When Mazin Alkabbi awoke from an anesthesia-induced slumber on a morning in 1994, Iraqi authorities gave him grim news: He had been in a car accident and lost his ears. Alkabbi knew better. There had been no accident. His ears had been surgically removed because he fled the military when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991. Just hours before the surgery, he was arrested at his home in Basra. Alkabbi, who now lives in Arlington, remembered having his hands tied, being blindfolded and at one point even thinking he might just be questioned and released. His Iraqi identification...