At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.

The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner's custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi's death as a "homicide," meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.

After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding-the near-drowning of a suspect-have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on "Meet the Press," said that the government might have to go to "the dark side" in handling terrorist suspects, adding, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.") The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.

This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad-among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan-John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their "nationality or physical location." On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain's proposal, the Senate voted 90-9 in favor of it.

Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.'s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the "flexibility" to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain's bill, permitting brutal methods when "such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack." A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney's visit, calling him the "Vice-President for Torture." In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain's proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee.

The outcome of this wider political debate may play a role in determining the fate of Swanner, whose name has not been publicly disclosed before, and who declined several requests to be interviewed. Passage of the McCain legislation by both Houses of Congress would mean that there is strong political opposition to the abusive treatment of prisoners, and would put increased pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute interrogators like Swanner-who could conceivably be charged with assault, negligent manslaughter, or torture. Swanner's lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, declined to discuss his case on the record. But he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year.

Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by Navy SEALs at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2003, after a violent struggle at his house, outside Baghdad. Jamadi savagely fought one of the SEALs before being subdued in his kitchen; during the altercation, his stove fell on them. The C.I.A. had identified him as a "high-value" target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October, 2003. After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to C.I.A. custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead.

For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as "Clint C." He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his coöperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.

In the spring of 2004, the fact of pervasive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib became public, on "60 Minutes II" and in a series of articles in these pages by Seymour M. Hersh. Photographs, taken by U.S. soldiers, that showed Iraqi prisoners being hooded, sexually humiliated, and threatened with dogs were published around the world. One of the most harrowing images was of Jamadi's severely battered corpse, which had been wrapped in plastic and put on ice; he became known in the media as the Ice Man.

Around this time, John Helgerson, the C.I.A.'s inspector general, sent investigators to Iraq and San Diego to interview witnesses about the agency's role in Jamadi's death. These investigators determined that there was the possibility of criminality-the threshold level required by the intelligence agency in order for the case to be referred to the Justice Department. The agency did so, and officials in the Justice Department then forwarded the case to the office of Paul McNulty, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over C.I.A. headquarters. The dossier has been there for more than a year. A lawyer familiar with the case, who asked not to be named, said that the Swanner file seemed to be "lying kind of fallow."

A spokeswoman for McNulty said that he would have no comment on the case, because it was still under investigation. (Last month, President Bush nominated McNulty to the position of Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful job in the Justice Department.) No other official in the Justice Department would discuss on the record why, more than two years after Jamadi's death, no decision has been made about pressing charges against anyone.

A government official familiar with the case, who declined to be named, indicated that establishing guilt in the case might be complicated, because of Jamadi's rough handling by the SEALs before he entered the custody of the C.I.A. Yet, in the past two years, several of the Navy SEALs who captured Jamadi and delivered him to C.I.A. officials have faced abuse charges in military-justice proceedings, and have been exonerated. Moreover, three medical experts who have examined Jamadi's case told me that the injuries he sustained from the SEALs could not have caused his death.

Fred Hitz, who served as the C.I.A.'s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, and who is now a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, said of Bush Administration officials, "I just think they're playing stall ball." He told me that he had no inside knowledge of the Swanner case, but he believes that, for numerous reasons, ranging from protecting national security to avoiding political embarrassment, Administration officials "would be opposed to any accountability in this case. They want it to disappear off the screen." (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said that its internal investigation into Jamadi's death was "nearly complete," making it "inappropriate to discuss any of the details.")

John Radsan, a lawyer formerly in the C.I.A's Office of General Counsel, says, "Along with the usual problems of dealing with classified information in a criminal case, this could open a can of worms if a C.I.A. official in this case got indicted-a big fat can of worms about what set of rules apply to people like Jamadi. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What has been authorized? Can the C.I.A. torture people? A case like this opens up Pandora's box."

Since September 11, 2001, the C.I.A.'s treatment and interrogation of terrorist suspects has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. Human-rights groups estimate that some ten thousand foreign suspects are being held in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and other countries. A small but unknown part of this population is in the custody of the C.I.A., which, as Dana Priest reported recently in the Washington Post, has operated secret prisons in Thailand and in Eastern Europe. It is also unclear how seriously the agency deals with allegations of prisoner abuse. The C.I.A. tends to be careful about following strict legal procedures, including the briefing of the top-ranking members of the congressional intelligence committees on its covert activities. But experts could recall no instance of a C.I.A. officer being tried in a public courtroom for manslaughter or murder. Thomas Powers, the author of two books about the C.I.A., told me, "I've never heard of anyone at the C.I.A. being convicted of a killing." He added that a case such as Jamadi's had awkward political implications. "Is the C.I.A. capable of addressing an illegal killing by its own hands?" he asked. "My guess is not." Whereas the military has subjected itself to a dozen internal investigations in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has punished more than two hundred soldiers for wrongdoing, the agency has undertaken almost no public self-examination.

The C.I.A. has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, including that of Jamadi, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases involving abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department. In March, Goss, the C.I.A.'s director, testified before Congress that "we don't do torture," and the agency's press office issued a release stating, "All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture. . . . C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice. If an individual violates the policy, then he or she will be held accountable."

Yet the government has brought charges against only one person affiliated with the agency: David Passaro, a low-level contract employee, not a full-fledged C.I.A. officer. In 2003, Passaro, while interrogating an Afghan prisoner, allegedly beat him with a flashlight so severely that he eventually died from his injuries. In two other incidents of prisoner abuse, the Times reported last month, charges probably will not be brought against C.I.A. personnel: the 2003 case of an Iraqi prisoner who was forced head first into a sleeping bag, then beaten; and the 2002 abuse of an Afghan prisoner who froze to death after being stripped and chained to the floor of a concrete cell. (The C.I.A. supervisor involved in the latter case was subsequently promoted.)

One reason these C.I.A. officials may not be facing charges is that, in recent years, the Justice Department has established a strikingly narrow definition of torture. In August, 2002, the department's Office of Legal Counsel sent a memo on interrogations to the White House, which argued that a coercive technique was torture only when it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer. By implication, all lesser forms of physical and psychological mistreatment-what critics have called "torture lite"-were legal. The memo also said that torture was illegal only when it could be proved that the interrogator intended to cause the required level of pain. And it provided interrogators with another large exemption: torture might be acceptable if an interrogator was acting in accordance with military "necessity." A source familiar with the memo's origins, who declined to speak on the record, said that it "was written as an immunity, a blank check." In 2004, the "torture memo," as it became known, was leaked, complicating the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General; as White House counsel, Gonzales had approved the memo. The Administration subsequently revised the guidelines, using language that seemed more restrictive. But a little-noticed footnote protected the coercive methods permitted by the "torture memo," stating that they did not violate the "standards set forth in this memorandum."

The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was "breathtaking," the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous "enhanced" interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. Like the torture memo, these documents are believed to have been signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, but written by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who is now a professor of law at Berkeley.

For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. "We need to know what was authorized," Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. "Was it waterboarding? The use of dogs? Stripping detainees? . . . The refusal to give us these documents is totally inexcusable." Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. "The Administration is getting away with just saying no," he went on. "There's no claim of executive privilege. There's no claim of national security-we've offered to keep it classified. It's just bullshit. They just don't want us to know what they're doing, or have done."

By the summer of 2003, the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had grown into a confounding and lethal insurrection, and the Pentagon and the White House were pressing C.I.A. agents and members of the Special Forces to get the kind of intelligence needed to crush it. On orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Geoffrey Miller, who had overseen coercive interrogations of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo, imposed similar methods at Abu Ghraib. In October of that year, however-a month before Jamadi's death-the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Iraqi insurgents were covered by the Geneva Conventions, which require the humane treatment of prisoners and forbid coercive interrogations. The ruling reversed an earlier interpretation, which had concluded, erroneously, that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law.

As a result of these contradictory mandates from Washington, the rules of engagement at Abu Ghraib became muddy, and the tactics grew increasingly ad hoc. Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., told me, "Abu Ghraib has its roots at the top. I think this uncertainty about who was and who was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and all this talk that they're all terrorists, bred the climate in which this kind of abuse takes place."

At Abu Ghraib, the confusion over interrogation and detention methods was compounded by the fact that C.I.A. officials worked side by side with U.S. military people. Colonel Janis Karpinski, a former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the administration of Abu Ghraib during the period of widespread abuse, has said that C.I.A. officers, along with contract interpreters and some military-intelligence officers, did not wear uniforms when they visited the prison, and it was not clear, even to her, what they were doing there. "I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians I didn't know," she told Seymour Hersh. "I called them disappearing ghosts. . . . They were always bringing in somebody for interrogation, or waiting to collect somebody going out." C.I.A. officials, unlike members of the Army and the Navy, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits "cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of" prisoners.

Walter Diaz, a military policeman, was on guard duty at Abu Ghraib the morning that Jamadi was delivered to the prison. He told me, "The O.G.A."- "other government agencies," initials commonly used to protect the identity of the C.I.A.-"would bring in people all the time to interview them. We had one wing, Tier One Alpha, reserved for the O.G.A. They'd have maybe twenty people there at a time." He went on, "They were their prisoners. They'd get into a room and lock it up. We, as soldiers, didn't get involved. We'd lock the door for them and leave. We didn't know what they were doing." But, he recalled, "we heard a lot of screaming."

Considering this level of secrecy, it's doubtful that any details would have emerged about the C.I.A.'s role in Jamadi's death had it not been for a strange and tangential chain of events. Three months after Jamadi died, Jeffrey Hopper, a Navy SEAL who had been assigned to carry out joint operations with the C.I.A. in Baghdad, was accused of stealing another SEAL's body armor. Hopper, who had been nicknamed Klepto by the unit, was expelled from the Special Forces. When he was dismissed, he told authorities that he knew of far worse offenses committed by other SEALs, and he cited the abuse of several prisoners, including Jamadi. His accusations formed the basis of multiple charges against several SEALs, which led to the court-martial of Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, the commander of the platoon that captured Jamadi, for, among other things, allowing his troops to assault the prisoner. Last May, Ledford was acquitted of any wrongdoing; but during the hearings, which were open, a number of troubling facts spilled out, hinting at the C.I.A.'s role in Jamadi's death.

Seth Hettena, an Associated Press reporter based in San Diego, California, attended the hearings. The courtroom testimony, he reported, indicated that Jamadi, before arriving at Abu Ghraib, was interrogated "in a rough manner" by a combination of SEALs and C.I.A. personnel in "the Romper Room," a tiny space in the Navy camp at Baghdad International Airport. Swanner was among those present. One of the SEALs testified that after Jamadi was handcuffed a C.I.A. interrogator rammed "his arm up against the detainee's chest, pressing on him with all his weight." According to a recent report by John McChesney on National Public Radio, a C.I.A. guard who witnessed the scene later told investigators that, after stripping Jamadi and dousing him in cold water, a C.I.A. interrogator threatened to "barbecue" him if he didn't talk. Jamadi reportedly moaned, "I'm dying, I'm dying." The interrogator replied, "You'll be wishing you were dying."

Court testimony also established that Jamadi was "body-slammed" by the SEALs into the back of a Humvee before being delivered to Abu Ghraib. During this time, he was handcuffed. "Was he a threat?" a Navy prosecutor asked one of the SEALs on trial. "No, ma'am," the SEAL conceded.

Soon after the Associated Press published Hettena's Romper Room story, two unidentified officials, evidently from the C.I.A., appeared in the courtroom. From that point on, Hettena told me, the officials, who did not give their names, protested when the testimony touched on matters sensitive to the C.I.A. In many instances, reporters and other members of the public were required to leave the courtroom. On another occasion, an unidentified C.I.A. witness testified from behind a blue curtain. Several areas of questioning by defense lawyers for the SEALs were ruled off limits. When one of the defense lawyers, Matthew Freedus, asked a witness, "What position was Jamadi in when he died?," the C.I.A. representatives protested, saying that the answer was classified. The same objection was made when a question was asked about the role that water had played in Jamadi's interrogation.

By late last spring, the SEALs' reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their rough treatment of Jamadi, but they were cleared of the gravest abuse charges. The question of who was responsible for Jamadi's death remained unanswered. Milt Silverman, one of the defense attorneys, told me, "Who killed Jamadi? I know it wasn't any of the SEALs. . . . That's why their cases got dismissed." Frank Spinner, a civilian lawyer who represented Ledford, said, "There's a stronger case against the C.I.A. than there is against Ledford. But the military's being hung out to dry while the C.I.A. skates. I want a public accounting, whether in a trial, a hearing before a congressional committee, or a public report. There's got to be something more meaningful than sticking the case in a Justice Department drawer."

Spinner and several of the other defense lawyers learned more about the C.I.A.'s role in Jamadi's death than they were supposed to know, owing to a classification error made by the agency. The C.I.A. sent hundreds of pages of material on Jamadi's death to the Navy; much of it was classified, and all of it was marked unclassified. The pages were passed on to the civilian lawyers, who read them carefully. The agency, after realizing its mistake, demanded that the lawyers return the classified material, and subsequently sealed virtually all the court records relating to the case. Some of the C.I.A. documents, however, were seen by a source familiar with the case, who shared their contents with me.

Manadel al-Jamadi arrived at Abu Ghraib naked from the waist down, according to an eyewitness, Jason Kenner, an M.P. with the 372nd Military Police Company. In a statement to C.I.A. investigators, Kenner recalled that Jamadi had been stripped of his pants, underpants, socks, and shoes, arriving in only a purple T-shirt and a purple jacket, and with a green plastic sandbag completely covering his head. Nevertheless, Kenner told C.I.A. investigators, "the prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine, and his speech was normal." The plastic "flex cuffs" on Jamadi's wrists were so tight, however, that Kenner had trouble cutting them off when they were replaced with steel handcuffs and Jamadi's hands were secured behind his back.

Staff Sergeant Mark Nagy, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, was also on duty at Abu Ghraib when Jamadi arrived. According to the classified internal documents, he told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi seemed "lucid," noting that he was "talking during intake." Nagy said that Jamadi was "not combative" when he was placed in a holding cell, and that he "responded to commands." In Nagy's opinion, there was "no need to get physical with him."

Kenner told the investigators that, "minutes" after Jamadi was placed in the holding cell, an "interrogator"-later identified as Swanner-began "yelling at him, trying to find where some weapons were." Kenner said that he could see Jamadi through the open door of the holding cell, "in a seated position like a scared child." The yelling went on, he said, for five or ten minutes. At some point, Kenner said, Swanner and his translator "removed the prisoner's jacket and shirt," leaving him naked. He added that he saw no injuries or bruises. Soon afterward, the M.P.s were told by Swanner and the translator to "take the prisoner to Tier One," the agency's interrogation wing. The M.P.s dressed Jamadi in a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, keeping the sandbag over his head, and walked him to the shower room there for interrogation. Kenner said that Jamadi put up "no resistance."

On the way, Nagy noticed that Jamadi was "groaning and breathing heavily, as if he was out of breath." Walter Diaz, the M.P. who had been on guard duty at the prison, told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi showed "no distress or complaints on the way to the shower room." But he told me that he, too, noticed that Jamadi was having "breathing problems." An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The C.I.A. officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive "medical attention."

"Jamadi was basically a 'ghost prisoner,' " a former investigator on the case, who declined to be named, told me. "He wasn't checked into the facility. People like this, they just bring 'em in, and use the facility for interrogations. The lower-ranking enlisted guys there just followed the orders from O.G.A. There was no booking process."

According to Kenner's testimony, when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that "he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall." (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi's arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window.

The Associated Press quoted an expert who described the position in which Jamadi died as a form of torture known as "Palestinian hanging," in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms. (The technique has allegedly been used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) The M.P.s' sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn't kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.

Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, "This guy doesn't want to coöperate." According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi's knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, "At first I was, like, 'This guy's drunk.' He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He's got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists-it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets."

Swanner, whom Diaz described as a "kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy," who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. "He was saying, 'He's just playing dead,' " Diaz recalled. "He thought he was faking. He wasn't worried at all." While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner "just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer."

Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just "playing possum." But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi's body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he "had never seen anyone's arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn't just pop out of their sockets."

Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi's hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi's open eyes, which didn't move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, "blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on."

Swanner, who had seemed so unperturbed, suddenly appeared "surprised" and "dumbfounded," according to Frost. He began talking about how Jamadi had fought and resisted the entire way to the prison. He also made calls on his cell phone. Within minutes, Diaz said, four or five additional O.G.A. officers, also dressed in black, arrived on the scene.

Dr. Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota, who is writing a study of U.S. medical practices during the war on terrorism, has examined the Jamadi incident extensively. He recently recounted to me what happened that morning: "An Iraqi medical doctor working with the C.I.A. confirmed Jamadi's death. Captain Donald Reese, the commander of Abu Ghraib M.P.s, came to the shower room and heard Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of military intelligence at the prison, say, 'I am not going down for this alone.' "

C.I.A. personnel ordered that Jamadi's body be kept in the shower room until the next morning. The corpse was packed in ice and bound with tape, apparently in an attempt to slow its decomposition and, Miles believes, to try to alter the perceived time of death. The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for pictures while stooping over Jamadi's body, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. The next day, a medic inserted an I.V. in Jamadi's arm, put the body on a stretcher, and took it out of the prison as if Jamadi were merely ill, so as to "not upset the other detainees." Other interrogators, Miles said, "were told that Jamadi had died of a heart attack." (There is no medical evidence that Jamadi experienced heart failure.) A military-intelligence officer later recounted that a local taxi-driver was paid to take away Jamadi's body.

Before leaving, Frost told investigators, Swanner confided that he "did not get any information out of the prisoner." C.I.A. officials took with them the bloodied hood that had covered Jamadi's head; it was later thrown away. "They destroyed evidence, and failed to preserve the scene of the crime," Spinner, the lawyer for one of the Navy SEALs, said.

The next day, Swanner gave a statement to Army investigators, stressing that he hadn't laid a hand on Jamadi, and hadn't done anything wrong. "Clint C.," the translator, also said that Swanner hadn't beaten Jamadi. "I don't think anybody intended the guy to die," a former investigator on the case, who asked not to be identified, told me. But he believes that the decision to shackle Jamadi to the window reflected an intent to cause suffering. (Under American and international law, intent is central to assessing criminality in war-crimes and torture cases.) The C.I.A., he said, "put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals coöperation."

The autopsy, performed by military pathologists five days later, classified Jamadi's death as a homicide, saying that the cause of death was "compromised respiration" and "blunt force injuries" to Jamadi's head and torso. But it appears that the pathologists who performed the autopsy were unaware that Jamadi had been shackled to a high window. When a description of Jamadi's position was shared with two of the country's most prominent medical examiners-both of whom volunteered to review the autopsy report free, at the request of a lawyer representing one of the SEALs-their conclusion was different. Miles, independently, concurred.

One of those examiners, Dr. Michael Baden, who is the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, told me, "What struck me was that Jamadi was alive and well when he walked into the prison. The SEALs were accused of causing head injuries before he arrived, but he had no significant head injuries-certainly no brain injuries that would have caused death." Jamadi's bruises, he said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, "He also had injuries to his ribs. You don't die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way and had broken ribs, that's different." In his judgment, "asphyxia is what he died from-as in a crucifixion." Baden, who had inspected a plastic bag of the type that was placed over Jamadi's head, said that the bag "could have impaired his breath, but he couldn't have died from that alone." Of greater concern, he thought, was Jamadi's position. "If his hands were pulled up five feet-that's to his neck. That's pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It's not only painful-it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there's less oxygen entering the bloodstream." A person in such a state would first lose consciousness, he said, and eventually would die. The hood, he suggested, would likely have compounded the problem, because the interrogators "can't see his face if he's turning blue. We see a lot about a patient's condition by looking at his face. By putting that goddam hood on, they can't see if he's conscious." It also "doesn't permit them to know when he died." The bottom line, Baden said, is that Jamadi "didn't die as a result of any injury he got before getting to the prison."

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical doctor and a lawyer who is the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, independently reached the same conclusion. The interpretation put forward by the military pathologists, he said, "didn't fit with their own report. They said he died of blunt-force trauma, yet there was no significant evidence of trauma to the head." Instead, Wecht believes that Jamadi "died of compromised respiration," and that "the position the body was in would have been the cause of death." He added, "Mind you, I'm not a critic of the Iraq war. But I don't think we should reduce ourselves to the insurgents' barbaric levels."

Walter Diaz told me, "Someone should be charged. If Jamadi was already handcuffed, there was no reason to treat the guy the way they did-the way they hung him." Diaz said he didn't know if Swanner had intended to torture Jamadi, or whether the death was accidental. But he was troubled by the government's inaction, and by what he saw as the agency's attempt at a coverup. "They tried to blame the SEALs. The C.I.A. had a big role in this. But you know the C.I.A.-who's going to go against them?"

According to Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the C.I.A., now a private-practice lawyer who handles national-security cases, a decision to prosecute Swanner "would probably go all the way up to the Attorney General." Critics of the Administration, such as John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, question whether Alberto Gonzales, who became Attorney General last year, has too many conflicts of interest to weigh the case against Swanner fairly. Sifton said, "It's hard to imagine the current leadership pursuing these guys, because the head of the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, is centrally implicated in crafting the policies that led to the abuse." He suggested that the prudent thing for Gonzales to do would be to "recuse himself from such a decision, and leave it to a deputy, or a career officer."

But there are political conflicts here, too. It is in the office of Paul McNulty-whose nomination to become Gonzales's deputy will soon be presented to Congress, and who was a Republican congressional staff member before being named a U.S. Attorney-that the Jamadi case has stalled. And Alice Fisher, the new head of the Justice Department's criminal division, got that job only under a recess appointment; during her confirmation hearings, Fisher, who previously handled counter-terrorism cases for the department, refused to provide all the information requested about her knowledge of C.I.A. prisoner abuse, and Congress did not approve her nomination.

Even more troubling is the possibility that, under the Bush Administration's secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws. Jeffrey Smith says it's possible that the Office of Legal Counsel's memos may have opened too many loopholes for interrogators like Swanner, "making prosecution somehow too hard to do." Smith added, "But, even under the expanded definition of torture, I don't see how someone beaten with his hands bound, who then died while hanging-how that could be legal. I'd be embarrassed if anyone argued that it was."

Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. Before his tenure ended, he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, "You can't imagine what it's like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left." He went on, "It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy."

Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass. Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin's cause-which led to last month's confrontation with Cheney and Goss. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American.

"I'm concerned that the government isn't going forward on these prosecutions," Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases. "It's really hard to follow the Administration's policies here. I think the world was very simple before 9/11. We knew what the law was, and I understood it to apply to everyone in the government. Now there's real uncertainty. There's a shadow over our nation that needs lifting."

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The Experiment: Torture Methods at Guantanamo
By Jane Mayer
The New Yorker

11 and 18 November 2005 Issues

The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?
On a steamy morning last month, as Congress was debating the treatment of the approximately five hundred terrorist suspects being held inside the United States-run military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a small delegation of American officials led a tour through one of the prison camp's empty cellblocks. The International Committee of the Red Cross has made inspections of the site, the results of which it keeps confidential, and a few dozen American lawyers have had limited visits with detainees. Yet most of the prisoners, who come from some forty countries, have been held virtually incommunicado, without legal charges, for three and a half years.

The cellblock, which had been fashioned from steel shipping crates, resembled a horse barn. Six-foot-by-eight-foot cells, with walls and doors of metal mesh, stood in two facing rows. The cells were protected by a low metal roof but were open to the tropical air. Each door featured a narrow slot, at waist height, through which meals and other items could be handed to detainees, and handcuffs and belly chains could be secured. The first cell on the right was laid out like a display model, with neatly folded prison garb and an array of what the officials called "comfort items"-awarded to detainees for good behavior, or confiscated as punishment. Among these luxuries was a roll of toilet paper. The cell was furnished with a thin plastic-covered mattress on a metal slab; a metal sink; a metal toilet; and a surgical mask, which could be hung from the wall, allowing a detainee to store a small Koran inside it.

"I'd be proud to let the media see anything in this camp," Colonel Mike Bumgarner, the commander of the Joint Detention Operations Group, the military unit that oversees the daily handling of detainees, said. "I'd gladly invite the world in to see our guards in action. I'm very proud of what they do. They treat the detainees humanely." Meals, he said, were excellent. "They get honey-glazed chicken and rice pilaf. They get lemon-baked fish." He noted that some detainees don't like to have their vegetables touching their meat: "So we serve them separately, in little Styrofoam clamshells, like the ones you get at a fast-food restaurant." He went on, "We have to be like the parents here. In loco parentis. That's how we look at it. It's like a big family."

As we reached the end of the cellblock, hysterical shouts, in broken English, erupted from a caged exercise area nearby. "Come here!" a man screamed. "See here! They are liars!" He was middle-aged, with a full beard and skinny bow legs, and wore an orange shirt and shorts. ("Privileged"-that is, coöperative-detainees wear white or beige uniforms.) "No sleep!" he yelled. "No food! No medicine! No doctor! Everybody sick here!" A soldier near the detainee began ferociously signalling to the officials leading the tour to usher me out. As I was leaving, the detainee pointed to his own cellblock, which was off limits to journalists, and screamed, "They are liars! Liars! Liars!"

"His English is pretty good," one official joked wanly.

The military officials who run the Guantánamo prison maintain that almost all of the detainees' charges are untrue. A training manual written by Al Qaeda leaders, which is known as the Manchester Manual, because a copy of it was confiscated during a 2000 raid in England, counsels Islamists to "complain of mistreatment while in prison" and say that "torture was inflicted on them." Bumgarner said, "They are trained to make false accusations. It's part of their P.R."

Brigadier General Jay W. Hood, the top commander of the camp, has worked to improve administrative control since taking over, in March, 2004. He has implemented random inspections of the cellblocks, to insure that "standard operating procedures" are being followed, and he has banished regular "cavity searches" for detainees. Lawyers and human-rights workers say that detainees are being treated less harshly, although their mental state continues to deteriorate. In an interview, Hood said that there have been "no demonstrated or consistent trends of abuse" inside Guantánamo, and "certainly nothing rising to the level of torture." From the beginning, however, the Guantánamo Bay prison camp was conceived by the Bush Administration as a place that could operate outside the system of national and international laws that normally govern the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Soon after September 11th, the Administration argued that the Guantánamo site, which America had been leasing from the Cuban government since 1903, was not bound by the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, the Administration claimed that terrorist suspects detained at the site were not ordinary criminals or prisoners of war; rather, they would be classified under a new rubric, "unlawful combatants." This new class of suspects would be tried not in U.S. courts but in military tribunals, the Administration announced. In February, 2002, President Bush issued a broad directive that required American troops to treat detainees "humanely," in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions, within the limits of "military necessity." A year later, he explicitly denounced the use of torture.

A series of internal Department of Defense investigations found what General Hood described as "isolated cases where individuals hadn't followed standard operating procedures." Many of the incidents addressed by the Pentagon had been widely reported in the media, making the camp a focus of international outrage. In one case, a female interrogator, attempting to unsettle a Muslim detainee, smeared fake menstrual blood on him. And on five separate occasions Korans were defiled; one soldier urinated through a ventilation shaft, splashing the text-accidentally, according to the Pentagon. (This spring, Newsweek reported that military investigators had evidence that guards at Guantánamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet. The Bush Administration adamantly denied the charge, and, ultimately, the magazine admitted that it did not have sufficient sourcing to stand by the story.) In each acknowledged case of impropriety at Guantánamo, Hood stressed, the transgressors had been reprimanded, but he doubted that their actions could be said to "rise to the level of abuse."

Last year, Vice-Admiral Albert T. Church III was appointed by the Pentagon to investigate the problem of detainee abuse. This spring, he released a three-hundred-and-sixty-eight-page report, most of which remains classified. In an unclassified section, Church concluded that there was "no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse." When cruelties did occur, the report claimed, they were rare mishaps, the result of combat stress, insufficient oversight, or a "breakdown of good order and discipline."

Yet a number of critics, including human-rights officials, detainees' lawyers, and others with knowledge of the inner workings of the detention center, believe that the problems at Guantánamo are the result of a more systematic effort. The strange accounts of torment that have steadily emerged, these critics say, are connected to decades of research by American scientists into the psychological nature of warfare and captivity. The research, which began during the Cold War, developed new currency after September 11th, when the Bush Administration declared a global war on terror and began trying to extract intelligence from radical Islamists, many of whom have been trained not to reveal anything about their activities. Since 2001, the critics say, medical and scientific personnel have played a role, largely hidden, in helping to design and monitor interrogations that are intended to exploit the physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees. According to a former interrogator at Guantánamo who was interviewed at length by a lawyer, behavioral scientists control the most minute details of interrogations, to the point of decreeing, in the case of one detainee, that he would be given seven squares of toilet paper per day.

"It is both illegal and deeply unethical to use techniques that profoundly disrupt someone's personality," Leonard S. Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that has been critical of the Bush Administration, says. "But that's precisely what interrogators are doing, in order to try to get people to talk."

Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School, in Newark, New Jersey, represents a Guantánamo detainee named Murat Kurnaz, a twenty-three-year-old Turkish citizen who was born in Germany. Kurnaz, who was apprehended while on a trip to Pakistan, has been detained in Guantánamo since 2002. Azmy told me that Kurnaz has complained of being sexually taunted by female interrogators who, he said, offered to have sex with him in exchange for giving information. When one woman began embracing him from behind, Kurnaz said, he turned and head-butted her. According to Kurnaz, he was then beaten by members of the Initial Reaction Forces, a military-police squad that patrols the cellblocks. Kurnaz claimed that he was made to lie on the floor, with his hands cuffed behind his back, for nearly a day. He also told Azmy that he was threatened with starvation and forcibly injected with unknown and debilitating drugs. (All of Kurnaz's charges have been denied by U.S. authorities.) Azmy told me, "These psychological gambits are obviously not isolated events. They're prevalent and systematic. They're tried, measured, and charted. These are ways to humiliate and disorient the detainees. The whole place appears to be one giant human experiment."

Concrete evidence of the medical and psychological mistreatment of detainees is all but impossible to obtain, in part because the Justice Department, in contravention of all national and international norms, has repeatedly blocked attempts by lawyers to get copies of detainees' medical records. "Prisoners, even terrorists, have the right to their medical records, according to federal laws, common laws, the American Medical Association, and court trials," Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, says. In an interview at Guantánamo Bay, Dr. John S. Edmondson, a Navy captain who oversees the facility's medical command, denied that he had refused to turn over medical records. "I believe we've complied with the requests that have reached me," he said. A respect for confidentiality, he said, prevented him from specifying the names of detainees whose medical records he had released. Yet Rob Kirsch, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Hale, who represents six Guantánamo detainees, provided me with a file of letters from the Justice Department denying him access to his clients' medical records, even though he had obtained waivers from the clients authorizing their records to be released to him. "They still wouldn't let us see the records," he said. Kirsch contends that at Guantánamo medical care is sometimes withheld or dispensed depending on a detainee's willingness to talk to interrogators. All his clients, he said, have made this complaint, despite having had no opportunity to talk to one another. One of his clients, Mustafa Ait Idir, was deemed resistant by guards, and they allegedly broke two of his fingers; Idir was not allowed to see a doctor after the incident, Kirsch said, and his hand is now severely misshapen. (Kirsch visited Idir at Guantánamo several times after the hand was damaged.) All six of Kirsch's clients have requested dental care to no avail. One client's teeth were so damaged that he was unable to eat regular food; after dental treatment was withheld, the prisoner requested a soft-food diet, which tasted so bad that he lost forty pounds. Edmondson denied that care had been deliberately withheld from any detainee. He also denied that medical professionals under his command had colluded with interrogators.

Scott Sullivan, a lawyer at Allen & Overy, a firm that represents eleven detainees from Yemen, alleged that medics under Edmondson's command routinely violated codes of medical ethics. For example, medics supervised the beating of one of his clients, Saeed Abdullah Sarim, he said. After Sarim was hit repeatedly in the face, an English-speaking detainee nearby allegedly told him that a medic had tried to calibrate the abuse, saying, "Hit him around the eye, not in the eye." After the beating, according to a report compiled by Sullivan's firm, Sarim asked a nurse for stitches. The nurse, Sarim said in the report, "did not answer me and did not treat the wound."

Another client of Sullivan's, Abdul Aziz al-Swidi, claimed to have been interrogated by a psychiatrist, who allegedly showed him a picture of a telephone and asked him what it was. When Swidi answered that it was a telephone, the psychiatrist angrily responded, "It's not a telephone-it's a bomb!" Swidi was shown other images and asked to identify them, and each time he was told that his answer was wrong. The goal of the exercise, Sullivan believes, was to make Swidi think that he was going crazy. ("We have no records or reports of this allegation," a Guantánamo spokesman said.)

Last month, a report in the Times said that doctors at Guantánamo had provided interrogators with information from some detainees' medical records. In one case, interrogators were told that a detainee had a profound fear of the dark, and ways were suggested to exploit this phobia, in order to break down the detainee's resistance to questioning. Also last month, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that a military policy statement instructed caregivers at Guantánamo to offer clinical information to interrogation teams on request. And last year a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, parts of which were leaked to the Washington Post, charged that doctors consulted detainee medical records to help interrogators, in a "flagrant violation of medical ethics." Edmondson said that the Red Cross's charges were wrong, but he added that national-security concerns might sometimes justify the breaching of a detainee's medical confidentiality.

The role of physicians, who take the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm," is ethically complicated in wartime. Doctors are often described as having "dual loyalties," to patients and to country. But at the Nuremberg trials, after the Second World War, revulsion at Nazi atrocities led to the establishment of rules barring medical mistreatment, even for reasons of national security. A section of the 1950 Geneva Convention, for example, states that "no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned." In 1962, the U.S. passed the first law requiring doctors to obtain "informed consent" from patients. And in 1975 the World Medical Association, or W.M.A., issued the Declaration of Tokyo, which barred medical personnel from participation in either torture or abuse, even as monitors. The American Medical Association is a member of the W.M.A., which means that U.S. doctors must follow its ethical standards.

In June, the Pentagon released a new set of formal ethical guidelines, titled "Medical Program Principles and Procedures for the Protection and Treatment of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the United States." The document, which was issued by Dr. William Winkenwerder, Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, stresses the importance of upholding "the humane treatment of detainees." It states that "health-care personnel charged with the medical care of detainees" cannot participate in interrogations. In this phrase is embedded a troubling loophole, however: scientific and medical personnel who are not directly responsible for a patient's care may take part in interrogations. Leonard Rubenstein, of Physicians for Human Rights, argues that "the Administration has basically given a green light for medical personnel to participate in abuse."

Winkenwerder, who formerly worked in the insurance industry, argues that most of the detainees have never received better care than they have been getting at Guantánamo. The Pentagon, he told me, took extraordinary pains to insure that detainees were treated in compliance with medical ethics and American values, and he presented statistics showing that last year Guantánamo detainees got more frequent medical treatment than most Americans. A state-of-the-art field hospital had been set up on the periphery of the prison camp, he said, and trained Navy medical corpsmen checked on the detainees' health and welfare three times a week. "A lot of good people are being besmirched by these stories," he said, referring to media reports that have described abuses of detainees at Guantánamo.

Winkenwerder did acknowledge, however, that a number of medical and scientific personnel working at Guantánamo-including psychologists and psychiatrists-are not providing care for detainees. Rather, these "non-treating" professionals have been using their skills to "assist the interrogators," as he put it.

People working in this advisory capacity are members of what are called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or bscts. (In military jargon, the teams are known as "Biscuits.") In past wars, the U.S. military has used health-care consultants for therapeutic purposes, to evaluate the combat readiness of soldiers with psychological or physiological problems, and to provide soldiers with counselling and psychotropic drugs. But Major General Geoffrey D. Miller-who commanded the Guantánamo Bay detention center between November, 2002, and March, 2004, and who was then sent by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to manage Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq-established a new role for health-care advisers. "These teams, comprised of operational behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists, are essential in developing integrated interrogation strategies and assessing interrogation intelligence production," Miller explained in an internal report in September, 2003.

Winkenwerder told me that bsct members are not under his command; rather, they fall under military intelligence. He said that he knew little about the program's daily operations but had heard that a number of bsct psychologists and psychiatrists had received specialized training. "It's connected to some military acronym," he said. "Something to do with Survival and Evasion."

Winkenwerder was referring to a Pentagon-funded program known as sere, which stands for "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape." sere was created by the Air Force, at the end of the Korean War, to teach pilots and other personnel considered at high risk of being captured by enemy forces how to withstand and resist extreme forms of abuse. After the Vietnam War, the program was expanded to the Army and the Navy. Most details of the program's curriculum are classified.

Each branch of the military now has its own version of sere training. The flagship program is conducted by the Army's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Green Berets train. There are several levels of sere courses; one, Level C, includes a gruelling exercise in which trainees endure days of physical and psychological hardship inside a mock prisoner-of-war camp.

This spring, I spoke at length with several people familiar with the sere programs, including a longtime affiliate. According to these sources, a small number of psychologists and other clinicians oversee the sere program at Fort Bragg. The supervisors discreetly check on trainees' progress at frequent intervals, keeping extensive charts and records of their behavior and medical status. Numerous experiments aimed at documenting trainees' stress levels have been conducted by sere-affiliated scientists. By analyzing blood and saliva, they have charted fluctuations in trainees' level of cortisol, a stress hormone, and these data have been used to understand what inspires maximum anxiety in the trainees.

The theory behind the sere program is that soldiers who are exposed to nightmarish treatment during training will be better equipped to deal with such terrors should they face them in the real world. Accordingly, the program is a storehouse of knowledge about coercive methods of interrogation. One way to stimulate acute anxiety, sere scientists have learned, is to create an environment of radical uncertainty: trainees are hooded; their sleep patterns are disrupted; they are starved for extended periods; they are stripped of their clothes; they are exposed to extreme temperatures; and they are subjected to harsh interrogations by officials impersonating enemy captors. (Colonel Hans Bush, a spokesman at Fort Bragg, declined to "disclose the details of the specific challenges our students face.") Research in social psychology has shown that a person's capacity for "self-regulation"-the ability to moderate or control his own behavior-can be substantially undermined in situations of high anxiety. If, for instance, a prisoner of war is trying to avoid revealing secrets to enemy interrogators, he is much less likely to succeed if he has been deprived of sleep or is struggling to ignore intense pain.

According to the sere affiliate and two other sources familiar with the program, after September 11th several psychologists versed in sere techniques began advising interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of these psychologists essentially "tried to reverse-engineer" the sere program, as the affiliate put it. "They took good knowledge and used it in a bad way," another of the sources said. Interrogators and bsct members at Guantánamo adopted coercive techniques similar to those employed in the sere program. Ideas intended to help Americans resist abuse spread to Americans who used them to perpetrate abuse. Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia, is a scholar of state-sponsored experiments on humans. He says, "If you know how to help people who are stressed, then you also know how to stress people, in order to get them to talk."

Carol Darby, a spokeswoman at Fort Bragg, said that the sere program has not deviated from its original purpose. In an e-mail, she wrote, "sere training is not designed and it does not teach anyone how to interrogate individuals. Students who go through sere are taught methods to resist interrogation techniques that may be used against them; they are taught how to respond when they are on the receiving end of interrogation."

Yet many of the interrogation methods used in sere training seem to have been applied at Guantánamo. One component of the training program, called the "religious dilemma," parallels Guantánamo detainees' chronic complaints about Koran abuse. At sere, trainees in the Level C course are given the choice of seeing a Bible desecrated or revealing secrets to interrogators. "They are challenging your faith," the sere affiliate explained. "The Holy Book is torn up. They say they'll stop if you talk. Sometimes they rip the Bible and throw it in the air." The goal is to make detainees react emotionally to the desecration. Some trainees who are devout Christians become profoundly disturbed during the exercise.