When Sy Hersh first told me about Abu Ghraib, I could not understand him, and not merely because he begins sentences in the middle of sentences. This was a problem of cognition. I had long ago built a template in my mind about these sorts of issues, and the story Sy was telling me did not fit.

This template was something I devised in the 1991, when I was a military policeman at the Ketziot Military Prison Camp in the Negev Desert of Israel. I had moved to Israel at the age of 20. I was drafted, and after many strange and discomfiting turns, I found myself in Ketziot, where I didn't want to be, for several reasons, including a) it's very hot in the Negev and I have the melanin of a Finn; b) I was raised as a socialist Zionist, which meant that I was a Jewish nationalist who opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; c) the job itself, which was to maintain order in a prison holding 6,000 Palestinians, most of whom would kill me if given a chance. This is not to say that I wouldn't die for Israel. I just didn't want to die enforcing an occupation I thought morally and politically dubious.

I won't use too much space here describing conditions in the prison; I do that in my book, "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror," which you should buy as soon as you buy Philip's excellent book (why not spend the entire summer reading true stories of brutality in Middle Eastern prisons?). Suffice it to say that the very existence of the prison violated what was then settled international law. The prison's location, in the unremitting desert, was a human rights violation; prisoners are supposed to be protected from the harsher elements. Ketziot's location also violated the rule that prisoners should not be transferred to another country; the prisoners, all of whom were residents of the West Bank and Gaza, should have been jailed in the territories, and not inside Israel. The treatment of children was even more troubling; boys as young as 14 were mixed in with the general population, and were sometimes raped by their fellow prisoners, a phenomenon about which we, the prison command, did nothing (I actually did something about this matter, but I failed to change anything). And so on.

There was also a fair amount of violence in the prison, in part because this was the Middle East and in part because we were understaffed. The violence took many forms: Palestinian-on-Palestinian, mainly, but also Palestinian-on-Israeli, and, most consequentially, at least for me, Israeli-on-Palestinian. For the first time in my life, I saw an Orthodox Jew beat a person, in this case, a prisoner who had wished the guard's family ill. In my experience, Orthodox Jews were the objects of beatings, not the perpetrators. The place made my head swim.

Not long after I arrived, I came up with a simple formula: The abuses that took place in my Israeli prison could never have happened in an American prison. This is the template that was rendered inoperative by Abu Ghraib. Once I understood what was taking place inside Abu Ghraib, I reversed the formula: The abuses that took place in this American prison would never have been allowed to take place in Ketziot, or any other Israeli prison. The sadism, the sexual violence, the torture-by-dog, these were outside my frame of reference. Ketziot was a warehouse prison - its prisoners were dispatched there after being investigated and adjudicated - and I know full well what happened, and happens, in the investigation wings of other Israeli prisons: stress positions, exposure to the sun, sleep deprivation, physical abuse. But I know that there are controls in place sufficient enough to weed out psychopaths among the prison staffs. I also know from firsthand experience that there are Israelis up and down the chain of command who regularly monitor and control abuse.

This is what is so shocking about Abu Ghraib, the complete absence of moral, adult authority. While in Ketziot, I suggested to camp commanders that no soldier under the age of twenty-eight be allowed to interact with prisoners. It seemed a simple enough proposition; young men granted discretionary physical power over other young men will use that power more frequently than men who are in their thirties and forties. I experienced this first-hand, when I commanded reservists, men who were then entering middle age. These men simply could not be provoked by the insults and goading of the prisoners. They laughed it off. Which is why I find the story of Charles Graner and his commanders so horrifying. These were men well into adulthood. Graner, I understand, is a lunatic (and, by the way, I've never read a more compelling portrait of this infernal character than in Philip's book) but the entire command structure abdicated its moral and legal responsibility.

I realize that I'm supposed to see Abu Ghraib as a metaphor for larger issues, for the violence in the American character, or for the malignant vision of the Bush Administration. I have trouble doing this for any number of reasons. Most probably because I served in a prison, and I couldn't help but read this story simply as a terrifying alternative history of my own experience. There were moments in Ketziot - there are moments in any prison, I suppose - when evil could find its way to power. But it didn't, certainly not in the comprehensive manner it did in the Military Intelligence wing at Abu Ghraib.

Another reason I don't see Abu Ghraib as the dispositive truth about America, or about the American military, or the 2003 invasion, is that I've met an astonishing number of kindhearted, moral American soldiers in Iraq, who risk their lives to minimize civilian casualties, to rescue Iraqis from harm, to rebuild sewer systems in the summer heat. I have no complicated feelings about the leaders, civilian and military, who allowed Abu Ghraib to happen. They should be in prison themselves. But I have complicated feelings about the mission, in part because, as a reporter, I was exposed to the reality of Abu Ghraib prison when it was Saddam's prison, and in part because I think the behavior of other Americans in Iraq mitigates somehow the behavior we saw at Abu Ghraib.

Philip asks what we should do with the knowledge of what happened at Abu Ghraib? I will give the practical answer: We know exactly how to run a decent, orderly, cruelty-free prison; proper staffing, language instruction, stringent supervision, clear punishment for those who abuse prisoners. This isn't a mysterious process. All we need is leadership that makes this a priority. Putting the people who were in charge of Abu Ghraib in jail, and jailing the people who supervised those people, all the way up the chain of command, would be instructive, for Americans, and for Iraqis as well.