They shut him up. Fast. You never even saw him. No footage of him coming off the plane, no flags or banners waving, no parade in his honor. He came home from Iraq in May, but there wasn't even a formal announcement. In fact, you're not supposed to know he's here.

He lives in a secret location. It might be just down the street, or it might be halfway to nowhere. Maybe he was sitting at the next table last night, having dinner right beside you. You have no way of knowing: Nobody knows what he looks like. The only picture most of us have seen is the one from 1997, the high school yearbook portrait, with his hair parted in the middle and the impish smile on his face. That was before he lost the hair, before he gained the weight and his chest filled out, before he got married and became a man. But that was the picture that ran in all the papers when the scandal broke. It was the only one that slipped out.

He hasn't done any interviews or made any statements since it happened, hasn't talked publicly about what he saw in Abu Ghraib prison or what made him turn in those pictures on that January night in Iraq. All we know is that he did turn them in and that everything changed because of it. The rest is speculation. He's been under a gag order for three months.

He wouldn't mind talking, actually; he wants you to know the truth. The desire to tell the truth was how he got into this thing in the first place. He was the guy who stood up to evil when everyone else fell silent, the guy who put himself on the line when nobody else would. No wonder they won't let him talk. No wonder he can't say what he knows. It would be easier if he could, if Joe Darby could tell you himself, but this will do for now.

+++++

He came off the plane changed. He was smaller, somehow, and thinner, and his face was drawn and gray, and as he descended from the roaring C-5 to the shimmering tarmac in the afternoon light, a sea of military brass surrounded him and pushed him into a van as the jet rolled on to the gate without him, with the other soldiers inside going home.

Joe Darby wasn't going home. That much he knew. He didn't know where he was going, or who would be there, but he knew that home was out of the question. Nothing would be that simple anymore. That was the irony of it. In Iraq, everything had been less complicated. He had been cut off from all the television news and the Internet buzz and the e-mail, even from his DVDs and video games, cloistered away in some private orbit with only his thoughts and memories. Now, in the States, in the van, in his desert fatigues with his day bag in his lap and his tired eyes flattened by the long hours of flight, he stared out the window at the air base whizzing by, and he knew that the easy part of his journey was over.

Coming back was like parachuting into a jungle with only glimpses of what lay below. What would people think? The military had been kind to him; but then, the military knew the truth. It was easy to be kind when you knew the truth, when you knew what else happened at Abu Ghraib, how far the abuse had gone, how much farther than all those photos in the news, farther than all the rumors and gossip, farther than almost any decent person could imagine. It was easy to be kind when you knew the depths of the depravity he had found in that cold concrete prison with the fresh coat of yellow Coalition paint and the slow fans chopping overhead. But the public didn't know all that. The public didn't know the truth. Oh, they knew about the piles of naked prisoners, and the hooded figure attached to electrical wires. They knew about the inmates being forced to imitate sex acts, and being terrorized by attack dogs. But how would they feel when they knew the rest? That was the real question.

As the van pulled up to a building, the officers told Joe to get out. He slung his day bag over his shoulder and stepped down, into the light. There was a glass door in front of him, but he couldn't see inside. One of the officers told him, "Open it."

Joe Darby was about to step into the rest of his life.

+++++

No marriage is perfect, but Bernadette and Joe were trying. They had married right after high school and moved from the Appalachian Mountains to the D.C. suburbs for a fresh start—until, after a few years, they realized that being close to home was more important than any adolescent notion of escape. So in the spring of 2001 they moved back, packing their bags and boxes into a U-Haul van and taking a small apartment in Corriganville, Maryland, just across the border from their families in western Pennsylvania.

From the beginning, Bernadette and Joe wore down the road with their visits home. For one thing, Joe's mother had fallen sick with cancer, so he felt a responsibility to be around as much as possible, cooking and cleaning and helping with the bills. But also, he and Bernadette just liked being around their families, especially Bernadette's.

The Mains family was close by any standard, but after Bernadette's mother died in 1998, they had only grown closer. There were three sisters—Virginia, Maxine, and Bernadette—and together they made a complete set. Bernadette was the youngest, beautiful and headstrong. The other sisters called her "Tut." Virginia was the oldest and most reserved, a wellspring of sensible advice her sisters often ignored, then wished they had followed. The family called her "Wood." And the middle sister was Maxine, the centerpiece of the family in many ways, the one who kept everyone else laughing with her biting, honest humor. Maxine could talk Bernadette out of something, and Virginia into something. Her nickname was "Bean." All three sisters looked up to their father, Dave, with a deference that bordered on anachronism. He was the intermediary in every squabble and the first to hear good news.

For Joe, Bernadette's sisters were almost like sisters of his own. At times he and Maxine might trade sharp words about whose pasta sauce was better or who knew jack and who didn't, but even this was more like a sibling rivalry than anything else. When Joe and Bernadette would get into a spat or Maxine and her husband, Clay, would grate on each other's nerves, you could find Joe and Clay an hour later at Hooters, drinking beer and cooling off while their wives got together to gossip about them, about what a pain they were, what a couple of overgrown boys, even while secretly wishing they would hurry home and sit on the floor and play their stupid PlayStations again with the volume cranked up and Maxine's daughter, Vanessa, climbing all over her favorite uncle, Jo-Jo. In the summers, they would all barbecue together or scoot out of town to the Maryland coast, where the girls would take long walks and play with the kids while Joe and Clay headed off on deep-sea-fishing trips, coming home with flounders and five-pound sea trout that either Joe or Maxine would fry for dinner, depending on who won that argument. Things were pretty good.

In fact, before Abu Ghraib tore their world apart, the biggest problem in Bernadette and Joe's life, aside from the occasional shortage of cash or the dumb squabbles that bubble up in any normal relationship was the problem of Joe being in the military. Bernadette hated the military. That's the word she uses. "I hated the military," she snaps. "I despised the military. I fought with Joe to get out. I hated the deployments."

It was a fair way to feel. For a guy in the Reserves—a young guy from the sticks, without any money or a jump on life, a guy hoping to start a family and wanting a little cushion of cash, a guy struggling to make ends meet as a big-truck mechanic, for a guy who signed up to spend one weekend a month and two weeks a year running exercises at a military base near home—Joe was spending an awful lot of time doing an awful lot more than that. Like, for example, going to Bosnia. For eight months. Or, you know, Iraq. For another sixteen. With only eight months in between. Actually, by the time Joe arrived at Abu Ghraib last fall, he had spent the better part of three years deployed, away from Bernadette, her family, his friends, and even his own mother, whose health wasn't getting any better with time. He and Bernadette were just 24 years old, and the last time they had really been together, they had been only 21. If Joe had known back then what it meant to enlist, he never would have done it. Even if he'd wanted to, Bernadette wouldn't have let him.

Being married to an active reservist, she discovered, was almost like not being married at all, except scarier and lonelier and more frustrating, and you had to hurry home from your sister's house after dinner sometimes just to sit around and wait for the phone to ring. So really, when Bernadette says she hated the military, what she means is that she loves her husband. It was simple: Joe was hers, and the military took him, and so what Bernadette hated was not the military so much as what it had done to her, what it had done to them, what it took away and wouldn't give back, which was not only Joe but time itself.

+++++

And that was before the call. Bernadette will never forget the call. It was a Sunday morning, and she was at home in the little apartment in Corriganville, enjoying her day off, when the phone rang. She felt a knot form in her throat, something only a military wife can understand.

"Hello?"

"Is this Bernadette Darby?"

Deep breath. "Yes."

"Are you related to Joe Darby?"

"Yes..."

It was a reporter from the Baltimore Sun. He only had a few questions, he said. There was going to be an article in The New Yorker this week, and Joe's name was going to be in it. Joe was the one who had turned in the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Did Bernadette know that? Had she seen the article? Did she have anything to say?

Bernadette said no. She didn't have anything to say about Abu Ghraib, and she didn't know much about it, and she didn't need to, because she loved Joe and trusted him to do the right thing. He was a good, honest man. She got off the phone as quickly as she could.

Bernadette stood alone in the apartment, blood pounding in her head. What the hell was that? Joe had done what? A little later, she called her father, but even as she punched the numbers, she felt her anxiety rising again. What if he didn't support Joe? He would, of course. She knew he would. He had to. But what if he didn't?

By the time Bernadette hung up with Dave a few minutes later, he still had no idea why she had called. It had all come out in gibberish, something about Joe and Iraq and those torture photographs on TV, but Dave couldn't make any sense of it. He kept asking Bernadette to slow down, but she couldn't seem to explain. Dave said, "I'm sure Joe didn't have anything to do with that," but he could tell she wasn't convinced. He went to bed that night with no idea what had happened.

For Bernadette, there wasn't any going to bed. The phone kept ringing, reporter after reporter, far into the night, but still no word from Joe. She finally turned off the ringer at two-thirty and tossed around till seven.

In the morning, it was everywhere. There was the article in The Sun, and the New Yorker story, and all day long at Bernadette's job at the hospital, her phone was ringing like nuts, reporters blaring the same three or four questions: "Why did your husband do it? What kind of a man is he? What can you tell us about him? Do you have any comment?"

Bernadette had spoken with Virginia right before talking with her dad. "Just be careful what you say," Virginia had warned. "Tell them you support Joe, but you can't answer any questions." So that's what Bernadette did. She said it again and again, and then she said it some more. Each time the phone would ring and another reporter began the routine, Bernadette would interrupt and repeat the lines. It was a workday, but she wasn't getting any work done. A TV crew from D.C. tried to get into her part of the building, but the hospital staff kept them out. The phone receptionist tried to screen the calls that were coming through the switchboard, but they couldn't stop her cell phone from ringing. So she kept at the routine, saying the same words over and over and over, until she picked up the phone ready to go through it for the hundredth time that day, and as she brought the phone to her ear, Joe said, "Hey, how's your day going?"

Bernadette wanted to scream. Halfway around the world and just as unflappable as ever. "You're asking me how my day was?" she shouted. "Don't you know?"

"What?"

"Joe! They're saying you turned in those pictures!"

A pause.

"Oh, shit," Joe said. "I'll call you later."

+++++

Up in Pennsylvania, Maxine was visiting Virginia that afternoon, getting away from her own house, where Clay had taken over the living room with his video games, blasting the volume at ridiculous levels and driving Maxine crazy. For Maxine, Virginia's house was always quiet, a getaway from the rest of the world, and the two of them had just said hello when they got a call from Bernadette. She sounded frantic.

"They're everywhere!" Bernadette said. "I'm at my landlord's house right now—I can see them across the way, at my apartment. They're waiting for me! They've been calling all day at work. My cell phone won't stop ringing!"

It was the first Maxine had heard about Joe's involvement with the scandal, but Virginia brought her up to speed quickly. "He's a hero," Maxine said flatly, when she heard. Then she called Clay right away, and they agreed that it was just like Joe to do this. It was almost funny in a way. Joe could be as stubborn and bullheaded as anything—just ask the other guys in his company. Some of them had obviously known about the abuse and said nothing. But not Joe. Good old Joe. You could always count on that fool to speak his mind, whether you wanted him to or not.

Clay and Maxine didn't spend much time laughing, though. Something had to be done for Bernadette, and they agreed that the first thing would be to get her out of her apartment, away from those reporters, to pick her up and bring her back to their home for a few days, at least until the buzz died down. The trouble was, Bernadette had to work all week. It was only Monday. The drive was an hour each way.

"That's fine," said Clay. "I'll drive her down every morning and pick her up every evening." He didn't even hesitate. Maxine felt like crying.

Soon the three of them were in Clay's red Explorer, ready to go. Privately, Clay was amused. It felt like some kind of military maneuver, or something from one of his video games. Extracting a media hostage. They stopped off at Knapp's Snack Shack for mozzarella sticks on the way.

It didn't take long at Bernadette's place to see how overwhelmed she was. It was one thing to hear about it over the phone, another to go inside and see how bad she looked, the fear and anxiety forming circles under her eyes, her cell phone ringing nonstop. As soon as they came in the door, a producer from the Today show arrived with flowers, then a reporter from the Associated Press right after that, all in the span of less than five minutes, while Clay hopped from one foot to the other, getting more agitated with every passing second.

Once Bernadette had packed her bags, they all hurried out to Clay's truck, slamming the doors and speeding off, the tension slowly draining from their shoulders as they went, as they got closer and closer to home, starting to laugh about it somewhere near the Pennsylvania line, joking about the movie they would make out of this and which actor would play each one of them. Everyone in the truck that night was aware that this would be one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. But it still hadn't occurred to anyone that it might also be one of the worst, a shitstorm of celebrity that would last days and weeks and months, that it would wreck old friendships and alienate family, that their neighbors would turn on them and vandalize their house, that the police would refuse to help, that Bernadette would never work another day at her job—or spend another night in the little apartment she was leaving behind.

+++++

Central Appalachia is a special kind of place, lost in time and space. Cut off from the corridors of traffic that run up and down the East Coast, the coal-mining towns nestled in these green hills fueled the nation through the industrial revolution. For 150 years, miners crossed the mountains just to get here, then they stayed, building cities around the vast deposits of anthracite and bituminous coal, starting families, thriving in the industry's heyday, and then crumbling under its collapse.

Today the poverty in places like Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where Joe Darby was born and most of his family still lives, is far worse than the national average, with unemployment a third higher. Perhaps more important, the jobs that can be found are often harder on families than the mines ever were. If it was tough to send a young husband into twelve hours of darkness for a paycheck, it must be even harder to ship him off for weeks at a time behind the wheel of a big rig or months on end doing a stint in the service. And yet for many families in this part of the country—for guys like Joe Darby—few other options exist. Long good-byes have become a part of the rhythm of life.

It was no coincidence that Joe lived only a short drive from many of the men and women in those photos from Abu Ghraib. It was no coincidence that he knew Lynndie England and Jeremy Sivits, who lived just a few miles from his house. They were in his local unit, the 372nd Military Police Battalion. They trained together, deployed together, lived together on assignments, and when they finally came home on leave, passing through the streets of their small towns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the flags and banners that hung from storefront windows were there for all of them.

Outside these communities, in most of America, the pictures from Abu Ghraib met with instant outrage and contempt, and Joe Darby became a hero. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised his actions as "honorable and responsible." The House Armed Services Committee praised him for risking his career in pursuit of "what is right." But inside the little towns of Jenners and Somerset and Windber and Johnstown, many neighbors weren't so quick to celebrate. Abu Ghraib became a litmus test of the American mood; reactions split along political and economic lines. On campuses and in the halls of government, even within the upper echelons of the military command, few would question what Joe had done. But in his own hometown, plenty of people did. Some had seen the face of battle themselves and had made their own moral compromises, which were easier not to remember. Others had family members who served in the first gulf war and had a hard time feeling sorry for Iraqis. Still others had relatives in Iraq this time, some of whom would never come home. So if a few prisoners got beaten up, if they were humiliated or even abused, well, shit happens all the time. War is war. Joe Darby's decision didn't make him honorable; it made him a traitor.

In another place, in a private moment, looking at those same pictures, who knows—maybe even Joe Darby would have shrugged his shoulders and looked the other way. But the thing is, when called upon to act, he didn't look the other way. He saw the pictures, and he couldn't forget.

He never wanted to see them. They almost literally fell into his lap. It was early January 2004, and his unit had been at Abu Ghraib for three months, when one of his unit members, a guy named Charles Graner, handed him a couple of CDs to duplicate. So Joe went down to the Internet café near the sleeping quarters and started duping the discs. Graner hadn't given him any warning about special files or secret folders, and Joe was sitting there scrolling through the images, mindlessly, when bam!, the first hideous photo came up. Then another. Then another. Then another.

"He said, 'What the heck is this?' " remembers Janis Karpinski, the Brigadier General who ran Abu Ghraib. "It was very innocent. He was absolutely shocked by this."

He was also unsure what to do about it. He took the discs back to Graner and told him what he'd found, but Graner just said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," adding, "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"

Then the discs disappeared. Days went by and nothing happened, and Joe kept thinking about it. Well, how could he forget? Graner's comment was bad, but the pictures were a whole lot worse, some of the same images that the world has now seen on 60 Minutes II and in newspapers and magazines, pictures of hooded figures, naked prisoners piled up, and detainees being terrorized by dogs. It was enough to unsettle him at the most elemental level, not only as a military policeman but also as a man. Maybe in another time, in another situation, with pressure from the rest of his unit to keep quiet, Joe could have found a way to move on. But the way it unfolded, finding it alone and then looking at the rest of the unit each day, wondering which ones knew and which were guilty, he couldn't keep it to himself. He decided to take the next step.

Late one night, he slipped a copy of the disc under the door of the army's Criminal Investigation Division. It was an act of conscience unobstructed, one of the most dangerous things in the world.

+++++

Back at Maxine and Clay's house, it didn't take long for the storm to catch up with Bernadette. Any fantasy she had entertained about escape to the hills was dashed at 7 A.M., when her cell phone started ringing and wouldn't stop for the rest of the day. At first, Bernadette just pretended to be Maxine, telling the reporters, "My sister isn't doing any interviews," but that didn't even make a dent. They just called back a few minutes later, then again a few minutes after that. Finally, Maxine got fed up and called a local TV station. "If you guys want to interview somebody," she said, "here's my address. I'll be here."

By noon, the house was surrounded by TV trucks and cameramen setting up lights and microphones. As soon as Maxine stepped in front of the first camera, she could feel the quicksand at her ankles. Every time she finished with one reporter, two more would arrive, then four more after that. How many times could she say the same thing? Afternoon fell and evening came and the reporters just kept coming, through sunset and into the night, newspapers and magazines and TV stations from New York and Washington, D.C., all the major dailies and the weeklies, too. Upstairs in the bedroom, Clay and Bernadette gazed out the window in awe, watching the line of reporters inch forward, single file, toward Maxine. Diane Sawyer's people called. Katie Couric's, too.

As the week wore on, it barely slowed down. In some ways it even got worse. No one slept, and the phones rang all night, and as the articles began to appear, the family realized that some journalists don't care what they say or how they make you feel. There was the writer from The Washington Post who asked a bunch of questions about Joe, then wrote an article about Maxine instead, about how small-town she was and how she'd never left Pennsylvania, which wasn't even true, and how her house was a mess, which was only true that week, and only for the obvious reasons, and nobody's business anyway. Then there was the team from ABC, calling so often it became like a joke. At one point, Clay counted fifteen calls from ABC in the span of a single dinner. But the worst was the guy from the New York Post who parked his white Mustang across the street, banging on the door every thirty minutes and demanding an interview with Bernadette. "I know she's in there," he would say. "I'm not leaving until she comes out." Sure enough, he didn't. He sat there for hours, watching every move they made and rushing to the door whenever anyone opened it. Well into the night, he was still there, and when Virginia came by to pick up her son Billy, Maxine brought him out with a blanket over his head, but the Post guy sprang out of his car, rushing toward them, and Billy started screaming and crying and Maxine shouted for help from the police officers who were standing across the street, but they just stared at her, then looked away. "It's a public street," they said.

That was the real hell of it. The media blitz was bad, but at least it was in their faces. You could see it coming and knew what to expect, which was a total disregard for privacy. It was bad but predictable. By contrast, the rest of the community, from the cops to the checkout clerk at the grocery, had become a terrifying mystery. There was no way of knowing where anyone stood, how they felt, or what they might do. Forget about the families of Joe's unit. Bernadette knew they would hate her, but there were only so many of them. It was everyone else she was worried about. There were thousands of people in this stretch of valley, and she had lived here for most of her life. She knew some of them wouldn't support Joe. They wouldn't feel any sympathy for the Iraqis in those pictures, and they would consider Joe a traitor for blowing the whistle. Bernadette could see that coming. But the question was, how many were there? And which ones would they be?

Each day, she would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do "a little devilish thing," on the whole he was "a wonderful kid."

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was "walking around with a bull's-eye on his head," just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe's dead. Some of Bernadette's family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn't support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn't be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

Bernadette felt unhinged. As days passed, she began to cry more often and to beg God for help, praying that Joe would come home or at least call again. She felt like she was sinking, this young woman who had been so vibrant and fiery just days before, now collapsing inside. She would dream of herself in a desert at night, hunting feverishly for water. She began to have trouble putting on her clothes, and her sisters would have to help. She wondered about shadows in the street and the things that might be in them. She began to fantasize about the hospital and what it would be like to go there, safe and away from everything.

In an effort to keep herself upright, she decided to go back home to the little apartment she shared with Joe and see her cats, to feed them and give them kisses. Clay agreed to drive her down, and Maxine and the two kids, Vanessa and Billy, piled into the back of the car, driving down the old, familiar road together, the one Bernadette had traveled so many times with Joe, visiting their families.

When they got to Bernadette's apartment in Corriganville, they went inside, and the cats rushed to Bernadette, and she held them in her arms and talked to them while Maxine and Clay tried to give her space.

And then the phone rang.

It was a major from the U.S. Army, and he was coming over. Within a few minutes, everything began to shift around Bernadette, and it was hard to tell what was happening. She found herself in the passenger seat of an unmarked government vehicle, speeding down the highway to some unknown destination, Clay's truck right behind her with Maxine and the kids packed inside, the whole group snatched up by military protective custody without any prior warning or even a clear idea of why. Bernadette called Virginia and said, "We're in protective custody now. I don't know where we're going, but we'll call you when we get there."

The whole thing felt insane. Could all this really be happening? Did they know something she didn't?

+++++

Well, yes. Quite a few things, actually. Like, one thing Bernadette didn't know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven't been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is "a good deal more terrible" than what you've seen. But you don't hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what "more terrible" means.

You don't hear anybody explaining, for example, how Private Lynndie England, the woman in so many of those pictures, the one smiling and laughing and giving the thumbs-up, wasn't even supposed to be in the cellblock, how she didn't have any police authority and shouldn't have been dealing with inmates in the first place. You don't hear much of anything about her job, because the truth is, her job was something else entirely. Lynndie England was an administration clerk; not an MP like Joe but the equivalent of a secretary. "She was assigned to an MP unit," says Blake Ellis, a paralegal with England's defense team, "but she wasn't an MP. She did not have any police authority. She was not supposed to be walking tiers or working with inmates."

If you don't believe him, how about the brigadier general who ran the whole prison? Janis Karpinski says that England had absolutely no business working with inmates and suggests that the only reason England was on the cellblock was because her boyfriend, Charles Graner, had invited her. "Graner's original claim, before he clammed up," Karpinski says, "was that the interrogators told him to get a female over there and he thought of her immediately."

Sound like procedure to you?

Then there's Sivits. Guess what? Not an MP, either. No business being in a cellblock, no business interacting with detainees. This is a prison with 300 military police on duty, and they've got a mechanic up at one in the morning taking pictures while they terrorize prisoners.

Sound kosher?

All this in a prison, by the way, that was overcrowded by about 350 percent. According to Major David DiNenna, who served under Karpinski in Abu Ghraib, "Towards the end, we had over 7,000 prisoners. We were only supposed to run 2,000." Karpinski says the same thing.

Or how about this: children. Little kids. In the prison. Sure, the army will say they weren't little, but they were, and they still are. According to Florian Westphal, at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, there have been at least 107 juveniles in American custody this year, and according to an army spokesman at the Pentagon, there are still "about sixty juveniles under the age of 18"—but he insists that "the youngest would be 14." As if 14 isn't young. As if 14 is a perfectly reasonable age to be housed in an adult prison.

Not that it's even true.

At least one person from Abu Ghraib says the kids in custody go far younger than that. And this person ought to know. After all, it was her prison—that is, until military intelligence and private contractors took it away. "There was one kid in there, he looked like he was 8," remembers General Karpinski. "His hands were on the bars, and he was clearly a juvenile. So I touched his hands, you know, and I spoke to him in Arabic to the extent that I could. I asked him how old he was, and he said that he was almost 12 and that he wanted his mother and could his mother please come, and he was crying, and he was grabbing my hand so hard. I asked him, what did he do? What was he there for? And he said he was bringing some food, and all of a sudden these soldiers came, and there was a lot of noise and a lot of shouting, and him and his brother were just playing there, just bringing some food to these people. So I asked him, 'Do you know about any weapons? Saddam? Planning?' He was swearing to me, 'No, no,' and crying. His brother was with him in the cell, and I asked him how old he was, and he said 15."

So it's tough to know exactly how old the kids in Abu Ghraib really are and how many of them are in there, just like it's tough to know how they're being treated. Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the Abu Ghraib scandal in The New Yorker, claims that video exists of young Iraqi boys being sodomized. But Hersh hasn't come forward with the video, and neither has anybody else. Even if he's not right, there's no question that other prisoners were sodomized by U.S. soldiers. There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn't see those pictures on the news though, didn't hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba's 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are "confidential." Just like all the pornography coming out of Abu Ghraib is being kept from you, the videos of Lynndie England fellating an unidentified man, the pictures of soldiers having sex. The members of the United States Congress apparently couldn't tell who the man was when they watched the highlight reel on a loop in a dark room on Capitol Hill one afternoon in May, an event that one Congressman calls "Bizarro World," with representatives coming and going while hundreds of pictures and videos rolled by, people like Nancy Pelosi sitting in front of a screen of depravity, with a military minder occasionally interjecting, "This one's from Tier 1A."

That wasn't on 60 Minutes II, either.

Just try calling your senator and asking him about that. Ask him what he saw. Any children? Pornography? Sexual abuse? Richard Durbin: No comment. Lindsey Graham: Can neither confirm nor deny. Joseph Lieberman: No response. Sam Brownback: No response. Carl Levin: No comment. Joseph Biden: No comment. Ron Wyden: Can neither confirm nor deny. Tim Johnson: Can neither confirm nor deny. Jon Corzine: No comment. Chuck Schumer: No response. Barbara Boxer: No comment. John Warner: No comment. Lincoln Chafee: No comment. Dianne Feinstein: No comment.

It's an election year, by the way.

And so, what Bernadette didn't know when the military escort came to get her—what she couldn't possibly imagine—was that she didn't need any help. All she needed was the truth. Because the irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime. And as long as that stays hidden, so will Bernadette and Joe, outcasts in their own community, two more victims of Abu Ghraib.

+++++

The day they went into custody, they spent the night in a hotel near Frederick, Maryland, squeezed into a room together, Clay and Maxine on one bed, Bernadette and Vanessa and Billy on the other. In the morning, the major came to get them. They packed up their bags and drove through the Appalachians, past the valleys and lowlands, through fields of young corn, arriving at an air force base in the late afternoon. There was juice and coffee in the waiting room, and Vanessa peppered the officers with questions until a van pulled up outside.

When Joe came through the glass doors, he was bleary-eyed and confused. Bernadette ran to greet him. Clay and Maxine stood back, holding Vanessa close. Bernadette's kisses covered Joe, but he hardly moved. None of it made sense to him. Why was he here? Why were they?

It was three hours before Joe seemed to come alive, playing with Vanessa and asking questions about what had happened, where things stood back in Somerset. In time, they moved to a new location, then another. Clay and Maxine eventually drove home, back to the ringing phones. But Bernadette and Joe stayed under lock and key, surrounded by military guards.

Three months in protective custody have been a mixed blessing. The house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a chandelier. That's all you need to know. That, and also that it's the nicest house they have ever had. They've made friends with the security detail and will probably stay in touch, and Joe changed his appearance, just a little, just to be sure.

It's not a bad life, really, being swept off the floor of reality. The army provides a daily stipend for their groceries, and they've had more free time than you can imagine, almost enough time to make up for all the nights together they've lost. But the investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal will be over someday soon, and Joe's gag order will be lifted, and they will emerge back into the world. The reporters will all come flocking to them again, and the phone will return to ringing, but this time Bernadette and Joe are ready. They've had three months to think about it, and they have a lot to say. There is still a lot more to know. They want you to hear it.