Hajj Ali squats in cage 49, diagonally across the hallway from the shower room at the end of the corridor. He hasn't eaten in days, he has been naked for days and he has pulled a sock in lieu of a bandage over his throbbing left hand.

A Syrian imam comes to his cell every day to collect the packaging material from the lunch packets. Sometimes he pulls out pills from his sleeve, pills he has found in the garbage, and Hajj Ali swallows them, swallows every pill he can get, but nothing can lessen the pain.

When his ancestors settled there, Abu Ghraib was little more than a pit stop on the route between Baghdad and Amman. The soil was fertile and his family lived from the fields, farming a 25-donum (about 15-acre) plot, tending dense gardens of date palms. Hajj Ali grew up as the youngest of eight children.

After finishing school, he ran a business collecting local farmers' fruit, vegetables and grain and selling it in the market in Baghdad. Business was good until the first Gulf War came along in 1991, followed by the embargo. When the profits dried up as a result, Hajj Ali sought comfort in the mosque, where he studied Islamic law. When his father died, tribal leaders asked him to take over his father's position as their local leader. From then on, people would come to him, complaining that their food rations weren't enough, or that they didn't have enough money for medical treatment. Hajj Ali comforted these people and did what he could to intercede on their behalf with the authorities and with doctors.

One day he came across an unused, rocky and uneven field near the river. He leveled the surface, built two goals and planted grass. Every day he would water the field and draw boundary lines with chalk. After a few weeks, he divided his neighborhood into four districts, and by the summer before the war, the Al Madifai soccer league began playing its first games. Hajj Ali stood on the sidelines and wept for joy.

"Clawman, what kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An RPG-7?"

"Clawman, have you thought about it? Are you ready to talk to us now?"

The guards repeatedly drag him from his cell, lock him up in the shower room, and force him to squat there for hours on end. The days are filled with interrogations that lead nowhere, and in the end they always pour sewage over Hajj Ali. They call the procedure a "shower."

The worst nights of all are when Spc. Charles Graner is on duty. He whistles when he walks into the wing, and sometimes he pretends to be a waiter, a white cloth draped over his arm as he carries a tray of hot macaroni. Graner serves the prisoners the meal, and whenever one of them rejects the food, either because he is fasting or because he believes the food could be poisoned, Graner laughs loudly and takes a picture.

At first, Hajj Ali didn't know that cellphones could be used to take pictures. Strange, he thought, why do they hold their phones with their arms stretched out like that? One evening, when the pain begins to move up into his arm, he stops Graner while the guard is making his rounds. He asks a cellmate who speaks a little English to ask Graner for some medicine to reduce the pain. Graner says that he can have it.

"Put your hand through the bars," Graner says. Hajj Ali extends his hand and Graner tears off the blood-soaked sock. Bits of Ali's flesh adhere to the material. Graner smiles, and says, "Doesn't that take away the pain, Clawman?"

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

After a visit by Geoffrey Miller, the commander in chief at Guantánamo Bay, more and more investigators, analysts and interpreters have been coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. They bring along their dogs, and these people are clearly the ones in charge now. They wear no nametags, and they address each other with code names, like DJ, John Israel, James Bond. They begin to apply pressure. It's late October 2003, Saddam is still at large, and Americans outside are dying every day.

Night after night, Davis is ordered to bring prisoners into the shower room for interrogation. The intelligence officers inside then lock the door, and Davis, standing outside, hears screams and the occasional prayer. The prisoners seem grateful when he brings them back to their cells. Davis works 14 hours a day, from 4 a.m. until 6 p.m., seven days a week. Occasionally a glimpse from home flickers across a TV screen, almost like a pathetic joke. When he watches "Terminator 3" or a New York Mets game, he thinks about his son, Zaniel; his daughter, Latrice; and his wife, Zeenethia.

Javal and Zeenethia were both 19 when they moved to Maryland, where they went to college and joined the Reserves. It sounded easy enough: just 16 weeks of basic training, the occasional troop exercise, the occasional deployment.

He was in Bosnia for nine months, was sent home for all of six months, and was then deployed to Iraq. His absence has put a strain on their marriage. Zaniel is doing well, Zeenethia tells him on the phone, he can already use the toilet by himself. She talks about the new car, about the dog.

"Don't worry," Javal lies, "I'm OK."

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

"Miss, hey Miss."

Hajj Ali hears a whispering in the corridor and quiet steps. The prisoners always whisper when Sabrina Harman comes walking through their hallway, alone, late at night. Harman, in her mid-20s, is the only one who gives Hajj Ali the feeling that she regrets what is happening here. Once, in his first few days in the prison, as he was kneeling in prayer on the floor of his cell, she stood in front of the bars, waited until he was finished, and then asked, with a gentle smile, whether everything was OK.

"Abu Omar," Hajj Ali whispers to the man in the next cell, the man who speaks a bit of English, "tell her I want to talk to her."

Harman walks up to the bars, silently looks at Hajj Ali -- looks him in the eyes -- and scrutinizes his body.

"Miss, why do we have to be naked all the time?"

"All I can say is that we have our orders. The people up there tell us who gets a blanket and who doesn't," she replies.

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