For Seven Iraqis, A Vital Part of Life Is Restored

"Saddam is the past," Kadhim said. "Now we must make business contacts in America."

'Amputation City'

Their odyssey began almost exactly a year ago, with an overheard conversation in a Baghdad cafe.

Don North, a former correspondent for both ABC and NBC who is currently a freelance producer, was in Baghdad last June helping set up the U.S.-sponsored Iraq Media Network when he received a videotape from one of the Iraqi journalists working for him. It showed doctors amputating the hands of nine Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib in 1995.

"I'd seen a lot of videotape, but this was truly gruesome and shocking," North said. In Baghdad, the owner of a small video production shop had been asked to make 10 copies of the tape by secret police in 1995. He clandestinely made an extra to keep as evidence of the atrocities. That was the copy that found its way to North.

Al Fadhly said that, after a year in hellish prisons and five months in Abu Ghraib, he was almost relieved when he heard he and the eight other merchants were going to be freed after having their hands amputated.

"We were the lucky ones," Al Fadhly said. "Others stayed in prison much longer. Thirty thousand in Abu Ghraib went to the hangman's noose."

Their trial lasted 30 minutes. Al Fadhly said all nine men believe they were scapegoated by Hussein because his economy was collapsing after the Persian Gulf War, and U.S. currency was anathema to him. Two weeks after the men lost their hands, they said, the law banning trade in foreign currency was thrown out.

Hussein had the nine hands brought to him, to be sure the sentence was carried out, said Farhad Taha, an attending physician at the amputations who was later interviewed by Al Fadhly, who now works for the media network.

Amnesty International estimates that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqis had their hands amputated for similar crimes.

"Baghdad is Amputation City," North said. "Within a block you run into two to three people without a leg, or an arm, or an ear."

Hussein's secret police, like Hitler's, kept meticulous records of who was killed or maimed, and why. A committee of former prisoners is sorting through 2 million to 4 million files in hopes of accurately quantifying the scope of the depravity.

One of the nine maimed men escaped to Europe after his release, and another has died. Over the next nine years, the seven who remained in Baghdad kept a low profile, living the life of scarred outcasts. They also became their own support system, forever bonded by their time in prison.

"They were their own best friends," North said.

Houston's 'White Knight'

After viewing the tape, North was determined to make a documentary about the men. "It was already a famous story in Baghdad."