January, 2005
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

The American Dream (continued)

In my readings about Iraq, I had come across a passage by Primo Levi about a recurring dream that many Holocaust survivors recounted: "They had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved one, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to. In the most typical (and cruelest) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence."

I did not want to be that cruel interlocutor.

AT OUR SECOND MEETING, I told Hanna that I would be confirming every aspect of her story. I mentioned a recent scandal involving a book called Forbidden Love, about the honor killing of a young Muslim woman in Jordan who had fallen in love with a Catholic army officer. Their relationship crossed religious and societal barriers and, uncannily, seemed to prefigure Hanna and Anwar's own star-crossed marriage. In Forbidden Love, the Jordanian couple's relationship was discovered by the young woman's father, who slashed her throat for dishonoring the family name. The book was a runaway best-seller in Australia until July, just a few weeks before I met Hanna, when it was revealed that the author had fabricated the entire story, and the publisher, Random House, withdrew it from stores.

I stressed to Hanna that we couldn't risk any inaccuracy. I hoped she wouldn't be insulted if I double-checked her claims; ultimately, such care would be in both our interests. She looked at me soulfully, clasped her hands together in a kind of prayer, and smiled at me as if I were her guru. "Oh, yes, thank you," she said.

She gave me a copy of a medical report by a California doctor who worked for a local center for torture victims. The report described faint circular scars on her forearms that matched the diameter of a cigarette and linear scars on her wrists "suggestive of tight restraints." A scar at the elbow was "consistent with, though not diagnostic of, a dog bite." There was no mention of the word traitor, which Hanna told me had been branded, in Arabic, across her left breast. Instead, the doctor described two five-millimeter scars that were "consistent with injury from a sharp pointed object such as heated pincers" but that "could conceivably be produced accidentally, e.g., by falling on sharp stones." The report was hardly confirmation of the odious torture that Hanna had described, but that didn't mean her account wasn't true. Torture practices have become increasingly sophisticated, and it is possible to inflict great pain while leaving little physical evidence. Indeed, one Iraqi dossier discovered after the Gulf war suggested that torture should be "artistic."

While still in Baghdad, Hanna had also undergone a medical examination by a respected gynecologist. The American lawyers who were preparing her case for prosecution had sought a doctor's verification for her claims of rape and abuse; to their disappointment, Dr. Said Hakki discounted her story and all but accused Hanna of lying. Hanna countered that she recognized him as the very man who had signed the death certificates of her fellow inmates, writing that they had died of natural causes when they had obviously been executed or tortured to death. Though no one took her accusation seriously, the doctor's failure to endorse her claims infuriated the two American investigators, who dismissed him as incompetent.

Specialists Daniel Dryden and Luis Mejia were both members of the Alabama National Guard, and they became close friends while working on this case. Dryden, who was activated two days before his service with the guard was due to end, had been a detective in the Montgomery Police Department. In the time he spent on Hanna's investigation, he fell in love with an Iraqi interpreter, whom he now plans to marry.

Mejia, a patrolman with the Sylacauga, Alabama, Police Department, grew up in El Salvador. Being in Iraq reminded him of his own war-torn homeland, while Hanna, he said, reminded him of one of his aunts back in the old country—a woman who "worked hard all her whole life, was always tired, but still had time to care about people." Last summer, when Mejia drove out to visit his parents in Las Vegas, he made a special trip to California just to see Hanna.

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.

One day, however, Mejia struck gold: He unearthed a number of large bones. "I was very happy," he recalled. "I called Daniel and said, 'Man, I scored!' I took the bones to the experts and they told me, 'No, they're not human bones; they're cow bones.' It was so disappointing."

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