The day before I interviewed Suhaib al Baz, I drove out to Abu Ghraib prison and found a small crowd of people waiting to talk to their relatives. A year earlier, I visited the prison with a poet named Hamid al Mokhtar who spent eight years there under Saddam. When we walked out the front gates, there were still half-buried bodies in the ground. I asked him what should be done with the place and Mokhtar replied, "They should tear it down and not leave a single brick." I returned to find that it had been reincarnated -- it was a gulag again.

I saw a crowd standing outside in the furnace heat of the sun, holding slips of paper with numbers written on them. One old man, Hardan Soud, had a slip of paper with seven numbers written on it, and he wanted to know when the Americans would release his sons. "They came to my house in Thuluaya at 2 a.m., pushing down the door to enter my house. They didn't speak or ask any questions, and they took away my sons. I still don't know why."

Hardan Soud was waiting by the prison to see if the soldiers would allow him to visit the men. We stood there with him for a few hours and like many others he was not allowed inside. A translator eventually came out and said there would be no visits for a week and that everyone must leave. The crowd roiled when it heard the news, because the hope was kicked out of them. Eventually, they drifted back to battered taxis and drove away.

Abu Ghraib is a strange new place in its rebirth, but there is still the same feeling of dread and anguish that emanates from the walls. Even when it is empty, this is true. I remember this from the last visit a year ago, which ended in a room with a row of nooses. It was a vile place, and one condemned man had written, "Please God give me mercy because I didn't get mercy from Saddam." The U.S. military has not been able to erase the radiation of accumulated suffering; they have only made the place more modern, cleaner looking. But we know that is only an appearance. It is the same place it always was.

After speaking to the relatives of the imprisoned men, we walked to the Marines guarding the checkpoint for the prison and they turned us away. I asked to speak to a public affairs officer. The Marines refused.

It was nearly a week later when I first heard American soldiers talking about the pictures coming out of the prison. I had flown with an air ambulance crew to the 421st Medevac Battalion from Baghdad in one of their helicopters, a Black Hawk with four stretchers inside. During the day, we flew two missions over the tan expanse north of Baghdad, which quickly turns into wide palm groves where fighters hide with their rocket launchers. When the crews weren't flying, they went back up to Taji, a base about eight minutes north of the Green Zone by Black Hawk.

The pilots and medics of the 421st were watching the news in Taji on Tuesday and the pictures everyone has seen by now were up on the screen, and the crews were sickened by them. On a long couch, a row of six men watched the TV in silence until 1st Lt. Jerry Murphy said, "It is so sad to be betrayed like this, because when someone's fundamental dignity is taken from them, there's nothing left." Lt. Murphy seemed to feel betrayed by the soldiers involved in the abuse at the prison, that they had betrayed the good things they were trying to do in Iraq. The medevac crews are working the other side of the war, the human side, which is perfectly OK with them. The 421st flies wounded people to the combat support hospital in Baghdad from wherever the accident or shooting went down. Everyone at the 421st explained their job in the same way: "It doesn't matter who they are. We don't care. The deal is that we pick up patients and take care of them." The pilots will land their Black Hawks on roadsides to pick up wounded soldiers; they land in firefights. The crews take civilians and people from both sides of the war.

Insurgents shoot them down despite the red cross clearly painted on the undercarriage of the aircraft. They respond to medical emergencies at the prison all the time because Abu Ghraib is in their territory. I wanted to know what sort of injuries they had seen, whether they had taken out patients who were the victims of abuse and possibly torture. I didn't get the details. Instead we sat and watched the news reports on the medevac TV, sullen and hypnotized, saying nothing.

As I write, Rumsfeld is before Congress trying to explain how U.S. forces could do such things. Many of the journalists in Baghdad think that this will surely finish him off, that it's only a matter of time. I watched Bush give his apology last night, but it all seems too late. The revelations of torture in Iraq by U.S. soldiers have pushed the country through a bloody and bruised event horizon. There is no apology that can bring us back.

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