They have recently begun stacking prisoners in piles -- heaps of naked, hooded men -- and they keep dragging prisoners through the corridors on dog leashes. Hajj Ali stands at the bars of his cells, and the things he sees are almost more unbearable than what they do to him.

On one occasion, a boy stands in the hallway in front of his cell, begging the guards to take him to the toilet. But they blindfold him and lead him around, fetch his father, and force him to lie down at his son's feet. Then they tell the boy: OK, now you're standing in front of the urinal.

When this war -- a war he didn't want -- began bearing down on his district, Hajj Ali made a decision. Al Madifai was practically abandoned in March 2003 with the young men fighting at the front, and the elderly, women and children already having fled to the countryside. But Hajj Ali couldn't just leave; after all, he was mukhtar. He called together the men who had stayed behind and formed a militia of 200 men -- farmers, engineers, tribal leaders, disabled veterans -- some of whom brought along their old swords and guns.

They built barricades on the town's access roads, stationed guards at the milk factory and behind the levees along the river -- and waited.

Then 28 cruise missiles struck the town, a swarm of Apache helicopters appeared out of nowhere, and tanks began approaching in the distance. The militia was quickly disbanded. It was early April 2003, and the war was over in Al Madifai. It had lasted less than an hour.

The mood in Al Madifai gradually shifted. The Americans introduced a system of rewards for information about terrorists, and the system flourished. No one was safe anymore in Al Madifai. Anyone could be arrested at any time, and sooner or later, Hajj Ali was certain, he'd be picked up.

Hajj Ali crouches in a corner of his cell. A few days ago they gave him a blanket, a piece of black material with fringes, which he has tied together to make into a cloak. He lies on it at night, but he has trouble sleeping. The floor is hard and damp, and the cell is never completely dark.

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

The high-security wing is overcrowded. More and more insurgents are brought in every day, and almost all of them are kept naked. "Prepare them for hell on earth," the people from military intelligence tell Davis. "They don't deserve anything better."

Davis sees the cracked tabletops after the interrogations, sees them bringing in dogs without muzzles. When he takes the prisoners back to their cells, they are often bleeding and semiconscious. One day there is a corpse in the shower room.

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Nov. 8, 2003, Davis hears gunfire and people yelling outside. He is told that there has been an uprising. Prisoners in Camp Ganci smuggled in weapons and are shooting at the guards, pulling out tent poles, and throwing rocks and debris. When a female soldier is hit in the face, the rest of the soldiers go ballistic. They are 70 against hundreds, so they simply begin firing into the crowd.

Davis is furious by the time they bring the seven leaders of the uprising into section 1 A/B around midnight. Their heads are covered with sandbags and their hands are tied. The soldiers drag the Iraqis into the corridor and surround them. Graner is part of the group, and so is Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick. Graner starts assaulting the prisoners. He throws them against a wall until they collapse on the floor, and when they've stopped moving, he stacks them on top of each other like dead animals. Davis is beside himself with rage. He goes to the end of the corridor, gets a running start, and slams his 220 pounds into the heap of bodies. He hears them groan and cry out, hears them crying under their hoods. Then he takes another running start, jumps on the pile, runs again, jumps on the pile again. Lynndie England, another M.P. who has just joined the group, climbs onto the pile and they begin jumping up and down it, as if it were a compost heap, not hands and feet and torsos.

Hajj Ali stands in his cell and watches as a sergeant appears and yells: "Stop this immediately!" He sees Davis leave, sees the others untie the prisoners and order them to strip naked, sees the guards arrange the prisoners in pyramids, give the thumbs-up sign, laugh and pose for photos.

Hajj Ali watches as Ivan Frederick traces the shape of a cross on a prisoner's chest with his finger and then beats him unconscious, watches as Frederick pulls off another man's hood and shows him how to masturbate, then tells the man to masturbate and forces another prisoner to kneel in front of him and open his mouth. "Look," says Frederick, "look at what these animals do when you let them out of your sight."

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

They open the cell door. "Hajj, your number!"

"One five one seven one six."

"OK. Investigation."

"Clawman, you've been trying our patience for weeks," says a voice. "We've had enough of this. If you don't give us some names, you'll get to know our other methods."

"Sir, I cannot name any names."

One of the guards pulls off his hood and points to a bunch of wires dangling from the ceiling, red wires and blue wires, with copper rings attached to the ends. Then he drags him a few steps closer to the wall, where there is a box on a floor, the kind of cardboard box filled with food that Hajj Ali has sometimes been forced to carry. Finally, the guard removes his handcuffs and places the copper rings around his fingers. Then he puts the hood back on, and someone says: "You have to get up on the box now. Stay up there. If you fall off, there will be electricity."

Hajj Ali climbs onto the box, cautiously feeling his way. Once he is standing, he lifts his arms to keep his balance, begins swinging his arms, starts to sway, and feels the box giving way beneath his heavy body. There is silence in the room.

"Clawman, if you want to talk, then talk now."

He stands there for one minute, two minutes, three minutes. He says nothing, and then he sees cameras flashing through the hood. Suddenly he feels the current shooting through his veins, and it's as if his eyes were being torn from their sockets. His teeth grind together, everything shakes and trembles, and he falls onto his left hand, the injured one.

Hajj Ali lies on the floor, almost unconscious, and he hears people laughing. Then someone takes his pulse and says: "He's OK. Continue."

When he stands up on the box again, Hajj Ali wishes, for the first time in his life, that he were dead. He prays to Allah for redemption, begs Allah to make them turn up the electricity, turn it up to give him one last, effective jolt of electricity.

This time he falls on his right side.

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