A photo of bin al-Shibh’s arrest last month shows him surrounded by an entourage of stern soldiers, his hands cuffed behind his back, his eyes blindfolded with a swath of white cloth. Dressed in a dark T-shirt, the frail-framed, 30-year-old Yemeni national was quickly ushered to an undisclosed location, where, two weeks later, the State Department said, he began to provide the United States with “valuable information.”

Bin al-Shibh’s trajectory from combatant to captive to informant may seem surprising given his die-hard religious zealotry. But he is not the only member of al-Qaida who has begun to crack. Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking operative in captivity, has also shared bits of information about the terrorist organization since his capture this spring. So has Omar al-Faruq, al-Qaida’s Southeast Asia point man, whose confessions three months after his arrest in June ominously portended the recent bombing of a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali.

How are such hardened militants made to reveal what they know? The classic interrogation scene in novels and movies features a harsh, hot light, a lone chair in a bare room, an ominous voice demanding again and again Tell us what you know. Resistance brings more severe measures — drugs, brainwashing, torture.

Which, if any, of these techniques or others the United States is using in its quest to pry information from al-Qaida members is impossible to say. The Pentagon, CIA and FBI have been highly guarded about their interrogation procedures. In an interview with Salon, an FBI spokesperson would not even verify which of the three government agencies was involved in questioning the prisoners, or whether a joint interrogation command had been established to coordinate the activities. One thing U.S. officials have said, though, is that extracting information from al-Qaida captives has been tough. In their iron dedication to their cause, which has the status of jihad or holy war, al-Qaida prisoners have proven to be disciplined and highly resilient to questioning. “They know precisely what they are doing,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this summer. “They are very well trained in interrogation techniques.”

If the training and dedication of al-Qaida operatives are partly responsible for their silence, so may their interrogators’ shortcomings. According to a new congressional intelligence report, the interrogation effort at Camp X-Ray on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba has been beset by a host of problems, such as inadequate training and a lack of linguistically competent interrogators. Moreover, outside experts note, the camp has failed to follow basic procedures like isolating prisoners.

With the Bali nightclub bombing and other deadly attacks this month being linked to al-Qaida, U.S. intelligence agencies are under even greater pressure to get results. And clearly, it seems, the fastest way may be to take a tougher stand in the interrogation chamber. Though no evidence suggests that the U.S. is directly engaging in torture, scattered reports corroborated by knowledgeable security experts suggest the U.S. has in some cases has helped steer captured combatants to third countries known for their brutal interrogation methods — raising the specter of U.S. complicity in torture.

While such complicity would violate both U.S. and international law, some observers have begun to make a once taboo argument: America needs to get even tougher. To prevent a deadly attack on the scale of those on Sept. 11, they say, American investigators must use the most forceful methods available to them in the interrogation chamber — including torture, if the circumstances dictate it. This view is openly espoused by only a few, but the fact that it is being discussed at all is significant.

Whatever the debate, one thing is certain: Since the last major allied offensive in Afghanistan ending in March, a fight that once took place in street skirmishes and mountain strongholds has shifted into the realm of psychology. Storming mental redoubts has become as critical as blasting through physical ones, if not more so.

One of the classic techniques used by captors to get their prisoner to talk is to subject him to isolation and disorientation. “When they took bin al-Shibh, they brought him to a place blindfolded so he had no idea where in the world he was,” Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA officer who specialized in counter-terrorism, told Salon. “There was nothing recognizable in terms of his surroundings. He couldn’t look out and see palm trees waving and feel the breeze and see the ocean lapping. They’re depriving him of awareness of his surroundings, awareness of what’s going on in the world, any access to news, for example. That was certainly the technique used with Abu Zubaydah, as well.”

This is a decades-old strategy. It was articulated as far back as 1963, in a top-secret CIA manual on counterintelligence interrogation published under the codename KUBARK: “The effect of arrest and detention, and particularly of solitary confinement, is to deprive the subject of many or most of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed.” The manual, recently declassified, goes on to cite the work of John C. Lilly, a psychiatrist who studied the experiences of polar explorers and lone sailors. “The symptoms most commonly produced by isolation,” Lilly found, “are superstition, intense love of any other living thing, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, hallucinations, and delusions.” The manual notes that there is no single rule of design for interrogation rooms but that the decor should generally be sparse and free of distracting items such as telephones or computers.

Although officials familiar with the interrogation process say they do not expect a hardened militant like bin al-Shibh to develop “intense love” for his enemies, the hope is that by divorcing the prisoner from everything he knows, he will eventually become psychologically reliant on the interrogator. Experts say that after numerous days of solitary confinement, a person will experience a nearly irresistible need to communicate with another human being — making isolation a key way to break a prisoner’s lockjaw silence, one of the biggest barriers in an interrogation. If the atmosphere is right, says former CIA officer Art Hulnick, who interrogated North Korean defectors after the Korean war, “the subject suddenly finds that he is comfortable with you; he develops a certain kind of affinity for you, and he becomes dependent on you.”

This can often mean beginning with a friendly gesture to develop the right rapport. But experts stress each case is different. Building dependency is only one aspect of a potentially three-pronged approach to breaking down an individual’s resistance during a hostile interrogation. The psychiatric literature referenced in the 1963 CIA manual argues that most prisoners, while under physical or psychological stress, will respond by experiencing debility, dependency and dread, otherwise known as the “DDD syndrome.” When cultivated to the appropriate level, the manual says, this syndrome can be effective in softening a subject up so that he or she is willing to share information. “If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”

Debility, dependency and dread can be produced in a variety of ways, many short of torture. “The exploitation of the source’s emotion can be either harsh or gentle in application (hand and body movements, actual physical contact such as a hand on the shoulder for reassurance, or even silence are all useful techniques that the interrogator may have to bring into play),” explains a declassified 1987 Army field manual. “The number of approach techniques is limited only by the interrogator’s imagination and skill. Almost any ruse or deception is useable as long as the provisions of the Geneva Conventions are not violated.”

The Bush administration, in insisting that captured al-Qaida operatives are not “prisoners of war,” has tried to create for itself an escape hatch from the international law governing POW treatment. The Conventions state that a “prisoner of war” is required to tell his captors only his name, rank, military unit and serial number. “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure information from them of any kind, whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

It’s unlikely that U.S. intelligence officers are following those rules to the letter, but experts say al-Qaida combatants in U.S. custody probably aren’t being tortured either. “No, they’re not sticking bamboo shoots under their toenails, or anything like that,” says Cannistraro, the former CIA officer. “But they are trying to play psychological games with them.” These games can be as well known as the good-cop, bad-cop routine, and as unusual as asking an aggressive but nonsensical line of questioning to disorient the subject, or playing with the prisoner’s sense of time by keeping him in rooms with clocks that give wildly different times. “They’ll say, al-Qaida is finished, your boss is dead — fairly typical stuff,” said Cannistraro. “If you want to call it psychological coercion, that’s about the extent of it.”

Of course, at some point those techniques can cross that hazy threshold where psychological coercion ends and physical coercion begins. Prolonged isolation for the sake of getting someone to talk is, by definition, physical punishment. A CIA training manual used during the early 1980s  but officially repudiated in 1985 — repeatedly advises against physical torture, but it recommends compelling an uncooperative prisoner “to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time,” because “pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.”

A commonly employed approach today appears to be sleep deprivation. Although it violates the letter of the Geneva Conventions, numerous press reports state that it is being used to break al-Qaida prisoners’ will to resist. An unnamed U.S. counter-terrorism official interviewed by Time magazine, for instance, said that Omar al-Faruq, the Southeast Asia al-Qaida operative, was subjected to “three months of psychological interrogation tactics,” which included isolation and sleep deprivation. Al-Faruq remained practically silent the entire time, until he finally started talking in September.

“There are many ways to keep a prisoner awake — you can have him move from room to room, again and again, for example, or use continuous loud music,” said Mike Ritz, a former Army interrogator, who said sleep deprivation was a common technique. Anyone who avoids sleep for two straight days will begin to experience a certain involuntary shift in thinking. MRI images show that the brain, in struggling to remain alert, will desperately transfer functions from one place to another: An area that may generally handle mathematics, for instance, will begin to process verbal abilities. But even these hapless synaptic swaps prove futile. There is a breakdown point no one can avoid. “In laboratory studies, every person who remains awake for more than 44 hours shows some significant impairment,” a recent report conducted for the U.S. military observes. “This includes highly trained and motivated professionals.”

The Pentagon has studied this phenomenon for the sake of better understanding how its own troops can survive high-stress situations. But the lessons are transferable. A soldier on the field and a prisoner in the interrogation room both get tired in the same way. Prolonged lack of sleep causes “a marked reduction in motivation,” according to the scientific report, titled “Sustained Carrier Operations: Sleep Loss, Performance, and Fatigue Countermeasures”: “Army field studies involving total sleep deprivation indicate that commanders often need to resort to persuasion to keep troops performing.”

Before Sept. 11, investigators in Manchester, England, seized an al-Qaida operations manual. The manual’s cover is innocuous: intertwining floral motifs envelop its entire front surface, to which a torn label is affixed. On the label, a handwritten message in Arabic warns: “It is forbidden to remove this from the house.” The first page makes the intent of the book clear: An ink drawing shows a sword violently piercing a globe that prominently features Africa and the Middle East. The title reads, “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.”

This 180-page document opens with a telling quote, one demonstrating the mindset that men like bin al-Shibh are likely to bring to questioning. “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates,” it begins. “But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon, and the machine-gun.” The passage then goes on to observe that Islamic governments have never been established by peaceful means and that the only way to do so is “by pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth.”

In clinical language, the manual sets out various methods of assassination, forgery and the cultivating of poisons. Chapter 17 provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to outsmart hostile interrogators. Captured al-Qaida members are told that the first order of business is to evaluate the environment and determine the nature of their interlocutors. The imprisoned fighter is commanded to recognize that there are fundamental differences between hostile interrogations and legal questioning, and knowing the psychological terrain is critical before devising the right strategy.

For most of the recently detained al-Qaida combatants, that terrain is not a matter for much confusion. They have been seized in the mountain battles or street gunfights that have unfolded across Afghanistan and Pakistan during the past year. They do not need to determine whether they are material witnesses or criminal suspects in, say, the police or FBI roundups that have marked previous terrorism investigations. They are prisoners of war, despite Washington’s aversion to the term. Most have been corralled behind Camp X-Ray’s razor-wire-tipped fencing; their interrogations occur in one of several windowless buildings constructed from panels of unvarnished wood, located just outside the compound. In high-profile situations such as Operation Enduring Freedom, al-Qaida militants are warned, “interrogation would be more severe.” But the manual explains that severity is likely to come in phases. “In the beginning, the brother may not be treated harshly, but rather kindly. He may be offered a chair with a cup of tea, or a drink. Then he would be asked to recall information that is useful to the interrogators.” This insight mirrors U.S. interrogation training. As Robert Newman, a former Marine who questioned Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf war, explains, different situations require different approaches, but the importance of building rapport at the outset cannot be underestimated: “Be his friend and show general concern for his well-being.” The declassified CIA guidebook on interrogations also endorses this initial approach: “So simple a matter as greeting an interrogatee by his name at the opening of the session establishes in his mind the comforting awareness that he is considered a person, not a squeezable sponge.”

But the lesson to captured Islamic brethren continues by pointing out that a lack of cooperation can quickly force the interview into a less friendly atmosphere. “If the brother refuses to offer any information and denies that he knows anything, he is then treated harshly,” the manual explains. “He and his family may be cursed; he may be forced into submission by following orders such as: face the wall, don’t talk, don’t raise your voice. All of that is to frighten the brother. The brother should refuse to supply any information and deny his knowledge of the subject in question. Further, the brother should disobey the interrogator’s orders as much as he can by raising his voice, cursing the interrogator back, and refusing to face the wall. The interrogator would resort to beating the brother in order to force him to obey. Thus, that attempt would fail.”

Earning a beating may seem like a strange measure of success. But in the highly sensitive interplay of personalities and egos that make an interrogation, it can demonstrate that the prisoner is seizing control of the situation, said Ritz, who now instructs civilians in interrogation procedures at Team Delta, a private company. Army and intelligence training stress that the interrogator should never relinquish command of the interview; he should at all times prevent the prisoner from exploiting his emotions. “The interrogator should appear to be the one who controls all aspects of the interrogation to include the lighting, heating, and configuration of the interrogation room,” a declassified Army field manual advises. Losing that control means losing the opportunity to obtain vital information. “It’s a strange technique, but it kills a lot of valuable time,” said Ritz. “If an interrogator loses his detachment, it almost certainly means you have to start all over again, usually with another officer.”

Elsewhere, the al-Qaida manual warns that interrogators may plant “suspicion among the brothers” by playing them off each other. It prepares militants to gird against isolation: “Security may leave you for long periods of time without asking you any questions in order to break your will and determination.” It recommends “patience, steadfastness, and silence about any information whatsoever. That is very difficult except for those who take refuge in Allah.” It advises on how to deal with torture: “Pretend that the pain is severe by bending over and crying loudly.” And it even advocates turning the tables on one’s captors, if possible, by gleaning any worthwhile information from the situation: An interrogation can be “a major opportunity for the [Islamic] group as long as the brother is tactful, bright, and observant.” In other words, just because you have been captured, that does not mean the fight is over; that does not mean you should succumb to hopelessness or resignation. Even in prison, resistance has a purpose.

“If Qaida operatives are being trained with manuals like the one obtained in England, that makes them a force to reckon with in the interrogation booth,” says Ritz. Indeed, failures at Camp X-Ray have become so commonplace they have bestowed a certain irony to the compound’s name. Throughout the year, military and intelligence officials, by their own admission, have had difficulty penetrating the minds of Afghan and Arab prisoners held at the 45-square-mile U.S. Caribbean base.

This summer, in a report accompanying the 2003 House Intelligence Authorization Act, members of the Intelligence Committee observed that Camp X-Ray’s “interrogation efforts have been hampered by a lack of appropriate training, a dearth of language-skilled personnel, and a lack of depth and breadth of analytic expertise.” The Senate’s version of this report has yet to be released, but sources familiar with its contents say it will express similar concerns. Some outside analysts note that an additional problem is the overall structure of the compound, which doesn’t keep prisoners segregated. As already noted, this breaks a cardinal rule of interrogation: isolating the subject. Al-Qaida training puts great emphasis on teamwork, a quality deemed “God’s command” by initiates. Practically speaking, this means that combatants permitted contact with each other will most likely coordinate their stories. “They can reinforce each other,” said Cannistraro. “I don’t think that’s worked out for the investigators very well.”

Camp X-Ray officers still do not know whether members of an entire group of prisoners are Taliban or al-Qaida or belong to some other organization, Lt. Col. David Lepan, a Pentagon spokesman, told Salon. The lack of significant progress has caused some former intelligence and military officials to argue that unless intransigent combatants face “credible threats” — an admittedly ambiguous expression — they will never start sharing valuable information. “What do they have to gain by talking now? Nothing,” said Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer who spent most of his 21 years at the agency investigating terrorism. “I mean, these people are smart enough to know that they’re not going to cut a deal by admitting that they’re members of al-Qaida. They know they’ll be prosecuted whether they cooperate or not. It’s better just to keep your mouth shut and say you’re a simple aid worker in Pakistan.”

Success in gaining information from high-level operatives held in isolation has been better than with the detainees at Camp X-Ray, although it is not clear by how much. For instance, Abu Zubaydah is said to have inadvertently provided interrogators with information about a key Sept. 11 planner, a Kuwaiti named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But that may have been something of an exception. When Zubaydah fingered Jose Padilla, the “Dirty Bomber,” as one of al-Qaida’s men in America, many terrorism experts suspected that was simply a ploy to distract investigators. “Jose Padilla is a throwaway,” said Cannistraro. “He was not involved in any core al-Qaida operations or projects they felt a great deal of sensitivity about.”

Other top al-Qaida captives also appear to be giving modified versions of what they know — or, in some cases, what experts believe they should know. (Given the terrorist organization’s loose structure, it is difficult to judge to what extent this is out of cunning or ignorance.) Omar al-Faruq, the top al-Qaida man in Southeast Asia, had warned investigators that attacks like the Bali bombing were in the making; meanwhile bin al-Shibh, during his interrogations, has given greater details about the Sept. 11 attacks, including the possibility that a fifth hijacking was planned for that day, according to the New York Times. But experts say those, too, are small victories. Although al-Faruq spoke of the possibility of an attack in Indonesia, he clearly did not give information specific enough to prevent the bombing, which killed nearly 200 people. Likewise, bin al-Shibh has provided “only fragmentary information” about last September’s attacks and current al-Qaida activities, the Times said. From interrogations with John Walker Lindh, investigators already had suspected that al-Qaida had explored the possibility of hijacking a fifth plane.

“That’s been the general approach senior operatives appear to be taking,” said Cannistraro. “Eventually you seem cooperative, but you give your interrogators misleading information, you give them crumbs, basically throwaway information. You don’t give away the inner secrets.”

Not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, a man by the name of Mohammed Haydar Zammar boarded a plane in Germany for Morocco, where he was allegedly planning to divorce his wife. He was 41 years old, born in Syria, but a German citizen. He had woolly black hair and a prominent beard. In Germany, Zammar is said to have given fiery speeches advocating a holy war between Islam and the Western world. By last October, he had already trained in Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and was thought to be a key figure in the Hamburg al-Qaida cell, whose members included Sept. 11 hijackers Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. His story demonstrates what may be the most complicated and ethically fraught aspects of interrogations.

Zammar arrived in Morocco the day he left Germany. But shortly thereafter, he vanished. His family filed a missing-persons report. German intelligence officials said they could not locate him, and when they pressed the Moroccan government about his disappearance, they were told Zammar had gone on to Spain. But that lead appeared to be untrue. Spanish officials said they had no records of Zammar entering the country, and for months, he was thought missing. Those who knew his whereabouts kept the information under a heavy cloak of secrecy, until news of his capture quietly emerged this summer. An unnamed American official, speaking to the Washington Post, simply said: “Zammar is not walking the streets.” Days later, German officials learned that Zammar had been arrested in Morocco and spirited to Syria, where long-standing charges were pending against him for his involvement in terrorist activities.

The extent of American participation in Zammar’s capture and transport to Syria is unclear. Unlike other arrests of high-profile al-Qaida members, this had no discernible trace of U.S. involvement. According to various press reports, for instance, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, an al-Qaida operative with possible connections to Richard C. Reid (the “Shoe Bomber”), was arrested in Indonesia in January and delivered from Jakarta to Egypt by a Gulfstream jet that was registered in the United States. Similarly, Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni student with links to the attack on the USS Cole, was turned over from Pakistani intelligence agents to U.S. officials in Karachi last October, and like Madni, was flown from Pakistan to Jordan on a U.S.-registered airplane. Despite the registrations, it is unclear who owns the plane in either circumstance.

News reports of Zammar’s arrest do not include those telling details. But his case, like the others’, appears to reflect a process ominously known as “rendition,” a term used by U.S. officials to describe the transportation of terrorist suspects to third countries for interrogation. Terrorism experts say there are important benefits to the procedure. A prisoner may be more inclined to talk to people of his own religion or ethnicity, rather than to nonbelievers or agents with a limited knowledge of his background. But the maneuver can also have more sinister implications. Sending a suspect to a third country is a way to get around U.S. laws that bar the use of physical coercion during questioning, and it gives the United States deniability.

Zammar’s homeland, Syria, engages in “the use of torture in detention,” according to the most recent State Department report on human rights in the country. “Former prisoners and detainees report that torture methods include administering electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyperextending the spine; and using a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the victim’s spine,” it says. “Although torture occurs in prisons, torture is most likely to occur while detainees are being held at one of the many detention centers run by the various security services throughout the country, and particularly while the authorities are attempting to extract a confession or information regarding an alleged crime or alleged accomplices.”

This is precisely Zammar’s predicament. “There is no cultural gap when you turn over a Syrian to the Syrian government,” said Cannistraro. “But Syrians are not known for their genteel interrogation methods, either. I don’t know if there have been Americans or Westerners present during Zammar’s interrogations. Presumably they weren’t because I am sure they were hostile. Syrians are pretty brutal, but they do get information.” Since his capture, experts say Zammar has been an important source for corroborating the confessions of other captured terrorists. “Syria has provided actionable intelligence from interrogations of al-Qaida operatives held in Syria, most likely Zammar, that led to the disruption of at least one terrorist attack against U.S. military forces in the Gulf,” Matthew A. Levitt, a terrorism analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told a House International Relations subcommittee last month.

It appears as though Syrian agents have already “broken” Zammar, who, as a well-trained al-Qaida operative, was probably prepared to deal with torture during an interrogation. But once a person is made to start talking, experts say, no matter what his level of training, it is difficult to return to a posture of resistance. Torture does not necessarily mean the constant application of pain; often a carefully targeted threat of injury is enough to remind the prisoner that there are dire consequences for remaining silent. As the al-Qaida manual warns, succumbing to torture just once can be the beginning of the end. The operative’s “situation is just like someone who falls into a swamp: the more he tries to save himself, the deeper he sinks,” it says.

Previous terrorism dragnets demonstrate the process of “rendition” — and the application of coercive force — at work in greater relief. One vivid example is the case of Abdul Hakim Murad, a co-conspirator of Ramzi Ahmed Youssef, who was convicted in a New York district court for his participation in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Murad had been detained in the Philippines. Prior to his transfer to the United States, Filipino agents interrogated him. In court papers, Murad said the agents burnt and suffocated him. Fragments of a tape recording made during that questioning, and played at the trial, were used to show how interrogators constricted his breathing (although it is hard to say exactly how), even as he was confessing. The transcript reads:

Interrogator: What is your plan in the Philippines?

Murad: I’m telling you the truth. I don’t have any plans in the Philippines.

Interrogator: How about in, eh, the United States?

Murad: I have a lot of planning in the United States?

Interrogator: What — what are your plans?

Murad: We are planning, I am planning to explode this airplane. I have planning of — I just can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.

Interrogator: What — what more? What is your plan?

More recently, there is the case of Mohammad Saddiq Odeh, an al-Qaida operative sentenced last year to life imprisonment in the United States for his involvement in the East Africa embassy bombings. The day the buildings were attacked, on Aug. 7, 1998, Odeh flew from Kenya to Pakistan. But on his arrival in Karachi, immigration officials immediately detained him and turned him over to Pakistani interrogators, who questioned him over a period of several days. Odeh submitted a court brief, claiming “he was not permitted to sleep for long periods during his interrogation, and was at times deprived of food and water.” He said his interviewers threatened to sodomize him unless he confessed to certain information. During his trial, a video of the interrogation was submitted into evidence. “You must tell me something,” a Pakistani interrogator commands. “Tell me, otherwise this will go on and on and on — your ordeal — and they will start pulling something different. They might even get your wife on, understand.”

Ten days later, Odeh claims, this is precisely what happened — with the help of the FBI. On Aug. 16, Pakistani intelligence officers blindfolded him and put him on a plane back to Kenya, where he was taken to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Kenyan police for interrogation. There, along with several U.S. and Kenyan authorities, he met FBI agent John Anticev. “We told him he had basically three options,” Anticev later recalled during Odeh’s trial: Odeh could remain silent; he could invoke his right to an attorney; or he could talk to Kenyan and American officials, without an attorney. Odeh made a counter-offer. He said he just wanted to deal with the FBI. “At that point,” Anticev said, “we all left the room to discuss that. Remaining in the room with Mr. Odeh was a Kenyan official, and by the time I got out to the hallway, the Kenyan official came out and said he’s agreed to talk to both of us, to both authorities.”

During that brief time, Odeh says he was given a powerful incentive to change his mind: The Kenyan official had told him that if he did not cooperate, “they would take him to a forest and hang him upside down until he told them what they wanted to hear,” his lawyers said in court filings. Not long after, Odeh’s wife, who was several months pregnant, was brought down to the police department for questioning. Odeh later said that he could hear her being interrogated in a neighboring cell. He said he listened to Kenyan officials insult her and threaten to lock her up.

“One American agent told Mr. Odeh that he should cooperate so his family wouldn’t be put in jeopardy,” his lawyers claimed. As proof, they submitted into evidence a copy of an FBI note taken during the questioning. It read: “Was upset re. Wife/tell him we have wife in custody.” The tactic appeared to have been effective. “Her incarceration offended traditional Islamic religious beliefs, and the authorities knew that,” Odeh later complained. “Nevertheless, they subjected her to questioning by men and made her remove her veil. They used her to get to me in a way that was very dirty.”

Dirty or no, some terrorism experts say the stakes are too high to allow committed enemies of the United States to withhold critical information. And that even though harsh coercive measures can elicit false information, if used properly, they argue, that information can provide critical pieces to the current counter-terrorism intelligence puzzle. “Generally speaking, Americans are not good at interrogation,” said a former intelligence official with extensive experience in the Middle East. “We don’t question prisoners the way a regime whose existence is at stake might. But to get the kind of information we need, we’re going have to really put pressure on them. We’re still playing by the rules. Putting pressure on the families — as some of the people I’ve worked with have done — can be extremely effective. Even for militant Islamists. These people are still very loyal to their families and their clans. In order to get to them, you need to embarrass them; you have to have serious threats.”

Others have even suggested legalizing the use of physical coercion during interrogations by having the U.S. government issue “torture warrants” in circumstances of dire urgency — such as the “ticking bomb” scenario, when police officers might want to harm one individual to save the lives of many. Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has been advocating just this position in his recent book and in numerous media appearances. “We can’t just close our eyes and pretend we live in a pure world,” he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He believes that because torture will inevitably be used in such circumstances, it is better to place legal controls on it rather than let it occur freely outside the boundaries of the law.

That, of course, raises a whole series of moral and practical questions. Foremost among them: Can the application of economic or physical pressure on families, or the controlled use of torture in the interrogation room, seriously undermine the fight against terrorism? “It gets very tricky,” said Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program. “There are people who say you shouldn’t use torture because it’s unreliable. That’s an empirical, pragmatic argument. Torture may yield information that is good, or that isn’t good. But, in that respect, it’s a lot like any other tactic used in an investigation, which will turn up information that may or may not be good. There are other reasons to forgo torture. The United States is a nation of law, it is a nation of principles, it is a nation that should not stoop and descend and debase itself by simply picking up the techniques of lawless thugs and terrorists. Those principles have to apply not just in public speeches but also in the interrogation room. You need a bright line that can’t be crossed. Torture can’t be condoned. You have to start from that premise.”

On the unabashedly patriotic Fox News, where anchors sport American flag pins, anchor Shepard Smith introduced a segment by saying, “Should law enforcement be allowed to do anything, even terrible things, to make suspects spill the beans? Jon DuPre reports. You decide.” Academic Jay Winick, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described how Philippine authorities tortured terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad into revealing a plan to crash U.S. jetliners and rhetorically wondered what would have happened if Murad been questioned by U.S. authorities, not Filipino ones. And conservative pundit Tucker Carlson opined on CNN’s “Crossfire” that “Torture is bad. Keep in mind, some things are worse. And under certain circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils. Because some evils are pretty evil.”

Amid these calls to begin debating a practice formerly condemned by all sides as barbaric — not to mention the Bush administration’s plan to try suspected terrorists in military courts, where they would have far fewer rights — it is worth examining Israel’s experience. The Jewish state has been using torture for decades against Palestinians. And its experience should serve as a powerful warning against the temptation to use brutal interrogation methods.

Officially there is no torture in the Holy Land. But on any given day, and on many more days now that the intifada has shattered Israelis’ sense of security, there may be a dozen people screaming in Israeli interrogation centers and in Palestinian jails, as Israelis hunt for Palestinian terrorists and Palestinians hunt for collaborators with Israel. “In Israel, torture is seen as regrettable but necessary, so the courts and the public close their eyes. In the Palestinian territories, there is a witch-hunt against collaborators so no one speaks up,” said Mireille Widmer, a Swiss human rights lawyer.

Until recently, torture was widespread, routine, legal and institutionalized in Israel. Although the state always denied that it resorted to torture, interrogation methods known as “moderate physical pressure” were deemed acceptable, legal and necessary in Israel’s fight against Palestinians it deemed security threats. These methods included violent head-shaking; relentless sleep deprivation; shackling of detainees to poles, desks and slanting kindergarten chairs in excruciating positions; beatings; exposure to extreme temperatures, incessant harsh light and blaring music; and threats to family members.

“Moderate physical pressure” was seen by politicians and terrorist experts as the perfect answer to a tough quandary: how to protect the lives of Israeli citizens while remaining true to the Jewish state’s self-image as the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East. According to Boaz Ganor, director of Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Institute, it successfully “breached the contradiction between effectiveness and the threat to liberty and democratic values.”

Human rights groups shattered that myth, contending that “moderate physical pressure” unequivocally met all definitions of torture under international law (including the Convention Against Torture which Israel ratified in 1991) and seriously undermined the moral foundations of Israeli democracy. They filed a petition against the abusive methods used by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security force (also known as the General Security Services, or GSS) and partially won. In September 1999, a nine-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously outlawed torture (although the judges shied away from using the “T” word). The judges left the door open, however, for physical pressure in exceptional circumstances by giving interrogators the right to invoke the defense of necessity if criminal charges were brought against them.

Torture continued to be practiced even after the high court’s ruling, but its frequency diminished dramatically. Then came the al-Aqsa intifada of Sept. 28, 2000. A year after the High Court verdict, the second Palestinian uprising started, pitting Palestinian stone-throwers, gunmen and terrorists against Israeli soldiers, settlers and interrogators in a bloody cat-and-mouse game in which about 900 people have died so far, four-fifths of them Palestinian. In this context, it was predictable that torture would come back in vogue, along with shatter-proof windshields, armored buses and guns, as a way of coping with danger.

According to a study published recently by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), one of the nongovernmental organizations that petitioned the High Court in 1999, the Shin Bet has reverted to many of its old habits. After reviewing affidavits from Palestinian detainees and other material collected by lawyers and human rights workers over the past year, the Public Committee concluded that although some of the torture methods outlawed by the court have almost entirely disappeared, “each month, dozens of Palestinians” interrogated by the Shin Bet are still “exposed, to one extent or another, to methods of torture and ill treatment.”

“After the High Court decision, there was a drop in the cases of torture. But affidavits have been pouring in since September 2000,” said Hannah Friedman, the executive director of PCATI. “Our conclusion is that there is real use of methods banned by the high court.”

Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, denied that torture is commonplace. “These so-called human rights organizations are laden with political motives and have their axes to grind,” he said in a phone interview. “As a veteran warrior, I’ve been hearing these accusations for over 20 years. It’s always the case that you hear about Israelis torturing the Palestinians, the poor guys, and nothing about the atrocities Palestinians commit against Israelis. We’re a free, open society, a democracy. We have nothing to hide.” Gissin contrasted that with the Palestinians, who he said used every means to further their cause and didn’t stop at “fabricating stories about torture.”

“When there are allegations of torture, we have investigative mechanisms to deal with them. The General Security Services are subjected to parameters and employ force only in the case of ticking bombs. There is an allowance for force but under the complete supervision of a board. And there’s always the press. I’m not saying that violations don’t occur. They do occur. But the numbers are small and we have mechanisms to deal with them.”

But Israeli human rights groups and other organizations charge that the practice of illegal torture is far more widespread than the Israeli government is willing to publicly acknowledge. For example, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, a well-respected group that mostly documents abuses by the Palestinian Authority, has direct knowledge of a case of torture that occurred this spring when one of its field workers, Abed Rahman Al-Ahmar, was arrested and beaten by Israeli security forces and later interrogated by the Shin Bet. On June 10, according to the testimony he gave his attorney, Al-Ahmar was shackled in tight handcuffs to a slanting chair for a whole day — a method known as “shabeh” that was outlawed by the High Court in 1999. (The angle of the chair, often a kindergarten chair whose front legs have been sawed down, places enormous pressure on a detainee’s lower back and stomach.) “Abed, being a human rights activist, knew it was illegal and protested. The interrogators just laughed,” said Widmer, the human rights lawyer who works for the same organization as Al-Ahmar.

“There’s a feeling of complete impunity — especially now [with the Intifada],” said Widmer. When human rights groups petitioned the High Court in the name of Al-Ahmar, the court rejected the petition, saying there was no sign of torture “in spite of the fact Abed was obviously sick,” said Widmer. “His wrists were all red and puffy and he vomited in the court.”

The alleged torture of Al-Ahmar raises another troubling issue: the authorities’ tendency to use torture, once it is allowed, against individuals who appear to have nothing to do with terrorism. As far as his colleagues can tell, Al-Ahmar is being held for membership in an illegal organization (he was once a supporter of the PFLP, a radical Marxist PLO splinter group) — that is to say for political reasons, not for any operational terrorist-related reasons. (No charges have been brought against Al-Ahmar, still imprisoned today. He is in administrative detention, a measure that allows Israel to hold people without revealing evidence and without trial, under Emergency Laws that were originally adopted by the British in 1945 to fight the Jewish underground. Al-Ahmar has been adopted as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International.)

Although Al-Ahmar’s case and dozens of others documented by human rights groups show that physical force is still commonly used by the Shin Bet, the High Court ruling has brought some significant changes. “Since the ruling, the situation has totally changed,” said Yael Stein, a researcher for B’tselem, a prominent group that documents human rights abuse in the Israeli-occupied territories. “In the past, torture was routine. Everybody went through the same procedures. It was documented, approved by the high court, the Knesset, the government — it was rooted in the system. Today it is less routine. There is no more shaking [which produces severe dizziness, brain damage, and possibly death]. Sleep deprivation is not as severe as it was. And numbers have dropped. Of course it depends on your definition of torture. There is ill-treatment and humiliation, but holding someone incommunicado [forbidding contact with family and lawyers] is not torture.”

Ledgers from the era that preceded the High Court ruling make chilling reading: interrogators kept precise records of their actions, jotting down how many hours a person was forced to crouch, how long a person was tied to a small chair tilted forward with a filthy sack on his head, etc. They used standard equipment for torture and put detainees through well-defined stages of physical pain and mental anguish.

This bureaucratic self-assurance was the product of the Landau Commission, a 1987 governmental commission led by former Supreme Court justice Moshe Landau. The commission, which was created after several public scandals, clarified just what type of physical force authorities were allowed to use against Arabs. Before 1987, torture was widespread — the practice began in the ’70s — and there was no specific legislation that narrowed down the use of force in interrogation. (According to PCATI head Friedman, before 1977 it was mostly the police (not the Shin Bet) who tortured Arabs.) Although the exact interrogation torture guidelines — which the Israeli historian Benny Morris called “a document unique in the annals of modern Western judicial history” — set by the commission remain secret to this day, the idea was that force would be used only in the case of “ticking bombs” — i.e. when information about an imminent attack could save lives.

“The first obligation of the government is to guard the lives of others. There is no higher right than the right to live,” said Ganor, the counterterrorism expert. After 1987, “torture was not allowed,” he added. “What they did was moderate physical pressure. The Shin Bet was reluctant to use these abilities because interrogators were under judicial control. If the guidelines were breached, they could be brought to court. It was not a no-man’s land where anything could be done.”

In practice, however, the legal restrictions on the use of physical force by the Shin Bet did not hold. “Israel’s experience shows you can’t stop the slippery slope: They tortured almost all the Palestinians they could. It was in the system. The moment you start, you can’t stop,” said Stein, the B’tselem researcher. B’tselem estimates that before 1999, the security services used torture against 85 percent of the Palestinians they interrogated. The exceptional became routine. Some 23,000 Palestinians were interrogated between 1987 and 1994, the years of the first intifada. In 1995, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted that violent shaking had been used against 8,000 detainees.

The “ticking bomb” scenario is the one most often invoked by Americans who argue that torture may be a valid weapon in the fight against terrorism. The problem, however, is that such a pure, morally unambiguous scenario rarely exists. “‘Ticking bombs’ are a very rare case,” said Stein. “The secret services also admit it’s very rare. It’s almost impossible to stay within the lines of this pure case. What is imminent? An hour? Tomorrow? In a week? What if a neighbor knows someone who knows someone who knows about a plot? You cannot restrict torture only to pure ‘ticking bombs.’” Palestinian detainees have often testified that interrogations stopped on Fridays and Saturdays, confirming the suspicion that torture had nothing to do with urgency.

The argument of necessity, which can still protect Israeli interrogators today if torture charges are brought against them, is technically flawed: Interrogators may not know if someone represents a ticking bomb and whether torture is justified (or defensible in court) unless they torture him into confessing first — a form of evidence-gathering that bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the witch trials of the 17th century. It is also morally absurd. “If everything is justified in order to preserve life, why stop at ‘moderate physical pressure’? ” asks Stein. “Why not do worse? Pull nails, rape sisters and wives? Shin Bet interrogators could do worse things — but they don’t. It’s illogical.”

Israel’s attempt to limit torture to exceptional cases was further doomed by the failure of courts to uphold human rights and prosecute Shin Bet interrogators responsible for breaching the Landau Commission’s guidelines. PCATI notes that over a period of seven years “not a single interrogator has been tried in criminal court, not even when detainees left interrogation wings with permanent physical or mental disabilities,” nor when a Palestinian detainee, Abd Al-Samad Harizat, was tortured to death in 1995 (the guilty interrogator resumed interrogating after a short suspension).

According to PCATI, interrogators are still protected from external scrutiny and from the threat of criminal investigation today. (Complaints by detainees are collected by an agent who works for the Shin Bet, who naturally prefers the version of his colleagues. And, as Al-Ahmar’s case has shown, the courts also prefer to close their eyes.)

“There is no doubt torture degrades society at large,” says Stein. But he sees torture as only one element of the methods used by Israel to enforce the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and protect itself from Palestinian ire. That list includes military sieges that punish entire communities, racial profiling and extra-judicial killings. All of these, he believes, have destructive effects not just on the Palestinians but on the Israelis who carry them out. “There are so many immoral things. Torture is just the more obvious and difficult to accept. When a man on reserve duty has to stand at a checkpoint for 30 days and enforce the closure on Palestinians, he also comes home brutalized by the experience. Occupation affects Israeli society in many ways.”

Indeed, Stein believes the High Court’s change of heart in 1999 came about in part because judges, who defended torture in petition after petition, “couldn’t stand it anymore.” Torture enlists the doctors who determine beforehand whether someone is fit for interrogation or needs to be treated with some restraint because of, for example, asthma, and violates their professional oath when they send patients back to the interrogation/torture room after perfunctory checkups.

The corrosion of values doesn’t stop at judges and doctors. Torture still seems indispensable to a wide majority of Israelis. “There was a public outcry after the High Court ruling — people were scared,” says Stein. Politicians of all stripes, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, have vowed to pass legislation that would make physical interrogation methods legal again. “In most countries people would be ashamed of using such methods. Here they are proud of it. There’s huge support for these methods,” said Yael Stein.

Although Israelis can easily imagine themselves victims of a terror attack — they seem to happen every week, everywhere, in restaurants, discos and train stations — torture is different. “Israelis don’t feel concerned by torture because it is something that will never apply to them but always to others, to Palestinians,” says Widmer. “It’s easier to torture people of a different race,” notes Friedman. The most recent PCATI report on torture is full of religious curses and religious slurs used by interrogators to dehumanize Palestinians.

For Palestinians, shackled to desks or shaken senseless during Israeli interrogations, the impact is obvious too. “You destroy a man’s soul and body for his whole life. He cannot work, marry, sleep at night. He has hallucinations. Torture is also a political way to destroy a people,” says Friedman. Not surprisingly, the interrogation methods used by Israel have found their ways into Palestinian jails. “Palestinian torturers were first in Israeli jails. They have work experience, so to speak. And now they use the same methods [against Palestinian collaborators],” says Friedman.

Finally, there is the question of torture’s effectiveness. Assessing this is difficult, if not impossible, for two obvious reasons: First, Israel still practices torture, despite officially outlawing it, and second, there is no way to know after the fact whether torturing a suspect would or would not have prevented a terrorist attack. But surely the burden of proof should be on the advocates of torture: If they cannot show that the practice’s results justify its use, it should be rejected.

It would be difficult for an advocate of torture to argue that the payoff is worth the cost. The routine torture sanctioned by the Landau Commission did not stop bombs from going off in the past. And today, when “moderate physical pressure” is in theory outlawed, the security services boast impressive successes. Although bombs have killed scores of Israelis since the beginning of the intifada, security forces have deactivated bombs in watermelons, bags and garages, intercepted terrorists strapped with explosives and foiled numerous plots by killing bomb-makers and terrorist leaders in targeted military operations.

Ganor is amazed by the success Israel’s security forces have had without being allowed recourse to force: “As a counterterrorism expert, I’m surprised to see that the Shin Bet manages even without moderate force. Detainees are very hard to interrogate,” he says. “They are trained not to give away secrets and to resist Israeli methods. When one is released, he goes back to his group and briefs others. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have put out books and leaflets teaching people how to withstand interrogation — even telling them which methods are allowed and not allowed so they can send their lawyers to court.”

Sharon spokesman Gissin admits there is pressure to revert to the good old days when the usage of physical force during interrogations was less restrained. “Of course some people would like to give the security services more of a free hand. But despite the limitations, there’s an impresssive rate of success so there’s no need to use torture as such and we don’t use torture as such.”

“In some cases, in a very tense situation like we have now with daily terror alerts, restrictions create problems and a certain burden on the security services,” said Gissin. “But despite that, within these limitations, the number of terror attacks foiled, stopped, scuttled, is far greater than the number of attacks that succeeded. I can’t tell you if a suicide bomber succeeded because not enough pressure was used during someone’s interrogation. But despite the guidelines, we have a very effective GSS and it’s doing a tremendous job in terms of locating terrorists and preventing attacks.”

Part of the reason for the agency’s success is that it can rely on an excellent network of collaborators to collect information — a luxury the United States may not have in its own war against terrorism. Israel, a much more powerful and wealthy country than its Palestinian opponents, has huge leverage to recruit collaborators by offering much-needed work permits, the right to be reunified with exiled family members, import licenses and money. (Collaborators tip off Israelis in their search for terrorists and help also to extract information inside jails by posing as friendly co-detainees.)

“A lot of experts feared that Israel’s intelligence ability would suffer if moderate force was not allowed,” says Ganor. “But at the end of the day, the Shin Bet manages to work without.”

There is one last point to be considered: For every actual terrorist who spills the beans because of torture, who knows how many non-terrorists are pushed into deadly fanaticism by the experience of being tortured?

One of the Palestinian teenagers who were tortured at the Gush Etzion police station last winter made headlines in the Israeli press when he said, several months after he was released, that he now wanted to become a suicide bomber. He was arrested for throwing stones at settlers’ cars, but he said the degradation and suffering caused by his interrogation made him consider terrorism.

When Montesinos took the step taken by so many other fallen villains before him — taking off for Panama in a private jet — he expected the same reception they had been given. But Panama’s president, Mireya Moscoso, refused him asylum on Oct. 22 — the first time in Panamanian history that the country refused to serve as the “trash bin for other nation’s cast-off leaders,” in the words of Miguel Antonio Bernal, a law professor and leader of a popular movement that mobilized to pressure the government into denying Montesinos sanctuary.

And that was just the beginning. When he arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that evening on what he thought was a secret flight back to Peru, he was met instead by a blizzard of television cameras and the flashbulbs of news photographers. The press had been tipped off by a man who had gained the upper hand in an extraordinary rivalry. Latin America’s most notorious spymaster had been handed a humiliating defeat by one of Peru’s leading investigative journalists, Gustavo Gorriti.

The world has learned of Montesinos’ brutal reign over Peruvian politics only recently. But for more than a decade Gorriti was chronicling his corrupt rise to power, and the human rights abuses committed by his security forces, in the Peruvian newsmagazine Caretas. Eventually he fled the country after death threats were isued against himself, his wife and his young daughter.

The tale of these two men, who grew up in the same neighborhood in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, now has the makings of a magical realist tale. Their personal rivalry has played a central role in kicking off the tragi-comic soap opera that accompanied Montesinos’ return to Peru. For when Montesinos made his frantic exit from Peru on Sept. 26 and landed in Panama City, he arrived, like a figure from a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, in the very country to which he had forced his journalistic nemesis into exile.

Montesinos would soon discover that Gorriti had not faded into the obscurity of exile. Since arriving in Panama City in 1996 — after stints as a Neiman fellow at Harvard and with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, as well as writing for the New York Times and the New Republic — he has been associate director of Panama’s leading newspaper, La Prensa. During his tenure in Panama, he has inspired dramatic improvements in the nation’s journalistic culture, leading La Prensa investigations into money laundering, arms dealing and corruption.

In 1997, Panama’s then-President Ernesto Balladares attempted to have Gorriti deported after a series of embarrassing exposés. That effort was derailed after the newspaper’s staff defied efforts by the police to oust him from La Prensa’s office — they created a round-the-clock phalanx of support, with Gorriti barricaded inside — and protests flooded in from journalists around the world.

Gorriti’s fury at Fujimori and Montesino’s increasingly authoritarian rule led him to take a three month leave from La Prensa last spring to advise the opposition candidate, Alejandro Toledo, whose accusations of fraud in the presidential election helped spark the current crisis in Peru.

Within days of Montesinos’ arrival in Panama City in September, Gorriti was on his tail, and the extraordinary saga of these two men’s battle began to play out in the pages of La Prensa.

The newspaper revealed the extent of Montesino’s business and real estate holdings in Panama, and revealed the fact that he applied for, and received, a residency permit (expired by the time he arrived) from the previous government. La Prensa chronicled his continuing attempts to influence events back home in Peru, and reiterated his abuses of power there, including evidence for prosecuting him in Panama under the Convention Against Torture — which provided the legal basis for the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In one particularly memorable exchange in early October, after La Prensa’s business editor identified a bank in Panama City as having received millions of dollars in deposits from Montesinos, a top official with the bank denied the allegations and accused Gorriti of “conflict of interest” in his handling of the story due to the two men’s history in Peru. Gorriti fired back in defense of his editor, on the paper’s editorial page, with the numbers of the accounts, and offered a spirited defense of crusading journalism.

“Does a journalist threatened with reprisals by the Mafia stop covering the Mafia because he thinks there will be a conflict of interest?” he wrote. “If [Montesinos] is here, he is laying down the gauntlet for journalists to investigate and shine the public spotlight, and we will continue to tell his story.”

Indeed, La Prensa’s coverage created an unparalleled public awareness of Montesinos’ presence in Panama. From Parliamentarians to taxi drivers, Montesinos has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The uproar marked a contrast to the last dictator who sought refuge here, Raoul Cedras of Haiti, who was given asylum quickly by President Balladares last year, and who has since faded into the comfortable rhythms of elite Panamanian society.

There is every reason to believe Montesinos expected the same soft landing. Recent reports had him seeking to purchase an entire Panamanian island off the country’s Caribbean coast with the estimated $200 million he is thought to have stolen from the Peruvian treasury, or accumulated through drug, arms and money laundering deals that marked his reign at the top of Peruvian intelligence.

“People of most countries do not like the idea of a criminal moving in next door,” comments Reed Brody. As advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, he flew to Panama City in mid-October to meet with top government officials on the Montesino case.

“But to get to that point, they have to know what’s happening. Usually, they just move in, settle down, no one knows. Gorriti followed the issue, he put it before the Panamanian public. La Prensa’s coverage enabled the natural revulsion of people against human rights abuses to come to the fore.”

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Sitting in his office in La Prensa one recent evening, Gorriti cuts an impressive figure. He is genial, intense, a bit stocky, bemused at the twist of fate that threw his enemy back into his sights. He laughs at how he and Montesinos seemed to have come full circle.

“We are reproducing our old relationship,” he says. “I keep looking for him, and he keeps hiding from me. I try to put the spotlight on him, and he keeps trying to stay in the shadows.”

On that night two weeks ago in Ecuador, their rivalry came to a head. Shortly after Montesinos took off, Gorriti received a tip from a reliable Panamanian source telling him that Montesinos was heading home, via Ecuador. The flight, on a private jet owned by Marc Harris — an infamous American expatriate offshore financier with extensive business interests in Panama — was supposed to be clandestine.

Gorriti phoned a friend at Peru’s only independent television channel, Channel N, with the news. “They put me on the air,” Gorriti recalled a few days after the incident. “I told Peru on Sunday night, ‘Vladimiro’s on the way.’ When he landed in Guayaquil, the place was swimming with media.” Within minutes of Montesinos’ arrival, Gorriti was interviewed on several of Peru’s leading radio stations. The story received coverage on CNN Español, and quickly hit the wires across Latin America and the world.

The blanket coverage derailed Montesinos’ plan to land in Lima. Instead, his plane headed straight for a secure air force base in Pisco in southern Peru.

But it was too late. By the time he arrived, Montesinos was greeted by the sight of himself, being broadcast on television, his own beak-nosed, pinched visage plastered onto masks of thousands of demonstrators in Lima and elsewhere demanding that he face prosecution for the many human rights violations associated with his SIN tenure.

His arrival kicked off the surreal saga now unfolding in Peru, with Fujimori charging off on a quixotic search — or an absurd pantomime of a search, as Fujimori critics say — for his former aide. Gorriti comments, “Those two, they’ve been so intimate with each other for so long, it’s like one side of a string trying to find the other side of the same string.”

Montesinos is now a man on the run, dodging the ostensible efforts of his former patron to find him, fearful of prosecution from a judicial system that he for years twisted to his own ends.

“Montesinos should not receive protection in Panama from a justice system [in Peru] he helped to create,” asserted Marco Ameglio, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Panama’s National Assembly in an interview last month. The government’s decision was a remarkable political event, defying the requests of the United States, 11 Latin American nations and the Organization of American States that it grant Montesinos asylum — on the grounds that it would speed Peru’s transition to democracy.

In addition to Gorriti, Montesinos is haunted by the legacy of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Montesinos’ status as the world’s leading pariah illustrates how inhospitable the world has become to human rights abusers in the wake of the international legal assault against Pinochet, which established the principle of prosecuting torturers outside of their own national territory.

“Pinochet has changed the way everybody thinks about justice,” comments Brody, one of the chief strategists behind Human Rights Watch’s legal offensive against Pinochet. “The norm used to be you brutalize your people and plunder the treasury. Then go off somewhere to retire. Now, you can’t do that. Countries may actually go off and arrest you.”

If Montesinos had stayed in Panama, he might very well have faced a legal challenge. Panamanian human rights activist Miguel Antonio Bernal filed a complaint in early October on behalf of several of Montesinos’ victims, demanding that he be charged with violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (which provided the legal standing for the Spanish case against Pinochet).

Three additional complaints have also been filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from Peruvians claiming to have been victims of Montesinos-orchestrated brutality — two from the families of tortured and murdered former SIN officials, a journalist who was tortured in a SIN facility and a former general who revealed the existence of a death squad run through the intelligence agency. Another complaint concerns the abduction and murder of nine students and a teacher from Peru’s La Cantuta University in 1992.

Refuge for Montesinos anywhere in the world now appears highly unlikely. Requests for sanctuary in Brazil and Argentina were rejected even before Montesinos’ flight to Panama. On Oct. 20, while Montesinos was still in Panama, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took a dramatic step in distancing itself from the pro-asylum position taken by Cesar Gaviria, chairman of the Organization of American States. The commission, formerly a branch of the OAS, expressed its disagreement with Gaviria by recommending that “member states of the OAS … refrain from granting asylum to any person alleged to be the material or intellectual author of international crimes.”

Under intense public pressure, last week Fujimori even withdrew a proposed amnesty for human rights abuses by the military and security forces overseen by Montesinos.

Thus, Montesinos finds himself in a situation eerily similar to that of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before his fall from power. With dwindling options, he holds onto the final cards in the deck — loyalists in the military and the specter of a coup — and pushes against the growing public protests calling for him to be brought to trial.

Does Gorriti harbor the slightest respect for his longtime adversary? “No. To respect an enemy, you must find nobility. Montesinos has astuteness. He has ruthlessness, he has a lack of scruples. He has treachery imbedded in his every molecule. His greed is enormous. But nobility, not at all.”

Gorriti still sees their rivalry in almost military terms. “It is a battle that will end when one of us ceases to breathe,” he says. “But I believe now the war is over, and he has lost. He will live life like a pariah, in a smaller and smaller world.”

Gorriti continues to monitor events closely as they unfold in his native Peru, and hopes, perhaps, to return there as a journalist after a democratic transition. As Fujimori headed off on the hunt for his former bagman, Gorriti said, “Peru is changing through comedy, through farce, but it is changing. In my case, knowing these characters, I might be pardoned to sit and watch these events and smile.”

The simple definition of a vegan is one
who doesn’t eat anything that comes
from an animal. Not just the meat, but
the byproducts. Eggs, milk and cheese
are all out. Forget honey, glycerin,
gelatin and casein (a milk-derived
protein). Most vegans also shun leather,
wool and other clothing made from
animals.

I’ve been a vegetarian for three years
and a vegan for two. My reason is
simple. I am opposed to factory
farming, which is where most meat and
dairy
in America come from. The meat, egg
and dairy industries want us
to forget where our dinner comes from.
They’ve sanitized the husbandry and
slaughtering process by giving us clean,
neat packages of boneless chicken,
bacon and steak. They’ve used a
wide-eyed, thick-lashed, talking cow to
pitch cheese and made us believe that
eggs come from a carton, not a sickly
chicken whose back end looks as if it has
been turned inside out from
overlaying. When I try to explain what
goes on at a chicken “farm” to people
who press me, they tell me, “Stop! I
don’t want to hear this … I may not
ever
eat chicken again.” That’s the point.
People put their gut feelings and
moral convictions aside when it comes to
eating.

I’m not opposed to eating animals or
their byproducts and I am probably the
only vegan in America who respects and
admires musician/hunter Ted Nugent.
Nugent has put some respect into hunting
and taught people that hunting, if done
properly, is an honorable act. Feeding
one’s family off the land is
honorable. There’s no dignity in buying
one’s meat from a huge conglomeration
that tortures, then slaughters, its
“product.”

I’m not about to go hunt and kill my
dinner (who has time these days?), so I
simply choose not to eat animals.
Thanks to the megacorporations that
have
pushed the individual farmer out of
business, or gobbled up his or her farm
operation, finding a small farm that
sells humanely extracted dairy products
and eggs at a reasonable cost is nearly
impossible. So I do without. I
certainly don’t expect people to take to
the woods to gun down their dinner.
Nor do I expect anyone to raise chickens
in their garage for omelets at
Sunday brunch. I wish people would take
a minute and think about exactly
where their food is coming from before
they inhale that pork chop. And stop
giving veg-heads such a hard time!

Sure, meat and other animal products
were delicious to me when I ate them.
But no craving I have is worth the
suffering animals go through to fill my
stomach. It’s just food. There are
plenty of other things to eat that don’t
involve animals. Maybe if enough people
raise a big enough stink, the meat
and dairy industries will give the animals
they raise and slaughter a little more
respect. Until then, pass the veggies.

Though Conroy pulls off the feat of writing a book that brings torture victims’ suffering to life without being too painful to read, his answer is disappointingly familiar: Torturers torture because they can, he reports, and because they think they must. Ultimately, despite an exhaustive survey of torture’s long history and its underlying psychology, as well as a close look at three occasions on which it was used, what Conroy leaves out of his book overshadows what he squeezes in.

Torture is the perfect crime, Conroy asserts, because in most cases “only the victims pay.” The British government, for example, was forced to admit that it used the “Five Techniques,” yet, in a stunning display of linguistic abuse, denied that these actions constituted torture. None of the perpetrators was ever identified or prosecuted.

Next, Conroy turns his attention to the actions of some Israeli soldiers in 1988, when the intifada was in its infancy. Acting on orders they were reluctant to carry out but nevertheless obeyed, the soldiers rounded up a group of unarmed Palestinians, transported them to a field and beat them bloody. Only one of the soldiers was “punished.” (Stripped of his rank, this colonel left the army, started his own security firm and is now a very wealthy man.)

Finally, in his own city of Chicago, Conroy follows the long and winding court case filed by Andrew Wilson, a man who killed two policemen in 1982 and was then beaten and tortured with electric shocks by enraged detectives. Again, the torturers received only the mildest of reprimands, and there was little public outcry. “I found I did not have to journey far to learn that torture is something we abhor only when it is done to someone we like, preferably in another country,” Conroy concludes.

How true — and yet in the cases of both the British and the Israelis, Conroy himself commits sins of omission by examining the cruelties of just one side of a protracted struggle. The fact that “the enemy” was also engaging in torture doesn’t excuse the horrors depicted here. But by ignoring the cruelties of the Irish Republican Army and the Palestinians, and thereby making the British and Israelis villains by default, the author becomes guilty of the selective blindness he decries in others.

After all, the IRA has always been very good at killing and maiming the innocent. It was Irish terrorists who perfected the art of “kneecapping,” shooting victims in the knees so that they would never walk again. The Palestinians, too, have a long history of relying on terrorism and other morally indefensible measures to further their cause. What were the people who carried out these orders thinking? Their crimes are mentioned only in passing. Though Conroy takes pains to depict the Israeli soldiers sympathetically, he also uses them to prop up his not terribly original thesis that torture is often the handiwork of “people like us.”

Recent history is also a casualty. Though torture continues unabated, in this book, time grinds to a halt somewhere in the early ’90s — the date of Conroy’s most current interviews. Of course, a book cannot aspire to the immediacy of daily journalism. But one story in particular cries out for at least some analysis. The case of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant tortured and sodomized by Brooklyn detectives in 1997, shocked New York and aroused a storm of protest that led one police officer to turn in fellow cops — exactly the opposite result of the Chicago case recounted here.

Throughout “Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People,” morality is at war with psychology, and the result is a stalemate. On one hand, Conroy eloquently condemns torture and society’s general willingness to look the other way. On the other, he summarizes a host of studies, most of them familiar to anyone who has ever glanced at a psychology textbook, to explain why torture persists and why it is so easy to ignore. Simply put, when faced with the gentlest of pressures from an authority figure, most people tend to follow orders first and ask moral questions later.

Forty years ago, Hannah Arendt (whose name, oddly enough, is barely mentioned here) attended the trial of Karl Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and recognized the banality of evil. Sadly, not much has changed. But Conroy, who is surprised to learn that men who have done terrible things do not usually appear to be terrible men, doesn’t seem to have heard the news.