January, 2005
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

The American Dream (continued)

Hanna had told me—not just once but many times—that 120 bodies had been unearthed based on her testimony. I repeated that to Mejia, who now chuckled. "Well, maybe she didn't understand. We didn't really want to tell her about all the problems we were having."

Was it a language problem? Or perhaps a simple misunderstanding, exacerbated by a young soldier's well-intentioned desire to protect a woman who not only touched his heart but also happened to remind him of a beloved aunt?

Whatever the reason, the discrepancy troubled me. In a country dotted with mass graves, the one this new American hero—Jumana Mikhail Hanna—described in such harrowing detail did not exist. What else in her story was not true?

I didn't know what to think, and then one day in the middle of September, Hanna seized upon a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle about an Iraqi man and his nine-year-old son. The boy had been severely injured in an explosion back in his impoverished village: His abdomen was ripped open, his left eye was gone, both hands were blown off. Somehow he'd survived and was being treated by doctors at Children's Hospital in Oakland.

"I know that man!" Hanna cried, thrusting the newspaper at me. "He is a very bad man." She tapped away at the front-page photograph, an unnerving image of a man and boy in sunny California, clutching at each other with something that seemed more akin to despair than love. "He is a bad man!" Hanna repeated. "I will never forget that man. On the day my friend Sindus was killed, they brought a new electric machine to the jail. They give her big shock and she died; her whole body turned black. He was the boss of this decision. How," she asked plaintively, "could the Americans bring him here?"

How rich, I thought; yet another example of history repeating itself. Just as the American government had once turned a blind eye to the immigration of former Nazi prison guards to the U. S., it was now allowing in the worst Iraqi violators of human rights. I thought it was outrageous and, admittedly, somewhat exciting—though a little part of me wondered how it was that coincidence seemed to follow Hanna wherever she went.

She had a plan. She would go to the San Francisco District Attorney's office and file a formal complaint against this prison guard who was masquerading as a devoted father and demand that he be arrested. She would bring a copy of the Washington Post story, as well as the medallions that the coalition government had given her. That would surely convince the DA's office.

Wait, I insisted, this had to be confirmed. Who else would recognize this man? Hanna didn't hesitate for a second: Her investigators would know him at once. They had a picture of him in their files. "General Ahmed will also know him!" she insisted.

Currently deputy ambassador to the Iraqi mission to the United Nations, Ahmed Ibrahim had been deputy minister of the interior while the CPA governed Iraq. It was in that role that he arrested Salah Mahmoud Kadhem, the highest-ranking officer among the nine men implicated by Hanna. Ahmed was himself imprisoned under Saddam Hussein's regime for denouncing the dictator in a private conversation. If anyone would recognize this man, said Hanna, it would be Ahmed.

But Ahmed didn't recognize the face in the Chronicle. Neither did Dryden. Ahmed, however, was very upset, having just learned that all nine of the men identified by Hanna in Baghdad had been released. They had been set free months earlier for lack of evidence—and financially compensated for wrongful imprisonment. Some had been reinstated in their old jobs.

According to Hanna, most had been low-level prison guards who raped her and sicced dogs on her. But a couple of the men ranked high in the chain of command. One was an officer named Hussain Fathel, whom Hanna identified as Major Khaldun, the sadist who ran the prison and loved to torture, "especially in the sensitive spot." Hussain disputed all of Hanna's charges, said he'd never even met her, and certainly wasn't "the Major." Based on his statements, however, military investigators inferred that he had been a member of the Iraqi secret police and had him arrested. Salah had been one of three candidates for Baghdad police chief before being implicated by Hanna. Out of all the men she implicated, he was the big catch.

Could Salah have been innocent? "That's what I'm afraid of," Olivia Troye, Bremer's assistant, who had snuggled Hanna's children, told me grimly. "The odds are that he was one of her torturers. But we just don't know. The thing about Iraq is you could put a hundred men in a room and the odds are that all of them tortured somebody at one point or another."

"I wouldn't be surprised if she fabricated," Troye added. "There were some problems. She was a key witness, and she'd point people out and then realize later that she didn't know who she was pointing to. She was very accurate when she was in the prison, where things happened, but as time went on I think her stories became embellished."

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