Last summer, at what they all called "the airport camp," outside Baghdad, few Iraqi detainees wanted to visit the bathroom during the morning shift. That was when, they believed, the Americans sexually harassed prisoners.

But on the morning of July 23, 2004, a 15-year-old Iraqi detainee I will call N. claims he was pulled from the wooden crate he'd been forced to crouch inside, wearing handcuffs and blacked-out ski goggles, for the past 11 days. On this morning, he says, he was taken to the bathroom against his will and sexually assaulted.

N. is a tall, thin adolescent with cropped black hair, brown eyes, and a wispy patch of dark beard on his chin. His family lives in a district outside Baghdad, and he doesn't want his full name used in this article for fear of retaliation by American forces. He says he had first experienced the degradations of the morning-shift bathroom two days earlier, when he was led in by two Americans dressed in camouflage fatigues and T-shirts (and not wearing the desert-camouflage overshirts that would have given their names and ranks, assuming they were members of the U.S. military and not private contractors). N.'s cuffed hands were unshackled and moved from behind him to his front before the guards re-cuffed him. He was preparing to use the toilet when, in his words, both soldiers started "staring ... gazing, let's say," at him. Then one of them came up to N. from behind and bumped him with his hips, moving against N. in a clearly sexual way while he said something to the other soldier.

N. had already endured embarrassing searches during his induction at the prison camp, but this was an altogether different kind of humiliation, one with an implied threat.

The next day, N. declined his bathroom visit. He was now eating and drinking very little and urinating into an empty water bottle he'd hidden in his roughly five-foot-nine-inch-high "prisoner box." (N. is a few inches taller than six feet.) The following morning the Americans were back in front of his crate and they were angry. The guards, on this day a male and female, yanked N. out of the box, screaming something along the lines of "Get the fuck out here!" (Well educated and from a prosperous family, N. has a rudimentary understanding of spoken English. He says the guards were always using the "f-word.") They then dragged him—one guard clutching each of his arms—down the facility's hall between rows of similar containers, each presumably filled with a detainee.

"No W.C.," N. said (meaning "No water closet"). "No W.C.," he tried again, hoping his jailers understood.

At the door to the combination bathroom and shower, the female guard let go of N., shoving him inside, where—as always—another male guard waited. The two men once again opened one of N.'s handcuffs, moved his hands from behind his back to his front, and relocked them. Then a guard lifted the blacked-out goggles.

"No W.C.," N. said again.

Both soldiers shouted, "Use the fucking toilet!"

"No W.C.!"

"I brought you all this distance to use the toilet!" the first guard shouted. "Undo your pants."

The first guard was Caucasian, tall, blond, and very thin. He was clean-shaven and on some days wore eyeglasses. Then, N. says, speaking in Arabic through a translator, "I was sexually assaulted by an American soldier." N.'s modesty as a Muslim, as an Iraqi, and as an adolescent prevents him from detailing much more about the episode, though in a declaration recently filed on his behalf under penalty of perjury in the U.S. District Court in Southern California, his attorney provides a somewhat more explicit account, saying one or more guards placed "fingers in his anus." (In 20 minutes of humiliating, circular discussion with N. about the above allegation, mediated by a translator, I could never fully ascertain the precise narrative of the July 23 assault, but N. made it clear that a guard's finger or fingers were willfully placed inside him in a manner that N. didn't welcome.)

Far clearer, by N.'s account, are the events of two days later, when he says he was once again torn from his wooden box and dragged to the bathroom during the morning shift. This time the American previously a spectator—a male of average height, clean-shaven, blond, and without eyeglasses—also sexually abused N. After shaming him by watching him defecate, the American grabbed N. by his penis and directed a stream of N.'s urine toward a spider crossing the floor a few feet away.

Later that same day, N. received an apology and was released by his captors at the airport camp (so called by prisoners because they could hear propeller aircraft taking off day and night). The man doing his exit interview, N. says, was a black-haired Caucasian known as James.

"You were wrongly arrested," James said. Then he directed N. to sign a release statement, printed in English, which N. doesn't read well enough to comprehend. After N. signed the statement, James saw that he was given $50 in U.S. currency, then said, "We apologize."

For his two weeks of wrongful incarceration in conditions violating Geneva Convention law on as many as a dozen different counts—among them prohibitions against detaining minors with an adult population— N. says, he was given one shower, the apology, a clean set of clothes, and the $50. He was released sometime around midnight on July 25 of last year, outside the American-run Green Zone in Baghdad.

This is a part of the War on Terror yet to make the nightly news.

"The Americans came to us promising freedom and democracy. If that is freedom and democracy...I don't want it."

It is important to note the timing of N.'s imprisonment and alleged abuse: mid-July 2004. That was nearly three months after the news of the U.S. Army's Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, horrifying the world, and two months after the Bush administration assured the world that Iraq's U.S.-run system of prisons and detention centers had been "cleaned up." Officially, the Abu Ghraib abuses have been laid at the feet of a famed "few bad apples," who have now been charged and await trial. According to news reports, however, there are indications that the abuses may have been a direct result of White House policies on intelligence gathering and the designated withholding of Geneva Convention protocols from certain suspected terrorists and insurgents.

N. was not incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. Where he was held, and by whom, is part of a larger mystery. The Pentagon has declined to identify all the detention centers it is using in the War on Terror, but at least 17 are known to exist in Iraq; there is also the Guantanamo facility, in Cuba, and other centers in Afghanistan and Jordan. Many questions remain unanswered: How many people have really been detained in these facilities? What, if anything, have individual detainees been charged with? How many have died of suspicious causes? And how many parallel secret camps might there be, places such as the facility where N. and other members of his family were held, seemingly off the official detainee rolls.

This past summer, in an initial step to plumb these mysteries, a team of three American attorneys, one of whom works with the Center for Constitutional Rights (C.C.R.) in New York, filed a class-action lawsuit and sought injunctive relief in the name of more than 1,000 Iraqi detainees against two U.S. corporate contractors operating prisons or detention centers in Iraq. (The suit does not name the U.S. government as a defendant, but it does identify certain military and government officials as co-conspirators.)

The immediate goal of these actions is simple: they petition to stop U.S. contractors from providing untrained or undertrained civilian workers to American and coalition detention centers in Iraq, institutions that could not run without the purported expertise of these workers. The defendants, who are currently fighting the lawsuit, are Titan Corp. (a San Diego-based supplier of Arabic-English translators to coalition forces in Iraq) and CACI International, Inc. (an Arlington, Virginia-based supplier of interrogators to coalition forces in Iraq).

"We will vigorously defend against [the lawsuit]," says Wil Williams, a spokesman for Titan. Jody Brown, an executive vice president at CACI (pronounced "khaki"), says, "CACI rejects and denies the allegations of the suit," which she characterizes as "a malicious and farcical recitation of false statements and intentional distortions."

Last fall, I met with 10 of the former detainees bringing action against Titan and CACI. Across four and a half days and 60 hours of interviews, I was granted a very specific glimpse of the experiences of some Iraqis under American (and, in one case, Polish) detention. I subsequently toured several American prisons and detention centers in Iraq as a guest of the U.S. Army. What is most surprising is that between these two perspectives—between what the detainees told me and the army showed me—I found numerous and irreconcilable inconsistencies. According to sources, as well as official army, D.O.D., and congressional reports, these gaps are most likely traceable not to the regular U.S. Army but to specialized intelligence services. Working in Iraq and elsewhere for a tangled Venn diagram of agencies including—but not limited to—military intelligence, the C.I.A., and the F.B.I.,"intel" personnel are charged with targeting and breaking down suspected "high-value" detainees, to enhance American and coalition understanding of the new, amorphous enemy faced in the global War on Terror.

To extract information from some of the high-value targets, intel often employs the expertise of military Special Operations, or Special Ops, a mix of elite army, navy, Marine Corps, and air-force troops whose activities are often classified. This relationship between intel and Special Ops also explains how the U.S. Navy recently charged a group of Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) team members in a November 4, 2003, incident where a detainee in the custody of the C.I.A. died at Abu Ghraib prison.

At least four of the detainees I spoke to, including N., appear to have been intel guests at an unknown location in Iraq. At least four others were in Abu Ghraib under the army's custody when the worst of that prison's abuses took place. Their stories shed new light on those already well-documented horrors. Altogether, the 10 Iraqis I interviewed allege hundreds, if not thousands, of separate Geneva Convention violations. Ironically, many of the detainees also inadvertently corroborated claims made in support of U.S. troops and civilian personnel, if not U.S. policy. The detainees noted that the soldiers and interrogators were obviously understaffed, undersupplied, and undertrained—while also being overwhelmed by their responsibilities. These claims were later seconded by a Titan Corp. interpreter I spoke with in Baghdad. Over dinner at the First Cavalry dining hall inside the army's Camp Victory, this interpreter said that, due to the overwhelming need for translators in Iraq, complete training for the mission consisted of "a three-minute videotape and a handout of dos and don'ts about interrogation." (The interpreter had felt compelled to "write up" several Titan colleagues for incompetence.) Wil Williams, the Titan spokesman, vigorously denies this assertion, characterizing it as "unfortunate," "a distortion," and "obviously untrue." Wiliams says that all Titan interpreters are given a full week of orientation and training, including instruction in Geneva Convention rights and how to handle themselves with military personnel and foreigners.

Some of the problems alleged by detainees and others may arise from the sheer number of detainees streaming into Iraq's camps: at Abu Ghraib, for instance, the ratio of prisoners to guards once rose as high as 75 to 1. (At Guantanamo, according to the navy, the detainee-to-guard ratio is approximately 1 to 1.) This volume is due in part to an American "paid tips" program. For the promise of rewards ranging up to $200,000, Iraqis inform on supposed terrorists or al-Qaeda operatives, a policy that allows Iraqis to settle long-smoldering grudges and vendettas while taking home a nice chunk of American cash. Consequently, prisons and detention centers across Iraq may be choked with Iraqis who don't belong there. The army denies that the paid-tips program has been abused, but does admit it has yet to establish penalties against those providing false or inaccurate information.

"They would give me electric shocks. I could feel the pulses going even into my eyeballs."

One of the first detainees spoke with told me a comparatively benign story, at least by the standard of N.'s. This detainee's name is Ali Jassim Mijbil, a sturdy, mustachioed 50-year-old tribal leader and prosperous business owner from just outside Fallujah. (All the narratives in this story are based solely on the detainees' accounts; except where noted, they were impossible to verify.) Mijbil told me he was taken from his house at 1:45 A.M. on December 6, 2003, after American armored personnel carriers and Humvees smashed through his estate's gates and doorways, which ultimately necessitated $7,000 worth of repairs. Hooded and handcuffed inside his house, still in his sleeping clothes, he was first taken to a detention center that had been built on Saddam Hussein's former farm outside Fallujah. All told, he would be incarcerated for six months and 23 days, with time spent on the infamous Abu Ghraib cellblocks as well as at Camp Vigilant, a barbed-wired tent city outside Abu Ghraib's "hard site" cellblocks but within the prison's outer rampart walls. (Abu Ghraib is a complex with multiple detention areas.)

During his incarceration, Mijbil claims, he was regularly beaten with switches, his medicines for a potentially fatal kidney disease were withheld, his knee was broken, and he was housed outdoors without ample food, water, or warmth all of last winter, when nighttime temperatures in Baghdad frequently dipped into the 30s. In the end Mijbil was never formally charged with anything. (He says he was arrested only because he happened to live in an area where several roadside bombs had been detonated.) He also received nothing resembling an apology.

Upon leaving Abu Ghraib for freedom, Mijbil learned that several women in his family had also been wrongly incarcerated and that U.S. forces had stolen his prized Mercedes, which was painted a unique silver color and had other distinctive markings. "Everyone saw a translator driving it," he says. "Everyone knows my car." U.S. forces eventually paid Mijbil $8,000 for eight months' "rental" of his vehicle—the American officer who paid him in Fallujah showed him price guidelines from a U.S. rental-car agreement. Despite being paid for the "rental," he says, the Americans still have his car.

Recalling his nearly seven-month incarceration, Mijbil shakes his head in disgust. "The Americans came to us promising freedom and democracy—" He stops talking and slaps at the air. "If that is freedom and democracy ... I don't want it."

Another detainee I spoke with may already be well known to Americans, thanks to what is arguably the Iraq war's most iconic image: a hooded man standing on a box, his arms held away from his body in a posture of total, pure, miserable submission, electrical cables trading from his fingertips.

There were at least two photos of a hooded, wired man taken at Abu Ghraib. Evidence suggests he is 46 years old, of medium height, and pale-skinned. He generally dresses in Iraq's traditional male clothing: a red-and-white checked head wrap (called a kaffiyeh), a flowing gown (or dishdasha), and sandals. He is a husband and father of four. His name is Haj Ali. (He asked that his surname not be used; Haj is an honorific signifying he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.)

Once the mayor of the Al Madifai district, near Baghdad, then—following the American invasion, when he was relieved of his position—an administrator for a mosque in the Baghdad suburb of Amria, Haj Ali is now devoting his time to prisoner issues in Iraq. (Like all civic leaders under Saddam Hussein, he was compelled to join the ruling Ba'th Party, but claims he was never involved in the regime's abuses.) Arrested as he walked down a street around 10 A.M. on October 14, 2003, Haj Ali is still uncertain of his specific infraction. Surrounded by Hummers and S.U.V.'s near his mosque, he was quickly handcuffed, hooded, and hustled into a vehicle. As he describes these events through a translator I have provided, he also observes that before the American occupation—even during Saddam Hussein's era—no one was ever hooded by authorities on the streets of Baghdad or anywhere else in Iraq. "This is something the Americans brought," he says. "The idea of bagging someone on the head, hooding them, is completely associated with the American occupation."

Driven away from his neighborhood, Haj Ali was eventually taken to a building of some sort. His hood was then removed and he found himself in a large hall. He didn't know it yet, but he was inside Abu Ghraib prison. (The army confirms he was held there.) He was given a medical exam. One thing quickly noticed by the Americans was that Haj Ali's left hand was heavily bandaged. Months earlier, it had been severely damaged at a wedding when he discharged an antique rifle in celebration—a common practice at Iraqi weddings—and the barrel exploded. ("You can check records of this with the police and the hospital," he says.) The blast ripped significant tissue from his left index finger, leaving it thin above the knuckle. His left ring finger and pinkie are distended and stubby, having been literally blown apart. He had scheduled surgery to restore some of his hand's use, but was arrested before he could have the operation. Now his hand is flattened along the palm and back, with Frankenstein-style scars from large sutures following the line of his ring finger's metacarpal bone. Altogether, it is an easily identified deformity and appears to be visible in one of the famous photos of a man with wires attached to his fingers. (Two slightly different low-resolution pictures, seemingly of the same man, have been released to date. Haj Ali's lawyers believe he's depicted in the photos, although no one can be sure, given the circumstances under which the photos were taken; Haj Ali does claim he was subjected to the same abuse. Unless the guards involved shed fight on the matter someday, it will likely remain impossible to say for certain who is pictured.)

As part of the initial exam at Abu Ghraib, soldiers kicked Haj Ali's feet apart, and he was made to stand, legs spread, facing a wall as they began searching his body. Beyond the pat-downs and cavity exams that are particularly insulting to Muslims, for whom modesty is an ingrained virtue, the Americans had another deliberate way of insulting new detainees: by removing their head wraps—an item infused with history and pride for Iraqis—and throwing them across the room with their shoes. In Arab cultures, pointing the bottom of a shoe or foot toward anyone is the pinnacle of insult.

Haj Ali was given a prisoner number, "151716," he says, speaking each numeral—among the few words he knows in English—with pained slowness.

Then the soldiers shoved him into another room, which smelled like an unclean bathroom and where he was confronted by three interrogators:

"Where is Osama bin Laden?"

"Osama bin Laden is in Afghanistan," he replied.

"How do you know?"

"I heard it on the news."

"What is your plan? What are your plans to resist the Americans coming to occupy you?"

"I thought the Americans came to liberate us."

"Are you anti-Semitic? Do you hate Christians? Do you hate Christianity? Do you hate Jesus Christ?"

"No. Why would I hate them?"

For 10 days Haj Ali was detained in Camp Vigilant, a kind of tent city at Abu Ghraib, without another question being asked. Then one day he was taken to a large steel room, perhaps one of the hundreds of shipping containers around the prison compound, and interrogated by a 50-ish man, one of the three who'd first questioned him.

"I'm going to give you two days to admit what you know," the interrogator said. "And if you don't, I'm going to send you to a place where even dogs can't survive. Your hand will rot away, because we're not going to give you any medicine. It's better for you to admit everything."

"Admit to what?"

"Give us the names of all the people in the Resistance."

"What people ... ?"

The interrogator, frustrated, dismissed him.

Two days later, Haj Ali was again called to the steel room. This time he was told to bring his blanket. This was a reference to the blanket each detainee was issued when he got to the tent camp. When the Americans ordered detainees to bring their blankets, Haj Ali says, it usually meant you were going to have to sleep somewhere else.

To customize his woolen blanket during the past 12 days, Haj Ali had taken two of its width-side edges, folded them back on the blanket itself, and sewn the corners of the folds down with heavy thread, taken from the seams of his tent. By doing this, he'd made a crude garment that he wore for added warmth.

Haj Ali grabbed his blanket, then soldiers secured his hands with plastic riot handcuffs called flexicuffs, chained his legs, hooded him, and drove him to another part of the compound. He was then unhooded, his leg-irons and flexicuffs removed. An orange jumpsuit was given to him. He was ordered to take off his clothes.

Haj Ali shook his head, refusing—nudity in front of other men is a humiliation to Muslim men. He was then punched and slapped. The soldiers removed his clothing by force. Once naked, Haj Ali was again hooded, handcuffed (this time with steel cuffs), and strapped back into a pair of leg-irons. As an afterthought, the soldiers draped the orange jumpsuit around his neck, then forced him up a staircase to another room, where they lifted his hands above his head and looped his handcuffs over a metal hook high in the air.

The room was frigid. "There was some type of fans," he says, "some type of cool breeze." As he dangled naked, the soldiers threw buckets of icy water on him. "It was very cold in Iraq at the time," he says. "It was winter. I had pain in my hand." They began to shout at Haj Ali, berating him through a bullhorn.

The Americans again removed Haj Ali's hood. They did this so he could watch as they lifted a garbage can from the far side of the room, carried it toward him, and dumped its contents on top of him.

For the first time, with his hood off, Haj Ali saw his tormentors. One of the soldiers was a sturdy man with army-issue glasses: Specialist Charles Graner, an army M.P. (A civilian death-row prison guard before joining the War on Terror, Graner, 36, is now preparing to stand trial for alleged Abu Ghraib abuses as well as for fraternizing with fellow soldier and Abu Ghraib defendant Lynndie England, who recently bore a son she claims is Graner's.)

Once again, the soldiers began asking him questions, while they resumed drenching his naked body with cold water. They also began writing all over his body with Magic Markers—and laughing at what they'd written.

At long last—he is not sure how many hours he spent in that room at the top of the stairs on the first night—Haj Ali's cuffed hands were unhooked and he was pulled down and told, "This is very mild compared with what we're going to do to you later ..."

Still naked, Haj Ali was shoved back down the stairs and led to his new digs. He was now an inmate on Cellblock 1A of Abu Ghraib prison.

For Haj Ali the ensuing weeks still defy rational explanation. Mostly, his days inside Cellblock 1A were consumed with pain. (He says he spent 48 days on Cellblock 1A; the army's records put his stay at closer to 60 days.)

"The interrogations," he says, "they didn't make sense. They were always hitting you and slapping you. One guy, for interrogation, asked questions like: How many dishdashas [robes] do you have? What color is your cow?"

And then there was the music. Graner and a soldier named Sergeant Hydrue Joyner looped a short digital sample of the refrain from the song "Babylon" by the musician David Gray and played it at earsplitting levels through a huge speaker just outside Haj Ali's cell while he was handcuffed, still naked and hooded, to the bottom bar of his cell, the speaker right next to his ears. (Neither Joyner nor attorneys for Graner returned telephone requests for comment.)

"'Babylon' ... 'Babylon' ... 'Babylon' ... over and over again," he says, "so loud I thought my head would burst. So loud you could hear it two kilometers away." (During a later part of our interview, to confirm what song he was tortured with, I hand Haj Ali my iPod with Gray's "Babylon" playing on it; he rips the earphones away from his head and begins to cry.)

"This went on for a day and a night," he says.

Finally the music was turned off, and whispers could be heard along the hallway that Graner was approaching. "Graner is coming," people were saying. "Graner is coming." Haj Ali remained handcuffed on the cell's floor. His injured hand and arm were so swollen and painful that he was whimpering. Soon Graner was in front of him. Haj Ali asked for his medicine. "Graner told me to stick out my arms as much as I could through the bars. I did, and he put his foot on my hand and he went back and forth when he was pressing it, grinding it. I was in so much pain I passed out."

Over the coming days, Haj Ali remained naked in his cold and damp cell. He was often lifted onto his toes, with his handcuffs laced through the jail bars above their highest horizontal crosspiece. Then he was left there, hanging, overnight. (These stretches were far longer than the four hours of "stress positions" Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had both approved and then questioned in a November 27, 2002, memo outlining U.S. interrogation policies in Guantanamo. By his own account, Rumsfeld added this note at the bottom of the memo: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?")

Haj Ali was also regularly deprived of food and water—once for five days. He notes that the overwhelming majority of abuses happened on Graner's night shift.

Often at night, Haj Ali and the other inmates, still naked, would be brought out into the cellblock's hallway to be beaten and humiliated in front of the other prisoners. The guards had nicknames for everyone, Haj Ali continues. "Colin Powell. Gilligan. Dracula. Wolf Man. Insulting names." Later he adds, "I think they really hated [the detainee nicknamed Colin Powell] because they always treated this guy really bad."

I later found out, through Susan Burke, a lead attorney in the Titan and CACI lawsuit, that Haj Ali's nickname was the Claw, owing to his mutilated hand.

According to Haj Ali, himself a former mayor, many of the men singled out for the worst abuse were civic and religious leaders. (According to one of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit, this appears to have been a pattern at Abu Ghraib as well as other detention centers.)

These are some of the other practices and events Haj Ali claims took place while he was on Cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, many also documented in now infamous pictures:

• Simulated sex acts, forced between inmates, as well as between guards and inmates.

• The use of attack dogs to frighten prisoners. Haj Ah recalled one American named "Frederick," who always brought a dog. The reference is to army staff sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 38, who pleaded guilty to eight counts of abusing and humiliating Iraqis and was sentenced in October to eight years in prison.

• Extended periods—often stretching to weeks, and in one detainee's case months— of public nakedness.

• Public torture. A man and his 18-year-old son were tied naked to live electrical wires for 72 hours and constantly drenched with cold water.

• The forcing of detainees to chant, "I love Bush."

• The shattering of one detainee's upper leg during a fall. Haj Ali said the bone was sticking through the man's skin, and the guards told him he would have to wait until the next day to see the doctor, who was gone for the night.

• Lynndie England's leading a naked man, prostrate on the floor, by a dog collar and leash. According to Haj Ah, the man in this widely distributed photograph is an imam at a large mosque in Baghdad.

• The death of one man as he was being tortured; Charles Graner and Specialist Sabrina Harman then had their pictures taken with his lifeless body as macabre souvenirs.

• And, finally, the degradations that led to the hooded man on the box becoming a worldwide symbol.

Haj Ali claims he was given electrical shocks near the end of his stay on Cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib. By this time, his old, customized blanket had been returned to him by Joyner; he wore it like a hospital gown for modesty, tying it in the back with its fringed edges. One night as he was praying, Haj Ah was taken hooded by Graner and led to another room. "I felt there were 8 or 10 people standing around," he says. He was then made to stand on a food box and lift his hands, as electrical wires were clipped between his fingers. "They would give me electric shocks. I could feel the pulses going even into my eyeballs. I would collapse and faint." Upon each collapse, the guards would kick and hit Haj Ah with boots and sticks, saying, "Get up! Get up!" He believes he was shocked five times.

As he tells me this, Haj Ah begins crying. Army investigators have not spoken to Haj Ah, but a report on alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib released last spring noted one instance of a detainee's being hooked up to wires to "simulate" electric torture.

Following his release, after more than two months, Haj Ali quickly co-founded an Iraq-based non-governmental organization, Victims of American Occupation Prison Association, which currently has thousands of members and is growing daily.

Despite his ordeal, Haj Ah claims he remains a man of peace. He asks how he could fight. "I really only have one functional hand. I can't use any guns."

Still, he says, because of the way thousands of detainees have been treated, even the most peaceful Iraqi will now consider taking up arms against the Americans. The best training camp for insurgents, in Haj Ah's view, was Abu Ghraib. Innocents went in, he says, and came out ready to fight.

Last April, shortly after the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, Major General Geoffrey Miller was placed in charge of all U.S. and coalition prisons and detention centers in Iraq, having come from his last, even more controversial post at Guantanamo Bay. Miller requested and was granted a handful of "31 Echo" corrections specialists, whose sole mission in the army is to provide prison services.

"We've dug ourselves a hole here," he tells me one night last fall as we stand outside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire at Camp Liberty, the pre-release tent city inside the walls of the Abu Ghraib complex. "As everyone knows about the abuse issues and scandal, it was done by a very small number of leaders and soldiers ... who did both unauthorized and illegal things. The military is a standards organization. It's all about the leaders. There's a big difference between talking and demonstrating action. This is the enemy ..." Miller gestures toward perhaps 200 detainees on the other side of the fence who are set to be released the following morning. "And you have to treat the enemy with dignity and respect, just like you'd expect them—oops!" As Miller is in midsentence, mortar fire explodes inside the walls of Abu Ghraib.

As they do almost every night (and as they did on both nights of my visit), Resistance forces outside the prison walls fire mortars, grenades, and rockets over the ramparts, aiming for Americans. But as the wounds and eye patches of the detainees inside Camp Liberty show, the majority of casualties from "over the wall" fire at Abu Ghraib are the detainees themselves; their tent cities are far more spread out and exposed than the fortified American offices and barracks.

After the threat has passed, the general continues: "We want to treat these detainees the same way we'd want our soldiers to be treated."

Miller has been improving the situation at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on numerous fronts—instituting physical and dental exams upon incarceration, making sure a "custody chain" of all detainees and their confiscated belongings is aboveboard, and developing a digital "in-processing" database of fingerprints, mug shots, iris scans, and biometric scans of each detainee's facial structure, so that the identities of imprisoned Iraqis are well documented. Miller has also relocated all detainees from Abu Ghraib's "hard site" prison into two new outdoor camps with heated and air-conditioned tents on the Abu Ghraib grounds. By Miller's mandate, all detainees also get three hot meals a day, as do U.S. soldiers. In addition, most meals are catered by Iraqi companies, so the detainees have food cooked and spiced the local way. In Miller's view, better treatment of detainees will facilitate better intelligence gathering—a dire need in the face of Iraq's ongoing insurgency.

If you spend time talking with former Iraqi detainees, one thing about the American occupation becomes eminently clear: if helicopters and Humvees begin massing, something bad is surely going to happen.

For N. and his brother, cousin, and uncles, the story begins shortly after the 1991 Gulf War. To evade Saddam Hussein's increasingly paranoid rule, N.'s wealthy and educated family—the father is a physician—had moved to Yemen. N. and his 17-year-old brother, M., along with their sisters and 20-year-old uncle O., lived there for more than a decade until, because the children were getting older and needed Iraqi-based higher education, the family chose to return to Baghdad, in October 2003, six months after Saddam's fall. The family hoped their country would be more peaceful under American occupation.

At first, the family relocated to the children's grandparents' large, walled estate while their own home was being built nearby. When they were finally settled, N.'s father returned to Yemen to continue his practice.

Then came the night of July 12. On this evening, in anticipation of their father's return from Yemen the following day, N., his brothers and sisters, mother, cousins, uncles, and aunts re-united at the grandparents' home for the night. After dinner, family members slipped off to different areas of the house to sleep. N. was up on the house's open, rooftop patio. M. and their 18-year-old cousin, H., were in a room downstairs with their uncle O. Then, sometime after midnight, as often happens in Baghdad, the electrical grid went down.

Because of the family's social standing and prosperity, the grandparents' house has its own electrical generator. And at roughly three in the morning on July 12, M. says, "I woke up in order to switch on the generator. But the generator did not work, because of lack of fuel. In such circumstances, you normally pump up some gas from the car." So M. went to the car and began to siphon off gasoline. By the time M. had pumped roughly 10 liters from the car, he sensed a commotion outside the house's walls. Then, suddenly, he saw helicopters hovering almost noiselessly overhead, with soldiers sliding down what may have been, according to M.'s description, mechanical-descender "fast ropes."

"In a matter of seconds," M. says, "I noticed more soldiers were jumping over the fences.... The one who jumped inside the fence was able to open the door." Amid this disorienting, middle-of-the-night scene, there came a deafening, blinding explosion: the invaders had detonated a percussion grenade in the kitchen.

Confronted by the soldiers, M. froze. From the darkness, an Arabic-speaking translator shouted for M. to put his hands up and his face against the house's exterior wall. "He told me not to move," M. says. Inside the house, the soldiers used photochemical light sticks to illuminate the rooms.

On the roof, things had not gone any easier for N. He had been sleeping on a small, benchlike bed, when he woke to see two helicopters approaching "from over the roof of our neighbors', but very, very low."

Afraid, he slipped beneath the bed, where he lay partially hidden, trembling, as a swarm of soldiers' black boots hit the rooftop deck. Fearing he might be shot if discovered hiding, N. moved to surrender. As he emerged from beneath the bed, he raised his hands up, and "probably 8 or 10 soldiers surrounded me and blocked my eyes and tied my hands [with flexicuffs]."

As the soldiers led N. downstairs, he, too, heard the percussion grenade go off in the kitchen, as did the three other family members I interviewed separately about this event. In another minute, N., M., H., and their uncles O. and Hussein, 33, had their hands flexicuffed behind their backs and were standing in the house's main sitting room. (I spoke to the first four; Hussein is still in U.S. custody and thus was not available for an interview.) The family members watched soldiers smash open cabinets and containers, break the TV set, bash the stereo, and generally ruin the house's interior in search of something—all of it illuminated by the light sticks' greenish glow. The family members could hear the women, girls, and small children screaming and shrieking in a nearby room as another soldier held them at gunpoint.

Then, suddenly, at the house's front door, the five cuffed family members saw another man step into the half-light just outside the front-door threshold. He was slightly overweight, wearing trousers and a T-shirt, and his face was masked except for his eyes. The soldier who'd been functioning as a translator stepped up and moved down the row of flexicuffed boys and men, one by one illuminating their faces with a light stick. Each time he lit up another face, the masked man said, with an Iraqi accent, "No. Not him."

Most likely, the man was an informant, possibly working through the army's paid-tips program. Following each "No," the family member being examined by light stick was then hooded and pushed outside, where he had OBJ NORTON (military-speak for "Objective Norton," probably the raid's code name) written across the shoulders of his T-shirt in green Magic Marker. Still hooded, the boys and young men were then guided farther out into the yard and up the inclined steel gangway of an armored personnel carrier (A.P.C.) and told to sit down.

For a long period—as shrieks and shouts of women and young children continued to fill the air from inside the house—the hooded family members sat in the A.P.C., waiting. "Do you think they're going to kill us?" M. asked.

Finally, they could hear the armed intruders coming out of the house, carrying and moving around boxes of one kind or another. In the end, the four family members interviewed for this story claim, the intruders looted the house of $7,500 in U.S. currency (not an astronomical amount of money to have on hand in Iraq, where citizens are afraid to use banks), as well as thousands of dollars' worth of gold jewelry. "Even the very small pieces of gold that are for kids," says M. "They had stolen them as well."

The family members were driven to a facility where they were eventually locked away in individual wooden boxes—roughly three feet wide by five feet nine inches high by five feet nine inches deep—in which they were forced to crouch with hands cuffed behind their backs, blacked-out goggles over their eyes. For two days they were given no food or water.

The boys were able to gauge the passing of time by the rising and falling temperature inside the warehouse-like building. Finally each was given a small amount of water and allowed to go to the bathroom. "By now I was shaking," M. says. "I felt about to faint because of the lack of water. I was also trying my best to find out where my relatives were. When the guards were away, I would call them quietly by name. I heard O. and H. and N. But never my Uncle Hussein. I never heard his voice."

In the following days, when they weren't locked away in their boxes, the family members were put through round after round of interrogation. For their first session, each was led to a room, still handcuffed and blindfolded, and made to kneel facing a corner as two men asked questions. For some of the boys, their interrogators were men with male translators, for others it was a woman with a male translator.

"What does your father do in Yemen?" the interrogators asked. "Why did you come here from Yemen?" Despite the fact that they were Iraqis born to Iraqi parents, it is likely their ties to Yemen—home to the bin Laden clan and a known terrorist breeding ground—was a hot button for the Americans.

The interrogations eventually grew longer and rougher, with threats of deadly force regularly made (though never delivered on). M. was told by an interrogator that "if I did not confess he would take all the females in my family and put them in here, and strip them naked and everyone will be looking at them. And we will bring your mother in here. Other times, he would just sit silently for more than half an hour. Nothing at all."

Finally, after a week that included four or five hour-long sessions of fruitless interrogation each, the boys were visited by a doctor, who checked them out and gave them a bottle of water to remedy the constipation that was a result of two days with no food followed by a diet of biscuits and crushed nuts. Twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time, the detainees—still inside their boxes and still cuffed—would have their hands moved in front of them so they could eat.

M., dehydrated and starving, finally collapsed in his wooden cell. "I would faint, for perhaps half an hour—I don't know how long," the 17-year-old says. "And then I would hear voices and try to get up again. I was very, very cold. I was dizzy. I kept passing out in my box. My head would hit."

By the end of the first week, N., only 15, was fainting, too. "We were told to remain standing all the time," he says. "But sometimes I used to lie down. I fainted twice. The second time I fainted I went down and my head was touching the door." A guard, possibly having heard N. fall inside his box, apparently came over to investigate. "He kicked the door from the outside," N. says. "It resulted that he was kicking my head."

After a full week spent handcuffed, wearing blacked-out goggles, and being forced to crouch in the wooden boxes, N., M., H., and their uncles O. and Hussein— the latter had been kept away from the others for the week—were pulled from their boxes and, still in goggles, driven to an airfield, where they were put on a plane they were told would take them to Guantanamo. Instead, after an hour's flight (the young men were sophisticated enough to know that a flight to Cuba would have taken far longer), they were driven to another prison facility and placed in small wooden boxes similar to those they had spent the last week in.

More rounds of interrogation followed. During one session M. was told by a translator, whose voice he said he recognized from the first detention center, "If you think you are in Baghdad, you are not, and you will never see your mother again. You will never go to your country or your homeland again." Then the translator left, returning shortly with an interrogator whose voice M. also recognized from the first detention center. "How are you here, too?" the boy asked. When the interrogator started to explain, M. says he asked, "You got from Baghdad to here in Guantanamo in 10 minutes? How could you come from Baghdad in 10 minutes?"

Following M.'s insubordination, the sexual threats and humiliating assaults began.

It was the following morning, as was mentioned at the beginning of this story, that N. was bumped sexually from behind by one of the guards.

That morning M. also had a threatening encounter when he was taken to the bathroom: "One of the soldiers leaned close and asked me, 'If I pay you some money, some dollars, will you dance for me?' ... Then he solicited sex. He said money for sexual acts, too." M. pretended he didn't understand, that he could comprehend no English. The guard kept talking. "You don't know girls," the guard said. Then he propositioned M. again.

H., the 18-year-old cousin, was also harassed. Walked to the bathroom by a male and a female soldier, he was met by another male soldier inside the bathroom while the woman soldier stood outside the still-open bathroom door watching. H. was stripped naked as the Americans laughed. "They would tell me to clean the toilet," he says. "The guards would give me a dirty cloth and tell me to clean, you know, wipe the toilet." Once he'd finished, and still naked, H. would ask for water to clean himself, but the guards would refuse. Other times, H. says, the two men in the bathroom would come up behind him and briefly hump or sexually bump him at the hips.

On a later occasion, after taking the one shower he was allowed during his incarceration, just hours before he was to be released, a guard handing him a towel came up and bumped into him. H. says, "He was fat. He was very tall. He was clean-shaven, but his hair was thin." Beneath this guard's uniform, H. says, he could feel the man's erection against his body. He felt violated. "I was scared," he says.

Earlier, the family members had begun refusing to use the bathroom. They were also refusing to drink any water, as that might eventually force them to call for a bathroom visit. Eventually, a doctor was called in.

Two days after the harassment began, N. was assaulted by a guard.

Before they were finally released, the four family members were debriefed by a new set of American interrogators. Each young man says he received an apology for his arrest, which the Americans admitted had been a mistake, and each was made to sign a form he couldn't read before being given $50; they would be released several hours later. During this final interrogation, some were asked about their treatment at the airport camp. M., in particular, was asked if anyone had hurt him, anyone had solicited him, or anyone had attacked him. He was so frightened, he says, he declined to answer. Flexicuffed and blindfolded, the young men, who hadn't had contact with their Uncle Hussein since the trip to "Guantanamo," were finally put in a helicopter and flown into Baghdad.

"They told us, 'Just go!"' M. says.

"It was 12:30 at night," N. says. "It's almost impossible for somebody to go out at that time. But we started walking, and we were lucky—we found a taxi. Once we got to our grandparents' home, we borrowed some Iraqi money from a neighbor to pay for the taxi ride. The house was really badly damaged. The garden was destroyed and the roof was damaged. Still, anytime, you know, a helicopter flies over, I still have these negative aftereffects: the whole family gets scared. We all start gathering in one room."

For all of the young men, one question stands out: What happened to their Uncle Hussein, who remains in American custody?

As has been duly recorded by the U.S. Army, Uncle Hussein turned up at Abu Ghraib prison on July 29, 2004, 4 days after the boys were released and 17 days after their capture, on July 12, which in the uncle's case is also in army records. What may also be in records somewhere but is likely classified is who had custody of Hussein and the other family members during the intervening two weeks.

When I first brought the four young men's claims to the U.S. Army's attention, the response was a mix of outrage, guarded concern, and outright derision. I was eventually referred—after supplying a detailed list of the detainees' assertions about wooden boxes, illegal detentions, 24-7 handcuffing and blindfolding, and sexual threats, abuse, and assault—to Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson in Baghdad, the public-affairs officer for detainee operations in Iraq.

Johnson and other army personnel in Baghdad—including several First Cavalry Division officers and staff in charge of the Baghdad area—assured me that soldiers using fast ropes to drop onto houses from helicopters, the writing of cryptic phrases such as OBJ NORTON on clothing, and the warehousing of handcuffed and blindfolded detainees in small wooden boxes were highly irregular.

"Helicopters? Fast ropes? C-130s to fly detainees around? We'd love to have those kinds of resources," said one First Cavalry officer. "We've got guys who could do the fast-roping. We've got helicopters. But we don't do the things you're describing. For us, they're not standard operating procedure. We just don't do that."

Colonel Johnson, a squared-up soldier with a Joe Friday demeanor, a steely gaze, and a quick sense of humor that underlies both, took an even more dismissive approach. "I call it 'flaky,'" he said of the detainees' claims as we drove away from our tour of the First Cavalry's interrogation centers, near Baghdad. "I just don't see what purpose keeping people blindfolded in boxes serves."

Two days later, I lent the transcribed narrative of M.'s incarceration to Johnson to read. I also gave him the prisoner ID number of Uncle Hussein, which I had obtained through his family.

The following morning, Johnson was far more open to the possibility that the four young men's versions of events in mid- to late July might be true. "The percussion grenade, the fast-roping," he said. "That's very consistent with troops' being inserted to gather up a high-value person. That's how it would be done." Johnson then suggested that a full investigation into the boys' stories of abuse should be started as soon as possible. As he had put it to me several days earlier, "I never said nothing happened to the detainees you interviewed." He said his enthusiasm for the American mission there might leave him vulnerable to naïveté, but that he was also well aware there were many agendas at work in Iraq. "I see other Americans around here ... guys dressed in civilian clothing, driving vehicles like ours [armored Humvees] and using weapons just like ours—and I'd like to think that isn't true. I'd like to think the things you've described to me couldn't be true. But I don't know. If someone is doing this to detainees, they deserve to be taken down." (For his part, General Miller said he was "very skeptical" that any abuses could still be going on in Iraq, even in facilities outside his command.)

Johnson also informed me that Uncle Hussein was still "among the population in Abu Ghraib," though he had yet to be charged with anything. He noted that, as the four boys had already told me, their uncle possessed a German passport, which had been taken from him. "A man with Yemeni ties and a German passport?" Johnson said. "You can see why, even if he wasn't the sweep's primary target, he would be of interest." Beyond that he wouldn't comment on Uncle Hussein's status.

Pursuing the question of whether intelligence agencies were involved in the boys' detainment proved something of a fool's errand. The C.I.A. declined to comment about detainees in Iraq. When I called the National Security Council office at the White House to ask about detainees, detainee rights, and who approves the policies that could have landed N. and his family in prisoner boxes at the airport camp, I was referred to an N.S.C. spokesman named Sean McCormack. After weeks of requests, McCormack finally took my call. "For the specifics with respect to Iraq detainees, I'll have to refer you over to the Department of Defense," he said. He added that all protections required by the Geneva Conventions apply to Iraqi fighters and P.O.W.'s in the conflict, but that there were fighters and P.O.W.'s in Iraq who do not fall into protected categories. Confirming news reports, he specified that "non-Iraqi al-Qaeda members, who enter Iraq in order to engage in terrorism, are not covered by the Conventions. That is not to say, however, that they receive no protection under international law. As a matter of U.S. policy, the president has said we do not engage in or condone torture."

At the Pentagon, Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, declined my request for an interview. Instead, after several telephone conversations with various department officials—including one with a navy captain who refused to provide her name after she'd telephoned me—I finally received an answer to my questions about the boys' treatment from Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway, spokesman for the D.O.D. (Full disclosure: Colonel Conway and I both attended Kenyon College in 1978.) With regard to whether N. and his family members could be grabbed up by Special Ops teams, flown around above Baghdad in a C-130, and transferred to different sites around the airport and city by automobile and helicopter, Conway answered simply, "It's extremely unlikely that anything could be taking place over there at this level without the knowledge of our forces."

Often, it's as useful to examine what's not being said on a subject as what is. No one I contacted in the U.S. government categorically denied that N.'s and his relatives' accounts of their imprisonment could be true.

On the night of September 30, I joined the detainees I'd been interviewing for a banquet-style dinner at an outdoor restaurant. After four days of my asking them seemingly endless questions, they all had questions for me.

Haj Ali asked, "Why do the Americans treat us this way? Why are they so afraid of us that they abduct us off the streets, or attack our homes at night, smashing everything inside?"

I tried to tell Haj Ali and the others that, going into a dark house at night, the soldiers were probably afraid and had to assume there would be a hostile defense of the property. I told them that, on the street, the soldiers or intelligence officers who were hooding people and dragging them off to Humvees only wanted to tip the situation to their advantage. They had, after all, become far too conversant with "improvised explosive devices," car bombings, and shootings.

Haj Ali smiled. "But when I think of what happened to me," he said, "I can't help thinking: In Iraq today, who is the terrorist and who is being terrorized? And for what? Had the Americans come to me, at my home or outside my mosque, and asked me to visit them and tell them what I knew, I would have done that. But now, after what's happened, they've turned the Iraqi people against them."