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Iraqis powerful story crumbles on second look { July 21 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-01-23-hanna-torture_x.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-01-23-hanna-torture_x.htm
Posted 1/23/2005 8:42 PM Updated 1/24/2005 9:18 AM
Iraqi's powerful story crumbles on second look
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
An Iraqi woman praised by a top Pentagon official for "brave testimony" about torture she said she endured during Saddam Hussein's regime could be expelled from the United States because she apparently made up most or all of the harrowing stories.
Jumana Michael Hanna first told her tales to The Washington Post, which made them front-page news on July 21, 2003. The stories prompted U.S. officials to bring Hanna and her family to live inside the safety of Baghdad's U.S.-controlled "Green Zone" that summer and spurred Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to praise her courage during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 29, 2003.
In September 2003, Hanna, her two young children and her elderly mother were flown to the United States aboard a U.S. military aircraft. They've been in the country ever since.
But this month, Esquire magazine reported that Hanna is "a liar." And last Thursday, the Post conceded it had apparently been duped. Hanna, the newspaper wrote, "appears to have made false claims about her past," including a dramatic account of having her husband's corpse handed to her after he died at the hands of Saddam's torturers. Her husband is apparently alive, the newspaper has learned.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is "going to have to look at this very carefully," spokesman Manny Van Pelt said Friday, after the latest Post story was brought to his attention. "We have a process called parole, and individuals are paroled into the United States for various reasons. But it's a temporary measure that can be rescinded at any time."
Efforts last week to contact Hanna, who was thought to be in the Chicago area, were unsuccessful. She did not answer a message sent to an e-mail address she is known to use. A call to her cell phone went to a voice mail recording, which features the voice of a woman who identifies herself as "Jumana." She did not return a message left there.
Peter Finn, the Post reporter who wrote the July 2003 story and Thursday's article, said last week in a telephone interview that he first met Hanna on July 12, 2003, at the Baghdad offices of the Human Rights Society of Iraq, an activist organization.
Hanna, who is now about 42 years old, told Finn that she had been imprisoned by Saddam's son Uday in November 1993, after she went to him to try to gain approval of her marriage to a non-Iraqi. Hanna said she was held for more than two years. She said she was raped repeatedly and regularly tortured in other ways.
Hanna told Finn that her husband was arrested in January 2001. On Feb. 14, 2001, she said, her husband's body was handed to her at the front gate of the same detention center where she was held.
Finn, 42, has been at the Post since 1995. He's now at the Post's Moscow bureau. Finn said he interviewed Hanna three times, for a total of eight to nine hours, before writing the first story. He said he interviewed Hanna's mother, two of Hanna's cousins and two other people who had helped the family. All vouched for her stories.
At Finn's request, Hanna took him to the detention center where she said she had been held. "She clearly reacted" strongly to being there, Finn said, and "was familiar with the place."
During that visit to the detention center, Hanna met some U.S. officials. They interviewed her over the course of about two days before the 2003 story was published, Finn said. In that story, he quoted Bernard Kerik, then the senior U.S. policy advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, as saying Hanna's information "appears to be credible."
Phil Bennett, now the Post's managing editor, was the newspaper's assistant managing editor for foreign news in 2003. The Post, he said, "certainly regrets that we published things in the paper that now appear to be untrue." But, Bennett said, "we did pretty much everything we could at the time to report this story out."
Finn said, "It's painful to be deceived, and it's even more painful to be deceived in print." He said that he wishes he had "reported more widely among the Christian community in Baghdad." Hanna is a Christian.
It was the Esquire piece that pushed the Post to write last week's mea culpa. The story that wound up in the magazine started as a book project.
Hanna's tales began to come apart soon after freelance journalist Sara Solovitch was hired last August to write a book with Hanna.
Solovitch, author of the Esquire story, said last week that she became suspicious of Hanna's claims. One thing especially bothered her: Hanna claimed to have earned a master's degree in accounting from Oxford University in England, even though her English was elementary at best. That claim, Solovitch found, was false. Solovitch checked out other parts of Hanna's story. Other family members in Iraq said Hanna's husband was still alive. Solovitch decided she couldn't write the book. Instead, the Esquire story tells how she uncovered Hanna's deceptions.
At the Pentagon, a spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, said last week that Wolfowitz and other officials had no comment about the turn of events in Hanna's life.
At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "we need to know whether the decision (to allow Hanna and her family to come to the U.S.) was based on fact," Van Pelt said. "We're definitely going to look into this."
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