William Safire: Islamofascism

Every war is entitled to a name. World War II was a warmed-over name, and the Korean conflict was not at first even given the name of “war,” which Vietnam rated until it was overtaken by “syndrome.” And not until 1947 was our intense but not-hot war against the Soviet Union named — in a speech by Bernard Baruch, written by Herbert Bayard Swope — the cold war.

We are now engaged in what many stay-the-coursers like to call “the long war,” which may turn out to be its name in history unless good fortune shortens it. But more important than the name of the war — at least to the people on our side fighting and supporting it — is the name of the enemy. To allow a sworn enemy to remain nameless is to grant it the propaganda advantage of eternal mystery.

Accordingly, President Bush and his legion of the resolved tried out “war on terror.” But that was derivative (“war on poverty,” “war on drugs,” “war on” a variety of isms), and terror was the method used by the enemy, not the enemy itself — an amorphous idea of intimidation rather than a specific, belligerent nation or a hostile people.

What rallying title to use? Not the “Iraqi war”; the elected Iraqi government is on our side. The “war on Saddam” is over, and the “war on bin Laden” would only build up a TV ghost. The “war on Islam”? No; we’re not fighting a whole religion. Bush tried narrowing that to “Islamic radicals,” but that formulation was denounced by Democratic senators and nonradical Muslims. “There was a conscious desire not to use just one definitive word,” said Michael Gerson, until last year the president’s chief speechwriter, now a Newsweek columnist, “because there wasn’t a perfect word.”

Bush has been sensitive from the first days after 9/11 to the wrong of tarring the vast majority of Muslims with guilt-by-association rhetoric. In straining to be fair, however, he set out a few suggested labels but declined to choose: “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism. Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.”

That’s the tie-salesman approach to war-naming. (“You like this one? How about this one? Or this?”) This was not typical, ringing, forthright Bush oratory; rather, it was as if the president had taken the contribution of the speechwriters Gerson and David Frum years ago and fused Saddam’s Iraq, the mullahs’ Iran and nuclear-armed North Korea into an “axis of whatever.”

But the option preferred by “still others” bears closer scrutiny: Islamofascism treats the opening Islam as the specifying modifier for the dominant noun, the repugnant ideology of fascism.

What’s a fascist? In 1922, the Italian politician Benito Mussolini turned to a symbol of the ancient Roman imperium, the fasces, which the Penn State professor of classics Daniel Berman informs me was “a bundle” of birch rods and an ax standing for penal authority. Il Duce’s Partito Nazionale Fascista stood for militarism, social elitism and fierce nationalism, combined with contempt for democracy and anger at the rise of Communism. In Germany soon afterward, Adolf Hitler’s version of fascism — his party was called National Socialism, or Nazi — added to that menacing bundle of sticks a fury against “decadence” represented by the despised weak and intellectual, demanding the replacement of “feminine lamentation” with “virile hatred” of Marxists and, above all, Jews.

But in current usage, fascism is remembered less as an ideology than as a dictatorship employing violent repression at home and military aggression abroad. Because of its anti-Communist beginnings and despite early socialist pretensions, the intolerant “axis” of Rome and Berlin, and later Tokyo, is semantically associated with ultraconservativism. The imprecation fascist has been more often flung at the far right by the extreme left than vice versa.

That’s been changing in recent years. Fascism is not so much taken to be a left or right political ideology; rather, it has become a word defining hate-based practices employed by a totalitarian regime or movement — bundling such punishing birch-whip words as “dictatorial,” “bigoted,” “jack-booted,” “racist,” “sexist,” “power-famished.”

To address the “some, others, still others” range of “ism” choices to describe Al Quaeda and affiliated terrorists:

First, Islamic radicalism seems long, bookish and weak, because a radical need not be any kind of terrorist.

Second, militant jihadist is redundant if you take jihad to mean “holy war.” But some Muslim scholars translate the Arabic word as “spiritual struggle,” from jahada, “to strive,” and besides, jihad is too unfamiliar to many English-speakers to register quickly as a label.

Third, Islamofascism. A popularizer of the term has been Christopher Hitchens, who writes for The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate. He declines coinage credit, informing me that he wrote that the 9/11 attacks represented “fascism with an Islamic face,” (a play on Susan Sontag’s phrase about the Polish coup of 1981, “fascism with a human face,” in turn based on the 1968 “Prague spring” theme, “Communism with a human face”). The first use I can find is in The Independent of Sept. 8, 1990: “Authoritarian government, not to say ‘Islamo-fascism,”’ wrote Malise Ruthven in the London newspaper, “is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan.”

The O.E.D. has a half-dozen citations of the Islamo combining form dating to 1906, from IslamoArab to Islamocentrist. Why the connective “o” and not a divisive “ic”? Euphony; the Greek construction flows more easily. That’s why Islamofascism may have legs: the compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and helps separate them from devout Muslims who want no part of terrorist means.

October 1, 2006

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Walter Benn Michaels: Last Words

The subject of disappearing languages has been in the news for some time — the standard prediction is that roughly half of the 6,000 languages currently spoken are, as Unesco puts it, “doomed” — but it has recently been given new impetus in the United States by the fear expressed by some conservative commentators that English is being added to the list. Will American English survive “the immigrant flood” of Spanish-speaking migrants, recent columns in the weekly Human Events have asked. Their answer is, “tragically,” no. But would it really be a tragedy if English vanished?

Of course, the idea that English is a vanishing language seems a little implausible (it’s the second-most-spoken language in the world), but then it was only a few years ago that the U.S. dominated world basketball, and look what has happened there. Furthermore, there’s a long history on this continent of immigrant languages killing off the indigenous ones. Scholars believe that there used to be as many as 300 Native American languages. Now there are fewer than 200. What happened? Well, one thing that happened was that missionaries and the federal government did their best to get the Indians to stop talking in what J.D.C. Atkins, a 19th-century commissioner of Indian affairs, called their “barbarous dialect” and to start talking in “civilized” languages like English. And another was that even when they couldn’t kill off the language, they were often quite effective at killing off the people who spoke it. Hence English flourished, and languages like Tlingit, for example, didn’t.

Things are obviously better today. Not only are almost no English speakers being murdered by linguistically evangelizing Mexicans; no Spanish speakers are complaining about how barbarous English is. In fact, few people today think that any languages are either barbarous or civilized. “No language,” as the linguist John Edwards has written, “can be described as better or worse than another on purely linguistic grounds”; all “languages are always sufficient for the needs of their speakers.” Which is why the effort to get people to stop speaking in their own tongues (taking them away to special boarding schools, punishing them when they didn’t speak English) and to start speaking in yours looked then, and still looks now, like an essentially arbitrary use of power. Theirs is just as good as yours: why should they give it up?

So the good news is that progress has been made; no one any longer thinks that one language is better than another. But the bad news is that many languages are dying anyway. In fact, for various social and economic reasons, they are dying faster than ever. Many of the Native American languages that still exist are spoken by a very few old people, and while no one is trying to force them to stop speaking whatever it is they speak, no one is having much success in persuading their children and grandchildren to continue speaking it. So where the tragic figure of 19th-century language loss was a child discouraged from speaking her own language and made to speak English instead, the tragic figure of 21st-century language loss is an elder allowed, and even encouraged, to speak her own language but with no one around to speak it to. The 19th-century problem was about people who couldn’t use their languages; the problem now is about the languages themselves — “tragically,” they’re disappearing.

But why would it be a tragedy if English disappeared? Why is it a tragedy if Tlingit disappears? Although we can all agree it’s a bad thing to try to get people to stop using their language, it’s hard to see why it’s a bad thing if their language disappears. Why? Because the very thing that made it a mistake for the missionaries to try to stop people from speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if English was better) makes it a mistake to care whether people continue to speak Native American languages (it’s not as if English is worse).

We can see the point clearly by pretending for a second that English really is starting to vanish. Suppose our children start speaking a little Spanish, our grandchildren become bilingual and our great-grandchildren speak only Spanish. Since we can’t speak Spanish, we can’t talk to them. But if that’s a problem, it won’t last for long, and once it is solved, there will be no problem left. Just as the language we speak does everything we need it to do, the language they speak will do everything they need it to do. No doubt it’s unfortunate that our descendants won’t be able to read Shakespeare in the original. But, truth to tell, we’re not doing much of that ourselves anyway. It’s not as if we’re native speakers of Elizabethan English. That’s why there’s a market for “No Fear Shakespeare”: the Bard on one page; a “translation into modern English — the kind of English people actually speak today” on the other. And, of course, instead of Shakespeare and Joyce, our descendants will be able to read Cervantes and Borges — the classics of their literature if not of ours.

Which is the whole point. Our language is the one we speak, not the one our ancestors spoke. My great-grandparents could read only Yiddish. Am I supposed to feel a stronger connection to Abramovich’s “Kliatche” (“Mare”), a book I never heard of until I looked up Yiddish classics on the Web two minutes ago, than, say, to “Vanity Fair,” a book my ancestors wouldn’t have understood one word of? And are my descendants supposed to feel they are losing their cultural heritage just because the old books they are reading are not the same as the old books I read?

Obviously not. Their cultural heritage will be the books they read; their language will be the one they speak. A language will have been lost, but like the old joke about the great train robbery (no loss of train), no one will have lost his language. And no one will have lost his literature or his cultural heritage or what our English supremacists say they most want to retain, their American identity. You can read “No Fear Cervantes” in Spanish; you can sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish; you can invade Iraq in Spanish; you can even lose the finals of the World Basketball Championship in Spanish. Although this year (Spain 70, Greece 47), it didn’t happen.

Walter Benn Michaels teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His new book, “The Trouble With Diversity,” will be published this month.

October 1, 2006

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William Safire: Pretexting

I define Plumber’s syndrome as “the feverish urge to plug leaks, whatever the cost.” The modern ailment began a long generation ago in the Watergate scandal, re-emerged in recent years with a prosecutorial Savonarola jailing a journalist in Washington and has just made a smooth transition from politics to business in the boardroom of Hewlett-Packard in New York.

The chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, had to resign the top board job after it became known that she ordered an investigation of a boardroom leak involving internal arguments, which led to the firm’s lawyers hiring “consultants.” These leak-pluggers gained access to telephone records of company directors that revealed calls involving known journalists.

The revelation of the current Plumber’s syndrome put a relatively new word into language of scandal when the company was obliged to inform the S.E.C. that “some form of ‘pretexting’ ” had been used. It defined the activity for which it had paid as “a technique used by investigators to obtain information by disguising their identity.” Floyd Norris of The New York Times put that weasel-wording more plainly: “I think that means they tell lies to obtain records to which they have no legal right.”

What is a pretext? Etymology helps: its origin is in the Latin texere, “to weave, to fabricate”; from that came the metaphor “to weave a web of lies” and “to fabricate a story.” A pretext can be mild, a mere excuse or “white lie”; it can also be synonymous with pretense, rooted in the Latin tendere, “to stretch,” in this sense meaning “to stretch the truth.”

No matter how you stretch it, the new participle pretexting has an aura of dishonesty about it. Here is how the Federal Trade Commission defines the word on its Web site: “Pretexting is the practice of getting your personal information under false pretenses. Pretexters sell your information to people who may use it to get credit in your name, steal your assets or to investigate or sue you. Pretexting is against the law.”

Well, not always. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act makes it a federal crime for pretexters (another new word for the O.E.D. to get busy recording) to make a false statement to a financial institution, but not to other businesses, like phone companies. Some states offer wider protection against identity theft or impersonation, which has Hewlett-Packard worried, and privacy advocates are urging Congress to stop the traffic in private snooping. (Of course, law officers are permitted to lie in the line of duty; undercover agents practice deception all the time.)

In a linguistic development only remotely related to the nefarious impersonation that is pretexting, we have the recent flap about adopting a pseudonym to conceal one’s own identity. As Tom Zeller Jr. of The Times reported, The New Republic writer Lee Siegel had a culture blog on which he “insulted his detractors and posted rhapsodic comments about himself using a ‘sock puppet.”’ Jonathan Zittrain, a “professor of Internet governance” at Oxford, declared, “The use of sock puppets is one of the graver transgressions you can make online.”

You don’t have to be a sock-free Señor Wences to stick your hand all the way into a small sock and by moving the four fingers against the opposing thumb make the device appear to talk. That transparent “disguise,” metaphorically employed by a writer-intellectual hollering back pseudonymously at his critics, is what sent shock waves through Netties on the Thames and on the Potomac.

Ization Nation

Thomas Nashe, the English minor poet and satirist, thrown out of Cambridge University in the 16th century for an unknown reason, felt the need — as a modern Merriam-Webster lexicographer put it — “to remedy the surplus of monosyllabic words.” To meet this need for longer locutions, he claimed credit for inventing the suffix -ize, but in 1591, Nashe found himself criticized (as he would put it) for starting the polysyllabic parade.

The -ize still have it. Whenever a new verb is launched using Nashe’s little trick, traditionalists are shocked. Only a generation ago, some academic jargonaut coined prioritize, meaning “give priority to” or “rank in order of importance,” and stiffs like me ran to the ramparts to denounce it as ugly, bureaucratic and unnecessary. Before that, we language mavens gnashed our teeth at the replacement of the simple finish with the pompous finalize, to no avail; both those -izes, and dozens of others, usaged their way into dictionaries.

Now we are faced with the rise of operationalize. Implement was bureaucratic enough as a substitute tool for “carry out,” but the vogue to Nashe-ize the phrase “to make operational” has seized the realm of academe and politics with a rush of just over a million Google citations. “That’s a good goal,” said Senator Hillary Clinton recently about the Bush doctrine to rid the world of tyranny, “now how do you operationalize that in a sensible way.”

My job is to hoot at this Nashe-ization for a few years, supported by the dwindling legion of those determined to stay the course, and then to cut and run with the usage antelopes. But wait: an exception. I am a happy resident of Nashe-ville about the usage — already at the quarter-million mark— of anonymize. Eric Schmidt, C.E.O. of Google, was quoted last month deploring a leak of subscribers’ private data by AOL with “The data as released was obviously not anonymized enough.”

What’s the matter with privatize? Here’s what: that verb was used by some politicians to torpedo what other politicians called “personal accounts” in Social Security. With privatize scaring people away, we privacy nuts needed a new Nasher. It is now provided by anonymize, soon to be followed by anonymization-resistant, the coiner of which prefers to masquerade as a sock puppet.

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Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt

The Petri-Dish Screen Saver

Leon Bender is a 68-year-old urologist in Los Angeles. Last year, during a South Seas cruise with his wife, Bender noticed something interesting: passengers who went ashore weren’t allowed to reboard the ship until they had some Purell squirted on their hands. The crew even dispensed Purell to passengers lined up at the buffet tables. Was it possible, Bender wondered, that a cruise ship was more diligent about killing germs than his own hospital?

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Bender has been practicing for 37 years, is in fact an excellent hospital. But even excellent hospitals often pass along bacterial infections, thereby sickening or even killing the very people they aim to heal. In its 2000 report “To Err Is Human,” the Institute of Medicine estimated that anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors — more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer — and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections.

While it is now well established that germs cause illness, this wasn’t always known to be true. In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics. In one clinic, babies were delivered by physicians; in the other, by midwives. The mortality rate in the doctors’ clinic was nearly triple the rate in the midwives’ clinic. Why the huge discrepancy? The doctors, it turned out, often came to deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, promptly infecting mother and child with whatever germs their most recent cadaver happened to carry. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, the mortality rate plummeted.

But Semmelweis’s mandate, as crucial and obvious as it now seems, has proved devilishly hard to enforce. A multitude of medical studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.

All of this was on Bender’s mind when he got home from his cruise. As a former chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai, he felt inspired to help improve his colleagues’ behavior. Just as important, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations would soon be inspecting Cedars-Sinai, and it simply wouldn’t do for a world-class hospital to get failing marks because its doctors didn’t always wash their hands.

It may seem a mystery why doctors, of all people, practice poor hand hygiene. But as Bender huddled with the hospital’s leadership, they identified a number of reasons. For starters, doctors are very busy. And a sink isn’t always handy — often it is situated far out of a doctor’s work flow or is barricaded by equipment. Many hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai, had already introduced alcohol-based disinfectants like Purell as an alternative to regular hand-washing. But even with Purell dispensers mounted on a wall, the Cedars-Sinai doctors didn’t always use them.

There also seem to be psychological reasons for noncompliance. The first is what might be called a perception deficit. In one Australian medical study, doctors self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry 9 percent. The second psychological reason, according to one Cedars-Sinai doctor, is arrogance. “The ego can kick in after you have been in practice a while,” explains Paul Silka, an emergency-department physician who is also the hospital’s chief of staff. “You say: ‘Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.”’ Furthermore, most of the doctors at Cedars-Sinai are free agents who work for themselves, not for the hospital, and many of them saw the looming Joint Commission review as a nuisance. Their incentives, in other words, were not quite aligned with the hospital’s.

So the hospital needed to devise some kind of incentive scheme that would increase compliance without alienating its doctors. In the beginning, the administrators gently cajoled the doctors with e-mail, faxes and posters. But none of that seemed to work. (The hospital had enlisted a crew of nurses to surreptitiously report on the staff’s hand-washing.) “Then we started a campaign that really took the word to the physicians where they live, which is on the wards,” Silka recalls. “And, most importantly, in the physicians’ parking lot, which in L.A. is a big deal.”

For the next six weeks, Silka and roughly a dozen other senior personnel manned the parking-lot entrance, handing out bottles of Purell to the arriving doctors. They started a Hand Hygiene Safety Posse that roamed the wards and let it be known that this posse preferred using carrots to sticks: rather than searching for doctors who weren’t compliant, they’d try to “catch” a doctor who was washing up, giving him a $10 Starbucks card as reward. You might think that the highest earners in a hospital wouldn’t much care about a $10 incentive — “but none of them turned down the card,” Silka says.

When the nurse spies reported back the latest data, it was clear that the hospital’s efforts were working — but not nearly enough. Compliance had risen to about 80 percent from 65 percent, but the Joint Commission required 90 percent compliance.

These results were delivered to the hospital’s leadership by Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, during a meeting of the Chief of Staff Advisory Committee. The committee’s roughly 20 members, mostly top doctors, were openly discouraged by Murthy’s report. Then, after they finished their lunch, Murthy handed each of them an agar plate — a sterile petri dish loaded with a spongy layer of agar. “I would love to culture your hand,” she told them.

They pressed their palms into the plates, and Murthy sent them to the lab to be cultured and photographed. The resulting images, Silka says, “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.”

The administration then decided to harness the power of such a disgusting image. One photograph was made into a screen saver that haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid evidence. “With people who have been in practice 25 or 30 or 40 years, it’s hard to change their behavior,” Leon Bender says. “But when you present them with good data, they change their behavior very rapidly.” Some forms of data, of course, are more compelling than others, and in this case an image was worth 1,000 statistical tables. Hand-hygiene compliance shot up to nearly 100 percent and, according to the hospital, it has pretty much remained there ever since.

Cedars-Sinai’s clever application of incentives is certainly encouraging to anyone who opposes the wanton proliferation of bacterial infections. But it also highlights how much effort can be required to solve a simple problem — and, in this case, the problem is but one of many. Craig Feied, a physician and technologist in Washington who is designing a federally financed “hospital of the future,” says that hand hygiene, while important, will never be sufficient to stop the spread of bacteria. That’s why he is working with a technology company that infuses hospital equipment with silver ion particles, which serve as an antimicrobial shield. Microbes can thrive on just about any surface in a hospital room, Feied notes, citing an old National Institutes of Health campaign to promote hand-washing in pediatric wards. The campaign used a stuffed teddy bear, called T. Bear, as a promotional giveaway. Kids and doctors alike apparently loved T. Bear — but they weren’t the only ones. When, after a week, a few dozen T. Bears were pulled from the wards to be cultured, every one of them was found to have acquired a host of new friends: Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella.. . .

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

September 24, 2006

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William Safire: Skin in the Game

The skinny on fleshing out a metaphor. Microsoft’s Certified Professional Magazine Online — an insistently nonamateurish house organ — quotes a vice president, Rick Devenuti, saying, “Customers want confidence, especially with this new product wave, that Microsoft has skin in the game.” A reader can presume that this means the company will hire new employees in its new-wave consulting business because the executive hints provocatively that “there is some relationship to head count.”

At the same time, on the other side of the world, Lachlan McKeough, chief of an Australian insurance brokerage on an acquisitions spree, told The Sydney Morning Herald that the key to the company’s success is the way that “front-line staff” retains a substantial equity in the business. Asked to describe his business model, he replied, “They have got skin in the game, so to speak.”

The planetary adoption of this figure of speech has penetrated the U.S. Senate chamber as it considers health savings accounts, which its sponsors claim will reduce health insurance premiums. “This bill will move us closer to a true consumer-oriented health-care system,” says Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK). (For foreign readers, I should point out that the five initials after his name do not signify “doctors are all right”; they mean that Coburn has a degree in medicine and is a Republican from Oklahoma.) “H.S.A.’s give consumers some ‘skin in the game’ by putting them in charge of health-care dollars.”

Whose skin is this? What is the name of the game? And who was the original source of an expression that is approaching a half-million citations on Google’s worldwide search engine?

The skin in this case is a synecdoche for the self, much as “head” stands for cattle and “sail” for ships. The game is the investment, commitment or gamble being undertaken. Thus, investors in a company will be more comfortable in their own skins if they know that the managers are personally invested as well — that they share the risk and have an incentive to share the gains.

As used in the Senate, the idea is to put more responsibility for paying health bills on patients by inducing them with tax breaks to save for a sickly day; their own money would become the skin holding down the health-care game’s costs. (Advocates of universal health care operated by the government are now challenged to come up with a vivid counterfigure of speech, much as opponents of “personal” Social Security accounts blitzed the Bushies with the fearsome word “privatization.”)

Now to the third question for those counting: Who coined it?

Just about every online free dictionary is eager to provide the answer: Warren Buffett, the multibillionaire who has just teamed up with Bill Gates to put muscle into charity. But dictionaries tend to engage in heavy lifting from one another, and as I have learned from grim experience in political lexicography, a chorus of coinage consensus does not guarantee accuracy. A call to Warren Buffett to get his recollection of first usage was returned by a spokesman, who denied unequivocally that his boss was the coiner. Apparently the famous investor has been bugged by many calls from etymologists (no, wait — bugs are for entomologists) and refuses all responsibility for the viral spread of skin in the game.

As the wild scramble begins to discover the mysterious initial perpetrator, let us narrow the field. “The first time I heard it was probably about 10 years ago,” recalls Dave Kansas, money-and-investment editor at The Wall Street Journal. “It is primarily used to convey financial risk in any kind of venture, but you could stretch it to mean some kind of emotional investment. Can you have skin in the game of your marriage? Well, you ought to.”

From “Town Talk,” The Oakland Tribune, April 20, 1912: “It cannot be said that the latest visit of Eleanor Sears to California was an unqualified success.. . .She didn’t play polo, though she seemed crazy for a chance. She was very insistent while the men refused to let her hazard her skin in the game, but when they finally consented she was attacked by what the vulgar call ‘cold feet’ and reneged.”

That can’t be it, but it shows how far back — in this citation, nearly a century — you can find a phrase, thanks to the Little Search Engine That Could. (Interesting, though, about the early use of cold feet.)

Let’s start at the epicenter of this epidermis epic. The skin game, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, can be “a card game in which each player has one card which he bets will not be the first to be matched by a card dealt from the pack.” John Scarne, in his 1973 Encyclopedia of Games, notes that “the game of Skin is dead even; that is, dealer and player have exactly equal chances of winning.”

Below that sense, however, is the swindling, cheating, fleecing meaning of the verb to skin, traceable to 1819 in the United States on the analogy of skinning an animal for its valuable fur (or fleecing it for its wool); the skin game throughout the 19th century was “a confidence game,” and paper dollars taken from suckers were known as skins.

I can hear gambling golfers in the readership firing up their computers. Golf’s skins game, about a half-century old, has a foursome betting against one another: “Three categories each account for one-third of the pot,” writes Steve Pajak of The Sacramento Bee, which are “team play (best four of six balls on each hole on this day), individual skins (any single low score on a hole) and individual greenies (closest to the pin on par 3’s).” The U.S. Golf Association librarian says that “skins is also known as cats, scats, skats or syndicates.”

The other skin game is, of course, the business of prostitution, with its offshoot of pornography, as anyone guiltily but gleefully clicking to a life-size skin flick in glorious color on HDTV well knows. No wonder Warren Buffett wants no part of the coinage of skin in the game.

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Wyatt Mason: My Satirical Self

Lately, my father has been angry. Seventy-nine, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, a lifelong dues-paying member of three labor unions and now a collector of Social Security, my father, temperamentally a gentle person, is often filled with rage. The news does this to him, not so much the stories of tsunamis or hurricanes or any instances of environmental malice that lawyers call “acts of God.” No, acts of God fill my godless, liberal father with melancholy, if not sorrow, over the inequity of the world, whereas it is the iniquity of the world, what you might call “acts of man,” that are, these days, driving him to distraction. My father’s solution to such furies, dependable as the daily newspaper, to the anger that sets upon him when he learns of the latest folly in the corridors of power, is to turn to the op-ed pages. For our purposes here, it hardly matters who is writing, though, naturally, he has his favorites. What matters to him is that every day, in those well-reasoned column inches, he finds a mirror for his rage.

Whereas, over the same period, his son has managed not to be angry, not in the least. Thirty-seven, a veteran of nothing, a subscription-paying reader of two magazines, a person whose Social Security pay-in, so far, is a sad little sum, I am, just as often as my father is furious, filled with mirth. Yes, I am aware of the disasters of the world, and they affect me no less deeply than they do him. What’s more, my father and I are of one mind about the inveterate folly, craven hypocrisy, unchecked greed, rampant abuse of office, ugly abuse of trust, vile abuse of language and galloping display of ignorance that has become a daily standard. And yes, I should admit that when I happen to think about such matters — when, say, my father phones me to chew over some morsel of maddening news — I find myself overtaken by a most unpleasant feeling. I imagine it is not unlike what must be suffered by a man who returns home after a long day’s work to find, in his absence, that his lovely house has been looted. And whereas my father, standing, as it were, at the front door of that plundered house, has come to find temporary shelter nearby, in reason — the arguments marshaled by those whose views he shares — I have found no relief in such reading, which lately I have forgone.

In its stead, though, I have found a way not to be angry at all.

I have taken shelter in the ridiculous.

Imagine, for example, another warm morning in August 2005. The national atmosphere that summer was humid with talk of intelligent design, the evangelical putsch — in Pennsylvania, in Kansas, in America — to see pseudoscience imparted to our keen young scholars in place of the theory of evolution. My father, I knew, would be calling on such a day (and did) to rail thereupon. “Did you read Paul Krugman?” my father asked.

“Of course,” I replied, “I did not read Paul Krugman.”

What did I read? A newspaper I keep bookmarked on my computer browser and which, among many destinations, I visit every morning. Here, in part, is what it read:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New “Intelligent Falling” Theory

Aug. 17, 2005 | Issue 41.33

Kansas City, KS — As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center for Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Should N.S.A. satellite footage surface of me reading the above report — which appeared in The Onion: America’s Finest News Source — you would witness me nodding with pleasure, shaking with delight and laughing aloud (or, more accurately, snorting un-self-consciously). Why is this man snorting? I am doing so with relief, saved, as I was, from having to endure another reasonable argument in unreasonable times. This is, after all, a country where anyone is free to believe that the fingerprints of the Creator, however small, are discernible on even the tiniest microorganism (just as I am free to hold my sober conviction that chocolate rainbows pave the way to a heaven made of fudge). And yet, to my uncaffeinated morning self, intelligent design seemed as brusque a turn of the American evangelical screw as I had encountered — a crude, anticonstitutional crack at marrying church to state. It was just too ridiculous! How ridiculous was it? Pretty perfectly on par, I’d have to say, with the refutation, along evangelical lines, of gravity.

That comedic turn, that comedic tone — a smart blend of parody and hyperbole and mockery — provided, that day, a remedy for my rage: it got channeled smoothly into ridicule. And that channel — a broadband of joco-serious rebuke — has been eating up the major part of my personal market share. As much as caffeine has become a matutinal necessity, a means of brokering, yet again, an uneasy truce with daylight, the kind of laughter — a well-aimed dart — induced by the larky bulletin above has become a no less necessary stimulant. How I hunger for that knowing tone! Like our little friend the lab rat at his lever — all a-jitter from another marching-powder marathon — I have acquired a taste for an addictive brand of fun.

Which means, of course, that I’m in luck: for that tone has been resonating through every echelon of American culture, a shift affecting and informing every storytelling medium, whether factual or fictional. The Onion, of course, is only where my day gets cooking. Other browser bookmarks send me to half a dozen sites where I hope to extract similarly intemperate snorts. The best of these, for sure, I forward along to friends — fellow traffickers in yuks — who, young and old, unfailingly send me links found during their own morning frolics. These I follow no less intrepidly than Theseus did Ariadne’s thread, leading me, once again, out of my labyrinth of rage to that happier place: YouTube. There, with a dependability that would make a demographer pump his fist and an advertiser lose his shirt, I watch segments from “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report” (programs that, funnily enough, poached The Onion’s top writers). In such shows, then, I find that tone — so knowing, so over it, so smart, so asinine. And given the choice, these days, between a smartass and, well, a dumb ass, even the Academy Awards, that most treacle-toned of evenings, picked this year’s host from that clever category.

And picking the smartass, it seems, is what we’ve been doing, across the televised board. We’ve been tuning in to “The Simpsons” (in its 18th season, the longest-running sitcom in television history), which pokes tirelessly away at the idea of the American family, not to say America. We’ve been turning on “South Park” (in its 10th season, the longest-running sitcom in cable-television history), with its bile-tongued children probing every asininity (and which made a successful trip to the big screen in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”). We’ve been ordering in “Chappelle’s Show” (the top-selling DVD of a television series in, well. . .DVD history), with its now-embittered impresario, who, erewhile, was acid-tongued as he chewed up (and out) another cracker, whistling all the way. We’ve been showing up at “The Office,” in branches on either side of the Atlantic, each of which, with regionally adjusted inflections, paws away at its constricting white collar (not to say its creator’s later “Extras” — another kind of office, a celebrity waiting room with sexier furniture). Like the soulless producer in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” our Hollywood executives have been courting the equivalent of That Barton Fink Feeling: that ubiquitous tone — so “young,” so “hip,” so “edgy.” Like the lava lamp of yore, it has been tucked into the hot corner of every room, whether “Da Ali G Show,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Boondocks,” “American Dad!,” “King of the Hill,” “The Thick of It” or, on the big screen, the no less knowing “Dawns” — and Shaun — “of the Dead,” “American Dreamz” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

But if we were to think that that tone — so sarcastic, so ironic, so sardonic — were trapped within entertainments trundled onto screens, we would be wrong. It has pervaded literary fiction for decades, from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” to Philip Roth’s “Our Gang” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” No surprise, then, that it should feature in the work of our most heralded young authors of the past year, whether Gary Shteyngart’s unbridled “Absurdistan,” Colson Whitehead’s mocking “Apex Hides the Hurt,” Marisha Pessl’s madcap “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” not to mention books by our more seasoned storytellers — “In Persuasion Nation,” by George Saunders; “The Diviners,” by Rick Moody; “Little Children,” by Tom Perotta; and “A Changed Man,” by Francine Prose.

All of these varied entertainments — human emanations on the Web, on television, at the movies and between hardcovers (whatever their differences in ambition, conception and achievement) — are attuned to the ridiculous in modern life. They are all, in other words, satirical: they revel in, and trade on, knowingness. And if we seem to be enjoying a sort of golden age of the satirical, that invites the question How successfully does satire serve our culture? That there is so much might seem proof of its expediency. After all, what could be wrong with a mode of expression that orients a critical, comical eye to flaws in the contemporary weave? And yet, you might wonder, as well, whether a culture can have too much of that knowing tone and, if so, just what that “too much” might mean.

The ancient Romans provide the beginnings of an answer, in large measure because that’s where satire has its beginnings. Just as Americans like to claim jazz as “our art form,” the Romans claimed satire as theirs. Gaius Lucilius (second century B.C.) was the first satirist, a writer vocal about the negative virtues of his fellow citizens — mostly the tendency to imitate their Greek neighbors in everything. As boastful as a modern-day rapper, Lucilius pointed to himself as the original Roman — not some Helleno-wannabe — as much because of what he lampooned (things Greek) as the fact that he lampooned at all. I am Roman, his writings say, hear me mock. And indeed, it was how such criticism was delivered that made satire different — and differently effective — from, say, a sermon. “A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.” Sounding like the always-fulminating Lewis Black of “The Daily Show,” Rome’s Juvenal tells us: “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . .Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.” The idiot wind, blowing every time Rome’s hypocrites moved their mouths, drove her satirists, in their artful way, to bluster back, setting a course pursued by writers living in turbulent eras ever since.

When, in 1729, the Tory politician Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published his satirical “A Modest Proposal” — which, in the straight-faced language of a sermon, advocated solving the problem of poverty by selling Irish children as meat — his mode was perfectly ironic. Swift did not wish to see his countrymen’s children ground into shepherd’s pies. Rather, he wanted to level an attack on political opponents who were devouring the Irish people. Swift, then, was approaching a troubling question upside down and intimating a sarcastic answer. (As such, Stephen Colbert, in parodying Bill O’Reilly’s extreme rhetoric, is fully Swiftian: “The Colbert Report” works to convince us of the opposite of its host’s every misguided opinion.) For Swift’s part, he believed that satire was a way of “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able.” His fellow Augustan Alexander Pope wrote, “When truth or virtue an affront endures, the affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours.” And although satire could not be a remedy in and of itself, it was doing a good deal, Pope assured, when it could “deter, if not reform.”

Indeed, this elegant, not to say defiant, means of addressing “affronts” to truth has proved a liberating mode of expression for authors across the ages, from Chaucer to Cervantes to Voltaire. Most comprehensible of all, perhaps, is the attraction that so insubordinate a brand of comedy, a very free kind of speech, held for writers in a country formed through insubordination — our own. Prerevolutionary America was rife with satirical pamphleteers, and even Benjamin Franklin, in his “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” lampooned the misadministration of the colonies. And yet, when readers today experience the best satires of our past, editorial points that once took center stage now shuffle toward the wings. Whether in the rueful parody of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” (“It was a time of great and exalting excitement”), the wicked ironies of Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” (“Conversation, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor”) or even the mordant sarcasm of Dorothy Parker’s “Comment” —

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Roumania.

— we are responding, not so much to the underlying “point” each author makes as to the virtuosity of its execution, the satirist’s fine ear for language, the pleasurable spectacle of seeing words used originally, used well. Yes, as it happens, Parker, Bierce and Twain are making timeless points: love, often unlovely; conversation, frequently dull; war, not exalting. No one, though, would needlepoint these revelations onto pillows — they’re old news. In the hands of an adept satirist, however, the old news satire brings becomes a special report. It reads, in part, that human civilization is not so wonderful: look, satire testifies, at the latest, artless shenanigans we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the report also shows that human civilization can be wonderful: look, satire says, at how artful we can be.

Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon.

An episode of “South Park” from last year, “Best Friends Forever,” was shown on the eve of Terri Schiavo’s final day, inspired by the grim battle among family members. Their private tragedy, we know well, became a series of loggerheaded squabbles in which efforts to reach consensus on what we mean by “human life” rapidly devolved. The creators of “South Park” addressed this rhetorical erosion with no small insight and freakish speed. (Like all their episodes, this one was produced in less than a week.) Kenny, the accident-prone child, is killed by an ice cream truck while playing his Sony PSP — the portable game console that, last year, was the grail of children everywhere. At the reading of Kenny’s will, Cartman, the obese, morally repugnant child who, on another episode, ate the parents of a kid he disliked, is left the PSP. Alas for Cartman, Kenny, dead for almost 24 hours, is belatedly revived. Now on a feeding tube and, as his doctor explains, in “a persistive vegetative state. . .like a tomato,” Kenny is, by law, alive. Kenny’s possessions, therefore, revert to him. As Cartman goes to the Colorado Supreme Court to seek the removal of Kenny’s feeding tube (so he can get the PSP), Kenny’s more altruistic friends, Kyle and Stan, court the media: “We’ll make everyone in the country know that they’re killing Kenny.”

The national uproar that ensued on this cartoon was, in temper, not a great deal more cartoonish than the one that was playing out that evening in Schiavo’s real America. The episode, however distorted by crudity, mirrored the polarizing rage of our citizenry, recalling nothing so much as Ambrose Bierce’s satirical definition of conversation. The genius of “South Park,” scatologically over the top though it tends to be (Oprah, this season, was kidnapped at gunpoint by her vagina), is how it nonetheless manages, with glee, to go after everyone, artfully sketching our society’s inability to make sense of itself, to itself.

Another target that our satirists have been skewering is our confusion about the responsibility that corporations, governments or, indeed, parents, have to tell the truth. Released in the spring of 2005, “Thank You for Smoking” (adapted from Christopher Buckley’s very funny novel) featured the charismatic tobacco-industry lobbyist Nick Naylor, a villain with a hero’s face and a salesman’s mouth. As one senator puts it, “The man shills. . .for a living,” a profession about which Nick’s son is curious. Joey, 12, understands that his father makes arguments on behalf of corporations, but given that the corporation in question manufactures death, he wonders what happens when his father’s arguments are wrong:

NICK: Joey, I’m never wrong.

JOEY: But you can’t always be right.

NICK: Well, if it’s your job to be right, then you’re never wrong.

JOEY: But what if you are wrong?

NICK: O.K. Let’s say that you’re defending chocolate, and I’m defending vanilla. Now, if I were to say to you, “Vanilla is the best flavor ice cream,” you’d say. . .

JOEY: No, chocolate is.

NICK: Exactly. But you can’t win that argument. So, I’ll ask you, “So you think chocolate is the end all and be all of ice cream, do you?”

JOEY: It’s the best ice cream. I wouldn’t order any other.

NICK: Oh, so it’s all chocolate for you, is it?

JOEY: Yes, chocolate is all I need.

NICK: Well, I need more than chocolate. And for that matter, I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom, and choice when it comes to our ice cream, and that, Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty.

JOEY: But that’s not what we’re talking about.

NICK: Ah. But that’s what I’m talking about.

JOEY: But. . .you didn’t prove that vanilla’s the best.

NICK: I didn’t have to. I proved that you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong, I’m right.

JOEY: But you still didn’t convince me.

NICK: I’m not after you. I’m after them.

Nick’s “them” are the people beyond the table where they sit, the wider world he would have believe that smoking is an expression of freedom. For Nick, “liberty” is merely rhetorical: it is, as he says, what he’s “talking about.” He doesn’t mean a word of it: he only means to win. The truth is not his — or, we are to understand, perhaps no longer our — business.

The business of scoring this frustratingly debased game of contemporary conversation has been the main focus of “The Daily Show.” Stewart et al. have built careers as liberal foils to conservative talk radio. Where the Limbaughosphere thrives on a muscular, hectoring rhetoric, the mode of “The Daily Show” has been a lampooning of such bullying. Although “The Daily Show” can revel in the same kind of posturing, even if the stance is far more liberal, the best of its work is restrained in the Horatian manner. The show’s “artful ridicule” is at its most scrupulous when attentive to, critical of and vocal about abuses of language. When James Frey, author of the fraudulent memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” was being torn apart by an array of talking heads indignant over his distortions, Stewart offered a deadpan summation that spoke to the perfervid journalistic outrage. Pundits were upset with Frey, Stewart explained, “because he misled us. . .into a book we had no business getting into.” Armed with scrupulous syntax alone, Stewart ironically evoked two infamies that rhymed with Frey’s: the claim that the Bush administration had misled us into war and the observation that the media, so severe in its judgments of Frey’s lie-world, had remained less dogged before the administration’s possible untruths.

This is artful indeed, but a high point both for “The Daily Show” and contemporary satire more generally came shortly after The New Yorker published Seymour Hersh’s 2004 exposé, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” There was genuine shock, both here and abroad, that a prison taken from a dictator who had used it to torture Iraqi dissidents had in turn served as a forum for the torture of Iraqis by their American “liberators.” Much of our high-flown rhetoric, billowing grandly over Operation Iraqi Freedom, collapsed on the mast. The irony — uncomplicatedly galling — seemed obvious enough, but its precise grade was measured nowhere more finely than in an exchange between Stewart and Rob Corddry, a player who has since departed. As Corddry explained to Stewart, his voice that of a schoolteacher instructing an uncommonly simple-minded child:

Jon, there’s no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a. . .well, that we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.

This is not, as it is sometimes called, “fake news”; rather, blunt satire. Co-opting the patronizing, abstraction-rich rhetoric of the administration of which “The Daily Show” has often been critical, Corddry shined a bright light on an empty set of bromides. All too clearly, words can prove seductive — but only to a point: the point where such seductions become fundamentally ridiculous.

Of recent examples of American satire, though, most remarkable may be Stephen Colbert’s appearance this spring at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. For anyone familiar with Colbert’s lampoonery on “The Daily Show,” not to say his rise to headlining “The Colbert Report,” it was something to see him following in the footsteps of Cedric the Entertainer, Jay Leno and Drew Carey — comedians who most recently tummled at the pleasure of the president. Whatever your tastes, we can agree that they are creatures of the mainstream. Whereas Colbert is nothing if not a critic of that mainstream, one traveling its trashy wake. Consider, then, his straight-faced, pseudoconservative patter, as he expressed, that night, his parodic support of a president sitting a few feet away:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Or how he “defended” the administration’s apparently chaotic profile:

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So, the White House has personnel changes. And then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

And how he reproached the “liberal press that’s destroying America” for its lack of professionalism:

Let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction!

To go by the media swirl that followed, Colbert’s speech that night represents in our culture a culmination of what satire does well or, rather, cannot but do: when it bends to kiss a hand, it bites. Such Lucilian ferocity drew the intended attention. By a great many journalists, Colbert’s “antics” were deemed abusive, discourteous, tasteless. And yet, by a great many citizens, Colbert’s appearance was a moment of hallelujah: he made many people — most poignantly the press — uncomfortable. Colbert stood in their midst, yes, but stood apart, just as the first Roman satirists stood apart, initially from things Greek and then from the corruption that flooded the mainstream. Whatever its latest stance, satire always finds its footing high above the polluted river of a culture, a vantage point from which it taunts. From Juvenal to Swift, from Franklin to Twain: each stood above his era’s lies and, from such a lofty perspective, named the truths of his time.

The appeal of such a mode of discourse to any vice-blighted age is understandable: it provides another means to editorial ends. And yet, more than merely editorializing, it also demonstrates a capacity for better behavior in human beings — our creativity, our subtlety, our panache. That so many people are responding to satire in the public square, and, indeed, that so much satire is thriving at a center usually held by more anodyne entertainments, suggests our hunger for the better — the better articulated, the better said, the better thought, the better done.

At the outset, I said I had taken shelter in the ridiculous. Upon reflection, the ridiculous may not be the most well shielded of retreats. Can you take shelter in the ridiculous if everywhere becomes ridiculous? For the tools of satire, the sharp knives of sarcasm and the pointy shivs of irony and the toy hammer of lampoon are being wielded with widespread enthusiasm, and not merely by cunning builders of satirical speeches and stories. Rather, they are being lent to us all, to enable every possible construction. Did you hear, for example, the news conference President Bush gave in Germany over the summer? “I’m looking forward to the feast you’re going to have tonight,” he said to the German chancellor in a moment of folksy charm, “and I understand that I may have the honor of slicing the pig.” This drew laughs, and when his remarks wound down, the president repeated, “I’m looking forward to that pig tonight.” This before fielding the following from a reporter:

“Does it concern you,” the man asked, stuttering, “that the Beirut airport has been bombed, and do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they’ve so far refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?”

“I thought,” Bush replied, “you were going to ask about the pig.”

Try to ignore, if you can, the image of the carcass of a pig, Bush poised, knife in hand, ready to carve. Consider instead that when asked on an international stage about real carnage — about spreading violence in the Middle East, about a constellation of worries suggesting a world at the brink of war — the president’s reply did not take the questioner’s inquiry seriously but, rather, sarcastically. His rhetoric sounded less like that of a steward of state — one addressing serious matters with sobriety — than that of a smartass. And this was not Juvenal’s sarcasm, or Twain’s, or even Colbert’s: it was not elegantly tuned to a point nor artfully part of a formal design. It was, instead, almost perfectly inappropriate and, of course, not unindicative of the president’s normal rhetorical mode. For it is not, I think, as is so often said, that the president is as much inarticulate as he is too clearly articulate, in a way: his tone, consistently condescending, betrays his sense of being, like a satirist, above those he calls down to. And that tone — carelessly sarcastic, thoughtlessly ironic, indiscriminately sardonic — that is the very one you now find everywhere. Bush is us; Bush is me: his is the same sarcasm I employ when I tell my father, once again, that of course I didn’t read today’s op-ed.

It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube. Perhaps that leveling of language merely passes, the rhetorical registers recalibrated by nothing so much as an unfolding of the days. Or perhaps there’s another way of putting it, one voiced by President Bush himself. After Colbert, after Germany, just before Labor Day, there was yet another news conference, one that found the president asking the press corps — who so lately protested their mistreatment at satirical hands — how long they were to be stationed in a temporary briefing room across from their typical quarters. “The decision will be made by commanders on the ground,” cracked one. “There’s no timetable,” went another. “What do you think this is,” quipped the president, “the correspondents’ dinner or something?”

That, it seems to me, is an excellent question.

Wyatt Mason received this year’s National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

September 17, 2006

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Tim Golden: The Battle for Guantánamo

1. A Warning From Shaker Aamer

Col. Mike Bumgarner took over as the warden of Guantánamo Bay in April 2005. He had been hoping to be sent to Iraq; among senior officers of the Army’s military police corps, the job of commanding guards at the American detention camp in Cuba was considered not particularly challenging and somewhat risky to a career. He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists.

“Is this what I went to bed at night thinking about?” he would ask nearly a year later, as he whacked at mosquitoes on a muggy Cuban night. “No.”

Bumgarner, then 45, received his marching orders from the overall commander of the military’s joint task force at Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood. A few weeks earlier, General Hood dispatched the previous head of his guard operation and two other senior officers for fraternizing with female subordinates. He was known as a flinty, detail-oriented boss with low tolerance for bad judgment, and his instructions to the colonel were brief: He should keep the detainees and his guards safe, Bumgarner says Hood told him. He should prevent any escapes. He should also study the Third Geneva Convention, on the treatment of prisoners of war, and begin thinking about how to move Guantánamo more into line with its rules.

It had been three years since President Bush declared that the United States would not be bound by any part of the Geneva treaties in dealing with prisoners in the fight against terrorism. He ordered that American forces treat captives in ways “consistent” with the conventions but hadn’t explained what that meant. Now, Bumgarner thought, the mandate seemed to be shifting a little. He was being asked to get more specific.

In the cramped bungalow headquarters of his Joint Detention Operations Group at Guantánamo, Bumgarner had his operations officer look up the conventions on the Internet and print out a copy. After nearly 24 years as a military police officer, Bumgarner knew the document well. He thought it obvious that many of the rights would never apply to Guantánamo detainees. No one was going to allow the distribution of “musical instruments” to suspected terrorists, as the 1940’s-era conventions stipulated for the captured soldiers of another army. No one was going to pay the detainees a stipend to spend at a base canteen.

But the assignment was more complicated than just cutting and pasting where he could. On some level, Bumgarner thought, he was being asked to weigh how far the military should go to improve the lives of prisoners whom the president and his aides had labeled some of the most dangerous terrorists alive. Or, as the colonel put it to me during our first conversation at Guantánamo in March: “How do you deal with an individual whom the president of the United States and the secretary of defense have called the worst of the worst?”

At that point, in the spring of 2005, he had little time to consider an answer. Tensions in the camp were surging, as the detainees tested a fresh rotation of Army and Navy guards. Of the 530 prisoners then being held at Guantánamo, most were classified as “noncompliant.” The two segregation blocks, which held prisoners who had assaulted guards, were full. So were two other blocks where detainees were sent for lesser infractions. “People were in a waiting pattern to get in and serve their time there,” Bumgarner said.

In older parts of the camp, the detainees would sometimes bang for hours on the steel mesh of their cells, smashing out a beat that rattled up over the razor wire into the thick, tropical air. Occasionally they would swipe at the guards with metal foot pads ripped from their squat-style toilets, declassified military reports say. The detainees rarely tried to fashion the sort of shanks or knives made by violent prisoners in the United States. But they did manage to unnerve and incite the young guards, often by splattering them with mixtures of bodily excretions known on the blocks as “cocktails.”

By the time Bumgarner took command at Guantánamo, information had emerged to suggest that many of the detainees were not, in fact, the hardened terrorists whom Pentagon officials had claimed to be holding there. Bumgarner did not doubt that his new prisoners were dangerous, but neither was he wary of getting to know them better. As he walked the blocks in Camp Delta, the fenced-in core of the prison, he soon began trying to engage some of the more influential detainees.

Military and C.I.A. analysts had been studying the Guantánamo population since the camp opened in January 2002. They observed that there were detainee spokesmen, who tended to speak English, and religious leaders, or “sheiks,” who issued opinions on questions of Islamic law. There was also a more hidden cadre, whose leadership the analysts defined as “political” or, when they could direct the protests of others, “military.” Nonetheless, there was much debate over who the most important leaders were, intelligence officials later told me. Like most guard officers before him, Bumgarner gravitated toward those who spoke English.

His ambitions were modest. “I was looking for a way, with what General Hood was wanting, just to have a peaceful camp,” he recalled recently. He said his initial message to the detainees was “Look, I’m willing to give you things, to make life better for ya, if y’all will reciprocate.” What he asked in return was “Just do not attack my guards.”

Bumgarner considered himself a take-charge, solve-the-problem kind of commander. A big, balding, garrulous man who speaks with a faint Carolina drawl and carries his 250 pounds easily on a 6-foot-2-inch frame, he grew up the son of a career Army sergeant in a family where military service was proudly taken for granted. In high school in Kings Mountain, N.C., a small town in the Blue Ridge foothills, he played quarterback for the football team and applied to West Point at his father’s urging. He quit the academy after only a few months but joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay his way through Western Carolina University. At Guantánamo, he was one of those officers who seemed to relish calling out, “Honor bound!” (shorthand for the camp motto, “Honor bound to defend freedom”), when a soldier saluted. Saying goodbye, he favored “Hoo-rah” over “See you later.”

But that image could be deceiving. Before deploying to Cuba, Bumgarner oversaw the development of detention doctrine at the Army’s Military Police School at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Like many military police officers, he had been deeply embarrassed when the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted in May 2004 and was determined to see its legacy undone. “We were not going to let that happen to us,” he said.

At Guantánamo, Bumgarner moved quickly to try to reduce tensions in the camp. If the detainees wanted clocks on the cellblock walls, he saw no reason they shouldn’t have them. In response to endless complaints from the detainees about their tap water, he persuaded Hood to approve the distribution of bottled water at mealtimes. The only stocks available were the soldiers’ own, bottled with a stars-and-stripes label under the vanity brands Patriot’s Choice and Freedom Springs. To avoid any problems, guards were ordered to peel off the labels before they passed out the bottles.

The detainees did not respond as the military authorities hoped. In late June 2005, two months after Bumgarner took command, some prisoners went on a hunger strike, calling for better living conditions, more respectful treatment of the Koran by guards and — most important — fair trials or freedom. Although it was hardly the first such protest, the camp’s medical staff worried about the unusually large number of prisoners involved.

Soon after the strike began, Bumgarner was alerted to a disturbance in Camp Echo, an area of more isolated cells on the eastern edge of the detention center. The problem was with a 38-year-old Saudi named Shaker Aamer. The colonel had not previously encountered Aamer, but he was already familiar with the legend of detainee No. 239 — the one his guards called the Professor. They marveled at his English, which was eloquent, and his presence, which was formidable. Some intelligence officials said they believed he had been an important Qaeda operative in London, where he lived and married before moving to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001. (Aamer has denied having anything to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.)

The colonel’s immediate concern was that Aamer was giving his guards fits, pressing one of the sporadic civil disobedience campaigns for which he was famous. “I finally said: ‘That’s it! I’m gonna go down to talk to him myself.”’ As Bumgarner remembers it, he burst into the small, hospital-white room as Aamer sat on his bunk, fuming behind the painted mesh that caged him into one corner. “You’re either gonna start complying with the rules,” Bumgarner recalls warning him, “or life’s gonna get really rough.” The colonel said he did not mean to threaten physical force, only to emphasize strongly that Aamer’s few privileges — like, say, his use of a toothbrush — hung in the balance.

Aamer, who wore a thick black beard and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail, was unimpressed. The prisoner, who was not wearing his glasses, squinted for a moment, trying to read the officer’s insignia. “Colonel,” he finally said, “don’t come in here giving me that.”

As Bumgarner settled into a white plastic chair, Aamer crossed his legs on the bunk and began to talk about his life. He spoke about his family, his travel to Afghanistan, his feelings about the United States. He told of working as an interpreter for American troops in Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war, and of later working at a coffee shop outside Atlanta.

“I got the impression that he was hanging around in clubs, drinking,” Bumgarner told me. “He loved women. But he said he had realized the error of his ways.” Aamer had a revelation, he told the colonel, “that this life of running around with women and boozing it up was the wrong path.”

“It was part of his charisma, that drawing me in,” Bumgarner said later. “He became a person.”

Much of the conversation centered on Aamer’s thoughts on the detention operation and what could be done to improve it. The Saudi’s ideas, it seemed, were perhaps not so far from Hood’s. “His implication was that if you applied the Geneva Conventions fully, everything would be just fine in the camps,” Bumgarner recalled.

After almost five hours, Aamer asked the colonel if he had made someone very angry. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in Guantánamo.

“Nobody survives Guantánamo,” he added. “You won’t survive, either.”

II. A Permanent Place

As part of the military’s standard tour of Guantánamo, visitors are driven to the end of a two-lane road that winds up to the northeast corner of the naval base on which the prison sits. They pause there on a small hill overlooking a locked gate that leads into Fidel Castro’s part of the island. The tour guide, usually a young Marine corporal with a black Beretta pistol strapped to his thigh, then recounts a brief history of Communist efforts to drive the American forces away.

At one point, the corporal says, the Cubans tried to cut off the Americans’ water supply. They trained floodlights on an American guardhouse to keep the soldiers inside from getting any sleep. But such annoyances were merely that. The United States never surrendered an inch of the 45 square miles it has occupied under a disputed lease since 1903, following the Spanish-American War. “We’re not as big a presence as we once were,” one tour guide, Cpl. Denis R. Espinoza, who is 22, said earlier this year. “But we’re still here, and we’re going to stay.”

In the Land of Unsubtle Metaphors that is Guantánamo Bay, the message of the tour is transparent: the United States fought a dangerous, implacable enemy here once before, in another war that seemed without end. Had we not held our ground then, the argument goes, the world might now be a darker place.

Despite the intense criticism it has drawn, the detention camp at Guantánamo has proved one of the more resilient institutions of the Bush administration’s fight against terror. It has weathered a 2004 Supreme Court decision that allows prisoners to challenge their detention in the federal courts. Scandals over the abuse of the detainees have come and gone, but Guantánamo has endured.

When President Bush announced broad changes in policies for the detention and prosecution of terror suspects on Sept. 6, he said the government “will move toward the day when we can eventually close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.” But by sending 14 important C.I.A. captives there and pushing to try prisoners before reconstituted military tribunals, he appeared to be extending the life of the detention center for the foreseeable future. Even if many more detainees are sent home and dozens are tried, administration officials acknowledged, the United States could easily end up with 150 or 200 others whom it would want to hold indefinitely and without charge. As to how the military should treat such men, Washington offered only the most general guidance.

What impact the C.I.A.’s prisoners might have on the camp’s operations is unclear. Already, though, Guantánamo has been the scene of an extraordinary struggle between the detainees and their guards. Only a few episodes of this conflict have come to light, like the suicides of three prisoners in June. But what has hardly been glimpsed is the dynamic that developed as military officers tried to deal more closely with the detainees, easing the harsh conditions in which they have been held and asking for compliance in return.

This article presents a view inside the prison based on interviews with more than 100 military and intelligence officials, guards, former detainees and others. It shows that as pressure built among the prisoners and some threatened even to kill themselves in protest, Bumgarner and other guard officers — acting as much on instinct as policy — took surprising steps to contain the upheaval.

That experiment illuminates the challenge the United States faces in continuing to detain indefinitely some 460 men at Guantánamo, only 10 of whom have been formally charged with crimes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the military has sought to keep what has taken place there under wraps. Asked recently about his dealings with the detainees and those of his staff officers, General Hood would respond only through an Army spokesman, saying, “Operational security precludes any public discussions that could potentially jeopardize the lives of detainees or the security force at Guantánamo.”

Rather than making Guantánamo go away, the administration has tried to make it smaller and less objectionable. The ruins of Camp X-Ray, the provisional facility where the first prisoners were held in cages, are slowly being swallowed by the jungle. Tour guides display them as proof of Guantánamo’s progress. Inside the existing camp, a barricaded precinct of the quaint, 50’s-era naval base where off-duty soldiers play softball and stop to eat at McDonald’s, the guides point out Camp 6, a new $30 million facility modeled after a county jail in southern Michigan.

But the detainees have long memories, and the portraits drawn by those who have been released — sometimes horrific, often impossible to verify — have shaped global perceptions in ways that the Bush administration has been unable to overcome. Their stories have been set down in books, films, plays and raps, most of which depict an Orwellian world that is by turns brutal, calculated and inept.

“Every country has its own way of torturing people,” Rustam Akhmiarov, a 26-year-old Russian who was arrested in Pakistan and ended up in Guantánamo, told me after his release. “In Russia, they beat you up; they break you straightaway. But the Americans had their own way, which is to make you go mad over a period of time. Every day they thought of new ways to make you feel worse.”

Over the last two years, human rights groups and the International Red Cross have noted some improvements. Hood said that the use of more extreme interrogation methods was curtailed within months of his taking command, around the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal became public. Yet the larger questions that indefinite detention at Guantánamo raises — how to forestall the radicalization of the detainees; how to control men who have only the slimmest hope of freedom — have never been resolved by senior policy makers. They have been left to military officers on the ground.

III. Out of the Dark Ages

As Colonel Bumgarner landed at Guantánamo in April 2005, he sensed that the military was in the midst of what he called “sort of an effort to normalize things.” The Pentagon wanted to streamline the guard operation as part of a push toward a more modern, less labor-intensive detention facility. It also wanted to present a more humane face to the world. Both goals required lowering the level of conflict within the camp.

After his first briefing from Hood, Bumgarner put the printout of the Geneva Conventions on his desk and left it there. “I had my staff look at it,” he said. “For me, it was the only black-and-white piece of something that I could reach out and grab for guidance.”

At that point, White House officials were still opposed to adopting even the most basic Geneva standard for the treatment of prisoners, a provision that bans “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Bumgarner considered such issues above his pay grade. He tried to deal with the detainees man to man. “Human beings are human beings,” he said in one of a series of conversations. “I always think that I can deal with anybody. I feel like dialogue can’t hurt.”

Weeks before he would meet the Saudi prisoner Shaker Aamer, Bumgarner came across a tall, wild-eyed detainee who was screaming at the guards in British-accented English. It wasn’t clear what his problem was, but when the colonel asked, the man quickly calmed down. “You are creating these problems by the way you are treating us,” the prisoner said.

A day or two later, Bumgarner had guards deliver the man to Juliet block, a small, fenced-in courtyard beside his command center where Red Cross representatives meet with detainees at aluminum picnic tables. He asked a guard to uncuff the prisoner’s hands. “It puts them in a much better mood to talk to you,” the colonel explained.

Prisoner No. 590, Ahmed Errachidi, was a handsome 39-year-old Moroccan who spent 17 years in London. He worked as a chef at a string of restaurants, including the Hard Rock Cafe, before traveling to Afghanistan after the United States began bombing the country in October 2001. The military authorities accused him of belonging to a radical Moroccan Islamist group and training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, charges that his lawyers have disputed. Intelligence officials told me they did not consider him a high-value detainee and noted that he had been hospitalized for manic depression. But the guards, impressed by his influence and sense of self-importance, had nicknamed him the General.

Errachidi seemed rather surprised to be sitting down with the commander of the detention group, Bumgarner told me. But in that meeting on June 6 and a second, longer one two days later, Errachidi seized the chance to inventory the prisoners’ grievances: The water was foul, he said, and the food terrible. The detainees were angry about the guards’ habit of walking loudly through the cellblocks at prayer times and even angrier that “The Star-Spangled Banner” sometimes played over distant naval-base loudspeakers during or right after the evening call to prayer.

The General “kept talking about ‘the dark ages,”’ Bumgarner would later recall. The prisoner complained, for example, that the guards often referred to the detainees in demeaning ways, calling out when they were moving a prisoner that they had “a package” ready.

“We are not ‘packages,”’ Errachidi told the colonel. “We are human beings.”

After the first meeting, Bumgarner received a piece of paper from a guard. It was a drawing by Errachidi, a sort of map. In one corner, it showed a shaded area labeled “the Dark Ages.” From there, a path wound through a thicket of obstacles. They had labels like “No ‘packages,”’ “Better food” and “Turn the lights down.” At the end of the path, Errachidi had drawn what looked like an oasis, with water and palm trees.

Back at Bumgarner’s command center, some of his staff officers wondered about the wisdom of trying to solve such complaints. They were used to their commanders walking the blocks and occasionally speaking to prisoners; they were not accustomed to sit-downs. Nor did they see why they should be the ones to pick through the Geneva provisions and suggest whether the detainees might be entitled to elect their own representatives or attend educational programs.

“We’re the guys on the ground,” the detention group’s former operations officer, Maj. Joseph M. Angelo, told me not long ago. “So why was I making recommendations on what portions of the Geneva Conventions we should implement? That just struck me as kind of weird.”

Still, the unease of Bumgarner’s staff did not compare with the reaction he got from the intelligence side of the Guantánamo task force. There had long been tension between the two military units, but this time members of the Joint Intelligence Group “were furious,” one staff officer recalled. There were few privileges to give out at Guantánamo, this officer and others said, and interrogators felt they should be the ones to dispense them — in return for cooperation from the detainees.

Before he deployed to Cuba, Bumgarner’s military police superiors had been emphatic that he should stick to his responsibilities and leave his counterparts in military intelligence to their interrogations and analysis. Bumgarner wasn’t worried about stepping out of his lane. “I run the camps,” he said.

Bumgarner set about trying to solve the problems he saw. He instructed members of the guard force to stop referring to the detainees as “packages.” On compliant blocks, he had guards start turning down the lights between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. and stop moving prisoners during those hours to allow the detainees to sleep. To avoid disturbing their prayers, he ordered guards to place yellow traffic cones spray-painted with a “P” in the cellblock halls at prayer times. He asked his aides to see that “The Star-Spangled Banner” recording would be played at least three minutes before the call to prayer.

Another of Bumgarner’s senior staff officers, Maj. Timothy O’Reilly, a reservist who is a lawyer in civilian life, began to recognize some of what he was seeing from jails and prisons in the United States. “The ultimate nirvana for anybody in law enforcement or corrections is compliance,” he said earlier this year. “In order to run an effective prison, you need to have people comply with your orders, and that’s no different from the smallest jail to the biggest high-security prison.”

But Guantánamo was clearly unlike other prisons in one important respect: The detainees found much less incentive to obey the rules. To some, exile to the discipline or segregation blocks was a source of status and pride, military intelligence officials said. And the punishments were limited. Striking or spraying urine on a guard brought 30 days’ segregation, the maximum length of any punishment under Geneva rules. There was no such thing as getting a few more years tacked on to your sentence.

In an American prison, O’Reilly and others noted, an inmate could be a sworn enemy of the prison authorities, respected among other prisoners, and still try to “run a good program” — avoiding trouble in an effort to reduce his time behind bars. At Guantánamo, compliance with the rules brought only prayer beads, packets of hot sauce, a slightly thicker mattress. It would not bring early parole.

Former detainees I met insisted that their defiance was provoked not only by their despair over their uncertain futures but also by unnecessarily harsh and arbitrary treatment from the guards. “If people’s basic human rights were respected, I don’t think they would have had any of these problems,” said Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban cabinet minister and ambassador to Pakistan who was the pre-eminent leader of Afghan prisoners at Guantánamo before his release in the late summer of 2005. “There were no rules and no law. Any guard could do whatever they wanted to do.”

Like other small, insular groups that live at the mercy of a more powerful force, the detainees have woven intricate, conspiratorial theories about their fate. In a closed world where prayer gives structure to daily life and the Koran is the one possession guards are never supposed to take away, prisoners were acutely sensitive to any perceived disrespect for their faith. But there were many other grievances. Some former detainees told me that early on, they were injected at Guantánamo with psychotropic drugs, a claim that military officials denied. Later, detainees continued to suspect hidden agents of social control in everything from the cloudy tap water to the configuration of their cells.

“Those blocks are designed so that you will not rest,” says Mohammed al-Daihani, a government accountant from Kuwait who was sent home last November. “There is metal everywhere. If anyone drops anything, you hear it. If anyone shouts or talks loudly, it disturbs everyone. If there is a problem at the other end of the block, you cannot possibly rest. After two or three weeks, you think you will lose your mind.”

Although the detainees came from diverse backgrounds and more than three dozen countries, there was only one real prison gang at Guantánamo. The authorities were convinced it was controlled by Al Qaeda members. An August 2002 study by the C.I.A. asserted that Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo had quickly begun “establishing cellblock leaders and dividing responsibility among deputies for greeting new arrivals, assessing interrogations, monitoring the guard force and providing moral support to fellow detainees, among other tasks.” (The study was posted in July on the Web site The Smoking Gun; two officials confirmed its authenticity to me.)

Such conclusions may have been drawn from the actions of detainees like Shaker Aamer, the man with whom Bumgarner spoke for hours at the end of June. Abdullah al-Noaimi, a Bahraini student who was released from Guantánamo last November, described in interviews at his home in Bahrain in June how Aamer initially organized their cellblock through sheer force of personality. “He’s always laughing and talking, very extroverted,” al-Noaimi said. “He was born to be a leader.”

Soon after his own arrival in Cuba, al-Noaimi recalled, Aamer rallied the detainees on the block to refuse to be weighed by the medical staff — a largely meaningless protest, he said, but one that infuriated the guards and thrilled the detainees. Eventually, he added, Aamer organized the 48-cell block into four groups of 12, with representatives for each unit and a spokesman for the block. “It’s the same thing John McCain did in Vietnam,” said Lieut. Col. Kevin Burk, who commanded the army’s first military police battalion at Guantánamo. “You continue your resistance.”

Some parts of the camp were easier to manage than others. The guards looked on the roughly 110 Afghans then at Guantánamo as relatively cooperative. They filled much of Camp 4, the newer wing where Level 1, or “highly compliant,” prisoners were allowed to live in communal barracks, serving their own food and moving freely in and out of small recreation yards. Most of the rest of the Afghans were in Camp 1, for Level 2, or “compliant,” detainees. Only a handful were held in Camp 5, the maximum-security area. Yet as more prisoners were released, the remainder were becoming a more cohesive group, military officials and former detainees said. They were also overwhelmingly Arab, and more likely to have endured more extreme interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and threats.

Several former detainees insisted that it was not Al Qaeda that bound them at Guantánamo but a common adversary. In standard prison fashion, they developed ingenious ways to organize and communicate. They attached messages to long threads from their clothing with wads of hardened toothpaste and then cast them into neighboring cells. They shouted into the plumbing to talk between floors in the maximum-security unit. And as their frustration grew, their ability to organize was brought to bear in new ways.

IV. Aamer the Hero

The hunger strike that confronted Colonel Bumgarner in mid-June 2005 escalated quickly. Of the many strikes since early 2002, few had gone far enough to prompt doctors to force-feed the detainees through stomach tubes. This time, however, there were not a handful of hunger-strikers but dozens.

As they often had before, military spokesmen dismissed the protest as a publicity bid typical of Al Qaeda-trained terrorists. Officers at Guantánamo had tabulated hundreds of incidents of what they termed “manipulative, self-injurious behavior.” Privately, though, they began to discuss how to respond to a potential suicide. At the Pentagon, officials dusted off contingency plans for dealing with a body that would need prompt burial under Islamic law.

Senior members of the Guantánamo staff began to meet regularly with General Hood to monitor the strike. The chief medical officer, Navy Capt. John S. Edmondson, M.D., worried about the prospect of having to force-feed large numbers of detainees. The medical risk was relatively low, but there were other considerations. “Anytime you’re doing a procedure that the patient doesn’t want, it’s not a place you want to be,” he would tell me later. “What takes precedence? The patient’s rights, or their life? It’s not an easy question.”

Bumgarner soon turned to Aamer, who had been on strike since around the time of their first meeting in Camp Echo. During that first encounter, he said, the prisoner had been “trying to convince me, in a very subtle way, that he could help control things in the camp.” He decided to consider the proposal.

Over a couple of more conversations with Aamer, Bumgarner made his case: He wanted the detention camp to run more smoothly, to make things easier for detainees who obeyed the rules. He was prepared to move closer to the standards of the Geneva Conventions in some parts of the operation, including discipline. What did Aamer think it would take, the colonel wanted to know, for the hunger strike to end?

Aamer summarized his discussions with Bumgarner in a statement he dated Aug. 11, 2005, and later gave to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. In it, he said the hunger-strikers demanded ending “the secret abuse project of Camp 5” (which he did not explain) and either bringing the detainees to trial or sending them home. Meanwhile, they wanted better medical and living conditions. Aamer wrote that the colonel promised him “that justice would come to Guantánamo at last.” The prisoner, his lawyer said later, had “decided that this was a man who he could trust.”

Bumgarner said he tried always to bring the talks back to what he could deliver: modest improvements in the detainees’ living conditions. He said Aamer told him: “‘If you can get me to go around the camps, I can turn this off.”’

There were no precedents for chaperoned consultations among detainees. But by July 26, 2005, the number of detainees refusing to eat was at 56, and doctors were becoming concerned about the health of several of them. Bumgarner decided to act. “I saw the chance to end it, and I just did it,” he said.

The colonel went to see Aamer at a small hospital inside the detention camp. He was sitting on a bed, one ankle chained to the frame, surrounded by some of the other more determined hunger-strikers. According to Bumgarner, Aamer told him that several of the detainees had had a “vision,” in which three of them had to die for the rest to be freed. Still, he agreed to try to persuade them to drop the protest.

Aamer agreed to suspend his own strike on July 26, his lawyer said, but was unsuccessful in persuading others. That evening or the next, Bumgarner said, he had guards retrieve Aamer from the hospital and meet him at Camp 5, the imposing maximum-security unit. Once inside the heavy doors, they went through the cellblocks one by one, as Aamer spoke with a handful of the most influential detainees.

Aamer went first to see Saber Lahmar, an Algerian-born Islamic scholar who was arrested in Bosnia in a supposed conspiracy to bomb the American Embassy in Sarajevo. (Lahmar denied any involvement in such a plot.) Trailed by the colonel and a military interpreter, Aamer continued through the tiers, crouching down to speak to a handful of others through the slots by which they received their food. His last stop was the cell of Ghassan al-Sharbi, a 30-year-old Saudi who studied electrical engineering in Prescott, Ariz. Al-Sharbi, who was later charged in the military tribunals with joining in an Al Qaeda conspiracy to manufacture bombs for attacks in Afghanistan, was reluctant to give up the strike. When he finally agreed, the others went along, two military officials said.

As they prepared to leave Camp 5, Bumgarner says, he asked Aamer if he needed to speak with some of the other hunger-strikers there as well. “No,” Aamer answered matter-of-factly. “The others will put the word out.”

The colonel and his prisoner drove to Camps 2 and 3. As they entered some of the blocks — Bumgarner in his camouflage fatigues, Aamer handcuffed to a chain around his waist — the cells erupted with applause.

“He was treated like a rock star, some of the places we would go in,” Bumgarner recalls. “I have never seen grown men — with beards, hardened men — crying at the sight of another man.” He paused, searching for an analogy. “It was like I was with Bon Jovi or something,” he said.

Former detainees who witnessed the visits recounted to me that Aamer, speaking in Arabic, proposed to end the hunger strike and explained that other detainees in Camp 5 were in agreement. In return, he said, the military authorities promised to try to resolve problems the prisoners faced and to observe parts of the Geneva Conventions.

The colonel’s subordinates had grown accustomed to his hands-on style of leadership. But they worried more openly about his meetings with Aamer. The Saudi, one officer pointedly said, “has an almost hypnotic power over some people.” Two others referred to Aamer as “Svengali.”

Bumgarner himself struggled with Aamer’s frequent demands. One morning, as Aamer was being sent off with other officers to brief detainees, he had a new one for the colonel: Now he wanted to move around without the leg shackles that were standard for detainees being transported outside their cellblocks.

“Look, Shaker, don’t make a big deal out of this,” Bumgarner recalled telling him. “Let’s get on to the bigger thing here. I can’t take you out of those shackles.”

“I’m not going unless you just handcuff me,” the prisoner responded.

“Shaker, don’t do this to me,” the colonel said. “It’s just going to make it harder.”

“No,” he quoted Aamer as saying. “I’m not doing any of this.”

Bumgarner ordered the shackles removed. The handcuffs stayed on. Aamer finally went ahead with his briefings to the other prisoners. “It was clearly a risk — not in terms of putting anybody in danger, but in terms of perception,” Bumgarner told me later. “But I thought that in the end, in order to keep things going, I was going to have to do it.”

Mullah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador, had just finished his prayers in Camp 4 when a sergeant came to his dormitory. “There is someone who wants to see you,” the sergeant said. Zaeef had never had an unannounced visitor at Guantánamo before.

He found Aamer waiting. The two men had known each other in Camp 1, where they were briefly neighbors. Zaeef, who spoke Arabic, noted that many of the Arabs respected the Saudi’s leadership. Aamer told Zaeef about his conversations with the colonel.

“We thought maybe they were becoming softer in their policies,” Zaeef recalls. “Or we thought maybe they were trying to trick us. But we thought that we should see which one it was.”

When I met him in Afghanistan almost a year later, Zaeef still seemed a bit uncertain about what had taken place. He is an elegant, professorial man who wears wire-rimmed glasses and the black silk turban favored by the Taliban. He described the episode during two long interviews in the well-guarded government guest house on the dusty outskirts of Kabul, where he has lived since returning home last September.

According to Zaeef, Aamer described a scheme of representation for the detainees that he had worked out with Bumgarner — one that vaguely echoed the Third Geneva Convention’s rules for a prisoner-of-war camp. Detainees in Camp 4 were to choose two inmates to represent them, one for the Afghans and another for the rest. With guards by his side, Zaeef said he then went from one block to the next, explaining the situation. After some discussion, he was chosen by acclamation to represent all of the Camp 4 detainees. Still, Zaeef recalled, “people were very skeptical.”

Nonetheless, most of the hunger-strikers suspended their protests by July 28. Disciplinary problems on the blocks eased. The mood in the camps swelled palpably, some military officials told me. Later Bumgarner would refer to this interlude as “the Period of Peace.”

The colonel then turned to some of the issues the detainees had raised during their strike. He and Aamer were sitting at one of the picnic tables near his office, debating the camp food, when Aamer insisted that the detainees’ meals were being poisoned.

“That’s asinine!” Bumgarner said.

“I don’t see you eating the stuff,” he said Aamer shot back.

Over a dinner of fish sticks and fries, they began working out a solution. Not long after, Aamer sat down with the head of the mess hall, the base nutritionist and a logistics officer on the military staff. According to one officer briefed on the meeting, Aamer unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn up an elaborate two-week meal plan with daily suggestions for four different diets: a standard menu, a vegetarian menu, a vegetarian-with-fish option and a bland diet for older prisoners and those with intestinal problems. Two officials said Aamer’s proposal eventually became the basis for a new meal plan that raised the amount of food offered to detainees each day from 2,800 calories to 4,200 calories.

After weeks of discussion with his aides, Bumgarner also instituted a new program to simplify the discipline in the camp. Under the previous four-level system, misdeeds were punished with the loss of various “comfort items” like prayer beads and books, or stints in the discipline or segregation blocks. The system was so complicated, military officials said, that its application often seemed arbitrary.

The new plan called for all or nothing. Every detainee was restored to compliant status and issued all of the comfort items generally available, including prayer beads and bigger bars of soap. Those who broke the rules would be busted down to “basic issue,” or B.I., with nothing in between. To symbolize the new order, all detainees in punishment-orange uniforms would be reoutfitted in tan.

The change might have made a dent in the prisoners’ abiding sense of humiliation. The problem, some officers said, was that the plan was set in motion before enough tan clothing could be requisitioned to outfit all the detainees. Some of those left in orange complained loudly.

“We did not think that through like we were playing chess,” Major Angelo said. “We thought like we were playing checkers. And that didn’t work.”

V. The End of Peace

A couple of days after Aamer visited Zaeef to explain the new plan for prisoner representation, a guard approached Zaeef with a cryptic message. “At 6 o’clock you are going to go somewhere,” he said. At the appointed hour, Zaeef was led out of the camp and put on the rumble seat of one of the small John Deere utility vehicles used to transport detainees around the detention center and driven to Camp 1.

The guards led him to the small, fenced-in exercise yard for Alpha block, where two picnic tables had been placed. Ala Muhammad Salim, an influential Egyptian religious leader in the camp who was known as Sheik Ala, was already there. The two prisoners sat down and began quizzing each other about what was going on. Four others trickled in. They included Aamer and two of the men he met with in Camp 5: Saber Lahmar, the Algerian scholar, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, the Saudi engineer. The sixth was Adel Fattoh Algazzar, a former Egyptian Army officer with a master’s degree in economics. Bumgarner did not attend the meeting, but when all of the detainees were seated, his deputy arrived with two other officers. Al-Sharbi acted as the Arabic interpreter.

According to other officers I spoke with, the deputy delivered a simple message: The six were being asked to provide their input on how to improve conditions in the camp. Each of the detainees responded in turn.

“Do not mistreat us anymore,” Zaeef recalled saying. “Be respectful of our religion and our Koran. Respect us as human beings, because we are human beings. If we are criminals, take us to court. But if we are innocent, let us go.”

News of the meeting buzzed through the camp. Right away, several former detainees said, the prisoners began to debate what was taking place. “We had never talked to the colonels before,” Abdulaziz al-Shammari, a Kuwaiti teacher, said. “But this Bumgarner came around all the time, wanting to negotiate with us.”

The younger detainees pressed Aamer to push past the matter of living conditions and focus on their demands for trial or release. “The shabab said to him, ‘We must not go only for the small things; we should go to the core issues,”’ al-Shammari said, using the Arabic word for “young people” or “youth.”

Mohammed al-Daihani, the Kuwaiti accountant, now released, said that soon after the colonel and Aamer visited his cellblock, Ahmed Errachidi, the Moroccan known as the General, challenged others there to analyze the possible motives of their captors. “He said: ‘Why is a colonel from the most powerful country in the world coming to negotiate with the detainees? They must be under some kind of pressure.”’

The skeptics on Bumgarner’s side were also growing more vocal. “I was one of the few who thought we should let the leaders come talk to us,” the colonel acknowledged. Hood was clearly uneasy with the negotiations, other officers said. He told aides not to refer to the six as “the council,” as the detainees did. Still, several officers emphasized, the talks would never have gone forward if Hood had not approved them.

On the evening of Saturday, Aug. 6, shortly after the council’s first meeting, the colonel convened the six again, officers said. This time, he sat with the group himself. Aamer had insisted that they should not be handcuffed or shackled. “These are leaders,” he told the colonel.

Bumgarner agreed, and the handcuffs were removed. Guards armed with pepper spray stood by, while an immediate-reaction team waited just out of sight. The colonel later summarized his introduction thusly: “You’re here. I’m here. You’ve got my attention. Tell me what the grievances are, and we’ll work through them.” He added, “This place ain’t going away, so we might as well make the best of it.”

As Zaeef recalled the encounter, Bumgarner made several promises: He would allow the circulation of religious books among the detainees and try to resolve problems that arose with the guards. He would assure that the prisoners’ food was “adequate.” Zaeef said the most important thing the colonel pledged was to send another official who would be able to speak with the detainees about their “future.” Bumgarner said he promised only that guards would act “in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions” and that he would see that Guantánamo’s discipline was consistent with its terms.

On the following Monday, the officers said, the six detainees were allowed to meet alone in the fenced-in yard. A pair of military interpreters were positioned nearby to monitor their conversation, officers said. According to both Zaeef and military officials, the detainees began using pens and paper they had been given to write notes. An officer observing the meeting interrupted them: they were not to pass notes, he said. When they insisted on confidentiality, he stepped forward again. But as the officer moved to confiscate the notes, some of the detainees popped them into their mouths and began chewing.

Hood pronounced the experiment over. “‘This group is not meeting anymore,”’ the colonel recounts him saying. “‘And you are not going to be meeting with them anymore.”’

The “period of peace” came to an abrupt end. According to various sources — military officials, former detainees and Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith — the detainees were also angered by a few incidents that had taken place over the weekend before the second council meeting. In one case, a prisoner had been forcibly extracted from his cell, only to sit waiting for hours to be interrogated. In another, the questioning of a slight Tunisian detainee by a much larger criminal investigator ended in a violent scuffle involving a cut nose, the possible hurling of a mini-refrigerator and the investigator’s being ordered off the island.

A couple of days after the negotiations were shut down, officials said, a riot broke out in Camps 2 and 3. Dozens of detainees tore up their cells, wrenching foot pegs from their toilets and using them to try to pry loose the mesh that separated them. Guards were pulled from the tiers and deployed to surround the perimeter of the blocks. Water and electricity were shut off, and Bumgarner finally got on a bullhorn with an Arabic interpreter to persuade the detainees to be escorted from their ruined cells. The repairs took weeks.

The guard officers were unsure what the detainee leaders had been up to. According to military and intelligence officials, there were indications that Aamer and al-Sharbi had been at odds. Al-Sharbi, the accused Al Qaeda bomb maker, once told a military review panel it was his “honor” to be classified as an enemy combatant, declaring, “May God help me to fight the infidels!” Paradoxically, he was believed to be the more pragmatic negotiator, urging that the detainees try to improve conditions in the camp. But Aamer, who had denied any involvement in militant activities, took a different position. According to the officials, he argued more directly that the detainees should use the talks to pressure the military into either trying them fairly or setting them free.

Aamer told his lawyer the military had “sadly betrayed its word on every occasion a promise has been made.” He blamed the colonel personally. At the time, Bumgarner said, he felt similarly betrayed. But when he recounted the story months later, he sounded merely disappointed. “We almost liked each other,” he said of the two Saudis, Aamer and al-Sharbi. “I shouldn’t say we liked each other, but when we spoke together, there was no animosity.”

By mid-August, the hunger strike that military commanders thought they had resolved was picking up strength. Complaints about living conditions were de-emphasized, military officials and lawyers for the detainees told me. Instead, the prisoners focused on their future legal status. The renewed protest hit a peak just after Sept. 11 of last year, with 131 prisoners refusing meals for at least three straight days, officials said.

Many of the officers doubted that the protesters were willing to take their own lives. Islamic law strongly forbids suicide. Abdulaziz al-Shammari, the Kuwaiti teacher who was one of the most frequent hunger-strikers, said he never considered taking his own life. “We saw that they would not let us die,” he said of the military doctors. “This was merely the most extreme side of the protests.”

Al-Shammari, who has a university degree in Islamic law, was one of a half-dozen more learned detainees to whom others turned for religious rulings on countless problems of their captivity. He said he knew of no relevant exceptions to the prohibition against suicide.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reporting from Guantánamo said that sometime in the late summer of 2005, Saber Lahmar, the Algerian religious leader who served on the six-man council, told other detainees of a fatwa that said it was lawful to take your own life in order to protect state secrets or to defend the common good. Other detainees spoke about the prophetic dream that Shaker Aamer mentioned to Bumgarner, in which three prisoners had to die for the rest to be free, the officials said.

As doctors began to tube-feed the more recalcitrant hunger-strikers, the strike consumed the medical staff. Specialists were flown in from naval hospitals in Florida. Most of the detainees maintained their weight at above or near 80 percent of their so-called ideal body weight. But as the strike dragged on, several slipped below 75 or even 70 percent of that measure, doctors said.

For detainees who obeyed the rules, the military offered new perks. Exercise time was extended once more. On Hood’s instructions, Gatorade and energy bars were given out during recreation periods. Wednesday became pizza night. Guard officers suggested soccer and volleyball tournaments to the compliant detainees in Camp 4. The detainees came back asking that a prize — two-liter bottles of Pepsi — be awarded to the winners. (The detainees disdained Coca-Cola, guards said.) Before the games could begin, however, the detainees changed their minds, the officers said. They had concluded that the contest was a scheme by the military to divide them.

While increasing the incentives for compliance, the colonel also tried to clamp down on disruptive behavior. The segregation and discipline blocks were overhauled. The rules became stricter, the guards tougher. When detainees in segregation tried to shout to one another through the walls, the guards were to turn on large, noisy fans to drown them out.

Worried about Shaker Aamer’s influence, Bumgarner also took an unusual step. In September, he had Aamer moved to Camp Echo, where he would be even more isolated than he would be on the segregation blocks. But Bumgarner did not cut off contacts with the detainee leaders entirely. He approached Zaeef to assure him that he wanted to continue to improve things for compliant detainees. He also developed a rapport with Ghassan al-Sharbi.

Al-Sharbi was described by people who know him as an intelligent, almost ethereal man from a wealthy Saudi family. (In an appearance before a military tribunal, he sat placidly with his hands folded at the defense table and told the presiding officer in plain English: “I’m going to make it easy for you guys. I fought against the United States.”) The colonel said he found al-Sharbi a useful interlocutor and met with him repeatedly. After August, he never spoke with Aamer again.

The guard officers saw some indications that the tougher approach was working. The number of detainees in the discipline and segregation blocks fell substantially. Only later did the officers begin to suspect that the more combative detainees were so focused on the hunger strike that they had little energy for other protests.

VI. The Suicides

To some of Colonel Bumgarner’s officers, it seemed that the latest group of hunger-strikers were being allowed to get too comfortable. They had hospital beds, air-conditioning, attentive nurses and a choice of throat lozenges to ease the pain of their feeding tubes. The arrangement also allowed some of the hospitalized detainees to communicate relatively easily.

By late November, while many of the strikers were maintaining their weight, four or five of them were becoming dangerously malnourished, Dr. Edmondson said. By sucking on their feeding tubes, they had figured out how to siphon out the contents of their stomachs. Others simply vomited after they had been fed.

On Dec. 5, the guard force ordered five “restraint chairs” from a small manufacturer in Iowa. If obdurate detainees could be strapped down during and after their feedings, the guard officers hoped, it might ensure that they digested what they were fed.

Days later, a Navy forensic psychiatrist arrived at Guantánamo, followed by three experts from a Bureau of Prisons medical center in Missouri. Bumgarner said the visitors agreed with him that the strike was a “discipline issue”: “If you don’t eat, it’s the same as an attempted suicide. It’s a violation of camp rules.” In addition to feeding prisoners in the chair, some of the more influential hunger-strikers were sent off to Camp Echo with the hope of weakening the others’ resolve. The number of strikers, which was at 84 in early January, soon fell to a handful.

Lawyers for the detainees were appalled. The lawyers quoted their clients as saying detainees had been strapped into the chairs for several hours at a time, even as they defecated or urinated on themselves. The doctors told me later that they had run out of options. “I would have preferred to have waited,” said Dr. Edmondson, the chief base physician, who other officials said opposed the restraint chairs. But he added, “I seriously believed that we were going to lose one of those guys if we didn’t do something different.”

In the spring of 2006, General Hood and Colonel Bumgarner were suggesting that the mood at Guantánamo had turned. A handful of hunger-strikers were still at it — a few young Saudis and Yemenites, and Ghassan al-Sharbi. But the officers saw them as zealots whose threat to the smooth operation of the camp could be controlled. Otherwise, disciplinary infractions and attacks on the guards were down, they said, and many of the detainees were responding positively to new incentives for good behavior.

In an interview in late March, Hood said he believed that many young Arab detainees — sheltered, passionate young men who had gone to Afghanistan to fight what they thought would be a noble jihad — were beginning to see the light. They hadn’t been radicalized at Guantánamo, he insisted. Rather, as conditions at the camp had improved, their preconceptions about Americans had worn away. “They discover, ‘You guys aren’t so bad.”’

“I think the hard-core people have lost ground over the last four years,” Hood said. “They are clearly losing ground.”

As he prepared to turn over his command in April to Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., Hood was upbeat about the future. “We are going to establish the most world-class detention facilities, and we are going to show the world that we’re doing this right,” he said. “Every provision of the Geneva Conventions related to the safe custody of the detainees is being adhered to. Today at Guantánamo — and, in fact, for a long time — the American people would be proud of the discipline that is demonstrated here.”

Six weeks later, as guards in Camp 1 patrolled one of the blocks, they came upon a detainee comatose in his cell and frothing at the mouth — symptoms of an apparent overdose. “Snowball” — the guards’ radio code for a suicide attempt — was called out over and over. In all, five detainees were found to have ingested medication that they and others had hoarded, and guard officers concluded that at least three were making serious suicide attempts. (Military spokesmen said that only two had really tried to kill themselves.)

Later that afternoon, May 18, a riot broke out among the “highly compliant” detainees in Camp 4 as guards moved to search their dormitories — and their Korans — for pills and other contraband, officials said. Detainees in one block of the camp set on guards who stormed their barracks after another guard saw a staged hanging and mistakenly called out “blizzard,” the code for multiple suicide attempts. The guards’ quick-reaction force fired rounds of rubber bullets and voluminous blasts of pepper spray to contain the disturbance.

Doctors later determined that the detainees had ingested sleeping pills, antianxiety medication and antipsychotics — whatever they could get their hands on. Since none of the men had been prescribed the medicines they took, it was evident that other detainees had colluded in the plan. (A cache of about 20 more pills was later found in one prisoner’s prosthetic leg.) Still, the military authorities seemed uncertain how to respond.

Some officials recalled the detainees’ premonition about three of them having to die. The medical staff tried to more closely monitor detainees with mental-health problems. But that screening apparently did not factor in the possibility that the men might have been determined to kill themselves for other reasons — like loyalty to a cause.

Sometime before midnight on June 9, three young Arab men, who were being held near one another in a single block of Camp 1, moved quietly to the backs of their small cells and began to string up nooses that had been elaborately made from torn linens and clothing. The bright lights had been turned down for the night. Still, the prisoners had to work quickly: guards were supposed to walk the block every three minutes.

After anchoring the nooses in the steel mesh walls of their cells, the three — Mani al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, both Saudis, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, of Yemen — piled clothing under their bedsheets to make it appear that they were asleep. They stuffed wads of fabric into their mouths, either to muffle their cries or perhaps to help themselves suffocate. At least one of the men also bound his legs, military officials said, apparently so he would not be able to kick as he died.

With the nooses pulled over their heads, the prisoners slipped behind blankets they had hung over the back corners of their cells and stepped onto their small, stainless-steel sinks. The drop was short — only about 18 inches — but adequate. By the time they were discovered, doctors surmised, the men had been asphyxiated for at least 20 minutes and probably longer. Military and intelligence officials said it appeared that the other 20-odd prisoners on the block knew that the suicides were being prepared. Some may have prayed with the men, the officials said, and a few may have assisted in carrying out the plan. What is certain is that in contrast to most previous suicide attempts at the camp, none of the detainees made any effort to alert the guards.

When doctors reviewed their files on the three men, they found that none of them had shown signs of depression or other psychological problems. All three had been on hunger strikes — one of them since the previous August — and at least two of them had been evaluated when they abandoned their protests. One doctor recalled one of the men telling him brightly: “I’m sleeping well. I feel well. No problems.”

What the men hoped to communicate by their deaths may have been contained in brief notes they left behind in Arabic. The notes have not been made public, and a Navy investigation into the suicides continues. But military leaders at Guantánamo were not waiting on its outcome. They concluded immediately that the suicides were a blitzkrieg in the detainees’ long campaign of protest. At a news conference hours after the suicides, the new Guantánamo commander, Admiral Harry Harris, described them as an act of “asymmetric warfare.”

VII. Tightening Up

I sat down with Colonel Bumgarner one blazing afternoon in late June, as he was preparing to give up command. He looked tired and stressed, and slumped into a chair in his small, cluttered office. As Shaker Aamer did the previous summer, Bumgarner used words like “trust” and “betrayal.” Bumgarner, at the time we spoke, was briefly suspended from duty while the military investigated whether he improperly disclosed classified information to a North Carolina newspaper reporter who, around the time the suicides occurred, had been in Bumgarner’s headquarters reporting a feature article on the colonel from Kings Mountain. (He was absolved of any wrongdoing.) But he seemed more worried by something else: Had he completely misunderstood the prisoners he was trying to reach?

“We tried to improve their lives to the extent that we can — to the point that we may have gone overboard, not recognizing the real nature of who we’re dealing with,” he said. “I thought they had proven themselves. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not think that they would kill themselves.”

Bumgarner said he could not discuss the suicides because of the Navy’s continuing investigation. But several officials said that the three detainees had taken advantage of some of the colonel’s quality-of-life reforms, including the nighttime dimming of lights and the availability of extra clothing. There were also indications that Ghassan al-Sharbi, the colonel’s onetime interlocutor, had helped plan the suicides, two of the officials said.

Looking back, Col. Kevin Burk, the commander of the military police battalion, said: “With any population like this, you’re going to have a battle. It wasn’t like we were all going to ‘Kumbaya’ together. But we were trying to find that middle ground, where the tension in the camp would even out. As far as we could see, no one had really tried to find that equilibrium before.”

It is unclear if or when the military might try again. By most appearances, Guantánamo has been tightening up. Since the May riot and the suicides, the military has increased security to prevent further disturbances or deaths. In its ruling on the military tribunals in June, the Supreme Court left the government no choice but to abide by the minimum standards of treatment contained in the Geneva Conventions. But what other privileges and freedoms the detainees are allowed may come even more into question as the Guantánamo population is winnowed down to a harder core and joined by the most notorious terror suspects captured by the C.I.A.

One hint of Guantánamo’s future may lie in the retrofitting of Camp 6, the brand-new medium-security facility that was to have opened this summer. Until this spring, the new camp was to embody the sort of conditions Colonel Bumgarner and other officials had hoped to institutionalize, with spaces for communal meals and larger recreation areas where compliant detainees could play soccer and other sports. After the riot and the suicides, the camp was substantially remade. When it eventually opens, military officials said, it will look somewhat more like Camp 5, the maximum-security unit down the road.

Tim Golden, an investigative reporter for The Times, has been writing about terrorism and detention issues since 2004.

September 17, 2006

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Scott Anderson: Besieged

Things were getting back to normal in Tyre. The bomb craters in the main streets had been filled in with dirt, which slowed traffic but at least made passage possible. Some of the town’s more spectacular ruins were already being shoveled into great heaps of rubble. Under the blanching sun of late August, the Lebanese port city — 12 miles north of the Israeli border on the Mediterranean coast — was returning to its usual dog-day rhythms. In the mornings and again in the late afternoons, shoppers crowded the central market, families strolled the corniche, the old seaside promenade, and traffic along Jal al Baher Street, the main thoroughfare on the east side of town, was a honking, barely moving mass. The midday hours, however, were given over to a heat-imposed somnolence. In the old city, residents settled in their leafy courtyards or brought chairs out to the narrow alleys to while away the time with neighbors. The outdoor cafes along the marina filled with men who appeared able to muster only enough energy to smoke. It was a city at rest. Even Tyre’s multitude of cats took part, gathering in bunches to sleep under the shade of parked cars.

But there was also something new in Tyre. Spanning the highway at the northern outskirts of the city stood a high, triumphal arch quickly constructed from wood and yellow cloth. That color featured prominently on the scores of new posters and banners that lined Jal al Baher Street — that were to be found on lampposts and billboards throughout the east side of the city, in fact. The images on these posters varied, as did their slogans, but all ultimately echoed the same thing: praise for Hezbollah, praise for “the divine victory” just won.

It was Aug. 8, and the city had been under attack for 24 days. Sitting on the veranda of her elegant house overlooking the marina of old Tyre, 46-year-old Madona Baradhi was extolling the virtues of her hometown. From a prominent Christian family whose members can trace their roots in Tyre back centuries, Baradhi, an effervescent and congenitally cheerful customer-service representative for the Libano-Française bank, explained that she had traveled much of the world and found no place better.

“Always when I am on vacation,” she said, “the last few days, I just want to come home because I miss Tyre so much.” She waved a hand out over the bay. “Every day I swim, I walk to my job in downtown, I go to the market. And the people here are wonderful — very tolerant and easygoing. We’ve never had any of the difficulties between the different groups like other places in Lebanon.”

Three days earlier, Baradhi’s veranda had afforded her a panoramic view of a predawn, three-hour battle across the bay. Israeli commandos, apparently dropped by helicopter, attacked Hezbollah positions, killing at least eight, then covered their withdrawal by strafing the oceanfront promenade a half-mile away with helicopter gunships. The previous afternoon, she watched as four apartment buildings in the northern, predominantly Shiite suburbs were brought down by heavy Israeli bombs in great clouds of black smoke and brown dust. Even on that early evening, as she sipped espresso on her veranda, the concussion of the explosions on the east side of town, two miles away, were powerful enough to occasionally rattle her home’s windowpanes, to cause its old joints to creak.

“My friends in Beirut keep calling me,” she said. “ ‘Come stay with us. Tyre is so dangerous.’ But no. How can I leave all this?” She waved her hand again over the picturesque marina: no one was moving on its stone walks; the colorful fishing boats had sat in their moorings for weeks.

What appeared to be an almost delusionary optimism may actually have been a practical fatalism, an understanding of the city’s violent history. Tyre’s very geography was formed by war. During the Phoenician era, the heart of the city was an impregnable island fortress just off the coast that withstood countless sieges — until 332 B.C., when one of its besiegers, Alexander the Great, came up with the idea of building a massive stone causeway to the island. The city fell to his men, and over the centuries, drifting sand built up around his causeway, forever linking the island to the mainland.

Tyre’s history is a dizzying saga of rise and fall, periods of splendor followed by ones of abject ruin; the Egyptians, the Romans, the crusaders and the Ottomans all passed through the city, and all left their mark for good or ill. This march of civilizations and armies made Tyre into a complex mosaic of cultures, religious sects and ethnic groups, a multicultural checkerboard that is both the enduring promise and the enduring tragedy of the place: promise because the city’s extraordinarily resilient people always rebuild and patch things over; tragedy because they always have to. In just the past 31 years, the city has endured a civil war, a foreign military occupation, a half-dozen air or naval bombardments and at least two massive suicide bombings.

Despite this sad legacy — perhaps because of it — Tyre has long had a reputation as a relaxed and open-minded place. Residents of all sectarian and political stripes tend to echo Baradhi’s view of their city as a haven of comity and tolerance. What’s more, until mid-July of this year, Tyre appeared on the cusp of a very bright future, about to catch the economic boom that had so transformed Beirut and other Lebanese coastal cities in recent years. Designated a Unesco World Heritage site for its profusion of Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine monuments — among other archaeological highlights, Tyre can lay claim to the world’s largest Roman hippodrome — the municipal government had just embarked on the construction of a new stretch of oceanfront promenade along the neglected south shore of the old city, workers laying tiles and erecting lampposts. Along Jal al Baher Street, construction was under way on a modern shopping mall, while on Tyre’s south bay a small vacant lot had just sold to a hotel consortium for nearly $2 million, a figure that astounded locals but testified to the city’s growing tourist industry and dearth of decent hotel rooms. Tyre did not yet have a Starbucks — so far in Lebanon, those symbols of the arriviste city were limited to Beirut — but by this summer it was easy to imagine that that blessed day was close at hand.

And then, quite literally, a bomb dropped. It happened at about 5:30 on the afternoon of Sunday, July 16, while Madona Baradhi was swimming with her nieces and nephews at the fine, white-sand beach beside the Tyre Rest House, the city’s most exclusive hotel. “It was a very nice day,” she recalled, “hot but not too humid, and a lot of people were in the water. Suddenly, we heard a very loud boom, and when I looked to the city, I saw this great cloud of black smoke rising up from downtown. That’s when we knew Tyre was to be targeted also.”

The signal event that set this in motion came four days earlier, when Hezbollah guerrillas launched a bold assault on an Israeli Army border outpost, killing three soldiers and taking two others prisoner. The Israeli response was predictably swift, if unexpectedly fierce. That same day, the Israeli military carried out airstrikes on some 40 suspected Hezbollah strongholds throughout southern Lebanon, then expanded their targets the following day to include the runways of Beirut’s international airport and highways and bridges throughout the country. When the heavy bomb dropped on Sunday afternoon — it destroyed the top four floors of an apartment building and killed at least 11 — the residents of Tyre knew that, once again, war had come for them.

“Within minutes,” Baradhi said, “everyone had left the beach, and by that night, everyone was leaving Tyre. I could see them from here.” On her veranda, she pointed to a headland four or five miles away. “A solid line of red taillights, everyone going north.”

As it turned out, Baradhi’s decision to stay was not based on simple blithe disregard. By way of explanation, she led me into her study and took a framed photograph down from a bookshelf. In the fall of 1982, when fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian guerrillas turned the old city of Tyre into a pitched battlefield, the Baradhi family was evacuated to the Tyre Rest House. The photograph was taken there: her father looking somewhat befuddled in the foreground; a pensive, young Madona behind; and in the background, a large crowd of other displaced people.

“We were only there a few days,” she said, “but even that was enough to show me what it was like to be a refugee. When we returned, the house had been badly damaged — you can still see the crack in the wall outside. This is why I will not leave now, because in Lebanon you can leave your home and never come back.” She carefully set the photograph back on the shelf. “I look at it very often. I always keep it close to me.”

Baradhi’s decision also pointed up one of the fault lines that runs through the city. In the days after that first bomb was dropped on Tyre, and under a rain of Israeli leaflets ordering its inhabitants to leave, an estimated 95,000 of the city’s 110,000 residents fled north. The pattern of exodus was not uniform, however; instead, it appeared that many calculated who this war’s principal victims were likely to be and made their choice accordingly. The overwhelming majority of Shiite civilians living in the Hezbollah strongholds at the east end of town — close to 100 percent in some districts — understood that they were at ground zero and left. In other parts of the city — in al-Bass, the Palestinian refugee camp closer to downtown, and in the Christian quarter at the westernmost tip of the coast — perhaps half the population remained. As time went on and the violence intensified, this phenomenon lent Tyre a surreal quality: vast urban stretches where nothing moved and no one was seen interspersed with pockets where a modicum of normal life continued, where stores were open and old men gathered in cafes to observe the destruction occurring elsewhere.

To the question of why she supported Hezbollah, Amira Khassem, a 58-year-old shopkeeper, seemed perplexed, as if the answer was utterly self-evident. “Because they are the resistance.” She shrugged. “Because they have brought order.” Khassem evidently saw no contradiction between those two words, “resistance” and “order.” Nor did she seem to appreciate that the “order” Hezbollah had brought to south Lebanon had precipitated a war that had turned much of the region into a battlefield and all but crippled the small grocery store that she and her husband ran in downtown Tyre. Just around the corner from their shop on Abu Deeb Street, two weeks into the war, Israeli warplanes flattened a six-story building reported to be one of Hezbollah’s local command centers, turning the surrounding commercial district into a ghost town. For Khassem, “order” was a good deal simpler.

“As a woman, I used to be very afraid walking alone around here after dark,” she told me in the fourth week of fighting. “With Hezbollah here, I know that now I am completely safe, that nothing will happen to me.”

When I asked her who patrolled the streets prior to Hezbollah, Amira shrugged again. “No one.”

One of the consequences of the 18-year cat-and-mouse war between Hezbollah and the Israeli occupying army in south Lebanon was the collapse of virtually all Lebanese government institutions in the region. It was a void Hezbollah deftly filled. Using money funneled from Iran, Hezbollah established an elaborate social-welfare apparatus — schools, soup kitchens, medical clinics, even law enforcement — designed to meet the needs of its Shiite constituency throughout the country, but most especially in the war-torn south. By the time Israel finally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah had become the de facto government in the region. The party had already joined the Lebanese political process; today, with a tenth of the seats in Parliament, Hezbollah has earned a place in the current coalition government and also, given Lebanon’s political patronage system, the ability to ensure that greater economic benefits flow to its supporters. In essence, then, the Party of God (the literal translation of Hezbollah) has emerged as the bringer of order and services to a chaos and ruin it helped create.

And yet, according to many residents I spoke to, until mid-July of this year, Hezbollah was neither particularly popular nor trusted in the progressive and easygoing streets of Tyre. While Hezbollah members were respected for their social-service programs for the poor and their personal code of conduct — as part of a general morality checklist, members are not supposed to smoke or drink — many city residents felt a lingering unease over the party’s ultimate intentions. The Party of God had long since muted its more radical rhetoric, including its call for an Iranian-style Islamic government in Lebanon, but was it all a ruse to lull their opponents to sleep?

Such fears extended into the Shiite community. In the most recent elections for Tyre City Council, Amal, the other principal Shiite political party in Lebanon, ran a quiet scare campaign suggesting a Hezbollah victory would mean segregated beaches and a ban on outdoor cafes serving alcohol. The tactic apparently worked; in the council elections, the Amal slate (with the support of the Christian minority) swept Hezbollah. Even into the first days of this summer’s war, some in Tyre admitted to a quiet satisfaction that, at last, Hezbollah was getting theirs, that however hard the Israelis might strike their enemies, the Party of God had brought it on themselves by their reckless cross-border adventurism.

That attitude soon changed. With Hezbollah giving Israel a far better fight than anyone had anticipated, and with Israeli warplanes engaging in what most in Tyre viewed as the wanton destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure — highways, bridges, gas stations and power plants throughout the country were bombed — national pride and national anger fused together in support of Hezbollah. In Tyre, the catalyzing moment came with the July 16 apartment-building bombing; the following day, three children were critically injured when Israeli warplanes blew up the canal they were swimming in. After that, even most Hezbollah critics in the city came to regard the Israeli offensive as an attack on the entire Lebanese nation. The militiamen who launched their Katyusha rockets on Israel from the farm fields surrounding Tyre were no longer viewed as the cause of the city’s woes, but as the city’s only defenders.

This sense of civic unity played out in myriad ways. After keeping a lower profile in the early days of the war, the Hezbollah auxiliaries — the teenage spotters on their motor scooters, the bearded functionaries in their 20’s with their walkie-talkies — suddenly were to be found throughout the city, lounging on street corners, calmly walking past police checkpoints. Defiant posters bearing the Hezbollah logo or the likeness of its bearded and bespectacled leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, were pasted to more and more walls and city monuments. Even Chucrallah Nabil Hage, the Maronite archbishop of Tyre and a man who would seem unlikely to be a fellow traveler of Islamic fundamentalism, allowed that Hezbollah was now seen as the chief protector of the city and the nation. “I’ve always had very good relations with them,” he explained to me as we sat in the stone courtyard of his church in the Christian quarter. “They are very forthright and decent men.”

What did not change was the elusiveness of the actual fighters. As arguably the world’s most disciplined and hierarchical guerrilla organization, Hezbollah’s military wing operates with both a cell structure and a pyramid structure: small units of salaried “soldiers” maneuvering independently of one another, occasionally coming together for joint missions ordered by the next rung up the chain of command, their security and secrecy maintained from below by an army of spotters, couriers and neighborhood patrolmen. A walk down a city street that might conceivably lead to a Hezbollah outpost would invariably end — for a journalist, anyway — in a young unarmed man stepping from the shadows to politely, but very firmly, announce that the path forward was “blocked.” In this war, the fighters in the streets were determined to remain almost as invisible as their enemies in the sky.

This vast “neighborhood watch” apparatus also made it very difficult to tell where support left off and coercion began. Any interviews attempted in public settings — in a refugee camp, for example — would usually lead to a young man with a close-cropped beard suddenly appearing at the periphery, casually taking note of the questions asked and the answers given. Even Hezbollah supporters who lauded the movement’s social-services programs in their district became visibly nervous if asked for help in locating an actual recipient, as if even this benign peek into the organization might be a breach of the rules on the street.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this code of silence centered on the conflict’s victims. In their “all front” war with Israel, Hezbollah had meticulously planned for the psychological dimension, and it appeared that a crucial component in this was to minimize the reporting of their battlefield casualties. On this front, they were able to rely on the support — or acquiescence — of the local medical establishment. While journalists were routinely allowed access to those hospital wards containing wounded women and children, other wards — presumably those housing adult males — were off-limits, blocked by orderlies or the requisite bearded young men. The same pattern extended to the dead: occasionally ghoulish public displays of the torn bodies of obvious civilians and a curious absence of those of fighting-age men.

Each car in the long convoy was crammed to overflowing — women, children, the elderly — and as they passed, all stared back with wide, uncomprehending eyes. They were coming from a cluster of villages at the extreme southwest corner of Lebanon, flush on the border with Israel, and for the past two and a half weeks, they had sheltered in basements and root cellars as their communities on the war’s front lines were pounded into rubble. Taking advantage of a lull in the fighting, they had chosen that day — July 31 — to make their escape, fastening strips of white cloth to their cars’ antennas and falling in behind a small United Nations convoy heading for Tyre.

The reason for the lull was itself rooted in tragedy. The previous morning, Israeli warplanes bombed a home at the edge of Qana, a small town eight miles southeast of Tyre, in the basement of which two extended families had taken shelter; by the time rescue workers were finished, 28 bodies — 16 of them children — had been pulled from the ruins. By perverse coincidence, Qana was the same town where Israeli artillery killed 108 residents seeking refuge in a United Nations compound during the 1996 incursion known as Operation Grapes of Wrath.

In response to the outcry over the bombing, Israel had announced a 48-hour suspension of “offensive” aerial operations. While no one was quite sure what that meant, throughout south Lebanon, rescue workers struggled to reach those who had been trapped by the fighting and get them out. Where many of them were taken was to the four-story U.N.-administered school in al-Bass, the Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre that had long ago become more like a Palestinian neighborhood. If it struck anyone as ironic that Lebanese should seek sanctuary in a Palestinian refugee camp, it was actually an irony that didn’t end there; al-Bass was originally a refugee camp for Armenians escaping the genocide in Turkey in 1915, a purpose that changed only with the flood of displaced Palestinians into Lebanon following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Farouz Atamian, a 51-year-old sanitation worker for the municipal government and one of the last Armenians in al-Bass, has lived there his entire life. “It’s very nice here,” he told me during the war, while sitting in the small garden of his ramshackle home. “We have more room than most of the others because we are one of the original families in the camp.”

Among the estimated 10,000 Palestinian inhabitants of al-Bass, there seemed to be a kind of collective discomfiture over what was happening in their adopted home, a sense that while this wasn’t technically their fight, perhaps it should be. After all, Hezbollah was taking on the “Zionist entity” and doing very well, and this was the same enemy the Palestinians had battled with far less success for 58 years.

Their sideline status in this fight could partly be attributed to the historical schism that runs through Islam — Hezbollah is Shiite, Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunni — but it also underscored the troubled position they hold generally in Lebanon. Seen by many Lebanese of all persuasions as a destabilizing force in the country, Palestinians are often held to blame for the 1975 civil war and even more for historically using Lebanon as a base to attack Israel, then offering only feeble resistance in the face of Israel’s periodic and ruinous retaliatory attacks. As many Shiites in Tyre will point out, usually with a touch of pride, it was the Palestinian presence that provoked the 1982 Israeli invasion that so devastated their city, while it was Shiite militiamen — precursors to Hezbollah — who dealt the invaders their greatest blow: the successive bombings of Israel’s two command centers in downtown Tyre in 1982 and 1983 that together killed 135 Israeli soldiers, events still referred to in Israeli military circles as the first and second Tyre catastrophes.

“In this war against Israeli aggression, we all have our roles to perform,” explained Abu Hussein Ali Salem, a craggy-faced man of 66 who is one of the “civic leaders” of al-Bass camp. “So far, Hezbollah has taken the lead on the battlefield, and we” — the Palestinians — “are contributing from behind: by taking care of the wounded, the refugees. That, of course, could change at any time. If we feel our place is on the battlefield, we are all prepared to go.”

As a younger man, Salem explained, he had been a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the militant Palestinian guerrilla organization responsible for many of the more spectacular terror attacks against Israel in the 1970’s. He claimed to have taken three Israeli soldiers prisoner during the bitter battle for Tyre in 1982 and subsequently to have executed them. “It was at the north end of the city,” he said, “and I was cut off from my unit. The Israelis were advancing, and I had to leave, so I just turned to them with my machine gun — pffft.” He swept a gnarled finger before him. “I had tried to talk to them before, but they never said a word. They died right there.”

There was something slightly unconvincing about this story — or perhaps it had just dulled in the telling over the years. In any event, Salem professed to be more interested in the future. “If the Israelis come to al-Bass, it will be their graveyard. All of us here are ready to fight — and we will fight them as well as Hezbollah.”

During Israel’s air-war suspension, several thousand refugees had come into Tyre from the southern villages. Most continued up the coastal highway to Sidon or Beirut, determined to get as far away as possible from the principal battle zone, generally delineated as everywhere south of the Litani River. Nevertheless, a more buoyant mood began to spread among many who remained in Tyre, a seeping optimism that the respite might be the harbinger of a general cease-fire. Those hopes ended when, just before the close of the 48-hour window, Israel resumed its airstrikes on the city’s outskirts.

On the first day of the resumption of the fighting, I dropped by the U.N. school in al-Bass camp to talk with some of the newly arrived refugees. Each classroom had been taken over by several families — usually grouped together by their home village — and set in neat stacks were whatever meager belongings they had managed to grab up in their flight: blankets, plastic bags filled with clothes. In the corridors outside, a surprising number of elderly women paced or sat slumped against the walls, many of them muttering to themselves or to anyone who came into their range.

At about 4 p.m., the building reverberated from the sound of four very loud bangs — apparently nonlethal concussion grenades detonated close by — and at one corner of the school courtyard, girls began running into one another’s arms, screaming and crying. More girls kept rushing in to join the group, the hysteria infectious, until perhaps 40 of them were mashed together in one small, screaming knot. A man hurried over and began pulling the girls free, yanking them from each other’s arms one by one, as if he were breaking up a fight.

On the morning of Aug. 3, a small crowd of doctors, orderlies and volunteers from the Lebanese Red Cross milled about the parking lot of the government hospital in al-Bass. They had gathered there to perform a mass burial. Muslim custom holds that the dead should be buried in their home villages, and quickly — on the day of their death whenever possible. But that tradition had now collapsed in south Lebanon. Because of both the sheer numbers of victims and the exodus from the region that the war had sparked — often, there were no family members around to perform the ceremony — bodies were being brought to the government hospital in al-Bass and warehoused in two refrigerated trucks outside its gates.

Hospital administrators had already performed one mass burial in late July. A backhoe had cut two long trenches in a nearby field, the 72 dead were set down in neat rows — each coffin identified by a number so it could eventually be reinterred in the home village of the deceased — and then the trenches were filled in, the whole task completed in a couple of hours.

By early August, however, the trucks were full again. Off to one side of the hospital parking lot, stacks of coffins for future victims were piled five and six high, maybe 100 in all. As proper wood had long since disappeared from Tyre, these were made from cheap shelving material — particleboard topped by a thin veneer of white plastic — and affixed with simple stainless-steel door handles for lifting. The local Palestinian carpenter who had constructed most of the coffins, Ali Hussein Firmawi, estimated that they cost $40 apiece and that he had already built around 185.

“They only take about 10 minutes to make,” he said. “A little longer for the children, because those sizes aren’t standard.” He was not at all proud of his work, he explained — to build a proper coffin took weeks — but the need was urgent, and he had no choice in the matter.

After much conferring, the hospital administrators decided to postpone the burial because of “the security situation”; there was a lot of shelling around the city that morning, and a large gathering of people might draw the notice of the Israeli warplanes and drones overhead. Over the coming days, there would be more postponements, and the odor emanating from the trucks would grow until it permeated a wide swath of al-Bass camp.

Tyre now became a city closing in on itself. Against the near-constant thrumming of invisible Israeli spy drones — a sound very much like a lawnmower — the Hezbollah fighters on the outskirts of town and in neighboring villages launched ever more Katyusha rockets toward Israel, drawing ever more Israeli bombing raids in response. As the city grew increasingly isolated from the outside world, rumors became the currency on the streets: there was about to be a peace deal; Israel had finally launched its much-delayed ground offensive; Hezbollah had Israeli forces pinned down just inside the border; the Israelis were sweeping north and might be in Tyre within hours.

The pace of events only added to a general sense of fatigue and disorientation. In the predawn of Aug. 5, there came the Israeli commando raid that Madona Baradhi witnessed, and later that same morning, a missile attack on Jal al Baher Street that killed two young men on their motor scooters. The next afternoon, Israeli missiles hit several cars on the coastal road, their occupants apparently trying to run the gantlet out of the city. Rumors floated back that a family was killed trying to follow an International Red Cross convoy out of town; an alternate rumor held that the car had been coming the other way and traveling alone and that the missile had wounded two.

Along with a cluster of doctors and nurses and other journalists, I was waiting by the emergency-room entrance of Jabal Amel hospital for those coastal-road casualties to be brought in when there came a terrific bang very close by. Two hundred yards down Jal al Baher Street, two Israeli antipersonnel missiles had exploded, and amid a swirl of brown dust and leaves torn from a nearby tree, a wounded man lay on his back in the street. He had just raised his right arm and appeared to be trying to stand when a third missile came in, lifting him six feet in the air and catapulting him face down onto the sidewalk. Incredibly, the man still clung to life, his mouth gasping for air, his severed right arm lying amid a sprawl of plastic coffee cups and shredded leaves. Within minutes, an ambulance arrived to take him up to the Jabal Amel emergency room, where, with one last shudder, he finally died. Nurses quickly wrapped his body in thick plastic sheeting.

The situation just kept getting worse. On Aug. 7, the Israeli military announced a ban on all vehicular traffic south of the Litani River. The sole exception, they said, would be medical vehicles with prior approval — although Israel wasn’t giving approval to anyone, so the point was moot. The ban meant that the city’s problems, already dire, were about to have a cascading effect. With all gas and oil deliveries cut off for nearly a month, its hospitals and ambulances were operating on emergency backup supplies — and they, too, would start running out in another week or so. With stores of insulin dwindling, Tyre’s diabetics might soon start dying. With thousands of refugees crowded into the city’s schools and the sanitation system collapsing — to say nothing of the still-unburied bodies decomposing at the edge of al-Bass camp — there was growing concern of an epidemic.

“So right now, we’re experiencing a humanitarian crisis,” Dr. Ghassan Farran, a member of Tyre’s city council, told me on Aug. 8. “Very soon, it will be a catastrophe.” Somehow things got worse yet — Israeli warplanes destroyed the last small bridge across the Litani. A fallen tree was maneuvered into place to span the breach, but even this merely underscored a remarkable fact: the only way in or out of a city that had once been home to more than 100,000 people was now across a single 18-inch-wide log.

And then on Aug. 12, the Israeli and Lebanese governments finally agreed to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, Resolution 1701. After one last furious exchange that continued right until the moment the cease-fire took effect, the guns and rockets and warplanes fell silent over southern Lebanon.

Within the air-conditioned confines of her office in the Libano-Française bank, Madona Baradhi was in a fine mood. Just over a week into the cease-fire, most of the residents of Tyre had come back from their temporary exiles. The central market was filled with shoppers, and the candy vendors had returned to their little stands on the northern corniche.

“Everything must come to an end,” she said, “and so it has with this war.” Still, Baradhi admitted, it had been a trying week. Each day since the bank reopened had brought a steady stream of people into her office who had lost everything and were trying to figure out how to rebuild their lives again. “They are taking out their savings, their pensions, trying to arrange loans — so many people. That is why I say the Lebanese are both the winners and losers in this war. We are the winners because we resisted Israel, but we are also the losers for how much we suffered.”

As to the question on everyone’s mind — whether the cease-fire would lead to an extended period of peace, or was merely a prelude to the next round of war — Baradhi, like many in Tyre, was philosophical. “Of course, I hope for peace, but it depends on the people, the choice they make.”

In the Shiite neighborhoods on the east side of Tyre, that choice appeared to have already been made. With its “sacred victory” over Israel, support for Hezbollah had soared, and the Party of God was riding that crest both by maintaining its defiant stand and by, once again, being seen as the chief provider to those in need. In the war-damaged neighborhoods, as in the ruined villages throughout the south, Hezbollah engineers were surveying the damage that had been done and drawing up blueprints for reconstruction, while the party’s field representatives were handing out cash payments to the homeless. As for Hezbollah ever surrendering its weapons to the incoming Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers — both the most crucial and contentious point in the debate over Resolution 1701 — the idea was met with derision by the group’s supporters.

“Why should the winners give up their weapons?” asked Moen Zaidan, an orange-juice seller on Abu Deeb Street. “That never happens in war. No, Hezbollah knows it must keep its weapons to prepare for the next war.” As for when that war might come, Zaidan claimed to have a reliable guide. “We’ll know it’s starting by what happens in Kiryat Shemona,” he said, referring to the town in northern Israel that has been a frequent target of Hezbollah’s rockets. “Because we are in a balance with them. If the Israeli Army moves back there, then we’ll know it’s about to happen.”

In this part of town, few seemed to doubt that war would break out again; the real topic of discussion was when. Perhaps this cease-fire would last for a few weeks, perhaps for a few years, but at some point, the missiles between Hezbollah and Israel would start flying again. In the meantime, Ali Hussein Firmawi, the Palestinian coffin maker, was staying busy. With the cease-fire, his open-ended work order with the municipal government to build temporary coffins had come to an end, but, he said, he had recently been commissioned to build 40 more.

“For Hezbollah,” he explained outside his small carpentry shop in al-Bass. “These are to be of much better quality than the other ones. And the good thing about Hezbollah, they always pay upfront, and in cash.”

Scott Anderson has covered numerous wars for the magazine. His last article was about National Guardsmen returning from Iraq.

September 3, 2006

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