Dan Fesperman, The Amateur Spy (New York: Knopf, 2008), 384 pp., $24.95.

Yasmina Khadra, The Attack (New York: Anchor, 2007), 272 pp., $13.95.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 208 pp., $14.00.

ON THE evening of June 29, 2007, two men parked two Mercedes-Benzes on the streets of central London, near a popular nightclub. They were loaded with gas canisters. The one closest to the nightclub was set to go off first, causing revelers to rush outside, when the other would explode, ratcheting up the death toll. They failed to ignite.

Less than forty-eight hours later, a green Jeep Cherokee loaded with similar canisters rammed through the glass-plate window of the arrivals hall at Glasgow International Airport and burst into flames. The driver and passenger were the same men who had left the cars in London.

These men were doctors. Men who vow to save lives. Who swear to do no harm. To heal the sick. To revere life. If doctors had become terrorists, was no one immune to the hatred and disillusionment that breeds such destruction? Conventional thinking about terrorism was set on its axis-that it was because of poverty, unemployment, alienated young men; that it was the product of religious zealotry, fueled by radical imams in the madrassas of Pakistan, the pesantras of Indonesia.

There is no simple answer to the causes of terrorism, as much as many politicians and journalists would have us believe that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda stand at the heart of it all. Three books offer some insights into the complexities of man and his motivation to kill, himself and innocent others. But, no, not three academic tomes, not more expositions by the burgeoning growth industry of terrorism "experts," rather, three novels: The Attack, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Amateur Spy.

Understandably, 9/11 has offered material for many writers, including some of the heavyweights of fiction-Don DeLillo, Falling Man; John Updike, Terrorist; Ian MacEwan, Saturday; Martin Amis, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.

The authors of the three books under review here are not as prominent. The Attack is the work of a former Algerian army officer who writes under the female pen name Yasmina Khadra (he is also author of The Swallows of Kabul and, most recently, The Sirens of Baghdad). The Amateur Spy was written by an American journalist, Dan Fesperman (who also wrote The Prisoner of Guantánamo). And Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is from an elite Pakistani family, and was educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School. As most novelists do, these men draw on their backgrounds. The protagonist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is from an elite Pakistani family and went to Princeton and Harvard Business School. As a journalist, Fesperman was posted in Bosnia and Israel, and his knowledge of these places serves the reader well in this page-turning thriller, which is the equal to John le Carré at his best (a level at which he hasn't been for many books now). And as an Algerian army officer, Khadra, whose real name is Mohamed Moulessehoul, knows whereof about torture and the complex attitudes of many Arabs and Muslims. The strikingly different backgrounds of these men add to the power of these books, when taken collectively, to add to our understanding of the making of a terrorist.

As a journalist, I have been writing and reading about terrorism almost exclusively since 9/11; I was based in Indonesia at the time of the bombing of the nightclubs in Bali, in 2002, and the bombings of the restaurants there in 2004; I was in London at the time of the failed attacks mentioned above, and had earlier reported on the July 2005 attacks on the London Underground. After reading these novels-by chance one after the other-I came away thinking that they told me as much, if not more, about terrorism than the pontificating by politicians, journalists, academics and counterterrorism experts.

If you prefer novels that have a high degree of verisimilitude, these will more than satisfy. Reading Standard Operating Procedure, the account of Abu Ghraib hauntingly told by Philip Gourevitch, I thought, if I didn't know it was true, I would think this was fiction. These three works of fiction, by contrast, at times feel like nonfiction. So many of the events described by and happening to these characters have happened in reality. The torture inflicted in The Attack is similar to the torture meted out by the American military and CIA to suspected terrorists. The humiliation suffered by Dr. Abbas Rahim, and his family, in The Amateur Spy because of their name, because they are Muslim, has been felt by Muslims-in the United States, in Europe, in Australia-post-9/11.

In trying to explain terrorism, novelists have an advantage over journalists and academics: they can "look" into the deepest recesses of the mind. We will never know for certain, for instance, what motivated the doctors in the London-Glasgow plot-one of the men died of burns; the other is on trial, and has pled not guilty. Almost by definition a suicide bomber isn't going to tell us what drove him or her to the ultimate extreme of taking one's own life, which no religion sanctions. Even the prerecorded videos, with their expressions of a desire for martyrdom, or to go to "paradise" and be with the virgins, still leave the question of why. Why did they want to be martyrs? Why were they willing to die? Novelists can fill in the gaps with the literary license not available to the nonfiction chronicler.

Perhaps most importantly, it is also probably going to take this very fiction to get Americans to face the reality of terrorism and its causes. Who is going to read the Canadian government's damning 373-page "Report of the Events Relating to Maher Arar"? Arar was detained by immigration officials in New York, on his way back to Canada from Europe. He was then secretly rendered to Syria, where his torture, detailed in the government report, included being kept in a rat-infested, dark room-much like Dr. Jaafari in The Attack. How many books have been written about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? As well as any of them, if not better, in only 257 pages, Khadra brings home the personal degradation that can drive a person to become a suicide bomber.

YOU DON'T blow yourself up in a public place on a whim,'" a colleague and former girlfriend says to Dr. Amin Jaafari.

Jaafari agrees. "‘I want to know why,'" he says in deep agony. His is not a dispassionate, academic or journalistic question, but an intensely personal one.

Jaafari is a surgeon at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, rarefied heights for the son of Bedouins. He is a naturalized Israeli, fully integrated into Israeli life. He and his wife, Sihem, live in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Tel Aviv. They entertain in their splendid residence, and vacation from Paris and Barcelona to Miami and the Caribbean.

Jaafari is having lunch in the hospital canteen, talking with fellow doctors about buying a villa at the beach-Sihem loves the sea-when an explosion shakes the walls and shatters glass. "‘A suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant,'" a colleague tells Jaafari when he reaches the emergency room.

The hospital echoes with wailing and screaming, all the gurneys are loaded with bodies, broken, riddled with splinters and shards. After hours of trying to save lives, one man dies in his hands and another refuses to allow Dr. Jaafari to treat him. "‘I don't want any Arab touching me,'" the wounded man says. "‘I'd rather croak.'" Jaafari operates on him anyway.

On his way home, exhausted, Jaafari is stopped at a checkpoint. He shows his papers. Arab name. The police order him out of the car, make him stand spread-eagle and search him. He is eventually allowed to go. He is stopped three more times on his way. "It was no use showing my papers and announcing my profession," he says. "The cops had eyes only for my face."

Jaafari's wife isn't home when he gets there, but given what he's just been through, he doesn't worry too much; he takes a sleeping pill and climbs into bed. The phone rings-"resounds like a jackhammer in my brain." It's 3:20 AM. The caller, a senior police officer Jaafari knows, tells him he must return to the hospital. When he arrives, a policeman pulls back the sheet covering a victim.

"I've seen mutilated bodies in my life," Dr. Jaafari says. "But the shredded limbs on the table in front of me pass all understanding. This is horror in its most absolute ugliness."

It is his wife, Sihem.

The wounds fit those of a suicide bomber, the police report says. Jaafari won't believe it. Then a scribbled five-line note arrives, no salutation, no date. It is from Sihem.

With that, Jaafari's torment and search begin. Diogenes with his lantern. "All night long, I try to understand how Sihem arrived at the point she reached."

Jaafari goes to Bethlehem, from where the letter was sent, searching for a fiery imam who he has come to believe indoctrinated his wife and blessed her mission. He is warned to leave. When he doesn't, he is assaulted in an alleyway, kicked and punched, left for dead.

The next day, he is taken-by circuitous routes, and after being searched for planted tracking devices-to a house where a young man of barely thirty receives him. The man, whose name we never learn, is some sort of leader of the intifada. He begins by apologizing for Jaafari's beating the previous evening, but chillingly notes, "‘Others before you have not gotten off so cheaply.'"

Jaafari is filled with rage, jabs his finger in the man's chest, talks so close to the man's face that his saliva sprays on it. "‘It makes me very angry to think that she preferred a set of fundamentalists to me.'" (There is an element to Jaafari's anger that is highly personal: how could his wife have kept all this from him, her husband?)

"‘My wife was an Islamist? . . . I can't get this through my head,'" he says. "‘She was a woman of her time. She liked to travel, she liked to swim, she liked sipping her lemonade on the terraces outside the shops, and she was too proud of her hair to hide it under a head scarf. What tales did you tell her? How did you make a monster, a terrorist, a suicidal fundamentalist out of a woman who couldn't bear to hear a puppy whine?'"

The leader explains the differences between Islamists-political activists who want a theocratic state-and fundamentalists-extremist jihadists who dream of a caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia. It is a paragraph that Westerners who are trying to understand Islam, rather than rely on knee-jerk generalizations, would do well to memorize.

"‘We're not Islamists, Dr. Jaafari, and we're not fundamentalists, either,'" the leader explains. "‘We are only the children of a ravaged, despised people, fighting with whatever means we can to recover our homeland and our dignity.'"

"‘I want to know everything. I want to know the whole truth,'" Jaafari says.

"‘Which truth? Hers or yours?'" the leader asks. This is the truth for his people, the reality for Palestinians:

"We spend our evenings gathering our dead and our mornings burying them. Our homeland is violated right and left, our children can't remember what the word school means, and our daughters have no more dreams, because their Prince Charmings choose to court the Intifada instead. Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don't know which way to turn, and you, simply because you're nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us. It's your right, after all. Everyone steers his ship as he thinks fit. But please don't come here asking questions about those who are sickened by your apathy and your selfishness and do not hesitate to give their lives to wake you up. Your wife died for your redemption, Mr. Jaafari."

Finally, the leader says: "‘We could spend months and years striving for mutual understanding, and neither of us would ever be willing to listen to the other. So there's no point in continuing. Go back home. We have no more to say to each other, you and I.'"

But Jaafari can't go home. He must find the answer. His quest takes him to Jenin, the site of so much bloodshed. Even though he doesn't live far away, Jaafari had no idea what was going on there-it might as well have been another continent. He never read a newspaper or watched a news show, so great was his ignorance. "The fundamental values of humanity are lying here, eviscerated; the incense stinks of broken promises; prayers are lost amid the sounds of weapons being cocked and sentinels' challenges."

He is quickly picked up, suspected of being an Israeli spy, working for Shin Bet. A tall man, in a parachute jacket, slams him into the wall, jams a pistol in his side and forces him to kneel. Soldiers grab him by the hair, pull his arms behind his back and clamp on the handcuffs. "‘End of the line, Doctor,'" says the man in charge. "‘You shouldn't have pushed things this far. We have no patience with assholes here.'"

Handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded, Jaafari is thrown into the trunk of a car. "When the trunk lid slammed down, it took away the last shreds of my self-esteem at the same time that it cut me off from the rest of the world." This treatment is eerily similar to that meted out by American soldiers and the CIA to suspected terrorists at the "black sites" and Guantánamo. And the goal is the same: deprive the individual of all shreds of self-esteem. Make Muslim men wear women's panties; taunt them with women; and put them in isolation, cut them off from the rest of the world. Make them feel as if they are totally alone. American soldiers who were POWs in North Korea said that the sense of isolation, the psychological torture, was far worse than any physical torture.

Jaafari is tossed into a dark cave, no windows, no light. He spends six days in his "pestilential rat hole, fair game to fleas and cockroaches, living on cold soup and grinding my vertebrae against a pallet hard as a gravestone." Again, a mirror of our moment. Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-Australian, was picked up in Pakistan and secretly taken by the CIA to Egypt, where he was held for six months, in similar conditions. Binyam Mohamed had his genitals slashed with a scalpel in Morocco, where he had been shipped by the CIA.¹

In literature, there is reprieve. On the seventh day, a commander, in his thirties, comes into Jaafari's cave, wearing combat fatigues, a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung on his back. He hands Jaafari a pistol. "‘It's loaded,'" he says. "‘Shoot me. It's your right.'"

Jaafari lays the gun on the floor.

"‘Conscientious objector?'" asks the commander.

"‘Surgeon,'" says Jaafari.

The commander puts the pistol into his belt, and speaks to Jaafari. It is another lengthy dialogue-a literary device to drive home the author's point.

"I don't know whether I've succeeded, Doctor, but I wanted you to experience, physically and mentally, the kind of hatred that's eating away at us. . . . Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I've known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That's all I've seen for my whole life."

The commander gives Jaafari new clothes, which he has bought with his own money.

"So how have you spent the last six days in this stinking cellar? I daresay you've learned to hate. If not, this experiment has been useless. I shut you up in here so you could develop a taste for hatred and a desire to act on it. I haven't humiliated you as a matter of form. I don't like humiliating people. I've felt humiliation, and I know what it is. When a person has been scorned, when his self-esteem has been wounded, all tragedies become possible. Especially if he recognizes that he's impotent, with no means of restoring his dignity."

He grabs Jaafari by the shoulders.

"I wanted you to understand why we've taken up arms, Dr. Jaafari, why our teenagers throw themselves on tanks as though they were candy boxes, why our cemeteries are filled to overflowing, why I want to die with my weapons in my hand, and why your wife went and blew herself up in a restaurant. There's no worse cataclysm than humiliation. It's an evil beyond measure, Doctor."

Jaafari still cannot comprehend. Nor can a police officer and friend, Navid, who has investigated too many suicide bombings in Israel. "‘How the hell is it possible for an ordinary human being, sound in body and mind, to make that choice?'" he says to Jaafari. "‘How can he give up his plans, his dreams, his ambitions, and decide to die an atrocious death in the midst of the worst kind of barbarism?'" Navid goes on: "‘Something clicks somewhere in their subconscious, and they're off.'"

Jaafari learns that his wife had long been supporting the Palestinian uprising. She gave money, allowed her house to be used for meetings. At some point, she stepped over the precipice. Deep inside her, maybe she was hiding the wounds from growing up "among the oppressed, as an orphan and an Arab in a world that pardons neither," Jaafari muses. It was a heavy burden to carry: "all it took was a simple little click to awaken the beast that was sleeping inside her."

"When did that happen, that click?"

IN THE Amateur Spy, Aliyah Rahim wonders if something has clicked inside her husband.

Rahim, one of Washington's leading surgeons-he was a member of the team that saved President Ronald Reagan's life following the 1981 assassination attempt-is treating a senator on his deathbed. As Dr. Rahim and Aliyah head to work, driving down Connecticut Avenue, just south of Chevy Chase Circle, a Metrobus slams into a Ford SUV. Aliyah isn't sure what her husband will do. Which is stronger now: His obligations as a doctor? Or the resentment and anger that's been building in him, arising out of the humiliation-and worse-that befalls him and his family as Muslims in America after 9/11?

Abbas once had strong convictions about the meaning of "doctor," about the Hippocratic oath to which he had sworn. It meant you saved peoples' lives, everyone's, no matter how venal. One evening, years past, during a dinner party with their friends-one of whom delighted in provoking debate-the topic was whether it might ever be appropriate for a doctor to withhold medication from a patient. Abbas set up this hypothetical. "‘Let's say that the world's most notorious butcher, someone responsible for the genocide of thousands, suffered some sort of emergency while on a state visit to Washington, then ended up on your operating table with, I don't know, a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Would you really do everything within your power to make sure he could live to kill again?'"

"‘Addition by subtraction,'" replied the host. "‘Save thousands by maybe not doing your best for one.'"

Abbas disagreed. "‘To me there is still no question that you would do your best. Or else you're playing God. The Hippocratic oath has to count for something. We can't just rent ourselves out as medical soldiers in someone else's cause. We have to do our duty, no matter how loathsome.'"

But that was several years ago. Aliyah has an uneasy feeling that something deep within her husband has changed.

At the scene of that accident on Connecticut Avenue, Abbas does stop, to his wife's great relief.

The Ford is pinned to a lamppost beneath an oak tree. Dr. Rahim pries open the passenger door to treat a victim. Aliyah doesn't know how he stands the gore.

"‘Who's the Arab guy?'" a policeman demands to know.

"‘The Arab guy is a doctor!'" Aliyah yells back, surprised by her own vehemence. "‘He is also my husband, and he saves lives for a living. Saves lives. Do you understand this? He is trying to help those people!'"

The policeman backs off.

Aliyah's worry increases when she discovers her husband has been taking antidepressants. She knows her husband has reason to be angry. She was angry.

A couple of years after 9/11, during a family visit to New York, they took a Circle Line cruise; as the boat passed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, their son, Faris, shot a video, perfectly understandable considering that he was an engineering student. And besides, other tourists were doing the same. But they weren't speaking Arabic, as Faris was with a friend from Cairo. The police hauled the family in for questioning. Dr. Rahim's name appeared on some computerized list, because years earlier-before 9/11-he had contributed to a Palestinian charity. He was held for two days, released without any charges being filed-and without an apology.

A year or two later, their daughter Shereen was in London with two friends after her graduation from Stanford, when her name and face delivered her fate. The day before their flight home, their passports were stolen. The American embassy issued new ones within a few hours-that is, it issued new passports to two of the girls, Catherine and Jane. For Shereen, there were complications. As her mother now fears, Shereen's encounter pushed her father over the edge. He wants revenge.

Fesperman wields his literary license here, having all of these humiliations happen to one family. But let us not forget, individually, the incidents are reality. Remember the Egyptian engineering student arrested by the FBI in October 2001, because he had a radio in his room at a hotel across from the World Trade Center? He was perfectly innocent-but he was also an Arab. As a correspondent in Southeast Asia in 2002 and afterward, I heard many stories of visa applicants being turned away, or their applications delayed, simply because they were males between the ages of sixteen and forty-five, and came from some twenty-six countries on the State Department's list. Most were Middle Eastern, but others hailed from Malaysia, Indonesia, even Singapore. Some were studying in the United States, at prestigious universities, and were trying to return after the summer break.

As Aliyah's fears mount, her search begins, told with great suspense by Fesperman, as twists and turns and more abound. She discovers that her husband is renting an abandoned pizza parlor. That former restaurant is within tunneling distance of a church where a funeral is to take place for the very senator Abbas has been treating-keeping alive. But was it "addition for subtraction"? Was Dr. Rahim only keeping him alive in order to perfect his plot?

Aliyah signs on to her husband's plot. But does she really want to help, or stop it?

To carry out his plans, Dr. Rahim needs technical assistance in making explosives. He finds a group in the West Bank willing to help. Abbas sends his wife there. She learns how to detonate explosives and asks to learn more. Here again, there is a strong parallel with real-world terrorism: while al-Qaeda may not be behind every terrorist attack, there is usually another group somewhere, most of them in Pakistan, from which the plotters have received some assistance, whether financial or technical.

There, by sheer coincidence, she runs into an American, Freeman Lockhart, a former aid worker, who is engaged in his own clandestine activities, having been blackmailed into spying on a humanitarian donor in the West Bank.

The Amateur Spy is two parallel stories. The one set in Washington, of Abbas and Aliyah. The other, highly suspenseful and full of intrigue, is about Lockhart and his stealthy exploits. Secrets are piled on top of secrets. (Incidentally, Lockhart's views on the failings of humanitarian aid-the compromises and corruption that aid workers encounter-are alone worth reading, and closely match my experiences in Latin America, Africa and Asia.)

Lockhart and Aliyah ultimately end up back in Washington, and reach the abandoned pizza parlor. They find Abbas, preparing a bomb below the church where the senator's funeral is being held. Most of Washington's highest-ranking leaders, including the vice president, are in attendance. Without revealing whether the plot succeeds or fails, suffice to know that all are arrested, Aliyah and Lockhart as material witnesses; they are not heard from again. Lockhart tells his story from a jail somewhere. And the public is never told about any of them. Why not? "Abbas Rahim is not the kind of scalp they wish to hang on their wall just now," Lockhart tells us. "If he were truly foreign, or well financed, or, better still, some sort of religious zealot, matters might be different. Instead he is a respected surgeon who has saved the lives of soldiers and statesmen, a very secular and very aggrieved parent from an affluent suburb of our nation's capital." In other words, the politicians want to blame Islamic fundamentalists or poor, uneducated Arabs-not worldly elites like Dr. Rahim. They don't want to admit that their conventional thinking may be wrong.

We don't want to be jolted from our delusions-we are more comfortable with our own version of the truth. Perhaps only the novel, with its ability to reel you in, make you feel, have you become a part of the story, can remove our ideological blinders.

MANY AMERICANS would rather not face such inconvenient realities. This is underscored, italicized and bolded by a review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist that appeared in National Review on May 14, 2007. "Anti-American agitprop," wrote Ann Marlowe, a freelance journalist who has worked in Afghanistan. But is it really that simple? Or does the book, like The Attack, tell us that even the most educated, most well-off people turn against America?

The protagonist, Changez, post-Harvard graduation, secures a highly sought-after job with an elite financial-consulting firm, and is taken under the wing of one of the partners. It's heady stuff for a twenty-five year old-flying first class, staying in five-star hotels, ordering around men old enough to be his father. Eventually, though, Changez finds it lacking, as many young people who have decided that there is more to life than making money do.

The turning point for Changez, that "click" again, occurs in his luxury hotel room in Manila, where he has been sent, as part of a team, to evaluate a company. As he packs to leave the next day, the television screen flashes pictures of the burning, collapsing World Trade Center.

"I stared as one-and then the other-of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased." He is elated that "someone had so visibly brought America to her knees."

Changez can't explain, not even to himself, why he felt this way. "I was the product of an American university; I was earning a lucrative American salary; I was infatuated with an American woman. So why did part of me desire to see America harmed?"

When he and his colleagues return to New York, he begins experiencing the fears, the anger, the knee-jerk reactions, which the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have unleashed in Americans.

"‘What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?'" asks the immigration officer at JFK, a heavyset woman with a pistol on her hip, and Changez notes, "a mastery of English inferior to mine."

Changez explains that he lives in the United States.

"‘That is not what I asked you, sir,'" she says. "‘What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?'"

He is taken aside to another room where he sits "on a metal bench next to a tattooed man in handcuffs." His colleagues do not wait for him to be released. Changez recounts, "I rode to Manhattan that evening very much alone."

Eventually, Changez gives up the pampered life and returns to Lahore, where he begins teaching, and his world collides, and colludes, with fundamentalists.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been a runaway best seller, translated into more than a dozen languages. It was short-listed for last year's Man Booker, the most prestigious literary award in Britain, for the best novel by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Ireland. (The winner was The Gathering by Irish writer Anne Enright. My choice was Mister Pip by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones.)

It is understandable that Americans will be offended by the attitude depicted in these books-the ungrateful, angry immigrant, given all the opportunities of "Western" society. At a recent dinner party in London, an American who described herself as a liberal Democrat said she had been deeply bothered when she read Changez's reaction to 9/11 (which, of course, even he found despicable). Less temperate, Marlowe, in her agitprop critique in National Review, is so offended that she urges people not to buy the book, because they are giving their money to someone who is "aggressively anti-American."

However offensive, the attitudes of Changez, Hamid's fictional alter ego, are widely held. And not just by radical Islamists. I have been astonished in recent years by the number of well-educated individuals I have met, in Indonesia and Singapore, in Australia and Britain, in India and Pakistan, who harbor similar opinions. It is sometimes hard to fathom the depth of antipathy toward the United States these days, not toward individual Americans, but toward the government.

What are we to do? Shut out those views? Dismiss them as "anti-American agitprop?"

Rather than being offended that an individual with an elite education and pampered life could feel such deep resentment, shouldn't our inquiry be: how is it possible that someone who is so well educated and has led such a privileged life has come to this point?

Let us hope we are not simply talking past each other. As the intifada commander in Bethlehem said to Dr. Jaafari, "‘We could spend months and years striving for mutual understanding, and neither of us would ever be willing to listen to the other.'"

Raymond Bonner, who as a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter at the New York Times has reported from nearly one hundred countries, now lives in London.

¹I interviewed Habib in Australia after he was released from Guantánamo. See Raymond Bonner, "Detainee Says He Was Tortured While in U.S. Custody," New York Times, February 13, 2005. For an account of Binyam's torture, see Clive Stafford Smith, The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side (New York: Nation Books, 2007). Stafford Smith represents Binyam and more than fifty other Guantánamo prisoners.