Paul Rubenstein lost much of his family in the Holocaust. "Afterwards people said, 'Never again,'" he told me quietly as we drove through a U.S. military base near Baghdad. "Now I'm helping to develop the science to continue studying this kind of thing." He paused. "It's hard to imagine that I'm in the vanguard of the science of mass murders and mass burials. This wasn't supposed to happen today."

Rubenstein is an anthropologist and a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He's also the deputy director of the forensics lab at Camp Slayer near Baghdad. For two years, even as Iraq's insurgency has grown deadlier, Rubenstein and a small team of scientists, most from the U.S. but also a few from other coalition countries, have been exhuming remains from mass graves. Using forensic techniques—linking bones, clothing remnants, identity cards, jewelry, photographs with names on captured government death warrants—they're coaxing secrets out of the death pits to determine who the victims were, where they came from, who killed them, and how, when, and why. Since 2004, U.S. officials say, hundreds of skeletons have been exhumed and turned over to the forensics team.

Although that number is tiny compared with the total number of Iraqis murdered, the effort is an impressive marshaling of the forces of science, all aimed at building airtight legal cases.

The forensic work at Camp Slayer is sponsored and choreographed by the U.S. Department of Justice, whose vested interest in proving Saddam Hussein a mass murderer has evolved as the Bush Administration's stated reasons for invading Iraq (weapons of mass destruction, links to 9/11) have proved false. Still, even as the death count mounts by the day—an esti-mated 26,000 Iraqis and 2,000 Americans and allies killed by late 2005—the investigation could bring value that surpasses the warfare and politics of the moment. If the forensics specialists demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and other mass murderers can be successfully brought to justice, they may help build a potent preventive against genocides of the future. This, at least, is the idealistic hope.

The forensics facility occupies part of the grounds of a former palace compound of Saddam Hussein's, a onetime pleasure court with swimming pools and boating ponds that now bristles with antennas and satellite dishes servicing CIA, FBI, and U.S. military intelligence operations. Rubenstein walked me through a quaintly incongruous white picket fence to a cluster of well-lit, air-conditioned tents, where I met specialists examining, x-raying, and photographing skeletons and studying clothing and artifacts such as jewelry, wallets, and government identity cards. Patterns of neat bullet holes peppered skulls and garments, many of them the baggy trousers peculiar to Kurdish men. Staring at cardboard boxes filled with skulls in plastic bags and skeletons precisely arrayed on steel gurneys, inhaling the oddly metallic death smells, I flashed on America's current fascination with TV forensics programs like CSI and Crossing Jordan. The real thing is not entertaining.