a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Ali said he spent a little over a month in Abu Ghraib. Apart from his initial interrogation at the Scania base, he was never questioned. Forty-five days after his arrest, he and his brother heard their sequence numbers read aloud one morning at roll call as part of a list of prisoners being set free. By that evening, he was home.

Ali's incarceration occurred last summer. Since then, the military has implemented some changes in its treatment of detainees. Now, for instance, security detainees held at Abu Ghraib no longer share quarters with criminal prisoners. (Ali described living in a large tent where fighting and theft constituted an ongoing problem.) But accusations of abuse continue, and not just at Abu Ghraib. Just recently Electronic Iraq, an antiwar site that carries many reliable stories regarding the current situation here, published accounts by an Iraqi man and his son who were detained at an unknown base and then at Scania in January. Their stories, as told to representatives of the peace and justice groups Occupation Watch and Christian Peacemaker Teams, include being struck, kicked and deprived of food, sleep and water. Psychological abuse also allegedly took place: The son said that one of his interrogators threatened to take pictures of his wife, mother and sister naked and show them on satellite as a sex film.

At the end of August, the military Judge Advocate established a Review and Appeal Board to help expedite the process for adjudicating security detainee cases. In its FAQ sheet, the Judge Advocate Office states that the board meets daily and considers an average of 100 cases per day and that, since its inception, it has reviewed over 2,500 cases and ordered the release of more than 1,500 detainees. It does not, however, state the criteria for keeping or releasing prisoners. Most of the investigations seemed to be based purely on initial interrogations. When I tried to arrange to speak to someone in the Judge Advocate Office, I was told that it was very difficult and that, if I submitted questions in writing, they might be addressed in one to two weeks. In all fairness, this probably has as much to do with the office's crushing workload as it does with avoiding the press. But, as the policy regarding journalists visiting the prison grounds indicates, this is not an issue where the military invites transparency.

When I spoke to Stewart Vriesinga, he told me that these numbers of detainees currently being released do not mean the situation is improving. They mean that more people are being detained than ever, he told me. And many never make it onto the detainee list at all -- they just get lost in the system. This is particularly true of those held at bases rather than prisons. Right now, the official detainee list hovers between 11,000 and 13,000 people. But CPT believes that number is by no means comprehensive. With so many detainees falling through the cracks, they feel the number is probably closer to 18,000 to 20,000. For families who cannot locate their relatives, he told me, the situation feels terribly reminiscent of the previous regime. A story on the Occupation Watch Web site quoted one Iraqi man as saying, "It was easier to get a visit under Saddam!"

Apart from the military, only the International Committee of the Red Cross has access to security detainees and they do not make their site assessments public. Iraqi and international human rights groups are doing their best to draw attention to detainee issues here, but they often find themselves stymied by the military's invocation of security concerns.

I sat down one night with Hania Mufti of Human Rights Watch to discuss some of the organization's concerns regarding the security detainee system. We met in a nearly empty hotel restaurant and I sipped at a beer while Mufti drank coffee. She had spent the day alternately in meetings and traffic and she seemed drained.

Mufti said that HRW couldn't say for certain how systematic and widespread the abuse was, but that the proceedings against soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Bucca seemed telling. In her experience, most of the complaints dealt with violence and humiliation at the point of arrest (i.e., men getting roughed up, women not allowed to put their hijab on during house raids) and bad living conditions in the camps. They were told of beatings but could not prove they happened.

Mufti reiterated what Stewart had told me -- that, after an Iraqi is arrested as a security detainee, it can take weeks before his name shows up on a computerized list, meaning relatives have no way of knowing what's happened to him. (During this period detainees are held at an interim interrogation facility like Scania. Many people, like Ali's brother and cousin, get released almost immediately and their name never enters the system.) If the detainee is not released, he'll be shipped to a more permanent facility like Abu Ghraib to wait for his case to be reviewed. The criteria for when or whether a detainee gets released is uncertain. Ali believed, for instance, that he and hundreds of others had been released one day because an army general visited Abu Ghraib and witnessed the severe overcrowding. The specific criteria for initial internment is equally unknown, Mufti told me, because it falls under the rubric of "rules of engagement" and, at any given time, rules of engagement are military secrets.

I asked Mufti, as I asked just about everyone I spoke to about military detainees, what would happen to the system after the handover of power to the Iraqis at the end of June. Though the U.S. military will remain in Iraq, theoretically, they will be here only to support the Iraqi security structure. At this point, no one seems to know what power, if any, the military will retain in regards to detaining Iraqis. A military PAO I contacted told me that the issue has yet to be resolved. It's hard to believe that this whole system will just end. That after an attack on troops, for instance, there will be no sweeping arrests. More and more, though, Iraqis see July 1 as a date of liberation. If the U.S. continues to act in any way as an occupying force, the consequences could be dire.

(Today's events in Iraq acted as a disturbing example of just how antagonistic Iraqis have become toward American troops. In my house in Baghdad, I watched footage from the aftermath of the bombings in Karbala and Baghdad's Khadamiya neighborhood on television. At one point CNN cameras captured American troops arriving in Khadamiya to restore order. Iraqis responded by hurling rocks, bricks and even chairs at the soldiers, necessitating their withdrawal.)

The Iraqi Assistance Center inside the Green Zone tries to help family members of detainees who have traveled from all over Iraq and even neighboring countries in search of information. They fill out a form with the detainee's name and date of birth, then make an appointment to return in two weeks to find out the detainee's sequence number and charge. Oftentimes the information they get is out of date. A lawyer I spoke to told me that he had gone to Abu Ghraib on behalf of a woman who wanted to find out whether she could visit her husband. At the prison, the lawyer was told that the man was a high-risk detainee and had no visitation privileges. When the lawyer went to his client's house to impart that information, he found the recently released prisoner sitting on his living room couch.

In the al-Mansour neighborhood, the half-built al-Rahman mosque (the largest mosque in the Middle East) hovers over the landscape like a rising minareted moon. Even the neighborhood's prodigious mansions look like dollhouses against such a backdrop. One of the nine Baghdad city council offices sits on a street right in front of the mosque, almost beneath its shadow. People refer to this office as "Orfalie" because, until the war, the building housed the Orfalie Art Gallery and a blue and white hand-painted sign identifying it as such still hangs over the door, behind the high cement wall that shields the front of the building from the street. As with any government office these days, armed Iraqi guards patrol around the barrier and search people entering the building.

In the Orfalie waiting room, I met several women who had come seeking information about husbands and sons. They sat in a row of chairs against the wall and, when the person in the last chair got up to meet with a council representative in an office, everyone else got up too and moved down a chair. One by one the women told me their stories. Husbands and sons arrested for reasons the women didn't know. What had they done, the women wanted to know. How long would they be held. Why couldn't they see them. One woman began crying. Her little daughter patted her comfortingly on the knee. "When we get rid of Saddam," the woman said, "we feel happy because this is a new time for Iraq. Now I hate the Americans."

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