I first meet the judge a couple of weeks after his congressional hearing. He sits upright in a white plastic lawn chair with a cardboard box of old personal documents next to him. Except for the two bags of clothes, the box was nearly all he'd carried with him from Baghdad. It contains just about the only items that testify to his existence—family photo albums, résumés, diplomas, and report cards from as far back as grade school. As Radhi pages through the files, he speaks through a translator, sometimes pausing to put a finger to his forehead as if in search of a distant memory. He wears a desert-brown suit with a yellow tie, and dark rings sag around his hard brown eyes. Though he looks as if he hasn't slept in weeks, he is surprisingly upbeat. "Things will get better," he tells me. "I'm hopeful."

This says a lot.

The judge, a secular Shiite, was born in 1945, the second-youngest of 10. Hamza Radhi al-Ketany, his father, was a successful seed merchant; his mother, a homemaker. The family lived in a cramped house in downtown Kut, a river city of about a half-million in eastern Iraq. After high school, he traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, for college, then returned to Iraq for law school at Baghdad University.

It was there, in the summer of 1968, that he caught his first glimpse of Saddam Hussein, a rising force in the Baath Party, which had recently seized power in a bloodless coup. Standing in front of about 1,000 law students in an auditorium, Hussein pulled out a pistol and began firing. Windows shattered and students ran.

Although some at the time hailed the Baath Party—baath is Arabic for renaissance—as the future of Arab unity and socialism, people who didn't join began to disappear, and fear infected the country. Intelligence agents were everywhere, and one night in 1970, at around midnight, they arrived at the 25-year-old Radhi's house in Kut, where he had a private law firm.

Radhi says that he was forced into a black Volkswagen sedan, blindfolded, and transported to the Palace of the End prison in Baghdad. There, he was asked why he had not joined the party. Radhi replied that he was not political. He was tied up, beaten with bats, hung upside down from a steel ceiling fan, given electric shocks, and thrown into a cell the size of a coffin. All night, he heard screams and moans emanating from prisoners in the hundreds or thousands of other cells around him.

After 100 days, he was released. His keepers told him not to speak of the place, though he would always have jagged white scars on his arms and back, as well as a soft spot about the size of a quarter on his skull, where the bats had done their work. He attempted to return to his life. Marriage helped to some extent. He wedded his cousin, a pretty brown-haired woman with whom he had grown up in Kut, and they had three children.

Later, Radhi joined the Ministry of Labor, where he inspected working conditions at regional factories and gained a reputation as a diligent and honest investigator. Seven years later, in 1977, he enrolled in the prestigious Judicial Institute, a two-year training program for the country's top judges and attorneys general.

Most of the students there were aligned with the Baath Party. Radhi still wasn't, which was why police returned when he was a year into the program, arrested him again, and interrogated him for another 10 days.

Hussein officially came to power in the summer of 1979. The next year, the country went to war with Iran. Radhi was appointed to a social post, where he spent the next eight years finding housing and schooling for children whose parents were battlefield casualties. In 1984, two of the judge's cousins disappeared after they were deemed to be communists; a third cousin, who refused to serve in the army, was executed by firing squad.

Despite being on the political and social fringe, the judge was eventually hired by the Ministry of Justice as an attorney for a job handling mainly civil cases.

As most of his colleagues were Baath Party members, Radhi says the position began to wear on him. He heard about disappearances and deaths of "traitors." After three years, he quit, and for the next decade, he disappeared from the public sector.