Fitted For Friendship

By Deborah Fowler

Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been a public relations nightmare for the Bush Administration. But the prison was once a site where Saddam Hussein brutally tortured his own citizens, and this week the White House will get a chance to remind Americans of that--and provide some more news that is uplifting.

In 1995 nine Iraqi businessmen were arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib on Saddam's orders. After a cursory trial on charges of illegally trading foreign currency, each was sentenced to have an X carved into his forehead and his right hand cut off. Saddam had the procedure filmed and the hands delivered to him. The men were even charged $50 apiece for the procedure. Seven of those men will be in Washington this week to shake hands--new bionic hands--with wounded American soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and to meet with President Bush.

The man responsible for all this is free-lance documentarian Don North. He was in Iraq helping rebuild its TV service when he heard of the men and says he used $100,000 of his son's college funds to find and film them. North, with help from a newsman in Houston, recruited Dr. Joe Agris, a plastic surgeon at Houston's Methodist Hospital, to operate on the men free of charge. The Department of Homeland Security waived visa requirements, and Continental Airlines agreed to fly them to Houston. The U.S. branch of the German prosthetics firm Otto Bock HealthCare donated seven prosthetic hands equipped with state-of-the-art sensors, worth $50,000 apiece, and two Houston firms helped with fitting and rehabilitation. At a cookout in the Texas hill country this month, the men laughed as one imitated Saddam giving commands to cut off people's hands. "When they came here, they were scared and depressed," says Agris. "This is part of the release." Says Basim al Fadhly, one of the seven: "We have all been in pain for nine years--nine years of suffering!--until now."

--By Deborah Fowler