Ishmael is a victim of a 2007 rendition program in the Horn of Africa, involving Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the United States. There are at least 90 more victims like him. Most have since been sent home. A few — including a Canadian and nine who assert Kenyan nationality — remain in detention even now. The whereabouts of 22 others — including several Somalis, Ethiopian Ogadenis, and Eritreans — remain unknown.

In late 2006, the Bush administration backed a full-scale Ethiopian military offensive that ousted the Islamist authorities from Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. The fighting caused thousands of Somalis, including some who were suspected of terrorist links, to flee across the Kenya border.

Kenyan authorities arrested at least 150 men, women and children from more than 18 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada — in operations near the Somali border, and held them for weeks without charge in Nairobi. In January and February 2007, the Kenyan government then unlawfully put dozens of these individuals — with no notice to families, lawyers or the detainees themselves — on flights to Somalia, where they were handed over to the Ethiopian military. Ethiopian forces also arrested an unknown number of people in Somalia.

Those rendered were later transported to detention centers in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and other parts of Ethiopia, where they effectively disappeared. Denied access to their embassies, their families and international humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detainees were even denied phone calls home. Several detainees have said that they were housed in solitary cells, some as small as two meters by two meters, with their hands cuffed in painful positions behind their backs and their feet bound together any time they were in their cells.

An unknown number of them — likely dozens — were questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Addis Ababa. From February to May 2007, Ethiopian security officers daily transported detainees — including several pregnant women — to a villa where U.S. officials interrogated them about suspected terrorist links. At night the Ethiopian officers returned the detainees to their cells.

For the most part, detainees were sent home soon after their interrogation by U.S. agents ended. Of those known to have been interrogated by U.S. officials, just eight Kenyans remain. (A ninth Kenyan in Addis Ababa was rendered to Ethiopia in August 2007, after U.S. interrogations reportedly stopped.) These men, who have not been subjected to any interrogation since May 2007, would likely have been repatriated long ago but for the Kenyan government’s longstanding refusal to acknowledge their claims to Kenyan citizenship or to take steps to secure their release.

Recently I spoke by telephone to several of the still-detained Kenyans. They described water-soaked mattresses, insufficient food and inadequate healthcare. Two said they have trouble walking, following beatings by Ethiopian officials, and a third said he can no longer use his left hand.

“I can’t sleep here. I miss my family. Please, I need you to help us to go home,” one detainee pleaded with me.

In mid-August 2008, Kenyan authorities visited these men for the first time. The officials reportedly told the detainees they would be home within a few weeks. But more than a month and a half has passed with no apparent follow-up.

In addition to working with the U.S., the Ethiopians used the rendition program for their own ends. For years, the Ethiopian military has been trying to quell domestic Ogadeni and Oromo insurgencies that receive support from neighboring countries, such as Ethiopia’s archrival, Eritrea. The multinational rendition program provided them a convenient means to continue this internal battle — and get their hands, with U.S. and Kenyan support, on those with suspected insurgent links.

Ishmael was one of their victims.

The questions his Ethiopian interrogators asked were nonstop, and always the same: “Are you al-Qaida? Are you an Ogadeni rebel? Are you part of the Somali insurgency?” Each time he said no, he was beaten, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. When he resisted answering, they targeted his testicles.

Then, in February 2008 — some 14 months after his original arrest — the Ethiopians decided Ishmael was no longer worth the trouble. They dumped him, along with 27 others, just over the Somali border. The men were met by a Somali officer who told him that he was very sorry, that their arrest was a mistake and that they were all innocent.

Now Ishmael is back in the refugee camp, limping and urinating blood. He is still waiting for the healthcare he came searching for nearly two years ago.

Almost everyone I spoke with assumed — whether true or not — that the United States backed the arbitrary arrest and unlawful rendition of men like Ishmael and the still-detained Kenyans. Almost everyone assumed that the Ethiopians operate with America’s blessing. Their stories have circulated, fueling anger and resentment. As one man, whose childhood friend became one of the rendition victims, told me, “Now when I go to the mosque, I pray to God to punish the Americans.”

To be sure, the United States is not the main culprit when the Kenyans unlawfully render suspects or the Ethiopians torture them. But when U.S. officials interrogate rendition victims who are being held incommunicado, the United States becomes complicit in the abuse. The U.S. is funding the Ethiopian military, supporting its activities in Somalia and training Kenyan security forces in counterterrorism — so as U.S.-backed military and police forces in the region brutalize their domestic opponents in the name of fighting terrorism, the United States is often blamed.

The United States could change those perceptions by demanding higher standards of its foreign partners and cutting off aid to abusers. It otherwise risks fueling the very problem — anti-American militancy — that it seeks to solve. For starters, the U.S. could demand the release or fair trial of any rendition victims still stuck in Ethiopian custody.

At the end of our interview, Ishmael looked at me with sad eyes. “I have suffered three times,” he told me. “I lost my family; I was beaten and tortured, and then I was arrested and tortured again. Now I have nothing to lose.”

In December, Belbacha reportedly tried to commit suicide and was moved to the mental health facility. He was stripped naked, dressed in a green plastic rip-proof suicide smock, and placed in an individual cell under constant monitoring –Guantánamo’s suicide watch. He says he was given absolutely nothing else in his cell — no toothbrush, no soap, no books, nothing he could somehow use to injure himself.

Each morning a member of the mental health staff reportedly came by and asked the same set of questions: Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to hurt anyone else? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well?

Close to two months later, he apparently had answered all the questions correctly and was moved back to another windowless cell.

More than half of the 270 detainees currently at Guantánamo — including many who are slated for release or transfer — are housed in high-security facilities akin to U.S. “supermax” prisons. They spend all but two hours a day in small cells with no natural light or fresh air. Their meals are slipped through a slot in the door, and they are given little more than a single book and the Koran to occupy their time. Even their limited “recreation” time — which is sometimes provided in the middle of the night — generally takes place in single cell cages so that detainees can’t physically interact with one another. None of these detainees have been allowed visits by family members, and very few have been able to make phone calls home.

As a result, many detainee lawyers say, their clients are suffering from serious and even dangerous mental health problems. Several have tried to commit suicide, some of them multiple times. Others have reported having visions and hearing voices. Some show strong signs of depression and anxiety disorder.

The Department of Defense does not allow any outsiders, including journalists and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, to speak with the detainees at Guantánamo, so it is difficult to get a full picture of the prison conditions and the toll they may be taking on detainee mental health. In addition, the DOD has generally prohibited attorneys from bringing in outside psychiatrists to evaluate the mental health of their clients, forcing attorneys to rely on “proxy” evaluations based on questionnaires the lawyers administer to their clients.

However, in a new report based on interviews with government officials and attorneys for detainees, as well as declassified notes attorneys took in meetings with detainees, Human Rights Watch has pieced together a physical description of the various “camps” at Guantánamo and the inhumane conditions that prevail within them. Titled “Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantánamo,” the report also documents the increasingly frequent complaints of mental health deterioration among the more than one dozen detainees profiled in case studies.

Mohammad El Gharani, a young Chadian who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, was reportedly arrested at a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, when he was only 15 years old and brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. He was wrongly classified as 25 and held as an adult. (He is now 21.) For the past two years, he has been held in two of Guantánamo’s most restrictive high-security camps.

Gharani’s lawyers say he has tried to commit suicide at least seven times. He has slit his wrist, run repeatedly headfirst into the sides of his cell, and tried to hang himself. On several occasions, he has been put on suicide watch in the mental health unit, given the green suicide smock, and placed in a single cell with no other items other than toilet paper. Each time, he has been moved out of the suicide unit and back into high-security detention.

Often subject to punishment for reported disciplinary problems, El Gharani says he is often left with nothing in his cell other than a mat for sleeping, a Koran and toilet paper. He says that at times even some of the basic items that all detainees are reportedly allowed at all times — including a finger toothbrush and small bar of soap — have been taken away.

He has never been provided any educational or additional recreation opportunities in accordance with his juvenile status at the time of capture. He has never been allowed to speak with — let alone see — any of his family members during his more than six years in U.S. custody. Like the majority of detainees at Guantánamo, he has not been charged with any crime.

A Guantánamo detainee named Walid, a 28-year-old Palestinian (whose lawyers requested that we withhold his last name), was reportedly sold to the United States by the Pakistani security forces, after the U.S. began offering bounties for suspected terrorists. He was among the first arrivals to Guantánamo Bay in early 2002. As of February 2008, he was “approved to leave” by U.S. officials — yet since 2007, he has been held in one of the high-security camps.

Since his arrest, Walid has had very little contact with his family, who thought he was dead until, several years after his initial detention, he was able to send them a postcard. He has not, to his attorney’s knowledge, been able to speak with any of his family members. Since learning of his whereabouts in 2005, his family has been writing to him and has sent him photos, including pictures of nieces and nephews he has never met.

Around 2003 or 2004 he went on a hunger strike for 20 months and was force-fed through intubation. At one point Walid, who is approximately 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed only 96 pounds.

His attorneys report that they have long been worried about Walid’s mental health, which they believe has been deteriorating over time. They describe him as lethargic, listless and distracted, and took the following notes of his speech:

I love cowboys. I love Indians. I feel like they’re my family … I knew an Indian woman in Gaza — she talked a witch language. I won’t tell you her name because she might send me a witch curse … Tarzan is a lovely person — very polite — he’s my friend, though he doesn’t [know] it. I don’t watch for entertainment but for another reason — a secret — I won’t tell you … I live in heaven, heaven is in my chest. I love Jesus, I want to see him, and all the mermaids around them.

After the U.S. denied Walid’s attorneys’ requests to release Walid’s medical records, and knowing that they would not be allowed to bring in an independent psychiatrist to evaluate him in person, Walid’s attorneys retained Dr. Daryl Matthews, a psychiatrist once hired by the Department of Defense to evaluate the mental health facilities at Guantánamo. They asked Matthews to prepare a questionnaire by which he could do a proxy psychological assessment. From the results of this questionnaire, Matthews concluded that Walid appears to have developed schizophrenia and suffers from delusions, significant anxiety and depression.

In 2001 a group of 18 Uighurs, an ethnic minority from Xinjiang province in western China, was living together in a camp in Afghanistan when the coalition bombing started. They claim that they fled to the Afghan mountains, were led across the border to Pakistan by some other travelers, and were sold to the United States for bounty money. Five other Uighurs also ended up in Guantánamo, possibly sold to the United States as well.

Most of these men have been cleared for release since 2003, yet remain in Guantánamo because they can’t return to China, and neither the United States nor any other country has been willing to take them in. While five of the Uighurs were resettled in Albania in 2005, 16 others remain housed in one of the most draconian facilities in Guantánamo, reportedly because they threw feces and urine at prison guards following a dispute about the Koran in May 2007. But instead of receiving a 30- or 90-day punishment, as is common in U.S. prisons for disruptive behavior, the Uighurs were moved into one of the highest-security, most restrictive parts of the facility — indefinitely.

As of April 2008 — almost a year later — these men were moved to their own wing of the camp, where they are reportedly allowed to keep the meal slots in the door open most of the day, so that they can more easily speak to each other without shouting. Military officials also claim that they are now being granted additional recreation time, including the chance to go into a single recreation pen with another detainee, and that ultimately they will be able to leave their cells during the day and mingle in the common space in the pods.

For now, however, they still spend the majority of their days locked in their totally enclosed, windowless cells, unable to congregate for meals or prayer time, and unable to see each other as they talk through the meal slots.

In April, before being moved to the “Uighur wing,” one of the Uighurs, Huzaifa Parhat, described his daily routine to his attorney, who wrote:

Wake at 4:30 or 5:00. Pray. Go back to sleep. Walk in circles — north, south, east, west — around his 6-by-12 foot cell for an hour. Go back to sleep for another two or more hours. Wake up and read the Koran or look at a magazine (written in a language that he does not understand). Pray. Walk in circles once more. Eat lunch. Pray. Walk in circles. Pray. Walk in circles or look at a magazine (again, in a foreign language). Go back to sleep at 10:00 p.m.

The next day is the same except that the detainee may leave his cell for two hours of recreation in a slightly larger pen or for a shower.

Another Uighur, named Abdusemet, described days on end of doing nothing other than eating, praying, pacing and sitting on his bed.

“I am starting to hear voices, sometimes,” Abdusemet told his attorney, worriedly. “There is no one to talk to all day in my cell and I hear these voices.” He continued: “What did we do? Why do they hate us so much?”

The U.S. government insists that the harsh conditions that exist at Guantánamo are necessary and legitimate. U.S. officials say that many of the detainees held there are sworn enemies of the United States. They note that some of the men have posed difficult and continuing management problems, engaging in misconduct that ranges from throwing “cocktails” of urine and feces at guards, to attempting to stage riots. They point to a recent slew of head-butting incidents, in which detainees have allegedly injured guards.

Indeed, it was after a riot in May 2006 — when detainees attacked guards with improvised weapons, including broken pieces of light bulbs — followed by three suicides the following month, that the military significantly increased security to prevent further disturbances. Detainees’ repeated hunger strikes and suicide attempts, which many outside observers perceive as cries for help, are seen by the military as challenges to its authority.

Still, while security concerns may explain some of the controls at Guantánamo, it’s hard to justify the extent of such extreme isolation. Although officials try to rationalize harsh conditions, it may be that the regime of prolonged, extreme isolation is contributing to the despair and insubordination among even the innocent or unlucky.

Military officials at Guantánamo appear to recognize the need to provide detainees additional stimuli and social opportunities. In March, the Pentagon announced that it would allow detainees to make phone calls home, with an ultimate goal of two phone calls per year. To date, however, only approximately 40 detainees have made phone calls under this new program. Military officials at Guantánamo have also told Human Rights Watch that they plan to make several additional changes in the future, including allowing increased recreation time, providing regular opportunities for detainees to congregate, and instituting additional language classes. No schedule for these improvements, however, has yet been announced.

Continuing to house detainees in single-cell units 22 hours a day with virtually nothing to do all day long and no access to natural light or fresh air is not just cruel but may also be counterproductive. None of the detainees at Guantánamo has yet been convicted of a crime, and many are ultimately likely to be released. Warehousing them in such conditions may have a long-term damaging psychological impact. It could further compound legal problems with attempting to repatriate or bring detainees to justice. (Efforts to put some detainees on trial, as we’ve covered in Salon over the last several weeks, are buckling under the U.S. government’s policies at Guantánamo.) And the ongoing treatment of these detainees over the long term is very likely to breed hatred and resentment of the United States.

By Tuesday afternoon, Hamdan had reached the conclusion that there was no law in Guantánamo. Or at least no law that could justify his continued presence at his trial.

The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, tried to convince him otherwise. “You should have great faith in the law,” the judge urged. After all, it was Hamdan’s previous court challenge that led the Supreme Court in June 2006 to strike down the first round of military commissions as unlawful. “You won. Your name is all over the law books,” the judge said.

But the victory was short-lived. Four months later, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, authorizing another system of commissions to begin — and the government charged Hamdan once again.

“You even won the very first time you came before me,” Allred added.

And that too was true. When Hamdan first appeared before Allred in June 2007 — in his second round with the military commissions — the judge concluded that he did not have jurisdiction over Hamdan and dismissed the case. Whereas the military commissions’ authority is limited to cases brought against “unlawful enemy combatants,” Hamdan had been determined to be an “enemy combatant” — a term that encompasses both lawful and unlawful statuses.

Within months, however, Allred’s decision was overturned by the hastily assembled Court of Military Commission Review. Hamdan was brought back before the military commissions for round 3. He was charged with conspiracy and material support to commit terrorism based on allegations that he had served as Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard and helped transport weapons to al-Qaida.

Hamdan was then rewarded by being moved from a communal living setting to what is effectively solitary confinement. His lawyers say he has suffered a serious deterioration in his mental health as a result, becoming increasingly despondent and embittered as time goes by.

On Monday, an initial attempt to boycott the system in which he is trapped — Hamdan has now been in U.S. custody for more than seven years — quickly devolved into the most basic of requests: to be able to use the toilet without being watched.

And to locate the law.

For the next day and a half, Hamdan, now changed into a flowing white robe and a black-and-white checkered suit jacket, sat quietly at his counsel’s table, listening intently and waiting for the law to appear. But in a commission system in which the government asserts the right to continue to detain even those who are ultimately acquitted, the law can be hard to find. And the proceedings this week did little to assuage concerns that the rule of law will ever prevail at this prison conceived and continued under the Bush administration.

First to take the witness stand on Monday was Air Force Col. Morris Davis. Once the chief military commission prosecutor, Davis resigned his post in October 2007 in protest and has since become one of the system’s boldest critics.

Davis strode into the courtroom with the same confident air he once wielded as a fire-and-brimstone prosecutor. But his message has changed. He took a seat about 10 yards away from the prosecutor’s table he’d formerly occupied. Now he explained — on behalf of the defendant that he once charged — the many ways in which the commissions system was politicized and unfair.

His first year on the job had been relatively free of interference, Davis explained. But by September 2006, 14 so-called high-value detainees — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — were transferred from secret CIA detention facilities to Guantánamo. Soon, the Military Commissions Act was passed, and presidential elections were on the horizon.

These events conspired against Davis’ prosecuting approach. It was like “the train leaving the station before the tracks were built,” he said. He said that he butted heads with the Department of Defense’s then-general counsel, William Haynes II, and Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartman, legal advisor to the top Pentagon official overseeing the military commissions process. Neither of them could understand why he was taking so long to put together the cases, why he would refuse to introduce evidence obtained through waterboarding (or other approved torture techniques), and why he insisted on declassifying evidence so that trials could be held in open proceedings.

In August 2007 he reportedly was told that he better get cracking on the high-value detainees before the 2008 presidential campaign got too far under way. It was a clear attempt to railroad cases to trial and get convictions, without regard for principles of fairness and transparency. The underlying theme, Davis said, was that 9/11 suspects had better be charged soon, to make it hard for the next president to stop the process.

When Davis was put directly under Haynes’ chain of command, he finally quit. “I would not take direct orders from a guy who said waterboarding was A-OK,” Davis said, glancing sidelong at his successor and former colleagues who had stayed on the job.

On Tuesday, Hamdan’s lawyers tried to suppress the use of statements taken from Hamdan by law enforcement officials (far from any battlefield), without ever informing Hamdan of his right against self-incrimination. Under virtually any other legal regime — the court-martial system, federal criminal law, state criminal law, the Constitution and international law — these statements would be deemed inadmissible.

Lawyers for the Bush administration, however, insisted that was irrelevant. True, these statements from Hamdan might be suppressed under a different legal system, they acknowledged, but not here. Not in the special courts designed solely to try alien, unlawful enemy combatants. In these courts, the only law that mattered was the Military Commissions Act, and its protections against self-incrimination did not apply to any statements made before the trial began.

After a break, Hamdan changed out of his formal wear and returned to the courtroom in his prison garb. He was ready to call the process quits. He apologized to the judge. He praised his lawyers. He smiled and even laughed and joked a little. But he had made up his mind.

“The law is clear. The Constitution is clear. International law is clear,” he said to the judge. “Why don’t we follow the law? Where is the justice?”

Hamdan pleaded for a fair trial, reminded the judge of his Supreme Court victory, and questioned why the U.S. government then proceeded to change the law and keep him locked up. “Is it just for my case?” he asked.

The judge listened intently and patiently. He thanked Hamdan for expressing his frustration. He promised to do everything in his power to give him a fair trial. He promised Hamdan a chance, after seven years’ confinement, to finally hear the evidence against him. He told Hamdan he would finally be able present his own side of the story.

But Hamdan’s central question remained: “By what law will you try me?”

The judge responded with the only answer he could: The military commissions law passed by Congress in 2006.

“But the government changed the law to its advantage,” Hamdan replied. “I am not being tried by the American law.”

And Hamdan left the courtroom, having made clear that he would no longer participate in a commissions system unmoored from American criminal law, the Constitution and international law.

The court closed down for the night. It reassembled in the morning and went straight into scheduling. But its star figure was missing. A trial date was set for June 2. With or without Hamdan.

At first, this seemed completely normal for the totally abnormal world of Baghdad in September 2007. “Convoys are common,” explained Khalaf. But this convoy made an unexpected U-turn, drove the wrong way around the one-way square, stopped in the middle of it and started shooting. Fifteen minutes later, 17 Iraqi civilians were dead, dozens more wounded, and a white sedan that had been engulfed in flames contained two bodies charred beyond recognition.

“It was a horror movie,” said Khalaf, describing the aftermath of the now notorious Blackwater shootings.

I interviewed Khalaf on Nov. 30, in a small conference room inside a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey. In one of the most in-depth collection of testimonials to date regarding Blackwater, Khalaf was among five witnesses and victims flown from Baghdad to meet with Susan Burke, William O’Neil and their team of lawyers and investigators. The team is suing Blackwater on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shooting.

That lethal incident was a watershed moment that brought intense scrutiny to the problems caused by private contractors, which have effectively operated with impunity as they’ve brought violence and widespread ill will to U.S. operations in Iraq.

With experience learned from a similar lawsuit filed two years ago against U.S. contractors implicated in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Burke O’Neil is perhaps the only law firm in the nation that could so quickly gather eyewitness and victim accounts, make the right legal arguments and begin the process of holding Blackwater to account.

Sadly, this lawsuit may be the only way that the victims and their families receive remotely adequate compensation for their losses.

Khalaf recounted the events of that day to a hushed room of lawyers with laptops. He watched, he said, as the Blackwater convoy made the U-turn toward the street where he stood directing traffic. As the convoy stopped, Khalaf watched as a large man with a mustache standing atop the third car fired several shots in the air. Khalaf turned back toward the Yarmouk road to see what might have spurred the shooting and heard a woman yell, “My son! My son!” He ran three cars back to a white sedan to find a woman holding a young man slumped over and covered with blood.

The man was Ahmed, a 20-year-old medical student at the top of his class, and the woman his mother, Mohasin, a successful dermatologist and mother of three.

“I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight,” said Khalaf. “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting,” he said, thinking that it would respond to such a gesture by a police officer. He described how he crouched by the car, his right arm reaching inside, his head out and left arm up in the air, signaling to the convoy, his gun secure in its holster. Then the mother was shot dead before his eyes.

The shooting then turned heavier, Khalaf said, his eyes red-brimmed and serious. He hid behind the police traffic booth, but shots came directly at him, hitting the adjacent traffic light and booth’s door, and he fled back across Yarmouk road to safety behind a hill. Along with a few hundred others, he stayed there as the chaos unfolded, watching as the helicopters circling above the street started shooting at those below.

Fifteen minutes later, the four-car convoy continued around the square and drove away. Amid the wreckage, colorful clouds billowed into the air from the convoy’s parting gift — multicolored smoke bombs.

In remarks prepared for delivery before a congressional hearing in October, Blackwater chairman Erik Prince claimed company guards “returned fire at threatening targets,” including “men with AK-47s firing on the convoy” and “approaching vehicles that appeared to be suicide car bombers.” Prince’s prepared testimony also asserted that one of the vehicles had been disabled by the “enemy fire” and had to be towed. And he contended that the helicopters never fired on those below. (These remarks were never actually delivered; the Department of Justice launched an investigation the day before the hearing and asked the committee not to discuss the details of the Sept. 16 incident. Prince’s remarks were subsequently reported in the Washington Post.)

But the accounts of Khalaf and others contradict each of Prince’s assertions. Khalaf, who was there before the shooting began, said he never saw anyone fire on or approach the convoy. He watched as all four cars drove away as the 15-minute shooting spree ended, and huddled in fear as the helicopters began firing. He thought the helicopters would start spraying those who were hiding behind the hill for safety from the street-level threat.

Khalaf’s observations are backed up by official accounts, including leaked FBI findings, which concluded that at least 14 of the 17 shooting deaths were unjustified, and statements by military officials disputing Blackwater’s claim that its guards had been fired upon or under any sort of attack. The Iraq government’s own investigation found no evidence that the guards had been provoked or attacked, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki‘s spokesperson called the shootings “deliberate murder.”

The scene as the Blackwater convoy exited the square was also described to the group of lawyers by Hooby, a 32-year-old bank employee who was there on lunch break, returning from a failed attempt to buy a gift for a friend’s newborn. (An unrelated bombing in a nearby market cut the shopping trip short.) Stuck in heavy traffic on the opposite side of the square from Yarmouk road, he heard the shooting start. When he got out of his car to find out what was happening, he saw the convoy and the white car burning, and started yelling at the other cars to turn around. Two helicopters circled overhead, each with a man strapped in and a machine gun sticking out.

In a panic, Hooby turned his car around and was leaving the area when the convoy approached from behind, throwing water bottles at the roof of his car. “All of a sudden, I felt pain in my right arm and left leg, opened the car door, and rolled out,” said Hooby. The car rolled forward a short way, hit a wall and stopped, said Hooby. “I thought I was dying.”

He spent the next three days in the hospital and underwent major surgery on his right arm, which was fractured by a bullet. He spent the next two months at home, recuperating. The large metal rod implanted by the surgeon to help his broken bone heal properly is expected to be removed at the end of December.

Like Khalaf, Hooby said he never saw anyone on his side of the square make even a threatening gesture toward the Blackwater convoy.

Now, left to deal with the aftermath are 16 grieving families, and those, like Hooby, still trying to recover from their wounds.

Haythem, the composed, articulate and powerfully calm father and husband of Ahmed and Mohasin, who died in the white car, expected them to pick him up at the health center where he worked that afternoon. He waited and waited, and eventually went home without them. “I tried to be patient,” he said. “I kept calling, but thought there must be some sort of cellphone interruption.”

Finally, around 5 p.m., he phoned his brother who worked at the hospital closest to Nissour Square. His brother went to the emergency room, then to the morgue. He learned that all of the bodies there were identified — except for two that were completely burned with body parts missing. His brother then headed to the square, where he called Haythem to tell him he had found a charred white car with a license plate number written in the sand. The numerals and letters matched the family’s plate.

Haythem identified his son from what was left of his shoes. His forehead and brains were missing and his skin completely burned. He identified his wife of 20 years by a dental bridge.

With tears in his eyes, Haythem described his beloved wife and son. “If you perceive marriage as half of your life, Mohasin was my best half,” he said. “We were always together. I don’t know how to manage my life or care for my other two children without her.”

Ahmed “was my first baby boy,” he said. “Everyone loved him.”

The State Department contacted Haythem and asked how much he wanted for compensation. “I said their lives are priceless,” said Haythem. But the State Department representative kept insisting on a number. Haythem eventually told him that “if he could give me my loved ones, I would gladly give him $200 million.”

None of the Iraqis we interviewed last month could describe their losses without breaking down in tears.

Assadi, 31, a stoic, unsmiling man, became the head of the family after his older brother Usama was killed in the shootings. His tough façade cracked as he described the moment he learned about the shootings. His brother left behind a wife and four children. Assadi is now the sole breadwinner for the entire family.

He documented what was left of his brother’s car. The line of bullet holes in one side door is overshadowed by the two soccer-ball-size holes in the roof and driver’s side door.

Another young man, 27-year-old Abu Hassam, suddenly became the head of his family just a week earlier, when on Sept. 9 his older brother was shot in front of the family’s carpet shop — in an incident also attributed to Blackwater. His brother’s wife had delivered their first child, a daughter, just 20 days earlier. At least four other Iraqis have been reported killed in that incident on Sept. 9.

These are not isolated events. In October, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released its analysis of Blackwater’s own internal reporting since 2005, which found 195 shooting incidents in the last two years, including 160 in which Blackwater employees fired the first shot. And Blackwater is not the only problem. An estimated 20,000 to 35,000 private security contractors operate in Iraq, without adequate oversight, without adequate training and without adequate legal sanctions to hold abusers accountable.

The Burke O’Neil lawsuit may be the only way that victims receive compensation for their loss. The State Department has offered family members $10,000 for those killed in the Sept. 16 shootings — an amount most consider insultingly low and have refused. In less high-profile cases involving U.S. contractors, no one has offered anything.

Some of the Iraqis told me that they don’t even care about the money. They just want to see those responsible punished. But the Iraqis’ hands are tied. An order issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority in its departing days and still in force gives foreign private contractors immunity under Iraqi law.

U.S. prosecutors are now reportedly trying to build a case against those involved in the Sept. 16 shootings. If successful, it will be the first time the U.S. government has held private security contractors criminally liable for abusive behavior directed at Iraqis. In other cases, investigations don’t even get off the ground, because of lack of political will, limits in the extraterritorial reach of U.S. criminal laws, and the absence of investigative units on the ground. Even in this case, the FBI did not visit the crime scene for more than two weeks after the incident, during which time State Department investigators interviewing Blackwater employees offered them limited immunity, complicating the prosecution.

Legislation now working its way through Congress would resolve some of the gaps in the law, and hold all U.S. private security contractors subject to criminal sanctions for felonies committed abroad. But such legislation is only as good as the oversight and enforcement that accompany it. A few token prosecutions of a handful of Blackwater employees will not be enough. There needs to be a wholesale reform of the way security contractors and those that oversee their work do business.

At stake is the future of other innocent lives, as well as America’s reputation throughout the Middle East and across the world.

One of the men I met in Istanbul wrote me after I returned home. “Conduct our deepest love to all the Americans who support and work hard to stop killing of innocent people all over the world,” he said. “Please, we want to live in peace, surrounded by friends not killers.”

The proceedings began with Khadr, a gangly and sad-faced Canadian accused of killing a U.S. soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, who has now spent a quarter of his life in detention. The expected fight over legal representation was resolved quickly, with both sides agreeing to find a way for Khadr’s chosen Canadian lawyers to participate, despite rules requiring civilian defense counsel to be U.S. citizens.

But then came the bombshell: The presiding judge, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback, announced that he was dismissing the case — without even any briefing by the parties — because the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed. A palpable buzz flooded the courtroom. The reasoning was this: Congress had granted military commissions jurisdiction over anyone found to be an “unlawful enemy combatant.” But Khadr, the colonel concluded, had been classified only as an “enemy combatant” by the military review board that determined his status (a term that includes members of a regular army entitled to prisoner of war status). Therefore, the commissions did not have the authority to hear Khadr’s case.

Hamdan’s case followed a few hours later — different parties, a different military judge, but the same conclusion. Case number two was dismissed with some audible sighs amid the broad smiles of others.

The unexpected outcome is fitting and a win for the rule of law. The Bush administration’s attempt to create an entirely new system of quasi-justice — one without any established precedent or rules, where even the basis for jurisdiction was made up on the fly — has been dysfunctional since day one.

Established with fanfare more than five years ago, the military commissions were touted by the administration and its supporters as the best forum in which to bring the masterminds of 9/11 to justice. They “don’t deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process,” Vice President Cheney declared at the time. Instead, suspected terrorists would be deprived of the basic principles of due process and could potentially be convicted on evidence they had never seen — including evidence obtained by interrogators using torture.

Only 10 charges were ever brought under these military commissions. In June 2006, the Supreme Court found the commissions unlawful, holding the administration had failed to seek congressional approval for them, and the pending cases were dismissed. But a few months later, Congress came to the administration’s rescue, rushing through legislation to authorize the continued use of commissions. It passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gave the president the authorization he needed to proceed.

The first and only conviction came just two months ago, when Australian David Hicks, the former kangaroo skinner, pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism in exchange for a sentence of just nine months, to be served in Adelaide.

Compared with the prosecution of terrorists in the federal court system, the military commissions are an abysmal failure. In the same five and a half years that the commissions have convicted just one individual, the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted hundreds of terrorism cases, including dozens of international ones. A few are well-known: Richard Reid, the shoe bomber arrested in Logan airport and sentenced to life in prison; Zacarias Moussaoui, who got life in prison for his involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Others are less familiar but significant nonetheless: The Lackawanna Six, who got seven to 10 years each for training in a camp in Afghanistan prior to Sept. 11. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who got 30 years for training with and supporting al-Qaida. Mohammad Ali Hasan al-Moayad and Mohammed Zayed, who got 75 years and 45 years, respectively, for channeling money to al-Qaida and Hamas. The list goes on. All are now incarcerated and serving out their sentences, having gone through an established U.S. system of justice.

By contrast, the few relatively low-level guys to be charged by the military commissions have been monitored by journalists from all over the world and been the subject of much fanfare — including article after article exposing the commissions as unfair, biased and nonsensical. The system has been put on trial rather than the alleged high-level detainees it was designed for.

And it should remain on trial until it is dispensed with for good. Its ad hoc nature becomes more apparent with every proceeding.

When Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, it made a considered distinction between “lawful enemy combatants” — those members of properly constituted armies who deserve prisoner of war status — and “unlawful enemy combatants,” defined negatively as someone who is “not” a lawful enemy combatant but is engaged in or has “purposefully and materially” supported hostilities against the United States. Of key importance to yesterday’s ruling, military commissions could preside over “unlawful enemy combatants” only.

The previously constituted Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) — the military review boards initially created by the Department of Defense to ascertain the status of Guantánamo Bay detainees — didn’t make such a distinction between types of enemy combatants. Thus, the administration now has three choices. It could appeal the ruling to the Court of Military Commissions Review, a court that does not even yet exist. It could redo the CSRT process, applying the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” approved by Congress, to see if the suspects qualify as such. Or, it could admit that its experimental system of quasi-justice has failed, close up shop, and bring any future charges in federal court or courts-martial — systems with established rules and precedent, where the alleged terrorists can finally be brought to a trial worthy to be termed justice.