Jumana Hanna جُمانة حنّا | |
|---|---|
 Photo of Jumana from the 2003Washington Post story about her | |
| Born | Jumana Mikhail Hanna 1962 (age 62–63) |
| Known for | False story of imprisonment in the Washington Post |
Jumana Mikhail Hanna (Arabic:جُمانة ميخائيل حنّا; born c. 1962), also known simply asJumana Hanna, is anIraqi-Assyrian woman who was imprisoned at the facility known as Al Kelab Al Sayba, orLoose Dogs, during the rule ofSaddam Hussein. She is most well known for creating a story about her imprisonment in Iraq, which was featured on the front page of theWashington Post.[1]
Hanna was born in 1962 to anAssyrian Christian family in Iraq.[2] Her mother had been the daughter of an iron merchant, and her father had been a pharmacist. The family lived in theKarrada neighborhood ofBaghdad, and Hanna was the only child.[2]
Hanna would become a well-known figure after the publishing of an article in theWashington Post in 2003. That year, Hanna had revisited the Al Kelab Al Sayba (Arabic:الكلاب الصيبة) prison where she had been incarcerated, telling reporters that she had been jailed and tortured in the facility, and that her husband had been killed in a nearby prison.[3] She had returned to the prison to identify the members of the Iraqi police force whom she said tortured her and others during her arrest, as well as to tell the story of her arrest to the Washington Post.
In the article, Hanna described many aspects of her arrest. Throughout the article, it's stated that Hanna was victim to many violations such as being hung from a rod and beaten with a stick,raped near a dead tree trunk, and having electric shock applied to hervagina. Hanna had testified about her experiences to theCoalition Provisional Authority that she had been tortured during her time in the prison, due to her religious beliefs. The evidence she provided eventually led to nine Iraqi officers being arrested.[2]
Hanna had stated that her arrest began after her marriage to a man named Haitam Jamil Anwar, whom she had met in the summer of 1993. Anwar was a 30-year oldIndian wood carver who was born to immigrants from theBritish Raj, and first encountered Hanna after she had come in to his shop asking him to repair a box. Although they had to keep their relationship secret, they had been able to marry by that August, breakingBa'athist law requiring permission for Iraqi citizens to marry foreigners. Hanna's arrest began in November of that year, after a visit to theNational Olympic Committee of Iraq.[2]
Immediately after the story of Hanna's arrest broke out, authorities relocated Hanna, her mother, and two children to theAs-Salam Palace. They stayed in a room near the office ofPaul Bremer and lived in the palace for three months, before relocating to northernCalifornia in the westernUnited States.[4][3]
Following Hanna's relocation to the United States, her case was given top priority byBernard Kerik, the formerinterior minister for the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Paul Bremer requested humanitarian parole for her.[5] Kerik had two military investigators on the scene, and he also went to go see the prison for himself, saying “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...It was sickening.”[4]
The Washington Post story was later mentioned byPaul Wolfowitz while testifying before theUnited States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.[6] Wolfowitz would redescribe the details of the story while stating that her courage to retell her story would lead to a sense of justice for many Iraqis who faced similar hardships underSaddam Hussein.[6]
Sara Solovitch, a journalist based in California, became interested in the story and met with Hanna for a series of interviews, as she intended to write a book about her life. She had met with Hanna in August 2004, and communicated with her through a translator and recording notes on atape recorder. After their first meeting, however, Solovitch began to have doubts about Hanna's stories, primarily due to her insistence that she attendedOxford from 1982-1984 despite her poorEnglish.[4] Other notable findings also sowed doubt in Hanna's story;
She would later feel that many of Hanna's stories were "ludicrous" and that hardly any details of her account were true.[3] After a conversation with Hanna's mother, Sara witnessed Hanna fly into a fit of rage, and would go on to find other faults in her story. Her husband, who allegedly had been executed in an Iraqi prison, was in fact still alive; he was also not originally Indian as she had claimed, but an IraqiArab.[3] Solovitch's research also revealed that a law preventing intermarriage in Ba'athist society never existed, and that the real reason Hanna had gone to prison was on charges ofprostitution to prevent her marriage to her husband.[4]
Following the publishing of the Esquire article, Hanna received negative attention for falsifying the story. Many details about Hanna, such as her spending habits and her work with charities, had also caused her to be alienated from many of the Iraqi emigres and other people in California she had met. She had moved toChicago by the time the article had been published.
The Washington Post edited their story with a clarification after the Esquire article had been published, stating that Hanna's story of abuse couldn't be verified.[7][8] However, then-editorDavid E. Hoffman stated "I would point out that she said one set of things to us and then she said another set of things to the author" of the Esquire article, Hoffman said. "If you look at those two sets of things, they didn't overlap much." Speculation over the charge of Hanna's arrest soon followed; Toma Kalabat, a cousin of Hanna, believed that she had been arrested for cheating people out of money on the promise of visas to Europe.[9]
The revelation of Hanna's story also called into question the legitimacy of theUS invasion of Iraq. Writing from Dubai, Youssef Ibrahim, former columnist for the Washington Post, believed that those in the Coalition Government were smart enough to know that Hanna's story hadn't been true, and that the controversy surrounding it negatedIraqis in the post-Saddam era to feeling manipulated and abused.[1] White supremacistDavid Duke also commented publicly about the story, blaming the American government asNeocons who attempted to justify the invasion using Hanna's original story.[10]
The nine Iraqi officers arrested on her testimony were released later when it became apparent that little of Ms. Hanna's tale could be verified.[11]
