The first floor hallway was full, when I got in, of people who came round for a couple of drinks on Amber’s last night and men with big guns and Iraqi Police armbands, asking for beer and arresting Tom for having a beard. Well, you can have a tin if you let Tom go. Perhaps he could go for a shave while you’re drinking it.

“Lawyer,” It’s what Wisam calls me every time he sees me, even though he’s already a qualified lawyer and I’m not. “Lawyer, we need you.” Iraqis, even legally qualified ones, sometimes, are reluctant to question the police.

Tom was accused of looking like “an Israeli” by the Iraqi Police and “a terrorist” by the US authorities. He was arrested a couple of nights ago with Jim, a stencil graffiti artist, whose work he was writing a story about. They brought him back to the apartment to collect his press credentials, refusing to believe he was a journalist.

But in all seriousness, for all the freakish comedy of the episode, for all the fact it was easily sorted this time, because it involved two westerners, it’s also an illustration of the chaos and crisis of Iraq’s legal system, how the absence of an adequate structure leaves Iraqi people unprotected from the whims of people given power, such as the police.

Let me make this clear. If they were arrested for criminal damage, or some variation on the theme, breaking a law that said you couldn’t paint on walls in public places, that would be one thing. But the stencil of two boys, life-size, by a cigarette stand, next to a real bomb hole in a building, was of no concern whatsoever to them.

A particularly tense officer pointed his pistol at me, primarily because I was there. I started blowing bubbles and he relaxed a bit. It was, he said, a “six hour” pistol. It was a blip in translation. “It’s a Glock” had somehow morphed in his head to “six o’clock” and thus to “six hour”. None of this mattered much to me, as long as it wasn’t pointing my way any more.

It felt like a precedent was in process. One of the independent journalists was stopped and robbed by Iraqi Police a few days ago. If Jim and Tom’s arrest proved equally lucrative, then any of us might’ve been next. We needed to make this more trouble than it was worth.

It’s not just because they were fellow westerners and activists. If I was ever there when an Iraqi person was getting arrested, I’d try and do what I could to support them as well. But what happens to Iraqis is usually hidden. It’s not a tactic Iraqi people are realistically able to use, following their mates to the police station when they get picked up on suspicion of plotting to go for a haircut, or something equally bizarre, whether by Iraqi Police or the US forces, because they tend to find themselves sharing a cell with the friend.

So we all went in the pick up, a blue light flashing on the roof, two other cars following. Someone shouted. A third car was left behind. We banged on the back windscreen of the pick up. “Stop, stop, wait a minute, there’s another car.” Surreally, they waited, even though they didn’t want any of us with them.

Down Karrada Dakhil, the length of Sadoon Street, no other cars in sight, the four vehicles racing, weaving. under the underpass beneath Tahrir Square, aquaplaning through the flood, onto Rasheed Street, into Bab Al-Sherji, fires burning on the roadside, Outside Bab al Mouadam police station they unloaded us from the pick up and got us to walk the last 25 metres to the door so it wouldn’t look like they’d brought us.

Tom was put back in the cell with Jim and we followed, filming, shouting, chatting. Baffled, they let us get away with blowing bubbles and handing more in to them. The cell was clean and pleasant enough. The men in the next section stuck their heads out to watch. As we were shunted out we turned to see a cloud of bubbles billowing out through the bars.

“Officer could you explain to me what they’re being charged with?”

“They are under suspicion”.

“Suspicion of what?”

“They will be taken to court in the morning,” the police told Ahmed to tell us. “The judge will decide.”

“Yes, fine, but what charges will the judges decide on?”

I know there is no law. I know due process means nothing here. But something in me needed to argue the point that arrests ought to rest on a specific suspicion rather than some ethereal, generalised, theoretical expectation that they might have had a thought of doing something that could be disapproved of. Iraqi people are still being arrested this way: accused without anything to be accused of, so there’s nothing for them to demonstrate innocence of, much less for the prosecution to fail to prove them guilty of. Even if the discussion was inevitably circular, it’s worth planting the seeds of the idea that those protections, those structures are needed for the Iraqi people.

“Someone was shooting at the guards.”

“Do you have any reason whatsoever to link them with that? Was the shooting coming from where they were standing? Did they have guns? Ammunition?”

Apparently not, but they would be taken to court in the morning and the judge could decide.

The officers outside the station were busy waving their guns about, threatening and posturing, till I offered them pots of bubbles to blow. I sometimes wonder if I put more faith in bubbles than is really warranted by a few globes of soap solution, but the growls and grunts turned to giggles and the stiff presentation of rifles gave way to bubble popping, guns hung loosely at their sides.

The taxi driver in the morning refused to drive up to the police station, nervous enough even to pull over on Rasheed Street for us to climb out opposite the relevant side street. The court in Wazeeria had no translators, no idea what the men were being charged with, if anything, and no idea when the judge might arrive. They would call Judge Rabina, the American senior advisor to the Ministry of Justice, and ask him what was to be done with the two foreigners who nobody could think of a charge for.

Perhaps they were planning to rob the bank?

Perhaps they were planning to fly to Mars. Do you have any reason to suspect that they were planning to rob the bank?

But you see, nobody walks around at night, so when people see someone walking at night they are suspicious.

So that was it. The final accusation: walking around at night. There’s no legal curfew any more, but there’s still some sort of expectation, the court – CPA Liaison Officer said, in his green suit. So it’s OK to spray on the walls? Does that mean if they were stencilling by daylight it would be alright?

Yes, he said. As long as you do it in the day, you can paint on the walls.

So that’s alright then.

And then the same lawyer proceeded to take statements from both the arresting police officer and the two “accused”, although even he was unable to say what they were “the accused” in relation to. Tom gave his statement in English, which was transcribed into Arabic and then verbally re-translated into English for him to sign, by which time Jim had been transformed from a graffiti artist to a clown. Jim’s statement consisted mainly of the lawyer asking him whether his story was more or less the same as Tom’s, and the scribe copying the document for Jim to sign.

They’d gone out for Jim to paint and Tom to observe. There was a shout in Arabic, immediately followed by two shots. They began walking away. Several shots were fired at them and they started running, after which they were caught by security guards, held for a day and then turned over to the police.

“As I think,” the lawyer said, “there is no evidence, but we will take them to the judge and he will decide if they can be accused of anything.”

The traditional way is to decide what to accuse people of and then bring them to a judge to decide whether they did it, but here still no one is willing to be held responsible for a decision, especially one about foreigners.

“I think you are lucky,” Liaison Man said. “If your friends were Iraqi they would be in prison maybe one month before coming here.”

Eventually they went to a judge, who eventually noted that there was no evidence on which to base anything and gave back the stencil and the spray paint. This being his second arrest though, Jim’s friends and neighbours are hoping, as much as they like his artwork, that he will consider suspending the project for the meanwhile.

There is more than one way to run a legal system but here, instead of a system, there is a void into which countless people have fallen. I know, from interviews with families of detainees, that Liaison Man was telling the truth when he said an Iraqi person could wait a month in jail and more, under unspecified suspicion, without charge, legal advice or family visits and before getting to see the judge. It’s not working.