BAGHDAD, Iraq — In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the American military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major American penitentiaries.

“It was hard to believe I’d get out,” a Baghdad shopkeeper, Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi, told the Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. “I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell.”

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through American detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many have said they were often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation, or any word on why they were taken.

Defenders of the system say it is an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.

Every detainee in Iraq “is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq, or coalition forces,” a spokesman for American-led military detainee operations in Iraq, Army Lieutenant Colonel Keir-Kevin Curry, said.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers and lawmakers, human-rights activists, lawyers, and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and America interviewed by the AP said the detention system often is unjust and hurts America’s “war on terror” by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on September 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions, and other abusive techniques.

The same day, President Bush said the CIA’s secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied.

Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.

Human-rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons — unknown in number and location — remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture does not cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law’s oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

“If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at [Bagram prison, Afghanistan], and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name,” John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York said.

The American government has contended it can hold detainees until the “war on terror” ends — as it determines. “When we get up to ‘forever,’ I think it will be tested” in court, a retired admiral and former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy, John Hutson, said.

In Iraq, the Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners at Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just “security detainees” held “for imperative reasons of security,” a command spokesman, Mr. Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing America’s presence here.

Others say no need exists for these thousands of people to be held outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.

Secretary-General Annan of the United Nations declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is “not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security.”

Meanwhile, officials of Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki’s four-month-old Iraqi government say America’s detention system violates Iraq’s national rights.

At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told the AP that it has been “a daily request” that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.

The cases of American-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of American military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the American command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.

Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.

The review process is too slow, U.N. officials have said. Until they are released, often families do not know where their male family members are — the prisoners are almost always men — or even whether they are in American hands.

Released prisoner Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.

“Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood,” he quoted an interrogator as saying, “or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years.”

As with others, Mr. Karim’s confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-American resistance. “I will hate Americans for the rest of my life,” he said.

As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002–2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The American military is believed holding about 500 detainees — most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis, and Central Asians.