Marc Kusnetz

After dropping out of contact for several months, Muhammad emailed from Baghdad last April:

I’m writing for you today asking your help (if possible if possible) to pick up me from the hell which is Iraq. Actually, I reached now the climax of the suffering here in Iraq.

I have never met Muhammad. But I have come to know him through telephone conversations and emails that stretch back...

On 10 November 2003 an Iraqi major-general called Abed Hamed Mowhoush presented himself at the gate of Forward Operating Base Tiger, a small US facility in the western province of al Anbar, near the Syrian border. He was there to find his four sons – the youngest was 15, the others in their twenties – detained about a week earlier in a pre-dawn raid at their home, an event that...