Rubenstein was for the most part all business. I reasoned that this was his way of protecting himself, not just from an inquisitive journalist but also from the nightmare he lived each day. Once, though, he let down his guard. "As you work with the victims, especially the children—their clothing, the baby bottles, the little shoes, just like the ones we bought for our daughters years ago, the little hands, so expressive in death —you have to try not to get into the heads of the monsters who did this, or it becomes overwhelming. You look at a perfectly knitted baby bonnet with two bullet holes in it, and you think, These could be your own kids."

The killers sometimes treated men, women, and children differently. "The men show signs of torture, of being tied and handcuffed," Rubenstein said. "The women often had children with them and received, perhaps, the blessing of being shot once at close range. All of this is based on clear evidence, not speculation."

An early step in the forensic analysis is to remove clothing and personal possessions from skeletons before the specialists start examining the remains. This, explained Joan Bytheway, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh, is to ensure that experts don't form biases about the victims. Bytheway pointed out an entry hole at the top of a skull that she cradled, an exit hole near the left eye socket, and a radiating crack in the left cheek. Only after she and the other anthropologists incorporate findings like this into biographical profiles—"female, mid-30s, five foot four to five foot six"—do they reunite bones and possessions.

A few feet away from where Bytheway was working, Tim Anson, an Australian anthropologist from the University of Adelaide, showed me a partial skeleton on a gurney. It had been recovered from a grave near Al Hadr, about 55 miles southwest of Mosul. The most obvious thing about it was that only the back of the skull remained. "The entire face was blown away," said Anson. He also noted leathery, mummified tissue in the forearms and explained that this was because the person had been buried in the middle layer of a grave 12 to 14 feet deep. Even after as long as 20 years in the earth, bodies farther underground often contain fat and other soft tissue, while those closer to the top are reduced to bare bones.

In an adjacent tent radiographer Jim Kister demonstrated his work with a Faxitron, used to x-ray bones to identify the source of trauma. He clamped a large transparency of a man's rib cage to a light box and pointed to a bullet. "This guy took 11 bullets," he said. "He was shot to hell." Kister said he anticipated that defendants in the Baghdad trials would try to claim that shattered bones were postmortem and therefore inadmissable evidence. "These pictures tell a different story."

So far the forensics team has only identified about 15 percent of the skeletons examined. The results will be collected in a massive report by the Army Corps of Engineers. It won't be made public for many years, not until after the trials—decades after Iraq's mass killings began in 1987. The eight-year war with neighboring Iran was ratcheting down, and Saddam Hussein had ordered his bedraggled army to punish the minority Kurdish community, many of whom had supported Iran. Saddam Hussein used this involvement as an excuse to attempt to eradicate the Kurdish population, which had long been a thorn in his side. (See "The Kurds in Control," page 2.) By the time the campaign ended more than a year later, an estimated 100,000 Kurds were dead (though some Iraqi interest groups put the number as high as 182,000), including thousands poisoned by chemical weapons. Most were buried in secret mass graves.