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he found ample outlets for his talent with knife or gun, while serving a kind of satanic apprenticeship with the hit squads operating on behalf of Hamas, and, of course, Yasser Arafat.
    His sorties across the border into Israel were constantly, by his standards, successful. He would kill any Israeli without mercy, man, woman, or child—striking viciously in the darkness with his curved blade or even with dynamite. He went by the name of “Cobra”—and he said it in English, to ensure the Israelis were in no doubt precisely who and what he was.
    He had value as a killer, but much more so as a constructor of bombs and an aimer of primitive rockets. Abu had been a nomad among jihadists, answering only to the call of al-Qaeda, moving silently across borders into Iran, into Afghanistan, back into Gaza, and up into the enfolding escarpments of the Hindu Kush. The modern profession of bombmaking is a bit like sailing a yacht. The skilled man can do it anywhere.
    Ben al-Turabi and Abu Hassan Akbar knew each other. They had sat side-by-side in those quasi-religious councils conducted by bin Laden in the border country between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both men were en route to the Tora-Bora district when the Americans slammed into the mountains with a barrage of twenty-first-century bombing.
    No one at Guantanamo knew for certain the two men had been al-Qaeda comrades in arms, though there were several interrogators who suspected they probably knew each other. There was just something about the way they talked quietly on the football field, as if they did not require quite so many words as normal people. Whenever they met, there was a substantial amount of head-nodding, and a paucity of lip movement. Quite often the interrogators had asked if the two men were acquainted, but neither of them gave an inch. Ben laughed, and Abu Hassan snarled. Neither of them uttered a word.
    Proof positive that the two men did know each other would, of course, have been damning evidence against them, because they had been arrested hundreds of miles apart—Ben in the high Afghan caves, Abu Hassan in North Baghdad. Both were believed to be active jihadists by the best Intelligence Services in the world. If they could be proven friends, that would probably be sufficient to guarantee them lifetime accommodation in Guantanamo. Which was, more or less, why Ben and Abu spoke only rarely and, right under the eyes of the guards, created a code of speaking and passing information through Ibraham and Yousaf, which had stood the test of time. The four men were blood brothers in the black art of silence and deceit.

    And, somehow, they understood there were forces out there beyond the razor wire that were striving for their freedom, and that in the end they would return to the front line of their holy struggle against the Infidel. Each piece of news came to them slowly and sketchily, by osmosis more than anything else. But it sustained them, and it gave them the oxygen of hope, and it kept alive the flickering flames of defiance and anger.
    Throughout their years of captivity, the only form of justice available was that of the military tribunal—a kind of commission for the trial and punishment of any individual detained at Guantanamo. In November 2001, President George W. Bush authorized these “courts” to proceed, and all four men, Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan had made brief appearances before the military “judges,” but none of them had spoken, which made the entire thing a pretty good waste of everyone’s time.
    Military tribunals can be quite useful for trying members of enemy forces who were operating outside the scope of conventional criminal and civil proceedings. Despite the presence of military officers, serving as both judge and jury, they are distinct from courts martial, which is a fairer and less intense procedure.
    The tribunal is an inquisitorial system, based entirely on charges brought by a military authority. Prisoners are