Reporters Without Borders also alleged that before Mujadadi’s arrest, NDS officials had asked him to sign a contract saying he would supply them with information. “This form was called the ‘Cooperation Form’ and if I had filled it out, I would have become an NDS member in addition to being a journalist,” Mujadadi had told the advocacy group, which posted a recording of the conversation on its website. “I was supposed to spy for them.” I’d heard about this from other Afghan reporters, but an Afghan government official, who said he had looked into the case in an attempt to help Mujadadi, told me that NDS had evidence. A would-be insurgent had apparently implicated Mujadadi in a planned suicide attack. Reporters Without Borders disputes this. “NDS tries to turn independent journalists into informers,” the advocacy group wrote in a statement. “It is disturbing that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force accepts the use of such methods by NDS, its partner in the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan.”

Listening to Nader, I was beginning to wonder if NATO wasn’t in the same game. His interrogators, a man and a woman, finally asked what they should do with him. “I accept you as a sister and him as a brother,” Nader says he told them. “We have a government in Afghanistan that’s corrupt, but I accept your system. If I’m guilty, I accept that you will punish me. If I’m not guilty, let me go back to my kids and my journalist friends.”

Nader looked forward to the interrogations. His questioners seemed like good people, he told me, and the translators they worked with were particularly adept. The sessions also gave him an excuse to leave his cell, a dark room about ten feet long and eight feet wide. The cell disturbed him. Pictures occasionally appeared on the wall. Nader described them as photographs projected from somewhere else by means of a light beam or laser. One image showed a person with two broken legs. Later, a picture of a bloodstain appeared on the wall. Nader wondered if it was the blood of the prisoner who had occupied the cell before him. Another picture showed two dogs fighting. The stomach of one of the dogs was ripped open and puppies spilled out. Nader tried not to look at the images, lest he grow frightened. The doctor gave him sleeping pills, but he spent his three nights in NATO custody wide awake. Unfamiliar music played, and he could hear the voices of children calling, “Baba, baba!”—the Afghan word for father. He was convinced these were the voices of his own children, recorded somehow through his phone or another device the Americans had planted in his house.

I had never heard of prisoners being subjected to sounds or images like the ones Nader described, but I was unwilling to dismiss his account outright. In 2003, I had interviewed several Afghan men who had just been released from Guantánamo Bay. Along the way, they had spent time in U. S. military detention facilities in Bagram and Kandahar. They described being stripped naked and exposed to high-powered air conditioners that reduced them to shivering heaps on the floor. They spoke of being forced to listen to loud, frightening, and discordant music. Their accounts sounded outlandish to me at the time, and having no way to confirm them, I left the details out of my story. Later, when photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib emerged, I realized I had been wrong. The mere fact that a detainee’s experience sounded bizarre or outrageous was no longer sufficient reason to believe that it had not happened.

Al Jazeera’s Kabul bureau occupies a candy-colored, four-story mansion in Sherpur, a glitzy neighborhood of grand, ostentatiously decorated houses favored by former militia commanders and wealthy businessmen. The neighborhood’s rutted dirt streets are guarded at regular intervals by armed men who do not work for the government. Looking up as we drove, I glimpsed dazzling blue glass windows and a mirrored balcony decorated with Arabic script. The Al Jazeera house had two giant satellite dishes on the roof. An armed guard opened the gate for us.