We want to believe

Babies thrown from incubators, the sequel.

In all of Iraq, Jumana Hanna was the bravest witness to the horror of Saddam's regime, telling the Americans of torture, rape, and mass murder. In Washington, Hanna became a potent symbol of Iraqi liberation, and the Bush administration brought Hanna and her children to the United States for their protection.

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Hanna became a symbol of survival, of the indomitability of the human spirit in one of the most repressive states in modern history. "I've been in seventy countries and taken testimony about many atrocities—including right after My Lai," said Donald Campbell, a New Jersey superior court judge who served as the coalition's top judicial advisor. "And I have to tell you that I found her story to be the most compelling and tragic I've ever heard."

Her case was given top priority by Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was in Iraq as senior policy advisor at the interior ministry; he assigned two military investigators to look into her claims. Their investigation lasted four months. Having heard her description of the prison concealed behind the Baghdad Police Academy, with its dead tree stumps still trussed with barbed wire for yoking and raping women prisoners, Kerik went to see for himself. "To be physically there, to look at the barbed wire that was hooked into the trees, to think about the stories she told and then actually see the devices they used . . ." He paused. "It was sickening."

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The two young men were ill-prepared for the job in many ways. "I was overwhelmed," says Dryden. "I was so misinformed about what the crimes were. I was told it was a rape case, but I never imagined it would be rape, sodomy, physical and sexual torture. I never imagined so many suspects and so many victims. When I met her and heard her story directly, I couldn't believe she was in front of me. But she always smiled. I think the only thing she cared about was whether we were comfortable."

The logistics of the investigation were also a nightmare. "They all told me how high-profile and important this case was," Dryden said. "Paul Bremer, he wanted something done. Bernie Kerik, he tells me how important the job is: 'Get it done.' "

They were given few resources—not even a shovel or a backhoe with which to exhume the bodies that Hanna said lay buried in the prison yard. Frustrated, the two men started digging up the ground with a metal bowl. By the time they finally rounded up an excavation team, the water and sewer mains had burst, flooding the area and making further excavation difficult.

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I'd been a reporter for twenty-five years and considered myself a professional skeptic, yet I'd been duped. I consoled myself with the thought that I was in good company. If I'd been duped, so had the Pentagon, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and one of the nation's most esteemed newspapers.

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Perhaps if American officials had been more knowledgeable about Middle Eastern culture, they would have questioned her claim about her husband's heritage. His name provided a clue: Haytham Jamil Anwar is an Arabic name, not an Indian name. He was, according to numerous Iraqis who knew Hanna, an Iraqi Arab—a simple fact that undermines the very premise of her story. But the American investigators never talked to any Iraqi citizens about Hanna. Dryden and Mejia were so isolated in the Green Zone that they couldn't do basic detective work. They didn't even have a car.

"I don't think the U. S. did much to verify her story," Judge Campbell told me in September, when I called him to discuss what I was learning. "Once the Washington Post article came out, we treated it as gospel. We were skeptical; as lawyers, we are always skeptical. But once the investigators looked me in the eye and said they believed her story, I accepted it. Nevertheless, they were young men, not seasoned investigators."

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Iraq, the context for her amazing story, was an astonishment of human cruelty. That is why her story was so terribly believable. She was telling a larger truth. And the American government, out of sincere altruism or rank political opportunism, responded to this truth. Even if it wasn't her truth. Even if it was, in fact, a mirage. Even if she was, after all, a liar.

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Read the whole Esquire article. It's amazing for the number of claims this woman made which could have easily been confirmed or disproven, but weren't even checked out. It was a great PR story for ousting the devil Hussein.

And here's the July 2003 Washington Post article: A Lone Woman Testifies To Iraq's Order of Terror