This letter is something I imagine. I imagine it because nothing else is permitted, and for me no other recourse than imagination exists. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this is true for you as well. You can only imagine me, like I can only imagine you.

I would promise to be truthful in my letter, if truth were relevant. I could tell you I am a terrorist, being dark-skinned, Muslim and found on a foreign battlefield. My name, if you heard it and if it mattered, would fill your heart with dread. It would say to you: I am not like you; I do not share your values; I hate freedom, free people, westerners; I hate innocence, peace, modernity. My name would say to you: This is a man to be forgotten, cast away, locked up, lost. This is a man who does not deserve to be imagined.

But I want to be imagined. I write asking, please, imagine me! So I will withhold my name. Or rather, how about this: Give me someone else's name. I leave the choice to you. Call me Ben, like your neighbor down the street. Or Michael, after your cousin--or yourself. I am a man, but if you want, call me Ann, your best friend in childhood. It no longer matters to me, so long as the name you choose recalls to you love, rather than fear; or even--I would accept this--humanity. If the name you call me reminds you that I am a human being, then, like I wrote, I would accept that.

I am a "terrorist." I know this is what you are told; it is what I am told, too. My guards spit the word at me. It is the name they choose for me. The evidence against me indeed is strong: my skin color, my faith, the land where I was taken. I can marshal no defense: if this is what a terrorist is, then I am a terrorist. I accept it, I have said so to them, I have claimed the name that they have given me. They are the ones who give names--as are you. I am but a thing to be named.

Sometimes I think I came here as someone else, not a terrorist. A person. In what passes for dreams here--in what I think of now as a dream--there is a cameraman, a journalist, who claims to have been me. In the dream, he thinks that his skin color, his faith, his location, even his name are justified. I am telling the world, he says to himself, what is happening here. I am reminding the world, he says to me in the dream, not to forget these people, these events, this suffering. My cause is just.

I waken to the bright lights that are always on, to my barren cage. I imagine my cage as clothing; it is like wearing pinstripes, I say. Close-fitting or, as I choose to think, snug. The dream, if it was a dream, or the delusion, if it was that, or the story that I overheard or was told by my captors--whatever it was, it steals away. For a moment, panic thrills my heart. I cannot move, I cannot breathe, my suit is too tight. This cage, my clothing, the loudness and the light in which they swathe me--these are the walls of my coffin. I am buried alive. "Free me! Kill me!" courses through me, burning and silent, as down a wick.

But wait: This thing that I am is ungrateful. It is in panic that they leave me hope. They are not monsters, like me, not terrorists, like me. They are human beings.

Ben, if that's what you've chosen to call me, or Ann or Michael: I suspect this person once had a family, before he was removed from time. This person probably had brothers and sisters, some of whom he was close to, others less so. He might even have had parents. His mother perhaps was sick or dying. Once, long ago, in another age, I can imagine this person promising himself that he would spend time with her. He would transcribe into music the song for her in his heart, the song of loss and longing and love.

You do not understand what has been taken from this man--from me--if you do not understand that it includes not only his parents, his brothers and sisters, his friends, his loves, his children--but also the certainty that any of them ever existed. Perhaps instead these are the twisted derangements, the corrupted imaginings of a terrorist, of a man for whom passion is suffering and desire want; hardly a man, in fact, less than a man, but a beast or a machine or a demon. Or a word, only a name: Terrorist. This word justifies all things. This word should be caged, denied darkness, denied silence, denied sleep, denied dreams, denied memories; this word should pace endlessly in its coffin-cage, should befoul itself before the leering eyes of those who hate it. Every conversation with this word should be an interrogation. Every vestige of reality, of choice, of freedom should be taken from this word.

Yet you ask me--I who am this word--to speak of torture. With what grim, thoughtless fascination does torture grip you! Yes, I can write of the specific acts of specific individuals. But to what purpose? If specific acts were not done, if specific individuals did not do them, would this treatment of me otherwise be justified? Is there not, even in Limbo, the Judgment that comes with the end of time? Yet time is forbidden me, as are an end and a judgment. I am ever before the law and ever beyond it. Try me, then, I say. Try me, if in the promise of a trial such treatment as mine can be justified. Condemn me, discover in me, whether falsely or truly, the terrorist you despise and desire. I give up my defense; I offer none. I could cry "Torture!" like a child exposing the pettiest of injustices, the cheating in a trivial game. But as I am beyond the law, so too am I beyond such infantile justice.

I ask you instead: Is there room for a notion of torture in a society that accepts this treatment of me?

Is there room, I ask, to imagine me?