Jumana Hanna

Jumana Mikhail Hanna (; born c. 1962), also spelled Jumana Michael Hanna,

Background Hanna was born in 1962 to an Assyrian Christian family in Iraq. Her mother had been the daughter of an iron merchant, and her father had been a pharmacist. The family lived in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, and Hanna was the only child. She had returned to the prison to identify the members of the Iraqi police force whom she said tortured her and others during her arrest, as well as to tell the story of her arrest to the Washington Post. Kerik had two military investigators on the scene, and he also went to go see the prison for himself, saying “To be physically there, to look at the barbed wire that was hooked into the trees, to think about the stories she told and then actually see the devices they used...It was sickening.” Wolfowitz would redescribe the details of the story while stating that her courage to retell her story would lead to a sense of justice for many Iraqis who faced similar hardships under Saddam Hussein. However, then-editor David E. Hoffman stated "I would point out that she said one set of things to us and then she said another set of things to the author" of the Esquire article, Hoffman said. "If you look at those two sets of things, they didn't overlap much." Speculation over the charge of Hanna's arrest soon followed; Toma Kalabat, a cousin of Hanna, believed that she had been arrested for cheating people out of money on the promise of visas to Europe.

The revelation of Hanna's story also called into question the legitimacy of the US invasion of Iraq. Writing from Dubai, Youssef Ibrahim, former columnist for The Washington Post, believed that those in the Coalition Government were smart enough to know that Hanna's story hadn't been true, and that the controversy surrounding it negated Iraqis in the post-Saddam era to feeling manipulated and abused.

The nine Iraqi officers arrested on her testimony were released later when it became apparent that little of Ms. Hanna's tale could be verified.