Willem Marx: Misinformation Intern

Last spring, during my final semester at Oxford, a cousin wrote to tell me that she was planning to work for an American company in Iraq over the summer. She suggested I join her. The company was called Iraqex, and it claimed on its website to have "expertise in collecting and exploiting information; structuring transactions; and mitigating risks through due diligence, legal strategies and security." Iraqex was also looking for summer media interns, my cousin pointed out, who would "interact with the local media" in Baghdad and "pitch story ideas." This was almost too good to be true.

I have wanted to be a reporter, and particularly a foreign correspondent, ever since I was given a copy of John Simpson's Strange Places, Questionable People as a teenager. In this memoir, Simpson recounts his many adventures as a BBC reporter: lying in a gutter at Tiananmen Square in 1989, his camera rolling as bullets zipped by; being arrested during the revolution in Romania; and broadcasting from Baghdad in 1991, with U.S. bombs exploding around him. Inspired, I began writing for my high school paper, eventually becoming its editor, and at Oxford, where I majored in Classics, I joined the staff of a campus weekly. (Simpson had edited a quarterly at Cambridge.) By the time I heard from my cousin, I was already slated to begin journalism school in the fall, but I was yearning for some John Simpson-type realworld experience. In fact, Simpson had actually spent years toiling in the BBC's London office before being sent overseas. And here I might be able to get a break right out of college.

I submitted my internship application within days. (Yet by then my cousin's parents had decided she couldn't go to Baghdad and Iraqex had changed its name to Lincoln Group.) After an anxious wait, I was called by one of the company's employees. He was young, himself just out of school, and he ended our short interview by asking whether I would be able to stay focused on work "with mortar fire at the end of the street." I was honest about my credentials. I had been to the Middle East, having vacationed in Egypt and Syria a couple of years before. During a spring break, friends and I had cycled some two thousand miles from Geneva to Damascus. And at university I had handled the pressures of translating Cicero and Polybius. But, I admitted, I couldn't say for sure about the mortar fire. He seemed to think this would be fine.

I soon received phone calls from both of Lincoln Group's founders, Paige Craig and Christian Bailey. Craig, a former Marine, told me that he had spent a great deal of time in Iraq and spoke very generally about the company's important work there. When I asked about security, he assured me that for them this was not a problem. Other foreign companies drove around the country in massive 4 x 4 armored vehicles, basically advertising themselves as targets. But Lincoln Group, he said, operated "under the radar," with employees dressed as locals and Iraqis manning the front offices.

Christian Bailey, like me, was an Oxford man. Yet whereas I had whiled away my time in pubs, he had set up an expensive Bloomberg computer terminal in his dorm room and successfully played the stock market. Although Bailey initially described the media internship as the perfect launch pad for my journalism career, he later offered me a position working on private equity projects in Washington. It was not my dream to become a financial analyst, I had to tell him. I wanted to spend the summer in Baghdad working with real Iraqi reporters. Bailey said he understood but would have to get back to me. A month later, in June, I was told the media internship was mine.

I was flown across the Atlantic to meet my new employers. In downtown Washington, I was surprised by the ubiquity of fresh-faced young men, their blue short-sleeved buttondowns tucked neatly into khakis. Lincoln Group had its headquarters above an Indian grocery on K Street; a small placard in the building's foyer read: VISITORS TO LINCOLN GROUP/IRAQEX, 10TH FLOOR, SHOULD BE ANNOUNCED IN ADVANCE. On the tenth floor, electricians wired lights in some rooms while in others suited men conferenced behind glass walls. The company's head of human resources, who had only just been hired herself, told me with a weary smile that things had been crazy lately.

Paige Craig popped in to see me as I filled out work papers in a tiny waiting room. Shaking my hand with a mighty grip, he uttered something to the effect of "welcome aboard." He was very well built, with short, tidy hair and the tight khaki trousers and shirt of a military man. As he strode away, he seemed purposeful. Bailey, by contrast, was baby-faced and slight, his sandy-brown hair cut in a Bill Gates bob. In his corner office, we chatted about Oxford. He had studied economics and management at Lincoln College. When I asked whether his college had inspired the company's new name, he shrugged. "Partly," he said cryptically. He did say that Lincoln Group was rapidly expanding and that it offered incredible opportunities for bright young people like me: stock options were available to employees after just three months, and I might consider staying on after the summer. Christian Bailey hadn't yet been to Iraq himself. Although he had planned numerous trips, he said, something always came up that kept him in D.C.

There was still one remaining formality before I was set to go. I had to travel to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to pick up a Common Access Card, a kind of passepartout for military facilities all over the world. The women running the office where I was given immunizations and completed more paperwork said they had a young friend back in the District who would love my British accent. They were going to call her this very instant, they teased, and then I'd have a companion for the evening. They also talked in more solemn tones about all the brave men and women who came through the base and then shipped off to Iraq. In another room a chatty African-American nurse, contracted by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), took my vitals and drew blood. She joked as well about the way I spoke and wanted to know about England. Yet when I asked why she needed to make copies of my dental X rays, she suddenly was speechless. "It's for our files," she finally said, shooting me a quick glance and then turning away. In the long silence that followed, I understood. With a body charred beyond recognition or exploded into irretrievable parts, a dental match might be all that remained to identify me.

Only then did I really consider that I would be risking my life for men I had just met and for a company I knew very little about. My pay, I had recently learned, would be a measly $1,000 a month, meaning I would likely lose money over the summer. When I had begged out of eight days of Stateside military training so I could get to Baghdad sooner, the company was only too willing to oblige. "It makes more financial sense for us," I was told. "We'll get more work out of you."

I might have aborted the venture then had I not been envisioning my burgeoning career. I had come to see myself braving the dangers of Iraq for the sake of the good news story, and I liked it when others saw me this way as well. Shortly before flying to America, I had visited my younger brother in Scotland, and he had said he was proud that I was willing to take real risks to pursue a profession. (He also was relieved that I was not becoming another investment banker, like so many other Oxford grads.) When a group of us went to an Edinburgh restaurant one evening, I was seated next to a raven-haired beauty, a halfItalian who had just graduated from university as well. After one of the courses, she asked perfunctorily about my plans for the summer holiday, and I began to talk excitedly about my impending trip. I needed to know whether I could survive in an environment like Iraq, which was now the center of the universe for the kind of reporting I wanted to do. Although dangerous, such work was essential, I said, since people back home needed to understand the painful realities at the other ends of the earth. She now leaned toward me, her dark eyes wide with interest. When I finally finished, she whispered, "That's very sexy."

I arrived at the Baghdad airport on July 7, after waiting for my luggage in Amman for nearly a week. People at the baggage claim shouted like tour guides for KBR employees to gather in one spot, while others, holding aloft signs with the names of various security firms, urged bulky, tattooed men to congregate in groups. But I saw no one there to greet me. As the hall emptied, I noticed a man and woman loitering indifferently near the exit. I eventually made my way over and asked if they were here to meet Willem Marx. They were. Each shook my hand, and then they led me in silence out of the airport and to the back seat of a battered sedan.

On the short drive to the U.S. Army's Camp Victory, a sprawling complex of prefabricated buildings in what was one of Saddam Hussein's many estates, I caught sight of my first bomb-wrecked palace. Its dome had collapsed, and exposed girders poked violently skyward. I asked my new colleagues about their work and what they had done before joining the company. Gina, a fair-skinned woman in her late twenties, said she had a military background in Iraq, and Ryan, who seemed not much older than me, had been a soldier as well. Their answers were so curt that I decided not to delve further.

Once inside Camp Victory, Ryan sent me to buy a transparent neck pouch for my military-contractor identification. I queued behind a group of soldiers, all of whom carried their rifles with them inside the base's PX. Then I was deposited in a dusty trailer, where I sat alone for the rest of the day watching Lara Croft and other action films on a giant flat-screen TV.

To get to the villa where I would be living for the summer, I was awakened before dawn and loaded onto what was essentially a Greyhound bus with armored plating and shatterproof windows. The road to Baghdad's Green Zone, where the Lincoln Group villa was located, is known as the Highway of Death, for the number of convoys that have been attacked along its route. And so we trundled along the dangerous road in complete darkness, flanked by a quartet of Humvees and watched over by helicopters with nightscopes.

There were four bedrooms on the villa's ground floor, and I was to share one of these with an Iraqi named Ahmed.1 Ahmed, who had attended American University in Washington, always wore immaculately pressed shirts and remained clean-shaven. Because he often shared his bed with one of several Baghdadi girlfriends, I moved down the hall after only a few nights. My new roommate, Steve, a recent Brown graduate, had signed on with Lincoln Group for a full year and seemed to be pacing himself accordingly. Most nights he would drink beers bought from a nearby market, and the next day he would sleep well into the afternoon.

The villa's other inhabitants had been sent to Iraq as part of a contract Lincoln Group had with USAID to build training centers for Iraqi businesses.2 None of them had much experience in the region nor had worked very long for the company. A tall San Franciscan, who passed whole days in the tarpaulin-covered courtyard smoking cigarettes with a former airconditioning-systems executive from Arizona, had spent a year or so on an archaeological mission in Egypt. When they weren't in the courtyard, these two trawled the Internet, pretending to work. They often speculated about the company, suspecting that it might secretly be owned by the Carlyle Group or that some of its employees were really CIA. I asked them whom I should speak to about getting going on my media internship, but they only shrugged. They had no idea. The Arizonan declared the whole organization a mess but couldn't say specifically what he meant by this.

Because I had just two short months in Iraq, I emailed Bailey and Craig back in Washington after several days of inaction. What projects could I begin working on? I wanted to know. Who was in charge here? What could I do to contribute? A day later I received a rather brusque response from Paige Craig. They didn't have time to deal with my little problems. I needed only to take my lead from Jim Sutton, the country manager, whom I had seen just once during my first week.

But my badgering did seem to pay off. I was soon contacted by a Lincoln Group employee named Jon, who formerly had run political campaigns in Chicago and now worked on the company's I.O., or Information Operations. Over lunch at the recently bombed and rebuilt Green Zone Café-an airconditioned tent with plastic chairs and a TV airing Lebanese music videos-Jon explained that he was returning home for several weeks of R & R and that Jim Sutton had chosen me to be his replacement. Jon quickly sketched out my new LO. responsibilities. An Army team inside the Al Faw palace, another of Saddam's former residences, would send me news articles they had cobbled together from wire stories and their own reports from the field. It was my job to select the ones that seemed most like Iraqis had written them. I was then to pass these articles along to our Iraqi employees, who would translate the pieces into Arabic and place them in local newspapers. Jon told me that the U.S. Army could hardly carry out this work in their military uniforms, so they hired Lincoln Group, which could operate with far fewer restrictions. It was a bread-andbutter contract, he said, that paid the company about $5 million annually. I asked if the newspapers knew that Lincoln Group or the U.S. military were behind these articles. They did and they didn't, Jon said. The Iraqis working for us posed as freelance journalists, but they also paid editors at the papers to publish the stories-part of the cost Lincoln Group billed back to the military. "Look," Jon assured me, "it's very straightforward. You just have to keep the military happy."

Despite some misgivings, I returned to the villa feeling like my career was starting. I would contribute to the news-making process during war and be embroiled in the politics that this entailed. The experience of doing any work in Baghdad, in and of itself, would help instill in me the skills necessary for survival in other perilous environments. Perhaps I could even change how the company operated and, if at all possible, maybe improve the situation in Iraq through my efforts.

I began my media work on July 14, waking up early to shave in the bathroom's cracked sink and brew some coffee in the sandy kitchen. I chose a spot on the large red sofa in the villa's living room, which also doubled as its office space, and waited for an email to arrive from the military. For several hours I checked the BBC website for news on Iraq, brewed more coffee, and sent emails home, telling friends and family that I was beginning to do real work here. In the afternoon I finally received an email from a First Lieutenant Christopher Denatale that was also copied to a long list of American military personnel with @iraq. centcom.mil address suffixes. The communiqué was labeled "Unclassified/For Official Use Only" and stated simply, "Here are the Corps IO storyboards for 14 JUL 05."

I carefully read the five articles that were attached as PowerPoint slides. The first reported on a speech by then prime minister Ibrahim alJaafari, in which he announced that Iraqi troops would soon be able to replace foreign forces. It was accompanied by a photo of Jaafari at a lectern and ended with this bit of uplift: "Combined with the recurring successes of the ISF, Prime Minister Jaafari's remarks inspire a greater degree of hope for the peaceful and progressive future of Iraq."3 In the second article, also on the progress of the Iraqi security Forces, the U.S. Army writers at the Al Faw palace put an even more positive spin on the country's prospects. "Unlike the terrorists, who offer nothing but pain and fear, the ISF bring the promise of a better Iraq. No foreign al-Qa'ida mercenary would ever consider bringing gifts to Iraqi children. The Iraqi Army, however, fights for a noble cause. . . . Together with the Iraqi people, they will bring peace and prosperity to the nation."

The remaining stories continued in this vein. The American soldier writing one of them took on the persona of an Iraqi to denounce the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, another argued that insurgents were attacking Iraqis solely to instigate a civil war, and the final one concluded with an apparent publicservice announcement: "Continue to report suspicious activities and make Iraq safe again." These were far from exemplars of objective journalism, but Jon had said that I should think of the storyboards not so much as news but as messages Iraqis needed to hear. I supposed they were that.

I was to publish at least five stories each week, so I now had to decide which of these, if any, made the cut. After some deliberation, I chose the piece on the insurgency inciting Iraqi-onIraqi violence. Its rhetoric was powerful, even Ciceronian, I thought, with the grand sweep of its opening line: "Great triumphs and great tragedies can redirect the course of a people's destiny." And I agreed with its overall message that one destructive act should not beget others. I was to pass along the article to a man named Muhammad, who would see that it was translated from the English. It also fell to me to tell Muhammad where to place the translated piece. Jon had left me a spreadsheet listing Iraqi newspapers and the amounts they charged to run our stories. Yet I knew nothing at all about the media in Iraq, and certainly didn't know the difference between the newspaper Al Sabah and the similar sounding Ai Sabah Al jadeed. Jon didn't believe this would be a problem, however, having himself started with no regional expertise, and he made it very clear that I should under no circumstances ask the military team for guidance. He warned me that the two majors in charge, Scott Rosen and John Muirhead, would hound me for information on exactly how Lincoln Group placed the stories, and that I should remain cagey about the process, allowing secrecy to swell the perceived value of the company's work. I was to send them only the results of what had been published, detailed in a spreadsheet. The military, Jon said, loves statistics.

From the dozen publications on the list, I picked out Al Mutamar, or The Congress, because it was one of the least expensive (around $50 per story) and I could see we hadn't used it in a while. (I thought it would be good to mix things up a bit.) Later that day, Steve came into the living room with a story Jon had asked him to put together. Written from the perspective of a frustrated Iraqi citizen, it condemned a recent insurgent attack that had left twenty-three children dead. Steve's information came directly from news sources on the Internet, with no actual reporting of his own, but he had authored what I considered to be a very decent opinion piece. I emailed this to Muhammad as well, asking that it be published in another of the newspapers, Al Sabah (The Morning), which I selected because it was the most expensive on the spreadsheet, charging over $1,500 to run one of our pieces. Steve's writing, I felt, deserved the best.

I received an email back from Muhammad the following day, acknowledging my instructions and including two Word files. They separately contained the two stories in English and in what I assumed were their Arabic versions, and I saved the files onto my laptop, as Jon had instructed me to do. Two days later I felt a little thrill when Muhammad sent me scanned versions of the "articles" as they appeared in the Iraqi newspapers. Despite the subject matter of Steve's piece, he and I both laughed at the thought that he was now published in a major Iraqi newspaper.

I forwarded the scanned articles to Rosen and Muirhead and received emails thanking me for my work. Then I sat back on the red sofa, proud that I had successfully completed my initial run through this process. I had even made what I believed were sound journalistic decisions.

Over the next weeks, my U.S. military liaisons at the Al Faw palace continued to send me around five storyboards each day. I soon had a better sense of how Lincoln Group was positioned between the Army team and our Iraqi staff, who were themselves the company's sole link to the local press. Lincoln Group had originally signed its media contract with the military's Public Affairs Office, which supplies "real" information to reporters wishing to know about troop casualties or reconstruction projects. But Paige Craig had later convinced the military that his company was better suited to the more covert Information Operations sphere.4 I was still struggling to get a grip on all this information myself but recognized that there was some power in selecting which storyboards to publish. Although not exactly intoxicating, this power was certainly more significant in the grander scheme of things than anything I had experienced at university.

I also learned that whatever power I possessed was not absolute. When senior commanders labeled storyboards a priority, this trumped my particular journalistic proclivities. One storyboard, with the alliterative headline "Badr Corps Not Baited into Fight," was given a special "emphasis" by General George Casey, the most senior U.S. officer in Iraq at the time, and as such was made a top priority by Majors Rosen and Muirhead. The story took a new tack, it seemed, praising Shiite militias for refraining from retaliatory attacks against Al Qaeda. "The restraint of the Badr Corps and their faith in all Iraqis to stand up to terrorist violence bring great credit to themselves and great honor to all of Iraq," the article opined. "History does not fondly remember murderers and destroyers. History reveres the people who stand up against pain and risk of death to say 'No' to the murderers and destroyers. This is why it is such treacherous blasphemy when the al-Qa'ida gang claims the honored title of'martyr' for their murderers."

I had by then developed what I considered a rapport with Muhammad and his staff, who had been remarkably forgiving of my naivete. Although I had assumed that all of the newspapers on the list Jon had left me were daily publications, Muhammad told me that, in fact, many were weekly, triweekly, or just unreliably issued. When I requested that an article appear in a specific paper, he would sometimes go against my request if he knew that the paper wouldn't publish for several days, and would place it instead in a daily. As he explained to me in an email, if he didn't do this, "Some of those articles will delay in time for couple or three days, and in this case their importance will reduce and attenuate and other newspapers will deal with them before us. This is one of the most important points which leads the newspapers' editors to know about the connection of those articles with the American, because who would pay money to publish an article which got old news!!!"

I passed Muhammad the Badr Corps story, explaining that it was of the utmost importance and feeling a bit excited to be carrying out the orders of such a senior officer. Days later, however, the story still had not been published. Muhammad told me that an editor at the newspaper I had chosen, Addustour, had rung the evening before it should have run, claiming that his managers had objected to its politics. By Muhammad's account, the same editor had then relented after some discussion, agreeing to publish the piece. (I assumed this meant that Muhammad had swayed him with an offer of more Lincoln Group money.) But when the newspaper came out the following morning, there was still no "Badr Corps Not Baited into Fight." I sent an apologetic email to the two majors, explaining why such a high-priority story had not been published. I hadn't taken up this issue with the newspaper's management, I wrote, because I didn't want to sour my relationship with the paper's editors. Rosen accepted this reasoning and was even somewhat pleased by the insight he thought it provided. "It is good feedback actually that the piece rubbed up against political/philosophical boundaries," he replied. "Is this something we should use to shape future pieces for that paper, for all papers, etc.? It is good to keep us on our toes and it shows that they are not our lapdogs."

Indeed, because Rosen and his team assumed I interacted regularly with the Iraqi press, they believed I was someone to take seriously. And Rosen's encouraging words actually emboldened me to offer additional suggestions on ways to improve our "pro-democracy" pieces. I told him that an article on the military's discovery of a cache of bulletproof vests was too outdated to run in a daily newspaper and read like a catalogue of munitions, with none of the "human appeal" that grabs readers. "This is not criticism," I wrote Rosen, "merely my honest opinion as a media analyst." (Jim Sutton had bestowed this title upon me, and it was by then printed on my Lincoln Group business cards.) For other articles, I pointed out that the military had failed to properly mask its own voice and intel, such as in one piece when the Army writers directly responded to an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claim: "It is true that during one security operation a woman was detained by Coalition Forces." I told them that their entire approach to Zarqawi was wrong, as they were giving him far too much exposure-bad press being better than none at all. Rosen thanked me for all my "efforts to steer us toward better products." Although they, too, were reconsidering how to write about Zarqawi, the team had been "given some fairly rigid guidelines from our boss." Rosen added that they also were "synchronizing messages with PSYOP and PAO," and were thus limited in what they could do. But attached below Rosen's comments was a forwarded email to him from a confused subordinate: "Should we continue to write the same way?"

In one correspondence with me, Rosen confided that his biggest frustration was when his colleagues-"a bunch of white guys"-nitpicked over this or that word for a piece that would eventually be translated into Arabic. "Not ONCE have they consulted one Arab on the best way to write the THOUGHT in Arabic. They forget that it is the message that we are trying to get across not the word."

One morning toward the end of July, Jim Sutton decided that I needed to check up on Muhammad and his team in their downtown offices. He picked me up outside the villa in a black BMW and drove us to the concrete blast barriers and razor wire at the outer limits of the Green Zone. A sign instructed drivers and passengers to "Lock and Load," and Jim gave me a Clock 9mm pistol to hold out of sight in my lap.5 Then we drove on, into the vast portion of Baghdad every American I had met called the Red Zone. At six two, with a shock of blond hair, I had little chance of blending in there, and my striped polo shirt and Ray-Bans hardly put me "under the radar."

Along a narrow street of ramshackle stores beside the Tigris River, Jim slowed the car to a crawl, waving to some kids on a nearby doorstep who returned the gesture. Then, without warning, another vehicle speeding toward us from behind slammed on its brakes and came to a halt directly in front of our BMW. Jim jumped out, and I frantically looked from him to the strange car, out of which large swarthy men were now emerging. One of these men ran past Jim toward our car. Before I could react, he was in the driver's seat beside me. He quickly introduced himself in rudimentary English as part of Lincoln Group's security detail. Able to breathe again, I saw Jim get into the second car, a silver-gray BMW, along with a couple of armed guards, and we were joined by a man wielding an AK-47 who sidled in behind me. My driver was Kurdish, from the area around Fallujah, and as he steered us into the downtown center he barked orders to the car in front through a two-way radio.

I was twenty-two years old, and here I was holding a loaded gun while being ushered through Baghdad's dangerous, detritus-laden streets by two total strangers. Maybe this was the real Iraq. Maybe this was what it was like to be John Simpson.

By this time, I was winning plaudits for my work. Jim Sutton liked my easy manner with the Iraqis and attempts at basic Arabic. He praised me, too, for my cool-headedness in unfamiliar situations-such as the automobile switch beside the Tigris, which seemed to have been at least in part a test. Even Gina, who had been so cold when I had first arrived in Iraq, became far less frosty toward me. Because of the Oxford background I shared with Christian Bailey, she initially thought I might be his spy, here to report back to him on company problems and employee activities. But when Gina learned I was risking my life in Baghdad for just $1,000 a month, as opposed to her $70,000 annual salary, she mostly felt sorry for me.

Jim Sutton sat me down one afternoon at the villa to talk about what he said was "the next step" in the company's operations. In line with Lincoln Group's longer-term aims, he and the established team (the half-dozen or so who had been in Iraq longer than two months) were intent on carrying out a much larger military contract. "Western Mission" would be a hugely expanded version of the current media efforts. It would be an all-out "media blitz," Jim said, and the largest contract ever of its kind. During the months of August and September alone, we were proposing to place sixteen different pro-government/anti-insurgent spots on Iraqi television stations for a fee of $16.5 million. There would be twenty radio broadcasts as well, with the military paying us around $20,000 for each. We would publish eighty half-page color advertisements and thirty-two op-ed articles, for which we would charge nearly $400,000. Blanketing Baghdad with 140,000 posters would earn us another $400,000, and we would design nine Internet news sites, at a cost of $2,500 each, and produce five DVDs, for just over $580,000. Lincoln Group's overall haul for the two months: $19 million.

We were also to create something called a Rapid Response Cell. Lincoln Group would hire Iraqi journalists and send them to the Anbar province west of Baghdad, which Jim called the "insurgency's center of gravity." Working in the violent cities of Ramadi and FaIlujah, the journalists would be paid by Lincoln Group to report news that bolstered the U.S. military message. They would be on hand as well to capture breaking stories, about which they alone would be conveniently forewarned by Coalition forces, and would thus be able to "positively" portray events before the insurgency could put out its own account. Ahmed and I were told to recruit cameramen, reporters, and television stations to do this work. We were also to line up op-ed writers, so that once Western Mission was formally approved our team would be ready on August 1 to "execute." Finally, in order to show the military officers at the Al Faw palace that we were giving them more bang for their buck, I was now to pass ten stories along to Muhammad each week.

Ahmed had worked in the press office of the Coalition Provisional Authority, where he issued professional accreditations to Iraqi reporters, and also as a fixer for ABC News. (He often reverentially recounted a brief meeting he had with Peter Jennings a couple of years before the broadcaster's death.) So to find willing op-ed writers, we began by visiting Ahmed's past associates. Two of them I met several times at the Baghdad Press Center-an office that the U.S. State Department funded to provide Iraqi reporters with equipment and to train them in journalistic ethics and professional conduct. And yet we were hiring these same Iraqi reporters to work indirectly for the U.S. military. When State Department officials at the press center asked me about my work in Iraq, I would tiptoe around an answer, saying I ran advertising campaigns in local newspapers on behalf of multinationals. (Which was effectively true.) A director in the office explained their belief that an independent media would help buttress the country's nascent democracy, and she thought it was great that my efforts were allowing local newspapers to gain commercial independence.

It was easy to find Iraqi reporters who would write U.S. military-friendly op-ed pieces for a little extra cash. But hiring those who would go to the dangerous Anbar province was altogether a different matter. The reporters, cameramen, and sound operators we spoke with all said the same thing: they would work in Ramadi and Fallujah as part of a Rapid Response Cell only if they were embedded with U.S. troops. But because the whole point was that they were to report news that at least appeared to be independent of the military, this was impossible. We even explored whether we could embed our reporters with Iraqi troops there. But this also proved to be untenable.

Gina then had the idea of placing a Lincoln Group team permanently in a U.S. base near Ramadi or Fallujah, where they would operate one half of a satellite uplink system that would send footage or sound recordings to Baghdad. At the other end, Iraqis working in the company's Green Zone villa would receive the footage and splice it into whatever form was required. Breaking news, the thinking went, could then be rushed to a TV station and aired immediately.

To explore this option, Ahmed and I visited a number of upstart production companies in their heavily guarded compounds. We found one company that would produce one of our halfminute TV spots for as little as $10,000. At Iraq's national station, Al Iraqiya, located within Baghdad's old Jewish ghetto, an English-speaking commercial director said he could air the spot during the station's nightly news, the most expensive time, for only $2,000. Production and distribution together, then, would cost us around $12,000. The amount Lincoln Group was charging the military for developing, producing, and airing each commercial had already been determined: just over $1 million.6

At Al Iraqiya, Ahmed and I were then escorted to another part of the decrepit compound and introduced to the station's news director. We were left alone with him, and Ahmed began to explain that we were part of a recently formed independent newsgathering service that sought to cover the Anbar province. I followed the Arabic with difficulty but heard Ahmed launch into an account of his work with ABC. Then he said I was a former BBC reporter, which was an outright lie. I kept quiet, and Ahmed proposed that Al Iraqiya consider airing the footage from our Iraqi reporters. Ideally we would get paid for this, Ahmed said, but at this stage we wanted to make a reputation for ourselves and would in certain circumstances be willing to pay to have our footage shown on the news programs. The news director nodded repeatedly and then vigorously shook our hands. He seemed thrilled by our proposal.

The chubby head of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation's Baghdad bureau, yet another of Ahmed's old friends, was less enthusiastic about doing business with us. Over small glasses of sweetened tea, Ahmed again portrayed us as a start-up news service but revealed to his past associate that the U.S. military was bankrolling our operation. The station director listened in silence, finally speaking to warn us that we were embarking on an extremely perilous campaign. All would inevitably be uncovered, he said, and we, our employees, and our partners would be placed in grave danger.

With all I was doing on Western Mission, I had begun to pay far less attention to the military's daily storyboards. Although I was passing along more than ten articles to be published each week, thrilling the stats-obsessed military team, I had stopped reading all the items the military sent me, and I'm sure I forwarded on to Muhammad stories I would previously have held back. Every week I was required to confirm the details of the military's spreadsheet, which listed the stories written by the I.O. team, the stories published, and which newspapers had published them. But it wasn't until early August that I really looked closely at the figures for the previous three weeks. When I examined Muhammad's records, I saw that the amounts some newspapers had charged us for placing articles had shot up dramatically. During July, pieces published in the newspaper Addustaur had gone from $84, to $423, to $1,345, and finally to $2,156. For another newspaper, Al Adala, what we were charged had climbed from $82 at the start of July to $1,088 by month's end. I checked the word counts of the articles, since we paid more for additional column inches, but all the stories were roughly the same length. On closer inspection, I also noticed that articles had been published in newspapers I had not specified. One particular paper, Al Sabah Aljadeed (The New Morning), had been paid around $12,000 over a ten-day period from late July to early August, although I had never told Muhammad to place stories there.

I traveled the Highway of Death to discuss all this with Jim Sutton at Camp Victory. We spoke on a fourth-floor balcony, the clicks of military boots echoing on the palace's red marble atrium. Jim said it was up to me to ferret out the thief or thieves: it could be Muhammad, members of his staff, or the entire office. I told Jim that I now believed I had naively misread the Iraqis at our downtown office, mistaking their effusive "Yes, Mr. Willem" and "Soon, Mr. Willem" for real fealty. I had allowed them to exploit my ignorance: because I didn't know exactly how they published the military-written storyboards or whom they dealt with at the papers, they were able to inflate prices and take advantage of Lincoln Group. Jim said there was some important Western Mission work to take care of the next morning, but after that I needed to make my way downtown to get to the bottom of this matter.

Western Mission, after an initial delay, was finally beginning in earnest. Lincoln Group, as usual, had promised more than it could deliver, so in order to purchase airtime up front, it was forced to request an unusually large advance payment from the military. In fact, as Gina and I drove with Jim to the Green Zone villa that next day, the advance sat a few feet behind us, in the trunk of Jim's car: $3 million in cash, separated into thirty plastic-wrapped $100,000 blocks.

Just beyond the concrete blast barriers at the camp's exit, where we waited for our Kurdish guards, Jim told me to turn off my cell phone so that our location couldn't be traced. I held one of the Iranian submachine guns at the ready, and Gina, who rode shotgun, hid behind gold-rimmed sunglasses and a black kaffiyeh head scarf. The guards were late, and as cars slowly passed and our wait lengthened, an ambush began to seem imminent. My fears were somewhat allayed when the Kurds finally pulled into the parking area, apologetic and prepared to escort us and our secret cargo to the villa. The seven-mile ride turned out to be uneventful, and the $3 million was locked up in a safe inside my bedroom.

A few hours later, after lunch, I drove into Baghdad to speak to Muhammad and his staff. Jim, who said he was a former FBI field agent, had instructed me on the best ways to question my suspects. During each interview a staff member was to be seated in a single empty chair in the center of Muhammad's office-without a wall nearby, Jim explained, the man would feel vulnerable and lose his nerve. It was very important as well that I remain calm yet forceful at all times, and Jim said that I should test various hypotheses by accusing each man of carrying out the crime in a different manner. According to Sutton, I would be able to hear guilt in their denials. To further unsettle the staff, Lincoln Group had also arranged for two Sunnis to be there while I conducted the examination. These men had worked for Saddam's notorious Mukhabarat, the intelligence arm of the Iraqi Baath party. And I had asked an Iraqi I had come to know quite well to accompany me, essentially to serve as my personal bodyguard and translator. Hamza worked for another American firm based in the same compound as our villa and was responsible for delivering our soft drinks. I offered him $100 for his time.

I began by interviewing Muhammad, and we all squeezed into his cramped office, with its gaudy ashtrays and low leather chairs. I took Muhammad's seat at his desk, and Hamza, in baseball cap and Oakley sunglasses, sat to my left. The Sunnis positioned themselves on a couch along one of the walls while Muhammad remained standing by the solitary chair. Muhammad was surprised as well by the discrepancies in the ledger, and his suspicions fell on two Christians in his office, Farooq and Majid-those on his staff who physically transported the translated articles to the newspapers. Farooq, he thought, was our man. I, too, found Farooq to be dodgy. His hands were clammy whenever he greeted me, and he seemed always to have an elaborate excuse ready for Mr. Willem. On several occasions when I had phoned to question him about late work, our connection had suddenly gone dead. He would later blame this on the country's notoriously bad telecommunications network, but I believed he had simply hung up on me.

So we brought in Farooq, pointing him to the empty seat in the middle of the room. His protestations of innocence began even before he sat down, his face quickly turning a deep shade of red and the lip beneath his bushy mustache quivering in indignation. As I tried to follow Hamza's rapid-fire translations, I was distracted by the loaded Glock that I had tucked into the belt of my trousers and that now jabbed into my groin. We generally were armed whenever we traveled outside the Green Zone, and on this occasion I had to consider that the entire office of Iraqis could be in collusion and willing to act against their young British accuser. I shifted to try to alleviate the discomfort but soon found the weapon's position unbearable. Removing it from my pants, I placed the gun on the polished surface of Muhammad's desk. Farooq looked from the weapon to me and then back again, and I realized too late just how threatening my action seemed. Yet I couldn't simply apologize and remove the pistol-this would seem a sign of weakness. Now panicking, Farooq begged frantically that I consider his livelihood, that I think of the well-being of his young family.

Along with adrenaline and fear, a profound feeling of disgust welled up inside me. I had become a kindof stock character in a movie, someone I categorically despised. I hated violence and guns, was against the American presence in Iraq, and was sympathetic to almost every Iraqi I had met during the summer. The Glock's barrel even pointed directly at Farooq, for Christ's sake! John Simpson may have been on the receiving end of interrogations, but he certainly never carried one out. And I was doing all this to recover a few thousand misappropriated dollars, for a company that was set to make millions from the American war effort.

With Farooq gone, the Mukhabarat heavies said there was no doubt about the Christian's guilt. They encouraged me to threaten him with a CIA criminal investigation. "Those three letters scare every Iraqi," the taller patricianlooking one said.7 As we went through the motions with Majid, his calm denials sounding the very timbre of innocence, we learned that Farooq had fled the building. Since it was also beginning to get dark, I decided I had had enough. It was time that Hamza and I returned to the Green Zone.

Back at the villa, Hamza waited in the living room while I went to get his money. Before he left, he said he didn't understand how I could drive around Baghdad without real protection and enter an Iraqi office where I had no idea what was going on. He liked me and appreciated the extra money but said he would never do this again.

The day had been extremely long, and I was exhausted and more than a little shaken. The blocks of cash that we had locked up in my room had been picked up and moved to a bank in central Baghdad. In my email inbox, there were messages from both my parents, asking me when I would leave Iraq and saying they hoped that it would be very soon. Lincoln Group had also sent me a newly drawn contract; they were offering me up to $70,000 to postpone journalism school and to work another ten months in Baghdad. But I couldn't fathom doing the work any longer. I had become what I had to admit was the antithesis of a journalist. And if I continued to suborn Iraqi reporters with U.S. military money, this would surely mean I would never be able to work as one.8

That night I rang Christian Bailey and Paige Craig at the company's D.C. headquarters and told them I wanted to go home. On August 20, I boarded a plane out of Baghdad, and my summer internship was over.
[Footnote]
1 To protect the Iraqis I worked with during my internship, I have changed their names for this article.
2 This contract was first delayed and then finally canceled, and by mid-August many of these Lincoln Group employees had returned home. Most were outraged by the vast disparity between the vital work that had been promised them by the company back in Washington and the pointlessness of their actual time in Iraq.
3 Because I knew so little about Iran at this point in my internship, I had to spend a good part of that first day loolcing up acronyms on Googie-somewhat more obscure ones such as ISF (Iraqi security Forces), MNCI (Multi-National Corps Iraq), and PAO (Public Affairs Office) but even, embarrassingly, such things as Genicom and PSYOP. I also realized very quickly that I needed to learn much more about this country, so I ordered a small library of books on Iraqi history and politics from Amazon.
4 Although Lincoln Group claims that aspects of this article are inaccurate or exaggerated, it declined to offer specific corrections. "Because the policies of some clients are regarded as controversial and newsworthy by a few members of the media, " Suzanne McKoy, the company's director of human resources, wrote, "there has been interest in covering some of our activities. Lincoln Group's commitment to client confidentiality has constrained its ability to correct errors in coverage of the firm."
5 Jon, who was known to spend hours in the villa's courtyard drinking beer and attempting to land bullets ejected from a pistol into a paper cup, taught me how to handle the company's various firearms before he left for Chicago. With practice, I was able to put together and load the Glock but had much more trouble with the larger MP5 submachine gun. Its dirty-bron?e-colored bullets would lodge in the chamber whenever I tried cocking the gun, and it repeatedly jammed as I tried to fire rounds into the ground. Jon told me not to take it personally, as this MP5 was a cheap Iranian knockoff.
6 Jim, Gma, and other senior Lincoln Group employees who worked on Western Mission all eventually left the company, after large bonuses they were promised failed to materialize. Although Bailey and Craig had initially offered them 10 percent of the profit on the entire Western Mission contract, after arbitration this summer the employees were able to recoup only a fraction of this amount.
7 Less than two months later, gunmen entered this Sunni's house and shot and kitted him and a number of his male relatives. The killings could have been retribution for his activities under the former regime. They also could have been reprisals for his involvement with our American company.
8 When U.S. newspapers broke the story late last year of Lincoln Group's secret propaganda work, it seemed a small victory had been won for journalistic ethics. Editorial writers condemned the business of paying Iraqi editors to run U.S.-military stories, and even the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared the practice a matter of serious concern. But such clarity was quickly obscured. A Pentagon investigation in March actually cleared Lincoln Group of any wrongdoing, with secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld extolling such "non-traditional" means of fighting terror in Iraq. In a companywide email sent around that time, Paige Craig assured his employees that their work had been honorable. "We've taken the fight to the enemy," he wrote, "and every member of the Lincoln team can be proud that their sacrifice and hard work has advanced the cause of the free world."

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Lewis H Lapham: Lionhearts

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.

-Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Although the reports from Baghdad this summer might seem to suggest that all is not well with Operation Iraqi Freedom-the city a blood-smeared ruin, the American Army hiding in holes-the impression is misleading. Understand the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service, and in the nightly newscasts we see before us victory, not defeat.

As is usual and to be expected, the witless liberal media get the story wrong, mistaking innovative business practice for waste and fraud, grotesquely characterizing superior sales technique as a crime against humanity. The biased commentary misconstrues both the purpose and the high quality of the work in progress. Measure the achievement by the standards that define a commercial success-maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors-and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland security, not the crowd of incompetent fools depicted in the pages of the New York Times but a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the men who built the country's railroads and liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo. Heed the message served with every Republican banquet speech-that the private interest precedes the public interest, that money is good for rich people, bad for poor people-and who can say that the war in Iraq has proved to be anything other than the transformation of a godforsaken desert into a defense contractor's Garden of Eden?

The winning numbers posted in the profit margins light the paths to glory. During the five years since the striking down of the World Trade Center towers, the United States Congress has appropriated well over $300 billion for the Bush Administration's never-ending war against all the world's evildoers. Now flowing eastward out of Washington at the rate of $1.5 billion a week, much of the money takes the form of no-bid contracts, cost-plus and often immune from audit-at least $12.3 billion to Halliburton; $5.3 billion for Parsons Corporation; $3.7 billion for Fluor Corporation; $3.1 billion for Washington Group International; $2.8 billion for Bechtel Corporation. The contracts specify the repair and reconstruction of Iraq's depleted infrastructure-roads, power plants, hospitals, oil fields, pipelines, schools, mosques, and sewer systems-but because so many of the project sites have been deemed unsafe for visitors, the invoices translate into art objects, intricately and lovingly decorated with surcharges for undelivered concrete and nonexistent electricity.

So also the goods and services with which private security companies supplement the American military effort in Iraq. The Pentagon furnishes 130,000 troops, many of them National Guard Reservists, poorly paid, inadequately equipped, and held against their will for extended tours of duty; the private companies field an additional 50,000 personnel, some of them earning upward of $150,000 a year for driving trucks, cleaning latrines, flying helicopters, pitching tents. Unhampered by U.S. Army regulations or by Iraqi law, the military guest workers are most conspicuously employed as bodyguards for the cadres of American middle management requiring, in the words of one of the advertising brochures, "discreet travel companions" or a "heavily armored high profile convoy escort." For a discreet companion armed with an assault rifle and a record of prior service under the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Blackwater USA charges $600 a day, plus a 36 percent markup for expenses-travel, weapons, insurance, hotel room, ammunition.

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn't matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events take a turn for the worseanother twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport-back home in America with the flags and the executivecompensation packages, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Fallujah-Lockheed Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006; over the span of the same three years, Boeing up from $33 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Halliburton up from $22 to $74; Fluor up from $34 to $87.

In a country that recognizes no objective more worthwhile than the one incorporated in the phrase "to make a killing," I don't know why so many people insist on withholding their applause. Were it not for the vapid hypocrisy that muddles the national political debate with idle moralizing-about the withdrawal of American troops or the disappearance of Iraqi children-the Republican politicians auditioning hairstylists for their November election campaigns could afford to tell the truth, to remind the voters that our greatness as a nation stems from what Upton Sinclair knew to be "those pecuniary standards of culture which estimate the excellence of a man by the amount of other people's happiness he can possess and destroy." Unfortunately, we live in a society that no longer remembers Sinclair's name, forgets that since the days of the ancient Romans it has been on their way to war that men have found the road to wealth.

The loss of historical perspective follows from the debasement of our better universities, the once vigorously imperialist curricula softened into sentimental platitude by two generations of English professors telling their students that the arms trade is neither a gentleman's profession nor a wise career choice. The lesson is both politically and economically incorrect. The medieval age of chivalry rejoiced in the exploits of brilliantly costumed horsemen faring forth to lay waste the countryside, murder the peasantry, strip precious ornaments from the bodies of the celebrity dead, hold as captives kings and popes from whom they could extort the ransom of a fortune or a crown. The undertaking was a private venture, not a public service. The noble knight supplied his own weapons, bore his own expenses (grooms, horses, squires, armor, etc.), took his own risks, paid his own pipers. When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Unlike our latter-day writers of romantic movie scripts, the fourteenthcentury poet Geoffrey Chaucer was under no illusion as to the whereabouts or meaning of the Holy Grail, and among the figures present in his Canterbury Tales, he draws the portrait of a perfect, gentle knight more inclined to rob a church or sodomize a nun than to retrieve the bones of a departed saint. The poet knew whereof he spoke. During the Hundred Years' War, Chaucer served in France with the English armies famous for their brutality, and of whom it was said that they went forth to war with the eager anticipation of guests invited to a wedding or a feast. The memory of the work done in the blood-soaked fields of Agincourt and Poitiers, the lords temporal dismembering one another with sword and axe, still lingers in the language of instruction learned at America's better business schools-asset stripping, war chest, target audience, corporate raider, downsized labor force.

The upgrading of the weapons technology in the late Middle Ages (heavier cannons, the English longbow) brought with it the appearance of private armies that in their forms of organization set the template of the modern corporation. The British historian Frances Stonor Saunders points up the similarities in a recent book, The Devil's Broker, in which she quotes a letter, from a fourteenth-century captain of mercenary soldiers to the papal legate in Italy, that if rendered as a procession of stately bureaucratic acronyms might as well have been sent by the president of Blackwater USA to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Our manner of life in Italy is well known-it is to rob, plunder and murder those who resist. Our revenues depend on ransoms levied in those provinces that we invade. Those who value their lives can buy peace and quiet by heavy tribute. Therefore, if the Lord Legate wishes to dwell at unity with us then let him do like the rest of the world-that is to say, pay! pay!

The words "merchant" and "mercenary" ultimately derive from the same root, and in Renaissance Italy Saunders finds the combined interests of the two allied professions giving rise to the entrepreneurial revolution that enriched the world with capital markets for the manufacture of fear and the sale of death. Chartered as joint stock companies known as societies of adventure or acquisition, the mercenary armies offered their services to the highest bidder (to the Duke of Milan for a raid on Siena, to a Pope at Avignon or Rome for the siege of Pisa); everybody made contracts-the soldiers with their captain (guaranteeing term of service, wage, portion of the loot); the captain with his client prince or cardinal (specifying payment in Florentine or Hungarian florins)-and in the long train of executive assistants traveling with the corporate picnic in the Tuscan countryside, none were more highly prized than the clerks who kept the accounts, named the price for a man's horse or a woman's life, supervised the cash flows, and attended to the distribution of silver goblets, fine linens, and Venetian ducats.

Made sacred by the Catholic Church and codified by Niccolò Machiavelli rediscovering the military history of ancient Rome, the notion of governmentsponsored terrorism as lucrative private enterprise strengthened the advance of Western civilization for the next 400 years. The rulers of the nation-states emerging in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed professional armies to extend their land holdings, replenish their finances, add luster to their bloodlines. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed the business of colonial empire to regulate the trade in Asian spices, American fur, and African slaves. The cost of the increasingly expensive weapons made it impossible for individual entrepreneurs to compete with the larger corporate interests, but even when enlisted under the banners of an English king or a French dynast (among them Napoleon, who informed Austria's Prince Metternich, "You can't stop me. I spend 30,000 men a month"), an enterprising mercenary still could look forward to a fair return on his investments-a share of the prize money, the beginnings of an art collection, a chance to rape good-looking women.

Our American forefathers understood the rules of the game. The first settlers of the New England wilderness constituted themselves as a society of acquisition as well as a community of God. A seventeenth-century governor of New York bankrolled Captain William Kidd's Caribbean expeditions in exchange for a share of the pirate's takings under primitive laws of eminent domain; the old spirit of adventure manned the American privateers plundering British merchant ships during the Revolutionary War, fortified the real-estate speculation otherwise known as the Mexican War, ensured the elimination of the Indians on the trans-Mississippi frontier, backed the 1898 raid on Cuba, drummed up Wall Street's enthusiasm for America's participation in President Wilson's war to end all wars.

The twentieth century's two world wars obscured the primacy of the profit motive as the only casus belli deserving the consideration of true patriots. Over the course of the thirty-one years between 1914 and 1945, so many people were killed to no apparently remunerative purpose that the world's spiritual advisers and political theorists were put to the task of coining expensive idealisms to explain the lack of an owner's commercial interest on the part of the innumerable decedents. Voices of conscience on five continents contributed an impressive range of consumer choices-fascism, liberalism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, racism, Nazism, socialism, Serbian irredentism, etc.-but so great was the confusion in the minds of men living under the shadow of nuclear extinction that it needed another thirty-five years, thirty-five years and the coming to the White House of the blessed Ronald Reagan, before the Americans could find their way home to the meaning of warfare as it was understood in the age of chivalry.

How better to describe our reunion with the wisdom of the Renaissance than as the triumph of American conservatism, the happy return to the smile of immortal selfishness that shines forth in the face of President George W. Bush. The smile is well and truly earned. His administration has so improved the business of making war-broadening the market for the product, relocating the costs and exporting the collateral damage, coming up with innovations both technological and aesthetic-that none of the principal beneficiaries need go to the trouble of learning how to lift a sword or ride a horse. The dying is done by the hired help, by our now privatized and outsourced army, or by entire regiments of auxiliary civilians deployed as targets for the staging of Pentagon air shows. None of the combatants demand a share of the spoils, which accrue on clean well-lighted computer screens far from the fear and smell of death. More politically sophisticated than the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance, our own military industrial elites not only extract tribute from foreign legates in distant provinces but also hold to ransom the citizenry of their own country, accepting payment in the form of taxpayer contributions to the Holy Grail otherwise known as the federal military budget. Lionhearts one and all, as bold as Chaucer's knight, as generous as Napoleon, deserving of an equestrian statue and a portrait in the Louvre.

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Kola Boof: His Prerogative

From Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof, published last February by Door of Kush Books. Boof has written for the NBC day-time drama Days of Our Lives. In 2003, when she was interviewed on Fox News by Rita Cosby, the network reported that Boof had lived for several months in 1996 on an estate in Morocco with Osama bin Laden.

People are animals. They fuck, pray, and make bombs. The Dinka women of Sudan say the devil is the most beautiful man you will ever lay your eyes on. I never took these words seriously until I encountered my now infamous ex-lover, Osama bin Laden.

Soon after installing me in his estate in Marrakesh, Osama started to abuse me. His hand would be resting on my hair, his eyes glued to the pages of his Muhammad Qutub books while I read Galway Kinnell. We would be lying there in bed and he'd say, "African women are only good for a man's lower pleasures. What need do you have for a wombr I would feel insulted-not just to the heart, but to the soul. Then I'd go back to Galway Kinnell's bone-white stanzas-only I wouldn't be able to make out the words for the tears in my eyes.

He would humiliate me by making me dance naked. It was such a strange thing, because for the most part he believed music was evil. If a guest at the estate played music, he would cover his ears until the "poison" was silenced. But other times he would become this devout party boy who wanted to hear Van Halen or some B-52's. To this day I hear the song "Rock Lobster" in my sleep. I would be jerking around like a white girl-"Dance like a Caucasoid girl!" he would say-and his eyes would track me from one side of the terrace to the other. "Your ass is too big, show me the front," he said. Osama, you understand, did not know the difference between being vicious and being tender.

The first night I met him, at a restaurant, I ran out the door, gripped by terror, and drove home. Relieved that his henchmen hadn't followed me, I ran a bath, lounged in the cold bathwater, then changed into a flowing silk robe. There was a bang on the door, and I could hear shouting: "Hey, black girl!" When I opened the door, there was Osama bin Laden and his seven-man posse. A cold bolt of lightning went through me.

But Osama was trying to be charming, despite the fear in my eyes. "Why did you run? I just think you're lovely and I find you intriguing. I wanted to be your friend." I can't deny what a goodlooking man he was-over six feet with a zesty salmon-orange complexion and very sexy Negrolike facial features, forged by generations of desert sun. I remember thinking he had the most beautiful lips and being overwhelmed by the largeness of his hand when he took mine (to kiss it). Osama's men laughed, and Osama's eyes kept falling on my cleavage. I knew no matter how many Barbara Stanwyck movies 1 had devoured as a teen, I was powerless, and men can be merciless when women have no power.

"From now on you may see no man but me," he said. I wanted to throw up.

He stepped into my room and told his men to wait outside. We were chest to chest, his eyes looking down at me as he closed the door behind him. A hundred ideas went through my head. Maybe I should get on my knees and beg for mercy, but that was too wimpy. At last, I thought my only escape from death was to seduce him. He wanted to fuck me: that was the only good card in the deck. So I stretched up and kissed Osama very softly on the mouth. I undid my robe and let it slip down to the floor.

"Put your clothing back on," he told me. "I don't want to see this acting. I want to see the real you. Serve me something to eat."

I made a pot of tea and served him chunky crab salad on pita crackers and thickened tofu with dates in it. His lust was thick. He smoked a little marijuana from a gold hookah, sipping his tea and instructing me that I was always to keep hot tea for his "kif-canbo," to ease the burn in his chest.

"Why do you wear your hair braidedr he asked.

"Because my braids are beautiful," I replied.

Osama said only monkeys braid their hair. He told me that the singer Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and that she never wore her hair braided. "I want you to fix your hair like hers from now on," he said. "I can't put my fingers through it when it's braided."

He asked me to hit the hookah, but I explained to him that I had a weak system and couldn't handle drugs. Luckily, he didn't insist. He talked about America. He laughed and rambled on about his favorite TV shows: The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver. He said the U.S. government was made up of "fanatical crusaders" and that he'd once worked as a mind reader and trained secret agents for the CIA. He even said that he'd had a white, blonde girlfriend back in some state I'd never heard of. He talked about his mother, describing her as something of a feminist. I was bored, but I listened.

Osama kept coming back to Whitney Houston. He asked if I knew her personally when I lived in America. I told him I didn't. He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar. It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives. I tried to hide my outrage at his racist remarks, but it would come to pass that for the entire time that I would be trapped in his palm, Whitney Houston's was the one name that would be mentioned constantly. How beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and her husband-Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed. In his briefcase I would come across photographs of the star, as well as copies of Playboy, but nobody in the West believes me when I tell them this. It's like they have this totally bogus image of Osama bin Laden. Anyway, it would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston's name.

Later, after he came back from the bathroom, Osama smoked some more marijuana and talked about his children. He said that he'd missed an appointment with his "doctor"-Ayman al-Zawahiri-just to do me.

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Bill Wasik: Gran Theft Education

"It should be noted that children at play are not playing about," wrote Montaigne; "their games should be seen as their most seriousminded activity." If true, this bodes well for the industriousness of our rising generation, for whom playing games-that is, video games, sales of which last year eclipsed Hollywood's box-office gross-borders on an occupation. Three fifths of American teenagers play video games each week, and a quarter play six hours or more.

Lesson plans are being adjusted accordingly. Last year hundreds of new educational video games were released, on subjects ranging from algebra to U.S. history. Players can coordinate hunger relief in a U.N. game called Food Force, or flee the perils of overeating in Escape from ObeezCity. The Army has developed some fifty different video games with which to instruct its soldiers.

In order to assess the video game's pedagogical potential, but also its implications for the English language, Harper's Magazine brought together four experts-two video-game enthusiasts and two teachers-and charged them with a task: to dream up video games that might teach, of all things, writing.

The following forum is based on a discussion that took place this summer at the New School, in New York City. Bill Wasik served as moderator.

JANE AVRICH is the author of The Winter Without Milk, a collection of short stories. She has taught English at Saint Ann's School, in Brooklyn, New York, for fifteen years.

STEVEN JOHNSON is the author of five books, including Everything Bad Is Good for You and the forthcoming The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Deadliest Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU's Department of Journalism.

RAPH KOSTER has been a video-game designer for many years, most recently at Sony Online Entertainment, where he was chief creative officer; games on which he has served as lead designer include Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online. He is the author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and a teacher at the Dalton School, in New York City, as well as at NYU. His book, Mediated: How the Media Shapes the World and the Way You Live in It, received the 2006 Marshall McLuhan Award from the Media Ecology Association.

BILL WASIK is a senior editor of Harper's Magazine.

LESSON I: GRAMMAR, SPELLING, PUNCTUATION

BILL WASIK: Let's begin with the rote elements of writing-grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It seems as though rote learning is where video games would naturally excel. What would be the best approach to teach the rote parts of writing?

RAPH KOSTER: To start, we should take a step back and think about how the learning process works in games. Games, fundamentally, are models. They're little toy simulations of some aspect of reality.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Right. One of the main things that games do is teach us how to play them.

KOSTER: But often what we're learning from them bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we think we're learning. In Pac-Man, we think we're eating dots, but the game is actually about visiting every location on a grid. With first-person shooter games like Grand Theft Auto, we're learning to position a cursor on a screen accurately.

For our spelling game, we might consider modifying an instructional typing game I once played called Typing of the Dead. This was a spinoff from light-gun games, where you aim a gun at a screen and the computer detects where on the screen you're pointing. In the original game, you simply have to shoot the zombies before they eat you and all the other people around you. Well, the game makers developed an alternate version of this game that is frankly ludicrous, when you first think about it, but is actually brilliant. To each zombie they added a placard with a word printed on it. Instead of shooting the zombie, the player simply had to type the word.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: That's a perfect idea.

JANE AVRICH: I want to play that game.

KOSTER: And it works. You learn how to touchtype. Now, the zombies are not the important part. The zombies are what I call the dressing. They're irrelevant. They're also peripheral to the game, the goal of which is simply to rack up points.

WASIK: Would the game have the same pedagogical value if the dressing were more pedestrian? If instead of shooting zombies you shot words on a virtual chalkboard? Does it have to look like sweets instead of vegetables?

KOSTER: It's long been known that brussels sprouts are not as much fun as chocolate. As Mark Twain put it, "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

AVRICH: Right. Tom Sawyer gets the other kids to paint Aunt Polly's fence by turning it into play.

KOSTER: It's very important to set up that context. In the video-game world, this is called the "magic circle" surrounding games. And it has to be a circle of no consequence: What you're doing in here doesn't matter outside it, so it's okay to fail. You're forgiven. One of the problems with standard pedagogy is that it all matters too much, there's a pressure to succeed. And that turns off a lot of learners. Pressure situations are difficult for some people.

WASIK: So zombies it is. Presumably, as students go along in the game the words will get more difficult? The zombies wilier?

JOHNSON: All good games start off relatively simple and they get more and more challenging. The learning is what keeps you roped in: Wow, it got a little bit harder, but I've gotten a little bit better.

KOSTER: Your long-term goal is to get a high score. You've got the medium goal of destroying whatever the enemy is. And you have an immediate goal: an obstacle to overcome. And right there is where the learning comes, in making that obstacle something that can teach you a skill.

JOHNSON: Any successful game works through a mix of exploration and reward. There are various different rewards promised at every level. And at the same time the player is exploring a space, trying to figure out how it works, or where that reward is going to come from. That mix is very primal, very attractive.

WASIK: So for our writing game-at least in its simplest, rote-leaming module-students will shoot the zombie with the misspelled word, or else he's going to eat them. Does it matter if they use the gun or the keyboard-that is, if instead of gunning down the error they just had to type the correctly spelled word?

KOSTER: When it comes to fun, there is no one size that fits all. It's very much dependent on what skills you bring to the table. My kids, for example, would have far more trouble than older kids would with the typing version of the game. If you can't type, the typing version of the game is going to be excruciatingly difficult-it will be more about the typing than it is about the spelling. So you do have to make that decision very carefully.

JOHNSON: If games are too hard they're boring, and if they're too easy they're boring, but if they're right in the zone they're addictive.

KOSTER: A large part of game design is figuring out the interface. Compare marbles with chess: both games are about territory, but the mechanical action of capturing the territory is radically different. And because of that, I will forever suck at marbles.

JOHNSON: Wait, there's a game with marbles?

ZENGOTITA: [Laughs] Son, let me tell you about it.

KOSTER: You make a circle on the ground, and you try to knock opponents' marbles out of it.

JOHNSON: Cool.

KOSTER: So the interfaces of the two games-having to flick the marble versus putting a piece down on the board-are very different. A three-year-old can be a chess prodigy if he understands chess perfectly, even if he has trouble moving the piece. We give him a pass on moving the piece. He's still considered to be good at chess.

JOHNSON: That's a hole in traditional game theory, by the way, which is accustomed to dealing with categories of games in which there's no difficulty of execution: poker, chess, and so on. This category of game-in which the act of performing the moves requires a certain level of skill-hasn't really been considered. When you move into the realm of video games, you have games that not only involve a lot of information, like poker and chess do, but also are challenging in the physical execution of the task.

KOSTER: But that isn't new to video games. In fact, we have always had games whose outcomes are determined primarily by interface. They're called physical sports. Think about it: What you're mastering is the interface between you and this round object that obeys the laws of physics. When you learn to play soccer, by dribbling around the cones, you're just learning an interface. It's analogous to having to master the array of buttons in Defender.

ZENGOTITA: I do want to interject here, though. It's really interesting to think of actual soccer as an interface between your body and the ball, etc. But should we be cautious about such metaphors? Don't the privileges of reality need protecting? Doesn't it matter that in the case , of a soccer "interface," the moves that you make are the moves that are happening on the field? Whereas when you press buttons on a controller, what's happening on the screen isn't even mimetically related to what you do with the buttons.

KOSTER: Sure. But I would point out that in video games, there's a broad spectrum of interfaces that range from the completely nonmimetic to the perfectly mimetic. In our zombie game with the light gun, the player is not just doing mimicry. He or she is actually firing a gun.

WASIK: Jane, you're the English teacher in the room. How would our zombie game go over with students? It does sound a bit more fun than typical grammar instruction.

AVRICH: Actually, one of the main tools that I use as a teacher is play. First, I should explain that my school, Saint Ann's, is very unconventional: no grades, no ranking. Our grammar workbook, which was written by one of our own teachers, is full of wacky stories and poems. But when I teach it, I pretend that the students and I are in a strict Puritan classroom. I get rid of my jewelry-"frippery," as we call it. I put on a bib, a bonnet, and this hideous, tattered schoolmarm's jacket. My voice becomes a horrible, earsplitting shriek. I turn to the blackboard, and when I turn back, I am no longer Ms. Avrich; I am "Mistress Jane," and all the children are now Puritan children. If they answer a question incorrectly, if they are not paying attention, if they do not speak courteously and audibly, they get a demerit. If they do all this correctly, they get a star. Three stars earn you a sticker, three demerits a dunce cap. At which point you must stand on your chair while everyone hisses at you.

JOHNSON: That's hilarious.

AVRICH: It gets worse. If you can't sit still, you get tied to your chair with your shoelaces. If you can't stop talking, your mouth gets taped shut. Or "corked," which means that the page in the workbook is stuffed into your mouth.

KOSTER: It's a classic game.

AVRICH: Sure. In certain ways, it's like a video game, in that it's based on repetition, and on pattern finding. Like in a video game, you learn the rules by playing, by seeing how the system evolves, instead of just being told at the beginning. It has the same elements of increasing difficulty and reward. But there's also a group dynamic involved, especially in the punishment aspect, in the spectacle of public humiliation. Yet the students love it. Every year, their attention spans get shorter, and every year they beg for it more.

LESSON 2: ARGUMENT

WASIK: Let's move on to a significantly more conceptual aspect of writing for our game to teach. Most nonfiction writing assignments call upon students to make arguments-using if-then logic, the "rules" of the world, to assert the truth of a proposition. Video games, of course, are based on complicated sets of rules, and often they say something about the world-such as SimCity, in which players design an entire city and try to help it thrive over time.

KOSTER: It's worth noting that Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, has been critiqued over the rules in his game. For example, some people said he made too much of the importance of mass transit.

JOHNSON: Last fall one of the top-selling games in the country was Civilization IV, in which you re-create the entire course of human economic and technological history. That's what kids today do for fun. Really, the fact that titles with such a cognitive challenge to them are bestsellers is pretty remarkable. Games have gotten vastly more complex than they were twenty years ago. There has been this amazing rise in both the complexity of the games and the willingness of the audience to submit themselves to that kind of mental challenge.

WASIK: So could an intensively rules-based game like Civilization IV help kids learn to make arguments about the course of civilization, in much the same way that a good book might? Even if the game had its biases-emphasizing, say, guns rather than germs or steel-it could still teach kids how, under that given model, civilizations tended to succeed or fail.

AVRICH: I think video games could teach logical, consequential thinking very effectively.

KOSTER: The best model here, actually, is the videogame hint guide. Take Grand Theft Auto, whose rules are fairly free-form, without any specific goal that you have to reach. Lots of players have written their own game guides, with advice and hints about how to tackle problems. Some of these run to more than a thousand pages of densely packed, single-spaced small type-longer than Tom Wolfe's last book.

JOHNSON: That's absolutely right. Game guides make explicit what is happening implicitly in the mind of somebody playing the game, which is the ongoing attempt to figure out the underlying rules of the system. Some of these rules are very explicit-you must have X amount of energy to stay alive, you must have fifteen gold coins to buy a sword, you must have a power plant in your city to be able to build anything else. But most of the time what you're trying to figure out are more subtle rules-the physics of the world, the economics of the world, the underlying logic of the system, even weird glitches in the code. Game guides synthesize all that knowledge, translate it into prose, make it intelligible to other people.

WASIK: So to teach argument, rather than designing a new game, we could have students write guides about the games they already play. But how do we know that the lessons will stick? How can we be sure that they'll be able to abstract this knowledge out of the gaming world and into the real world?

JOHNSON: I'm convinced that there has to be some kind of transfer. If you spend time assessing these complex systems and writing about them, then you should be able to take that skill and apply it to a real-world ecosystem or a political system or a cultural system.

ZENGOTITA: Okay, but while I'm trying to budget for my curmudgeon factor-this is not the world I grew up in-I have to say that I'm skeptical. I see how students could learn to write analytically, deeply, about the systems of rules that are embedded in video games, rules that appear in the game to be the way the world actually works. But when the players go out into the real world, I think there's a real danger-and I see signs of this in my students, and young people in general-of failing to understand not just the complexity of the real world but also its mystery. I'm using "mystery" as opposed to "problem" on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don't. People are profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real world involves understanding that you're never going to entirely understand them.

KOSTER: I call it gamist thinking, and I strongly agree with you.

JOHNSON: Of course, I agree, too. You do have to grow up from the game.

ZENGOTITA: Good, good.

KOSTER: To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a really big mistake. But of course this perspective predates video games. It harkens back to behaviorist psychology, and a variety of unsavory political movements as well.

ZENGOTITA: It's systems-based thinking, modelbased thinking. I can't claim that Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara were products of a video-game education. But they show all the symptoms of it.

WASIK: Within reason, though, it seems as if you all agree that analyzing these complex games, and writing about their worlds, might serve as good preparation for the task of argument.

KOSTER: The people who write strategy guides are the kind of people who grow up to write nonfiction books. Seriously, it's a personality trait. I've seen many, many examples of it-players who started out being interested in, say, guild dynamics in adventure games, and now they have their Ph.D.'s and are doing ethnographic studies of guilds.

LESSON 3: PLOT

WASIK: Let me now broaden the question somewhat. Are there any other structural aspects of writing that we can model on the rules of games? Narrative, for example, was taught for centuries on the Aristotelian scheme of rising action, climax, denouement. What about a game called SimStory, in which what the player creates and grooms is not a society but a well-balanced narrative?

JOHNSON: There are two ways you could do it, one of which I think would potentially work, the other of which would not. The first would be to use the game as a way to broaden the realm of experiences the students have, to trigger their creativity. If they want to write a story about what it was like to live in a medieval village, then through video games they now can go experience that in a way they couldn't before. But in the other approach-where the actual text of the story is being built and evaluated inside the game-you would need a game engine that itself had some form of consciousness. You can't evaluate complex forms of writing without consciousness. And with our current technology, you know, my grammar checker in Microsoft Word can't even tell if my subjects and verbs agree.

KOSTER: It's true, though, that like any art form, writing is very, very heavily formal. Incidentally, I don't know if you all know this, but I don't come from the computer world at all. I actually have a master of fine arts in poetry. I'm probably the only person in the room to have written a garland of sonnets-a form that was out of date 300 years ago. Any of you who have taught or taken creative-writing classes know that you learn and absorb a giant pile of formal rules, often contradictory, and then learn when to use and when not to use them. The classic arc, the monomythic structure. Creative-writing exercises are designed to put you through the paces. Write an interior monologue. Write something in the second person, even though you probably will never do so again.

AVRICH: I've definitely seen that by restricting the autonomy of students in writing narrative, by narrowing their choices, it can be exciting for them-it gives them more of a sense of consequence and responsibility. One model might be a game like Indigo Prophecy, which is basically an update on choose-your-own-adventure. Or even The Sims, or any other game in which you create your own character. One eight-year-old girl I know told me that she uses her Sims characters in her own short stories.

KOSTER: There are certain kinds of underlying formal structures in game narratives, but the problem is that games never let you play with them. The games aren't trying to teach you to assemble stories; they're trying to give you the story experience. Which is why their stories are like really, really bad movie scripts. That's usually what game writing is. You have the perfect best friend, played by Catherine Keener or whoever.

JOHNSON: Parker Posey.

KOSTER: Right. The games are good at that.

ZENGOTITA: I worry that games have the same effect on the imagination that movies have. If you read a book and then see a movie based on it, there's always dissonance. The characters in the movie are never the people who occupied your mind when you were reading the book, that you yourself constructed out of the stuff of your own life experience. On the other hand, if you go to a movie and then you read the book, it feels seamless.

JOHNSON: Yes, that's true.

ZENGOTITA: You submit completely to the movie. You see Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett. You just let that happen.

KOSTER: There's a reason why so many games draw their inspiration from genre fiction-sci-fi, fantasy. It's precisely because the genres are so rigid and formulaic. In Japan there's now a whole subgenre of romance games-although almost all of them take the man's point of view. We haven't yet had many romance games for women, but I think that the video game as a form will be well suited for it.

AVRICH: One gamer did create her own Sex and the City-style video game called Sex and the Single Adventuress.

KOSTER: There's actually a Desperate Housewives one that is coming out very soon.

JOHNSON: The Sims is the closest thing we have so far. You can spend days trying to get two neighbors to fall in love and have a baby.

AVRICH: But it's in the realm of character that the games-like genre fiction-get stuck. Both forms are entirely plot-driven.

KOSTER: All nuance is lost in games. They are intrinsically and irredeemably formal in nature.

JOHNSON: But one of the problems we have in understanding games is that we see them as being driven by their narratives. In fact, I think the narratives tend to be a vestigial part of games that has been carried over from ear lier forms. When people play games, they aren't playing them for the story. They aren't playing them for a narrative are of any kind. In fact, if you're looking for an analogy, I would say that game design is closer to architecture than it is to novel writing. The designers do create resistances to certain types of behavior and encourage other types of behavior within the space, but first and foremost, they're creating a space that can be explored and occupied in multiple ways.

LESSON 4: CHARACTERIZATION

JOHNSON: Honestly, I doubt that video games are capable of dealing with psychological depth at all. I mean, the closest thing to the interior life of characters we have is in The Sims, at the bottom of the interface, where a small chart displays your comfort level. It lists comfort, hygiene, how sleepy you are, and how full your bladder is.

AVRICH: It's funny, when I was talking to my eight-year-old friend about The Sims, at one point she said, casually-referring to herself, not her character-that her bladder bar was red and she had to go make it green.

JOHNSON: So that's the interior life of your character. And people were drawn to The Sims because the characters had that much of an interior life. But I just don't think it's possible to re-create that part of human experience in the game form. The games are about external systems and rules, and interiority is something they just don't do very well.

AVRICH: One of my former students told me recently that her favorite books as a child were the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. And the reason she gave was that the lives of Wilder's characters were completely different from her own, and yet she felt like she could be there and be them. This is the same thing when we're in the mind of Jane Eyre, or Isabel Archer, or whoever. To replicate that in a video game would be very difficult.

WASIK: Is that an inherent limitation of video games as opposed to books?

ZENGOTITA: I do think there is something special about the screen. In video games you get to be the star on the screen and to be the spectator at the same time. There's a huge narcissistic charge to that.

AVRICH: Right. A video game makes the player the superstar, the central figure. It's very me-centered. The player isn't curious about the outside world and how to fit into it; it's the world that has to fit into his game. The world is just a backdrop. Or a mirror.

ZENGOTITA: This isn't just video games, by the way. They're part of a much broader phenomenon that one might call the "virtual revolution," in which spectators are able to use all these new resources-video games, but also video-hosting sites like YouTube, socialnetworking sites like MySpace-to overthrow the whole idea of celebrity. You get all of the gratifications of spectatorship, but at the same time you're also the star. And the closing of that loop, the gratification of both watching and being at the center of attention, the pleasure of that just goes on and on and on.

WASIK: Jane, earlier you compared Mistress Jane to a video game, but it does seem like there is one very crucial difference. As Mistress Jane, you are an actual person in the room, and the students know that they're pleasing or displeasing you. Video games are just about the player.

KOSTER: I do want to correct a misapprehension about video games, though. We tend to think of the gamer as one nerdy male teenager sitting alone in front of a screen. But that is unusual in gaming. There's a reason why all of the game consoles have multiple controller ports on them. The default mode of playing video games is actually four people on a couch, rather than one person in front of a screen. And then, of course, increasingly we have connected games, truly connected games. Even the single-player games today connect back into the social environment. When I play my Xbox 360, it tells me everybody else who's playing; other people can watch me play, they can leave comments on how I did, they can publicly shame me using a reputation system. They can gather into tribes of friends and comment on one another, or compete group versus group.

AVRICH: But that's not the same thing as authority. Kids may not need hand-smacking, but they do need to have a sense that there's a mentor figure who is guiding them and setting limits.

KOSTER: Well, all games act as an authority in some sense. Grand Theft Auto, even.

AVRICH: Oh boy, does it ever. The authority to waste you. The time I played, I crashed my car seventeen times and died.

KOSTER: Right. You did something wrong, and so the game cracked the whip.

WASIK: But you're suggesting that increasingly it's the social network itself, through reputation systems or what have you, that is acting as the authority?

JOHNSON: This is especially true in the online network games, too, which are really the most influential games in the world right now. Raph, actually, helped to create some of the biggest ones. With Ultima Online and other online games, we've had the rise of guild structures, these distributed systems for collaborating. A player who wants to slay a particular dragon will need to get twelve people together, and put one in charge of this, another in charge of that.

KOSTER: That's right.

JOHNSON: You know, one possibility for a game to teach writing would simply be to have an open document in a Wikipedia-like format that the class works on together. It could be a short story, or it could be just a traditional paper of some kind. The game of it would simply be that people are free to make suggestions for things that could be changed or additions, and those changes could somehow be evaluated by the rest of the class. Whoever ended up making the most valuable contributions to this document would win somehow. Instead of a grade, you would get this kind of social esteem.

KOSTER: That's a good point. One category of games that did actually teach higher orders of writing was the text-based online network game. You would go out and slay dragons, make your character more powerful, and so on, but your entire interface to the game was typing text. At the time, this was because it was the only technology available. But what it meant was that the game privileged and rewarded people who could communicate effectively in text. The best players knew when to be incredibly efficient and use shorthand, and when to cut loose with lengthy role-playing text that really conveyed the intensity of, say, the virtual wedding they were performing. I know a lot of people who got to be much better writers, who went on to write published fiction, because of the training they had there.

AVRICH: But any game that would teach students real literary writing, with real characters, would have to include some real literary reading. There's no other way to learn style, tone, the uses of irony. Because on so many levels it's the language that propels the story, that creates the narrative. When I teach The Great Gatsby, I have my students keep "character lists," gathering details and quotes, and as they take down more and more quotes they get addicted to it. The jazzy cadences get into their heads, and in class they actually start to speak like Fitzgerald. Their stories become gorgeous and lilting and synesthetic-full of green tastes and glittering music.

WASIK: So it's not enough to inhabit the characters; on some level they have to inhabit their language.

AVRICH: The inhabiting of the language. Exactly.

LESSON 5: GREATNESS

AVRICH: My friend Griffin suggested an idea for a game to teach writing. I thought it was very clever, considering that he's ten. He said, "What about a detective game, with questions and real clues?" Such a game would involve finding patterns and discovering evidence. It could be a great way to learn narrative.

WASIK: Could you modify a game like that to include real reading?

AVRICH: Yes, my idea would basically be a hybrid. In order to move to the next phase of the game, you would have to read literary texts and answer questions about them. The questions would grow more difficult, detailed, and arcane, and the answers would create a pattern, a text within a text. The text, a unique story determined by the player, would ultimately lead you to the goal of your quest: the secret scrolls of Atlantis, for example, or the buried wing of the library of Alexandria.

But within this frame mystery would be the mysteries of the English language, everything from basic rules of grammar to the obscure etymology of words-this word is Greek, this is from the old French, this is Arabic, and so on. Our language is full of historical and cultural riddles. Drama too: the conquests that transformed it could provide great visuals. A magician-mentor figure could guide you back in time to show you through the different eras: the Druids and the Romans, the Angles and the Saxons, William the Conqueror and William Shakespeare.

KOSTER: That's a great idea. Have you heard of alternate-reality gaming?

AVRICH: I don't think so, no.

KOSTER: It's a relatively new genre of game, in which the play links up with the real world in some way. The first well-known one was actually made as a promotional campaign for Ai, the Spielberg/Kubrick movie. In the credits at the bottom of the movie poster, a woman was credited as the film's "Sentient Machine Therapist." People who saw it knew that it had to be fake, but when they searched for the woman's name online, they found academic papers by her, websites that cited her. The more they dug, the more they found, and they had to keep up this exercise in close reading. Eventually they found their way to phone numbers, meeting places. In the end, many hundreds of players wound up playing this game to figure out the hidden history. The game you're describing sounds a lot like that. It's an exercise in a form of literacy.

AVRICH: That's the idea-to create a really great mystery story within the game, but where the reading supplements would be bits of actual literature.

KOSTER: I hate to make the analogy, but I also think the appeal would be very similar to that of The Da Vinci Code. Which is a very gamelike book, right?

AVRICH: Yes, that's true. The protagonists solve a series of riddles in order to move from level to level.

JOHNSON: One of the signs of how important gaming is now, I think, is that video games have started to influence our ideas of narrative, as opposed to the other way around. The best example of this is the television show Lost, this huge hit that is in some ways trying to build a television show structured like a video game. The show has all these little clues that you can only see if you freeze-frame on your TiVo.

KOSTER: Lost has run its own alternate-reality game, in fact. During its first season, in 2004, the show ran television commercials for a fictitious airline-what was it, Oceanic?

JOHNSON: Oceanic Airlines, yes.

KOSTER: And viewers could visit this airline's website and find hidden details about the show.

JOHNSON: As with video games, there are hint guides to Lost that have been created by fans online, all these fans with way too much time on their hands.

AVRICH: I have to admit, I love Lost. I've actually had conversations about Lost with my students that have turned into discussions of reading skills.

JOHNSON: So as games become more and more dominant, you are starting to see' these more traditional forms of storytelling borrow elements from them.

WASIK: It seems, then, that insofar as video games might soon rise to a kind of art, they will do so by changing the nature of art itself. What about in the realm of ideas? Will games have a similar impact?

ZENGOTITA: I have been wondering about just this question. If a game like SimCity might be said to have sociological depth-for example, contemplating the role of mass transit-could we, in thirty years, imagine a game whose impact on political thought would be analogous to John Locke's in the seventeenth century, or Marx's in the nineteenth?

JOHNSON: I actually think that's plausible. In fact, in some sense you can see it starting to develop already. The best example I can think of is in Second Life, which is another of these online network environments. Even though it lacks an explicit game structure, there are all sorts of small games within it. You have a character who represents you, an avatar who is persistent over time, who has possessions. A lot of second Life revolves around real estate.

Anyway, recently a character with the Pynchonesque screen name of Lazarus Divine started buying infinitely thin strips of land next to other people's valuable houses. Because the land was infinitely thin, it was incredibly cheap to buy. On these infinitesimal strips, he erected the equivalent of thousandstory towers, incredibly garish, ugly things that were blocking people's view. Then he would go to these people and say, "Would you like to buy my house that I've just built, blocking your view? I'll sell it you for $1,000 instead of the $10 I paid for it." Now, all of this is very funny, but it created a huge brouhaha inside Second Life, because there was no institutional system to stop him from doing that. So what they've had to do is get together as a community and figure out-

ZENGOTITA: A social contract.

JOHNSON: Right. What the laws of this virtual world should be. Out in the real world, we live at a time when Utopian minds no longer have the same influence they had over us in the nineteenth century. And so we don't think about radically different forms of social organization. But in these online communities, that's exactly what they're doing. There the rules are totally up for grabs, and they are trying to figure out what the best social system should be.

KOSTER: Back in 2000, I actually wrote a declaration of the rights of avatars.

JOHNSON: Yes, I read it.

KOSTER: So it's absolutely true. There is a lot of debate, in the games, about the very fundamentals of democracy, especially among players who have been thrust into leadership roles. Or among those who have tried to be police, and then have quit because they concluded that policing was too hard, was in fact an unsustainable role in society. We've had people come to the position that in large societies, democracy doesn't work. As a designer, also, you find yourself having to make these philosophical choices. When I designed Star Wars Galaxies, I said, you know what, I won't allow players to make exclusive cities, because people tend to form into guilds in which they associate only with their friends. I wanted people to live like they do in New York City, where you have to deal with the fact that somebody you don't like just moved in next door to you. To me that's an important part of the human experience.

AVRICH: It's like what one learns from being in the physical classroom, from having classmates.

KOSTER: So I designed into the game the ability to move next to somebody, which is the same thing that Second Life is wrestling with. There is no right answer to that problem, because there isn't one right answer to it in the real world.

WASIK: It seems, then, as if video games might serve ideas better than they will serve art.

AVRICH: My concern, really, is for language. Which I fear is becoming more uniform, more practical, less grammatical, less edited, and more bland.

KOSTER: What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation-of a painting, or a historical text-and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. To me, there's a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they're parasitic on things other people have written. It's a democratized writing, a democratized literacy.

ZENGOTITA: This plays into the virtual revolution I was describing earlier. Everyone in the overdeveloped world will have the took they need to create this amazing stuff, whether it be blogs or films or games. None of it will rise to the peaks that we associate with names like Joyce or Proust, but a great deal of it will be fantastic. And there will be so much of it that it will inevitably divide into niches, into small groups devoted to the art that they are making. In a way it's the fulfillment of an ancient dream. Everyone can have a creative life and a meaningful dialogue with the culture. Everyone will be an artist, but the price is that no one will be a great artist. There will no longer be a place for such a being.

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Eliza Griswold: American Gulag

Every year, the United States government sends Fidel Castro a check for $4,085 to pay the rent on forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay real estate. Castro, who has long wanted the U.S. to vacate the premises, refuses to cash the checks. The lease agreement, which dates from 1934, cannot be broken without the consent of both countries, and it is unlikely that ours will ever be given. We have, after all, a network of seven prison camps there, and we've just spent $30 million to open an eighth. The U.S. Supreme Court recently acknowledged, in Hamdan v. Bush, that holding a human being in such a facility, and subjecting him to torture, and denying him even those protections afforded POWs, is in direct violation of Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Yet there is no indication that this ruling will actually improve the lots of the 450 prisoners held at Guantánamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently "detained" in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA "black sites" around the world. There is no indication that the ruling will at all alter the conditions under which, to date, 98 detainees have died (34 of these deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse. President Bush maintained shortly after the decision that the Supreme Court had actually ruled in his favor. "They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo-whether or not we should have used Guantánamo," he said. "In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made."

What this means is that for the foreseeable future we will be unable to ascertain what goes on in places like Guantânamo without taking some extraordinary measures. Not even the Red Cross is allowed into the CIA black sites or shipboard brigs, and the organization does not visit the "forward operating bases" where many abuses occur. Red Cross workers are permitted into Guantánamo only on the condition that they not discuss what they see there. Therefore we must turn to the lawyers who attempt, despite intentional and ridiculous obstacles, to provide these prisoners with the representation to which they are entitled under both U.S. and international law. To learn about life at U.S. detention centers, one of these, Tina Monshipour Foster, who as an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights organized more than 500 pro-bono lawyers to represent the detainees at Guantanamo, recently traveled not to Cuba but to Bahrain, Yemen, and Afghanistan, so that she might speak with some of the few to be released.

I went along.

Last winter, twenty-four-year-old Abdullah al Noaimi returned home from more than four years of prison in Cuba to the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain. Abdullah lives in Bahrain's wealthiest suburb, Riffa, near a Starbucks and across the street from King hot Dog, where those close to the royal family have homes. One evening, several weeks after he had returned home, Tina and I knocked on the al Noaimis' steel gate. A servant led us past a Nautilus machine and swimming pool to where Abdullah sat in a marble-floored reception room with his mother, his aunt, and two of his sisters. His father works for King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa. His grandmother was a princess. When Abdullah's mother saw Tina, she hugged her and started to cry.

Abdullah was more circumspect. He said it might be okay to tell his story in front of his mother since she didn't speak English. His own English was inflected with the lazy slang of an American college kid. "I lived in Virginia," he explained. "I went to Old Dominion University for two years. I've even been to Disneyland." His thirteen-year-old sister said to him, "I understand you."

There are three kinds of detainees: highranking Al Qaeda suspects; men who are not necessarily accused of anything but may have intelligence value; and those, like Abdullah, who were supposedly rounded up on the battlefield, fighting against Coalition troops. Any of these may be designated enemy combatants. Abdullah was accused of traveling to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting jihad, an accusation he denies. Like 95 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo, Abdullah wasn't arrested by Americans. Instead, he was abducted and sold by Pashtun tribesmen to Pakistani security forces. At the time of his arrest, in late 2001, there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab's head, and fliers promising "wealth and power beyond your dreams" were dropping, as Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "like snowflakes in December in Chicago." The Pakistanis piled Abdullah and others into the back of a truck. "They blindfolded and cuffed us," he said. "I shouted at them, 'You monsters, you don't even know what Islam is.'"

Over the next two weeks, Abdullah was taken to a series of prisons in Pakistan's tribal areas, along the Afghan border, and eventually to a large prison at Kohat. The prison at Kohat and another at Alizai are significant because, according to Human Rights First, both are suspected of being proxy detention centers, where detainees are held by third-party countries-Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria among them-allowing the United States to deny culpability for abuses committed on its behalf. After several weeks there, Abdullah heard that he and other prisoners were going to be handed over to the Americans.

"When I was told I was going to be taken to the Americans, I was relieved. Please, take me to an American prison," he said. Under American justice, he believed, innocent men like him were sure to be released. That was more than four years ago.

"I told everybody that it was good the Americans were taking us." But the Pakistani guards said otherwise: "If you can escape, escape now. You're being taken to Kandahar."

The night before Abdullah was moved, a Pakistani officer snuck into his cell to take digital pictures and obtain phone numbers from prisoners, given the likelihood that the young men were about to disappear. It was only because of this officer's efforts that Abdullah's family learned of his arrest.

During his first interrogation by the Americans, Abdullah realized that things were not as he'd expected. An American man and woman, who were not wearing uniforms, became furious when he told them he'd visited the States numerous times and had even attended Old Dominion. Abdullah told them he was nineteen; they decided he was thirty. He remembers being "tied like a package, covered with a white cloth" on his journey to Afghanistan. "It was very cold and quiet," he said. "There were thirty of us tied together." Half of these men were then taken into a tent and heard the sound of triggers being cocked. "They pulled our legs and we fell on our faces and they hit us with rifle butts. They walked on us like we were piano keys."

I asked him what happened next.

He laid his head back against the couch. "They cut off my clothes, and men and women were there ..." He paused and looked at the floor. "I prefer to skip this part," he said. "I don't want anyone to know what happened to me."

At Guantánamo, Abdullah said, his lack of intelligence value wasn't difficult to discern. "For three years, the interrogators said to me, 'We don't know why you're here. You're going home soon.'"

But at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal-a proceeding at which the accused can neither review the evidence against him nor have a lawyer present-Abdullah was found to be an enemy combatant nonetheless, because, according to the U.S. military, he had "traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and die in jihad." The evidence in support of this claim remains secret. When eventually it was arranged for him to be released and sent back to Bahrain, he was ordered to sign a paper promising that he would never again be involved with Al Qaeda or the TaIiban. He was told that if he didn't sign, he could not go home. The paper also said that he was grateful to America for his release.

"I made so many friends there," he went on. "I wish I could have one more night with my friends in Cuba." Tina and I assumed he was talking about fellow prisoners, but he was referring, oddly, to the guards. "Put it in an American paper: 'Did you know Prisoner 159 at Gitmo?' A lot of people will respond to you."

"The guards are one of the system's victims. Some of them have signed contracts they can't escape." Some of the soldiers came to him with marital problems, and one said he wanted to kill himself for what he'd seen in Cuba. "I told him, 'Remember these cages, the orange jumpsuits, and keep going.'"

Before we left, Abdullah's mother gave us dishes of oud al-Hind, an incense that is said to cure seven diseases, including sore throat and pleurisy. Out of earshot of Abdullah, she suddenly spoke better English. It was clear that she had pretended not to understand in order to hear her son's story. For a year and a half, she told us, she called her son's mobile phone every day hoping that he would answer. After that, "I did nothing but cry."

If and when a lawyer is allowed to apply to visit Guantánamo, the only part of the U.S. detention system where legal representation is even a possibility, he or she must undergo a thorough background check, with neighbors, friends, and even doormen questioned by the FBI. In one instance, FBI agents asked an anxious girlfriend why, after four years, her lawyer boyfriend still hadn't married her.

Upon reaching Guantánamo, lawyers are often told that their clients don't want to see them. Clients have later told their lawyers that they didn't even know anyone had visited. Once their lawyers leave, detainees are frequently interrogated. Interrogators have told detainees that cooperating with a lawyer will keep them in Cuba forever, and that the attorneys who visited Guantánamo are "Jews." At times the interrogators have even posed as lawyers themselves.

Upon leaving Guantánamo, attorneys must submit all their notes to the Department of Defense, which then decides what is classified and what is not. To get these notes back, the attorneys must go to Washington, D.C., and apply in person to have the notes declassified. On one occasion, the government claimed to have lost all the notes from an eighteen-hour interview, forcing the lawyer to go back to Cuba and explain this to a detainee who was already deeply suspicious of the whole process.

"The incredible challenge is having them open up to you in any way," a litigator named Yiota Souras told me. So attorneys will often travel abroad, make contact with their clients' families, take photographs, videos, and collect personal stories only the family would know in an elaborate effort to establish trust. As in: "Look, I've had tea with your brothers, and here we are in the garden," Souras said.

Frequently, though, the attorneys end up being interviewed by families desperate for information about the law and news of their fathers and brothers and sons. In Bahrain one morning I found myself behind the closed wooden doors of a conference room with five Saudi men and three American women, all of them lawyers. The Saudis, conservative Salafists, had traveled for days to meet with the only people to have seen their sons since the young men disappeared nearly four years ago. The meeting took place in Bahrain rather than Saudi Arabia because the Saudi government had not yet granted permission for the American lawyers to enter the country. (Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim el-Kuwaiz, the Saudi ambassador to Bahrain, explained to me later that "in the case of 9/11, fifteen of the nineteen were Saudis. The Saudi government is always being accused of aiding terrorists. It has to clear itself first.")

One of the fathers, All Saleh Jrab al Sayari, fifty-three, with clouded blue eyes and a nervous smile, said that for three years he had believed his son to be dead. Then he was called into the office of the Saudi Interior Ministry and handed a note from the Red Cross. This is how many families find out that their missing sons are not dead: they receive a handwritten letter from the Red Cross, which has now delivered more than 20,000 such letters. In his letter, Ali Saleh said, his son's message was unclear and didn't even reveal when or where he'd been arrested, "so much of it had been blacked out." No other word followed.

"Are they chained in their cells?" he asked Jennifer Ching, a thirty-one-year-old corporate litigator. Her head was covered with what looked like a baby blanket trimmed in maroon satin.

"I can only tell you what I have seen," she answered.

The Saudi men nodded and continued with their questions.

"Those who are in an isolated cell, do they eat alone?" Ali Saleh asked.

"Do they pray alone?"

"Is there a toilet in the cell?"

"Do they change their clothes every day?"

Jennifer described how and where men are imprisoned at Guantánamo. Every father was eager to hear if his son was in Camp Four, at that point the communal camp and the only medium-security camp at Guantánamo. Jennifer explained that she met with her clients only in Camp Echo, where they are held in solitary confinement. What she didn't say is that the men there are chained to the floor during meetings and, because of the construction of the new camp, have more reason than ever to fear that they'll be in Cuba forever.

Ali Saleh asked what the men wore in each of these different camps. "It depends," Jennifer said. Generally, the clothing was color-coded: white for the best-behaved, tan for the slightly uncompliant, and the infamous orange for the worst. In the summer of 2005, at the outset of a long hunger strike, the inmates demanded an end to this system, and the color-coding was relaxed-for a while.

The Saudi men went on: "What is your nationality?"

"I'm an American-born Chinese," Jennifer said. The men looked at her blankly.

"What about interrogations?"

"Some men haven't been interrogated in two years," she said. "Others sit in interrogation rooms and say nothing."

"Do they read papers, books?"

"Most of the time just the Koran," she said. Books-like socks or mattresses-are considered comfort items and can be taken away at will. Letters are another luxury, she explained, something that interrogators use against prisoners. Blankets can be withheld, or air-conditioning can be overused to freeze a prisoner into compliance. This, like mock executions, is a "no-touch" torture, two common forms of which are "sensory deprivation" (hooding) and "self-inflicted pain," such as being made to stand with arms outstretched. The combination, Alfred McCoy notes in A Question of Torture, "causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers."

In the one letter from his son, Ali Saleh had learned that the young man is suffering from severe memory loss, which is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. "He says he can't remember very much," AIi Saleh said. "Is that because of psychological or physical torture?"

Jennifer was quiet for a moment. "It very well may be," she said.

After the Saudi fathers left, Jennifer curled up on a couch. She looked worn-out. She has made five visits to Guantanamo, where she finds the staffs bustling mini-mall (Starbucks, McDonald's, KFC) unsettling. Worse, though, are "all these little concrete cells just hanging around on top of each other waiting to be inserted into prisons." When she saw these, she said, "That's when the finality of what the government is doing struck me. This is not a one-time thing; this is a permanent shift in the way we participate in the world."

Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantánamo Bay, it is still the most transparent piece of the larger mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments. When we arrived in Yemen, Tina asked repeatedly for permission to visit former U.S. detainees now held in Yemeni jails, but the government said no. Nonetheless, one visiting day, Tina and I slipped quietly into Sanaa's central prison in an attempt to meet Karam Khamis Said Khamsan, who was reputedly being held there after two years in Cuba.

Amidst a black sea of abayas, we handed over our passports and were hustled into a caged yard, where women shouted out to husbands and brothers and sons coming up from an underground passageway. Eventually Tina spotted Karam and called to him. He came over and peered through the grate at us, then he began to tell his story. "Every day for three months the soldiers at Kandahar used their fingers in my anus," he said, "and also some kind of tool I could feel." For an Arab man, this matter-offactness was startling. Four months after being cleared by his review tribunal in Cuba, he was sent back to Yemen, where his case had been under further "review" for the last five months. Frankly, after the things he had admitted to during painful interrogations, he was surprised to have been released from Guantánamo at all. "I would have told them anything they wanted to hear," he said. "I would have said I was Osama bin Laden."

The pathways of secret detention have reportedly led through Thailand, the naval base at Diego Garcia, and even East Africa. Given the criteria essential for total secrecy, the system seems always to be in flux. "The Bush Administration is looking for a place that's beyond the snooping of lawyers and journalists-a small island in the middle of nowhere," Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for thirty-six detainees at Guantánamo, told me. "It's got to be a place that is under American control, but not by the military, because the military leaks like a sieve. There are only one or two options. Parking a boat at Diego Garcia makes sense, a boat that doesn't belong to the Navy, because they learned early on that since U.S. Navy ships are American territory, habeas applies." There are also reports of two detention centers being built in Israel and a new one in Morocco.

The system of secret detention is linked to the larger network through the CIA rendition flights. After Dana Priest of the Washington Post first broke the story of "extraordinary renditions" in 2002, a series of further investigations uncovered a fleet of more than twenty CIA-owned planes that move detainees from location to location. These flights were supposedly authorized in a 2002 executive memo entitled "The President's Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captive Terrorists to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations."

About seven months after this memo was issued, a Yemeni man named Abdulsalam al Hila, a prominent businessman and tribal leader to some 10,000 people, flew from Yemen to Egypt on business. On September 26, 2002, he disappeared.

One afternoon Tina and 1 had lunch at Abdulsalam's home with his three brothers, some community leaders, and a group of American lawyers from southern California. "The Yemeni government has said they want him back, but the government is afraid of America," said a man named Hamoud, who was acting as tribal leader in Abdulsalam's stead, as we sat on the floor around a vinyl cloth. "We are hoping for something good from these American people," Hamoud said, nodding toward the southern Californians. He picked up the top half of a goat skull, its yellow teeth intact, and scooped out spoonfuls of brain for his guests. One of the lawyers, a blonde vegetarian, politely ate rice and carrot sticks; I busied myself taking notes.

When lunch was cleared away, the lawyers reclined on pillows around the large, airy room as the Yemenis recounted what they knew of their missing brother's journey through the network of U.S. detention. Abdulsalam brokered large-scale construction deals, and several years ago he arranged to help some Egyptian contractors build universities. When the Egyptians stiffed him, he flew to Cairo to sort it out. Within days he was detained by Egyptian intelligence officers. The family's theory was that the cheating businessmen somehow framed their brother. More likely, though, Abdulsalam fits into that second category of detainees: those who are not necessarily suspected of wrongdoing but might have valuable intelligence. As a tribal leader, Abdulsalam had been instrumental in helping Arab Afghan fighters return home after the Yemeni civil war. This association with foreign fighters may have interested the American military, but no one can say for sure.

After several days of interrogation in Cairo, Abdulsalam was loaded into a minibus by the Egyptian intelligence officers and taken to the airport. On the runway a group of ski-masked men waited in front of a private plane. According to flight plans obtained by British jounalist Stephen Grey, the day after Abdulsalam disappeared a Gulfstream V, tail-number N379P, left Dulles airport in the early morning, landed in Athens, and then continued on to Cairo, landing the day before the Egyptians handed Abdulsalam over to the hooded soldiers. The soldiers cut off his suit, stripped him naked, and searched him. They dressed him in a blue jumpsuit and blindfolded him. He was loaded onto the plane, where he was waist-cuffed, hooded, and gagged. That night, at 11:01, the CIA plane left Cairo for Kabul. This plane was and is owned by Premiere Executive Transport Services, a CIA front company. Its tail number has since been changed at least three times.

Abdulsalam was imprisoned in Afghanistan for two years, first in a prison the detainees call the "dark prison," because prisoners there are held in total darkness. At the dark prison, Abdulsalam was hung from the wall by chains. As he would eventually explain to his lawyer, "In the prison of darkness, they made up stories, and I said I'll thumbprint anything-just let me sleep and give me clothes. I was naked." One hand was cuffed to the wall at all times, which made it hard to sleep or to use the toilet. "It sounds bizarre at first," his lawyer Marc Falkoff told me. "But look at the leaked interrogation logs. They do weird, surreal things designed to disorient and humiliate the men."

Meanwhile, Abdulsalam's family had no idea where he had gone. The Egyptian Embassy in Yemen said that he'd been sent "on a special plane" to Baku, Azerbaijan. Finally, they received a letter smuggled out of Afghanistan by another prisoner. Abdulsalam wrote that after almost two years in Afghanistan he was taken to the U.S. base at Bagram. In 2002, two Afghan men were killed there after being chained and hung from the ceiling and brutally beaten. According to a coroner's testimony, one of the deceased, a taxi driver named Dilawar, had his legs "pulpifted." If he'd lived, both of them would have required amputation. Like many detainees, Abdulsalam prefers not to talk about his time at Bagram, because, he says, the "wounds are too bad."

In September of 2004, Abdulsalam was on one of the very last airlifts from Bagram to Cuba, along with nine other detainees, some of whom had been rendered to third-party countries before transfer to Afghanistan. The June 2004 Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush, which established the detainees' right to habeas corpus, meant that Cuba would no longer be a legal black hole. The number of detainees at Bagram, which no one could claim was U.S. soil, soon swelled from 100 to more than 600. Some prisoners, though, have simply disappeared-most likely into the shadow world of CIA black sites.

In Yemen I met with Zacharia bin al Shibh, elder brother of Ramzi, reportedly one of the 9/11 plotters. "You know what was the biggest surprise for me?" he said. "Seeing his picture on Al Jazeera with his big beard." He pulled a picture from his wallet. The brothers had the same deep-set eyes. His family thought Ramzi worked in a German bank. Apparently, he was roommates with Mohammad Atta and had joined the Hamburg Cell.

"I had no idea he was an extremist," Zacharia said, "and it's too hard to say I believe it now." Ramzi was arrested after a shootout in Karachi in 2002 and was immediately handed over to the U.S. He was reportedly flown to Thailand, but now he has vanished. Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff has said that interrupting Ramzi's interrogation would cause "immediate and irreparable" damage.

"We know American history better than our own," Zacharia said. "Even the Nazis who burned more than half the world were given a fair trial." As he showed me out he asked, under his breath, "Is he alive or dead?"

Toward the end of our trip, Tina and I traveled to Afghanistan so that she could search for family members of the 100 or so Afghans still in Guantánamo. We were hoping as well to speak with former detainees who'd been held in the detention centers closest to the fighting, known as "forward operating bases." The U.S. military has at various times made use of some twenty-five holding facilities in Afghanistan, though there may be more. Along with two translators, Tina and I drove three hours south from Kabul, then climbed a snowy pass and dropped down into the valley town of Gardez to meet Dr. Rafiullah Bidar of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. He'd put out word of our visit in advance so that families who feared their sons were detained in Cuba could come and talk to Tina. Some had traveled for days.

As we walked up the path to Dr. Bidar's squat stucco office, we passed a group of twenty angry-looking men in gray turbans beneath a stand of eucalyptus trees. I asked our translator who they were, but no one seemed to know. Dr. Bidar's office monitors U.S. detention in three Afghan provinces-Paktia, Paktika, and Khost-where, according to former detainees, there are at least three U.S. prisons, one of which is undisclosed. The commission has documented eighty-five cases of abuse by U.S. soldiers. "Every journalist comes through this office," Dr. Bidar said as we sat on his couch. He handed around a plate of wilted cookies and told a story about a young humanrights worker recently killed in Iraq, and how, just months earlier, she had sat on this very couch saying that she didn't want to go back to Baghdad.

Here, as in Iraq, the closer you get to the fighting the worse things are for the detainees. Detainees aren't supposed to be held near the fighting for more than ten days, but many talk about being held for a month. And because there is no formal system for finding out who is detained in such a place, anyone held there is a virtual ghost. Dr. Bidar has made repeated requests to the U.S. military to be allowed to visit the base near Gardez, as not even the Red Cross has been there, but these requests have been denied.

Tina set up shop in a small cold room, and family members filed in one by one to tell the stories of missing sons and to ask questions. Sitting stiffly in front of a video camera, most looked down and spoke in a monotone as they shared familiarities-a love of computers, the time so-and-so fell out of a window-that might later win a lawyer a detainee's trust. Just next door a counselor named Jamila met with a woman who was about to be given to another family because of a blood feud: one of her relatives had killed a man, and she was intended as payment for the death. Over the past three years, the commission has successfully intervened in a number of such cases. When Jamila learned that I was looking for men who'd been detained in forward operating bases, she put on her coat and said, "There is a family I think you should meet."

We drove to a nearby compound. Jamila disappeared inside for a moment, then reappeared at a green door and beckoned to me. I stepped over a pair of a child's muddy rubber boots and followed her under a piece of lace and into a carpeted receiving room filled with terra-cotta pots of geraniums and zinnias.

We were met by Haji Mohammad, a man of about fifty, who showed us around the house and told us his story. One night in January 2004, as his family slept, a group of American soldiers pounded on the door. The soldiers ordered the fourteen adults and fifteen children living there out into the frozen courtyard while they searched the house. Haji showed me where shots had been fired into the roof. "They broke the locks on all of our trunks," he said. "Maybe they heard I'd gone to Saudi Arabia twenty-five years ago." He said that the Americans took several thousand dollars in cash and a gold clock, as well as a Thuraya satellite phone and a couple of Kalashnikovs. It seemed a large claim to make, but later Dr. Bidar told me that stolen money is a common complaint after raids.

Haji disappeared for a minute behind the lace and returned with a laminated paper and what looked like a thick hospital bracelet with the number BT958 on it and, next to the number, a digital picture of a man in an orange jumpsuit with a shaved head. I didn't recognize the man until Haji pointed to himself. It was his prison tag from Bagram. I peered at the laminated paper and read, "This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan." During the raid, Haji had been arrested with his young son, Taj. My attention was directed to a quiet boy nearby with grease-covered hands. Since the raid, Taj had dropped out of school and was learning to be a mechanic to help support his family.

The soldiers hooded and cuffed the father and son and took them to the detention center at the Gardez forward operating base, a small, dirty jail where prisoners were packed together. "We were fed and allowed to go to the bathroom once every two days," Taj said. "We couldn't lie down to sleep." The men were repeatedly beaten, and they weren't given water to perform ablutions before praying. "I wore a hood for eighteen days," Taj told me. If any soldier had bothered to remove Taj's hood, he would have found beneath it a twelve-year-old child.

Haji was taken to Bagram, where 500 detainees are currently being held in conditions much worse than those in Cuba. There he was kept in "a kind of steel net" for seven months with sixteen other men under bright lights that shone around the clock. If a prisoner tried to cover his face, he was punished by being made to assume and maintain "stress positions." Then, inexplicably, Haji was released. He even got an apology. "The Americans said they were sorry," he grimaced, "and they gave me two dollars to get home."

"They said, 'Because you're innocent, we'll give you this paper.'" He held up the sheet again, which he'd laminated and, like many other former detainees I met, kept with him at all times in case he was stopped again. Because it was in English, he couldn't read it himself, and so he didn't know that the line at the bottom read, This has no bearing on future misconduct.

When we arrived back at the Human Rights Commission, those same gray-turbaned men I had noticed beneath the eucalyptus trees were now lined up outside the door, glowering. I went to ask Dr. Bidar if he had any idea who they were. "They've been waiting all day to speak to you," he said. "They were held at Bagram."

Among those waiting was a man named Najibullah, who said that until his release in May of 2004 he had been repeatedly beaten. He also said that he had been given an injection he believed would cause sterility. He likened the cage he was kept in to an animal kennel. For days he received no food. He was short-shackled and forced to squat between three soldiers and two Afghan translators. "They kicked me around like a football," he said.

The next man to enter the room said that before giving information about Bagram he wanted to tell a joke. "You know those monkeys who are forced to dance in the bazaar?" he asked. "Afghans are those monkeys. First the Soviets, then the Pakistanis, and now America forces us to dance." Lately, he said, he'd been trotted out to meet every human-rights delegation and journalist who came through Gardez. "How is telling you this story going to help me?" he asked. He pulled out the same laminated letter that Haji Mohammad had shown me, then left.

Dr. Bidar was somewhat embarrassed. "It was the Afghans themselves who pointed one another out to the Americans," he said. Now they wanted justice from the Americans in the form of reparations none would ever receive, even those whose businesses had been destroyed and whose homes had been looted. An increasing rage, as well as the lack of security in the villages, was making these men perfect fodder for the resurgent Taliban. Just the day before, in Kandahar, a suicide bomber had attacked the police headquarters, killing thirteen people. Even as we returned to the relative safety of Kabul, there were rumors that more suicide bombers were expected. A couple of attempted kidnappings made it unwise to stroll about the town.

In Kabul the lawyers among us continued their efforts to track down their clients' families. Because of the security situation, they couldn't travel outside of the capital, so Tina and her cohorts depended on a local network of detainee families to spread the word about free legal aid for those in Guantánamo. Sadly, most families made the trip because they had loved ones in Bagram, only to discover that there was nothing the lawyers could do: so far it has been next to impossible to prove that U.S. law applies there. One afternoon, as the lawyers sat in the canteen at their guesthouse, a TaIib arrived on crutches from Kandahar. Terrified and angry, he didn't look like the other tribesmen and had trouble convincing the guard at the guesthouse to let him in. The Talib refused to give his name. He said that he wanted help in freeing his brother from Bagram. He said that a Bagram guard had used a cell phone to take a photograph of his brother's pulverized face, and that if no one would help him he was considering becoming a suicide bomber.

Although about 100 Afghans are still being detained in Guantánamo, some of the more high-profile detainees have begun to return home. It isn't easy to return in the middle of an ongoing war, and some have become the unlikely spokesmen for civil liberties. One of these is Abdul Salam Zaeef, who formerly served as the Taliban ambassador to Islamabad. He is currently under house arrest with his two wives and eight children in a muddy and new section of Kabul. Zaeef spent the past three years in Cuba and then was suddenly released last September just in time for Afghanistan's elections, a political move he says was designed to appease the Afghan people and convince them to support the American-backed Karzai government.

Zaeef's journey through U.S. detention is unusual in that he was held aboard a ship. The Department of Defense claims that it does not keep detainees on Navy vessels, but, according to Human Rights First, at least two ships, the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, have been used as brigs. Zaeef spent a week aboard the ship, then was taken to Bagram. "Bagram was the worst kind of mistreatment," he told us. "The first night, the soldiers broke my shoulder, took off all of my clothes, and threw me out into the snow." After several hours, he lost consciousness. "I was sure they were going to kill me," he said, "so I wanted them to do it more quickly."

Once he arrived in Cuba, Zaeef served as an ambassador of sorts between the Afghan detainees and the U.S. military. He counted out the seven hunger strikes on his fingers. "We asked them to give us our rights according to the Geneva Conventions," he said. (Lawyers had sent copies of the Geneva Conventions, in Arabic, to Guantanamo.) Zaeef then met directly with Colonel Mike Bumgardner, who oversaw interrogations at the time, and was told that secretary Rumsfeld had agreed to some of the demands. Along with five other chosen leaders among the detainees, Zaeef was granted permission to meet detainees to convince them to eat, but the promised changes at the camp never materialized. All six of the chosen leaders were taken to solitary confinement in Camp Echo. Five days later, Zaeef was sent back to Afghanistan. Before he was flown home, Zaeef was presented with a paper similar to the one given to Abdullah from Bahrain. "It said, number one, the detainee confesses to his crime; number two, die detainee asks for forgiveness; number three, die detainee won't engage in terrorist acts again, which is an admission of guilt; number four, the detainee won't have any links with Al Qaeda; number five, the detainee is thankful to the United States for releasing him."

"I was told if I wouldn't sign the paper, I wouldn't be released." He didn't care. "You made me sit here for three years. You can make me sit here for my entire life, but I'm not a criminal and I won't sign it." Finally, after several hours of this, the soldier across from him gave up and said, "Okay, you write something." So Zaeef took the paper and wrote, "I was kept here for three years and I am not a criminal."

"The American interrogators told me to be cautious about you," Zaeef said, teasingly. "They said not to give you permission to be my lawyers. I'd be in trouble forever and the case would never go away." He smiled. "The interrogators said that lawyers are bad people and that they're always after bad things."

Another former Talib, Mohammed Ibrahim Sahadat, is now one of Afghanistan's leading defense lawyers. He finds the job overwhelming. On one of our last days in Afghanistan, Ibrahim took Tina and me to visit Policharki Prison, where the United Nations is now helping to revamp the block that will house former detainees from Guantanamo Bay. With white turrets and a sullen concrete needle that serves as a watchtower, Policharki looks as if it is made of Soviet-style Legos. Built in the 1970s, and expanded during the Soviet occupation, Policharki was the site of frequent executions for more than twenty years. According to CNN, some 70,000 bodies are buried in mass graves in the surrounding plains. Today, Policharki houses about 2,000 prisoners, including the Afghan Christian convert recently tried for his faith and three Americans who ran a private prison in Kabul and were convicted of torture. The prison also holds hundreds of former Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Two weeks before our visit, Ibrahim told us, seven Talibs had broken out of the prison. The men had escaped with their families during visiting hours. One of them had been a client of his, he said a bit sheepishly. After the escape, eleven guards had been arrested, and even the warden was under investigation. As a result of the prison break, the detainees were going to be forced to wear uniforms for the first time.

The day we visited was sunny and bright, turning the recent snow to mush. As we waited around a wood stove for permission to visit the new cellblock, a grumbly Tajik guard from the Panjshir Valley-the new face of the law in Afghanistan-eyed us from across the room. He did not offer us tea.

"If I were the warden," he said, "I wouldn't let you in here." Later, as he grudgingly led us toward the new block, he spoke up again and said, "This is the worst war ever."

As we tromped through a muddy field behind the prison, a man appeared from a shiny white United Nations trailer. His name was Sohail Sahibi, and he was an engineer. He was overseeing the work on the Guantanamo block on behalf of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He looked at us strangely. Here we were: a former Talib, a huge red-haired Pashtun, a Persian-looking woman with a video camera, and an amoebic American scrawling notes. He was friendly enough, though, and he led us through the large half-built cells and pointed out where new bathrooms would be installed and where, in the center, the prisoners would be able to exercise.

There wasn't much to see there-just four old cement bunkers that looked a lot like a dilapidated U.S. prison. And as Sahibi led us through the old cells, he seemed to grow increasingly suspicious. He asked us again who we were. When finally he understood that Tina was one of the American lawyers attempting to free Afghans at Guantánamo, he broke into a sudden smile. "Come back to the trailer," he said. "Have tea with me."

As we sat in the U.N. trailer, on brand-new office chairs still covered in plastic, he served us tea and stale chocolates, and said, "My uncle has been in the U.S. prison at Bagram for two months." He said that his uncle, a shepherd named Saqi Jan, had wanted to build a bridge over the river between his village and the next so that his sheep could cross the water to graze. The neighboring village didn't want more livestock traffic, so they reported the old man to the Americans as a member of Al Qaeda. Outside, workers poured the foundation for the new prison. Over the sound of the cement mixer's engine, Sahibi asked if Tina could help get his uncle out of detention. "He's an innocent old man," he said. "Can you help get him free?"

Three weeks after our tea, a riot broke out in Policharki when some of the 350 Al Qaeda and Taliban inmates seized control of their block for several days. Smoke poured out of windows as the inmates set fire to whatever they could find. One of the three Americans convicted of torturing people in a private prison got caught up in the rioting. Frantic, he called the Associated Press from inside the prison on a contraband cell phone: "They said they are going to chop off my head." The prisoners chanted "Death to America" and dropped notes about their mistreatment through the bars. Apparently the protest began when several "high-value" inmates refused to accept the new dress code.

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