Hajj Ali sits on a truck bed, a hood covering his head, surrounded by other prisoners. It's late December, three weeks after the electroshocks, and he has been in Abu Ghraib prison for two and a half months.

They repeated the procedure two more times, but it was unsuccessful. Hajj Ali said nothing, and at some point they must have realized that he would keep on saying nothing, no matter what they did to him. After a few days, Sgt. Hydrue S. Joyner came to his cell door, carrying a notebook and accompanied by an investigator. They stood there a while and offered him a cigarette. Then Abu Omar, Hajj Ali's ad hoc interpreter, heard the investigator say that 151716 is an innocent man, telling Joyner to make a note of that.

A little later they put Hajj Ali in orange overalls and took him back to the camp. He vomited when he saw the sun.

The truck speeds up. They must be out of the camp by now, he thinks. Forty people are packed tightly on the truck bed and he feels the man next to him touch his hand.

"Hey," the man whispers, "are you Hajj Ali?" "Yes, I am. Where are they taking us?" "Home," says the stranger. "I heard they are taking us home."

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In late April 2004, shortly after Javal Davis saw his photo on the TV news, he was arrested by the military police. When he returned home a short time later, the newspapers were calling him a war criminal. A psychologist diagnosed him as traumatized. Davis hardly ate anymore, spent hours walking, mile after mile, waiting for his trial: The United States of America vs. Javal Davis, the most powerful nation on earth against a boy from New Jersey.

At his trial in February 2005, he testified, in tears, that it was an alien world, that it had made him crazy. He said that when he jumped on that pile of bodies, he had no intention of injuring anyone, only of scaring them.

"I'm embarrassed to be sitting here," he said, his voice trembling. "I don't know what I was thinking. Believe me, I wasn't myself when I did that."

The defense had called 20 witnesses in Davis' trial before a military tribunal in Fort Hood, Texas.

"My son," said the mother, "is a good man. I am very proud of him."

"He was humble, quiet and always helpful," said Chris Satterfield, Davis' former football coach. "I don't believe that Javal is guilty. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"There was no supervision, no training and no clear command structure," explained Maj. David DiNenna. "There was chaos in the camp, a state of lawlessness."

"Javal Davis' behavior was completely normal under these circumstances," said Dr. Ervin Staub, a psychologist from the University of Massachusetts. "He just played along with the rest."

"He was popular," former prisoner Omar Jalal said in a videotaped testimony. "He played sports with us and made us laugh."

"He is a father and a man who stood up and took responsibility," his attorney, Paul Bergrin, said in his summation. "We ask for justice. When someone has to live like an animal, something snaps inside," he continued. "Weigh that 10-second regression against the man's entire life -- seven years of which were spent serving honorably."

The judges sentenced Davis to six months in a military prison for inflicting bodily injury and gave him a dishonorable discharge from the army -- a mild sentence. But now Davis' attorney wants to file an appeal against the military court's ruling. He wants Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to testify in court. He says he wants justice for Javal Davis. Davis feels betrayed by the Army, the organization that he loved and that was his life. Now, he says, his life is destroyed.

He has moved back to Roselle to take care of his grandfather, who has cancer, but when they go for walks now, the two men say nothing. He and his wife, Zeenethia, are separated. Davis has trouble sleeping, and when he does sleep, he has nightmares of being shot at, of lying in his cell at Abu Ghraib, of smelling the feces and the urine and hearing the sounds of rocket-propelled grenades raining down on the camp.

He is silent, locked in his memories. Someday, says Javal Davis, he will write a book about it. He will write about what really happened in Iraq. And he will ask the Iraqis for their forgiveness.

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Shortly after his release from Abu Ghraib prison, Hajj Ali was treated by a psychologist, Dr. Mohammed al-Karchi, who gave him sedatives to sleep and other drugs to stimulate his appetite.

In the past, he says, he believed that forgiveness is always better than revenge, but now he is filled with a hatred that he cannot shake off. The worst thing about it, says Hajj Ali, is that he hates himself for hating others.

"How can it be," he asks, "that the victims are not being called as witnesses, that no one wants to hear their version of the story? How can it be that someone like Davis gets only half a year in prison?"

"Davis and the others," he says, "killed our souls."

In May 2004, Hajj Ali decided to take advantage of his popularity. He founded an organization and called it the Association of the Victims of American Occupation Prisons.

The organization quickly mushroomed into 40,000 members -- victims of torture, innocent suspects who were quickly released -- and its headquarters are at Hajj Ali's guesthouse.

There they collect the victims' horrible stories and assemble them into dossiers intended to provide an overview of the situation in the prisons. They take the information to newspapers, and they have exhibited the photos in Baghdad. But they are not interested in enlightenment. They want justice.

The organization has brought a lawsuit in an American civil court against the private contracting firms that were responsible for the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, companies like Titan and CACI, which it alleges played a key role in the torture. Hajj Ali hopes that they will be compensated, that the victims will receive monetary awards, something at least to make up for some of their suffering. This is his way of dealing with these things; he feels the need to do something to make peace with his memories.

He recently received a letter, a letter from the occupiers, asking him to resume his old job as community representative. They promised him a car and a real salary, but Hajj Ali turned down their offer. It is too early for forgiveness.

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This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe's most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

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