O ne day in the summer of 2004, while sat in the western Baghdad studio of Radio Dijla, Iraq's first all-talk station, listening to a deputy interior minister being interviewed, a man named Haithem called in. His story sounded garbled and frantic: late at night bandits had forced him off an unlit highway overpass, destroying his car, crushing his chest against the steering wheel, and shattering his leg. After twelve hours, American soldiers found him under the highway and called the Iraqi police, who stole his money and gun before loading him into an ambulance. The next day went looking for Haithem in a modest neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. He lay sweating in a dark room, a radio and phone by the bed, sunlight burning around the window curtain. There was a towel wrapped around Haithem's waist, and his bandaged knee was held in traction by metal pins and a primitive sack of bricks, sand, and lead weights that hung from a wire over the bed frame. It looked as if torture, not healing, was going on in Haithem's room. As it happened, the same leg had been fractured by Saddam's secret police in 1992. This latest injury seemed to have broken Haithem's will; he said that he'd attempted suicide by sticking his finger into the power strip on the floor. I have no manhood right now, can't feel my manhood. I'm asking you through the spirit of brotherhood to help me find compensation. I'm desperate?I have