John Barry

It's an ordinary-looking house, painted green, in a rundown neighborhood on Kabul's outskirts. The landlord says he rented it to an American who told him he was in the rug-export business.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was America's first big trophy in the war on terror: a senior Qaeda operative captured amid the fighting in Afghanistan. What is less known is that al-Libi, who ran Qaeda training camps, quickly became the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects.

The meeting was small and unpublicized. In a room on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building last week, Condoleezza Rice grittily endured an hour's worth of pleading from leading human-rights activists who want to see a 9/11-style commission created to investigate the abuse of detainees in the war on terror.

It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is angry. She says she warned her superiors from the first about the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. As commander of the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade, she oversaw the guards at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, including those at Saddam Hussein's former torture center at Abu Ghurayb.

The inaugural mission of the 1st Cavalry's 2d Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment was, in its humble way, a bid for hearts and minds. It was to safely dispose of Iraqi sewage.

A year ago this week, U.S. Marine Cpl. Edward Chin scaled the long arm of a tank-recovery vehicle to put a noose around the neck of Saddam Hussein's statue.

Admirers of Bill McRaven like to tell a story of his courage and grit. Not against the enemy, but against the legendarily ruthless Dick Marcinko, a gung-ho Navy SEAL commander in the Vietnam era who used to swallow sacs of cobra venom and boast that "killing is my mission." Marcinko once ordered McRaven, then a young lieutenant on the super-elite SEAL Team Six, to perform "some questionable activities," recounts a former Special Forces commander.

IraqI'll Scratch Your Back...This week, former secretary of State James Baker is scheduled to fly to Europe to beseech Russia, Germany and France to forgive Iraq's crushing $120 billion debt.

The Pentagon is just across the Potomac River from the White House, but sometimes the gulf seems far wider. Last week an edict from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz appeared on a Pentagon Web site announcing that any country which failed to support the war on Iraq would not be allowed to bid on some $20 billion in contracts to rebuild the country.

The military has been hitting hard lately in Iraq, using overwhelming firepower to kill the enemy in operations with videogame names like Iron Hammer and Ivy Cyclone II.

No U.S. commander in Iraq has done a smarter job than Maj. Gen. David Petraeus. Practically every military observer agrees: in the seven months since his troops took charge in the northern city of Mosul, the 101st Airborne Division commander has put in a flawless performance.

Burned out by two wars and drained by ideological disputes, President George W. Bush's national-security team is dreaming of a kinder, gentler life outside government.

It's hard to know your enemy when you don't speak his language. In Iraq, when guerrillas place an IED (improvised explosive device) by the side of the road, they sometimes write a warning on the street--in Arabic.

Jet-lagged but upbeat as ever, Lewis Lucke clambers through the rubble of Al-Mamun switching station. American missiles blasted the place four times during the war, then looters stripped and torched it.

Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a congressman from Illinois back in the 1960s, but these days he seems to have lost his touch on Capitol Hill. He sends up endless reports, gives regular closed-door briefings and averages two breakfasts a week with members of Congress.

The Iraq war had yet to begin, but some nasty fighting was already going on back in Washington between the Department of Defense and the Department of State.

The Bush administration's military predicament in Iraq has suddenly gotten worse. Just a month before the next U.S. Army unit is due to deploy in Iraq to relieve the hard-pressed forces already there, the military is confessing to a potential showstopper.

In a move widely seen within the Pentagon as a purge, a dozen or more Army generals are being ushered into retirement as the Army's new chief of staff, Gen.

Just as the administration approved the first efforts in a decade to develop new nuclear weapons--earth-penetrating nukes to entomb underground WMD facilities--it's triggered a potential exodus of America's top nuclear-weapons designers.

While Bush aides try to look calm, the search grows increasingly feverish. They predicted they would find Saddam Hussein's arsenal of mass destruction as soon as Iraq's experts could dare to tell the truth.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered the U.S. military to collaborate on a "lessons learned" study of the Iraq war. That will take months, but the air commander, Lt.

Nato's been casting about for a new mission ever since the cold war ended, with Europeans craving some kind of role in the lone superpower's strategic plans.

NATO: New Marching OrdersDespite all the frisson from the French and the anger from the Americans, it seems the so-called great divide between the two traditional allies could yet be bridged--starting with NATO.Even with the recent talk of its impending doom, NATO may still have a role to play in Iraq.

U.S. military planning has hit a giant roadblock. Turkish leaders, having failed to persuade their Parliament to OK the deployment of 62,000 U.S. ground troops for a northern front against Iraq, has now said the fall-back U.S. request--use of Turkey's airspace for air- and cruise-missile strikes against Iraq--will also have to be approved by Parliament.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set out to "transform" the military in 2001, the prevailing view among Washington lobbyists, journalists, politicians and not a few members of the United States armed forces was: fat chance.

EXCLUSIVEA Defector's SecretHussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect, told the CIA, British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in 1995 that, after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapon stocks and the missiles to deliver them.Kamel had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs.

Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.Kamel was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs.

Turkey is raising its price for allowing U.S. forces to invade Iraq from its territory. In early negotiations with the United States, Ankara spoke of sending in Turkish troops to set up a "buffer zone" perhaps 15 miles deep along the Iraqi border.

It's called the "E-bomb." Delivered by a cruise missile, the E-bomb is a warhead that explodes to emit a high-energy pulse that, like a bolt of lightning, will fuse any electrical equipment within range.