It was November 19, 2009, at 3:15am.
A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city in Afghanistan's south. A team of US soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, a spokesperson for the agriculture ministry.
Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they — both children — refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.
The foreign soldiers threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee.
Acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda, the foreign soldiers took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter and transported them to a small US base in a neighbouring province for interrogation.
After two days, US forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.
US forces later issued a statement saying that those killed in the raid were "enemy militants [that] demonstrated hostile intent".
Qara said: "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government. Rahman couldn't even leave the city because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside, they would have killed him."
Qara asked: "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?
"They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime?
"I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners", he added. "But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?
"I don't care if I get fired for saying it, but that's the truth."
Dogs of war
Night raids are only the first step in the US detention process. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on US military bases around the country.
There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for interrogation.
Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.
One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the country's east. Sher Khan said US forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby US base.
He said interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut, and chained him to the ceiling. Occasionally, they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him.
At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed."
They then pushed him to the ground, held his mouth open and forced 12 bottles worth of water down his throat. He passed out, and after he was roused, vomited water uncontrollably.
This continued for a number of days. Sometimes, he was hung upside down from the ceiling. Eventually, he was sent on to the US-run Bagram prison.
Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.
Disappeared
In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally, a body turns up.
Such was the case at a detention site on a US military base in Helmand province.
In 2003, a US military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in US custody (made available through the Freedom of Information Act): "Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle).
"Manner of death is homicide."
In Khost one day in December, US forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses said.
Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained — plastic cuffs binding their hands — were found more than a mile from the largest US base in the area.
A US military spokesperson denied any involvement in the deaths and declined to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders, however, steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in US custody.
Secrecy is the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations are aware of them.
There may, however, be others whose existences on the scores of military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed.
For instance, as well as the infamous Bagram Internment Facility, marked since 2002 by regular reports of Abu Graib-style abuse, US Special Forces run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base.
The Red Cross still does not have access to this facility. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the "Black Jail".
[This is an extract from a much longer article first published at Tom Dispatch.]