Today’s article in the Times about an American contractor, Donald Vance, swept up during a raid in Iraq, is breathtaking in its nightmarishness. To call the legal system Kafkaesque is to diminish it almost entirely:

“At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see.”

And this was an American detained over there. So is Mohammad Munaf, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by an Iraqi court. How is that even possible?

This article appears in December 15 • 2006.

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