Posted on 01/21/2005 10:00:22 AM PST by areafiftyone
WASHINGTON - An Iraqi woman's story of being tortured in prison during the rule of Saddam Hussein, which led the United States to grant her refugee status, appears to include false claims, it has been reported.
Jumana Michael Hanna, in a Page 1 story in the July 21, 2003 editions of The Washington Post, said she was beaten and raped during more than two years of imprisonment for marrying a foreign national without proper permission. She also said her husband had been executed under Saddam's reign.
But an article in this month's Esquire magazine, by a writer who pursued writing a book with Hanna, concludes she was not truthful.
The Post reported Thursday that it has since interviewed three of Hanna's in-laws who said she was imprisoned for another reason - cheating people out of money - and that her husband was alive and living outside Iraq.
Ten days after The Post featured Hanna on its front page, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told her story at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to illustrate routine torture and abuse of prisoners by Baathist policemen.
U.S. officials took Hanna and her children into protective custody in Baghdad and then on to the United States, based on her story. She now lives in Chicago.
Asked by the Post about its findings, Hanna said, "You write what you like. I have nothing else to say."
The Post said it located a brother, uncle and cousin of Hanna's husband, Haitam Jamil Anwar, who said they believed Hanna was imprisoned for cheating people with false promises that she could get them immigration visas.
Another "refugee" seeking political asylum to immigrate to the country otherwise known as the "Great Satan". Liberals need to remind me why America is so bad and evil when people from pretty much any country in the world are willing to lie their way in here.
Well, if it didn't happen to her than I guess it never happen to anyone else.
Just like the cockroaches stealing from the tsunami disasters... they are everywhere.
In this case, however, deportation ASAP is not only possible, but appropriate. Crooks from any foreign country should not be welcome in ours.
I'ld be in favour of cutting her some slack. If I was a woman living under Saddam, I'ld lie to get out of there too.
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