Hajj Ali stands in the middle of a brightly lit room on the day after his arrival. The room stinks of urine. Three men sit behind a table and the oldest asks the questions. The conversation, as Hajj Ali recalls it, goes something like this:

"So you are a terrorist."

"What makes you think that?"

"Where is Saddam Hussein?"

"I don't know."

"Osama bin Laden?"

"In Afghanistan."

"How do you know that? Did you meet him?"

"I saw it on the news."

"We know that you are a well-known man in your town. You know a lot of people. You know who the insurgents are. Tell us what they're planning." Hajj Ali remains silent. "Or do you want us to let your hand rot off?"

Hajj Ali slowly realizes that he could be kept here for a long time, no matter what he says. He stays at Camp Vigilant for 10 days. Soon there is frost. He thinks of his pregnant wife at home. Every day a guard comes to the tent to ask whether prisoner number 151716 is ready to talk.

Hajj Ali says nothing.

On the morning of the 10th day, the guards pick him up, place a hood over his head, and drive him around the grounds for a few minutes. Then he is taken into a building where it is cool and damp, where the sounds of steps echo through hallways. They order him to remove his clothes, and Hajj Ali strips down to his underwear.

"Keep going! The underwear too!"

They tear off his underwear. Hajj Ali trembles with fear. His hands and feet are bound, and six or seven soldiers push him around. Then one of them tells him to walk up the stairs. Hajj Ali lets himself drop to the floor, crawling and squirming, his wounded hand throbbing with pain. An interpreter tells him to bark like a dog, and Hajj Ali complies.

"Bow-wow."

"Louder!"

"Bow-wow!"

He keeps collapsing, barely able to move forward. After a few steps, they start whipping and kicking him, yelling, "Faster!"

Then someone tears off his hood, grabs his hair, and drags him up the stairs. Hajj Ali looks up and sees a man holding a megaphone on the landing. He looks athletic and aggressive, and he barks at Hajj Ali: "Up, man! Up! Come on!"

The name tag on the man's chest reads: Davis, MP.

At the top of the stairs, they put the hood back on his head, place him against a grating, and tie his hands together high above his head, forcing him to stand on tiptoe. The guard with the megaphone, probably Davis, returns periodically and whispers in his ear: "What kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An AK-47?"

Hajj Ali stands at the grate for one day and one night. Whenever he loses consciousness and his ankles collapse, they douse him with cold water to wake him up again.

At some point he asks the black man with the megaphone whether he can go to the bathroom, but the guard refuses. Later he urinates on his own feet.

"So what's the deal?" asks a soft voice a short time later, "are you ready to talk?"

"I would like to," he answers, "but I don't know any terrorists. I don't know who is planning what, do you understand? And it's against my religion to denounce innocent people."

Hajj Ali is kept at the grate a while longer. He has stopped thinking, stopped feeling. Finally the guards take him to a cell. They tell him that he has suffered enough, that he needs to relax and listen to music. They tie him to the ground, place a megaphone next to his ear and keep playing the same song, "Rivers of Babylon," 10 times, 20 times, throughout the night. The music is so loud that Hajj Ali believes his skull will burst open.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

For the past week, Davis has been working his shift in cellblock 1 A/B, the high-security wing at Abu Ghraib. The cells look like cages, and the prisoners cowering in them look like frightened animals. They are suspected terrorists and members of the insurgency, imams, high-ranking politicians and generals, and Davis even recognizes a few faces from the deck of cards they handed out to the Army.

Some prisoners are naked and wear sandbags over their heads. Others are chained in positions that force them to stand for hours on end, or they squat, naked, penned into dark, toilet-less dungeons. The stench in the wing is worse than at a sewage-treatment plant.

"What the hell is going on here?" Davis asked his major, but the officer merely shrugs his shoulders and tells him he should ask the people from military intelligence.

"You're a big boy. Scare them, be mean," says the Italian from intelligence, the commanding officer in the high-security wing. "Make sure they have a rough night, soften them up. Yell in their ears with your megaphone."

"Why, what's the point of all this?"

"We need information. They're killing our people out there every day. Believe me, they'd cut off your head if they could."

Davis feels out of his element. He is a military police officer, not a prison guard. But if there is one thing he has learned in his seven years in the military, it is that a command is a command. Davis' shift begins at 4 a.m. He counts the prisoners three times, and then he takes a look at the logbook at the end of the corridor. Cell 25: no food. Cell 30: no sleep. Cell 40: four hours of radio.

Javal Davis, who wanted to serve his country, who worships Bill Clinton, and who gave speeches in high school against the stigmatization of blacks, now patrols the halls with a megaphone, yelling "Wake up!" He forces prisoners to strip naked, pours ice cold water over their bodies, and takes them to a shower room they use for interrogations.

Maybe this is a test, Davis thinks to himself. Maybe this is what God wants him to do: to obey every command and never think twice.

A few prisoners lie in their cells, almost lifeless, traumatized, in despair. Others throw garbage, leftover food and feces at Davis. "I hate America!" they yell into the corridor. "Asshole," another yells repeatedly, "Saddam will fuck you!"

Davis knows that many of the prisoners have studied in the United States and that they are smart -- better educated than most of the guards. Because their Arab names are too complicated, the guards give them nicknames: Clawman, the fat one with the injured hand; Shitboy, whom Davis likes because he mimics everything he says; Froggy, who is later renamed Shooter when he tries to shoot a guard; and Thumbie, a loyal Saddam supporter, polite and cooperative.

"I just fight against you because you are fighting against us," says Thumbie. "I am defending our country, our oil, our honor. What would you do in my place?"

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