In 1997, a woman named Misha Defonseca wrote a book about the four years she spent as a child searching war-torn Europe for her Jewish parents, who’d been deported by the Nazis from Belgium.

Maurice Conway does not recall being particularly polite when the phone rang that first evening, and he had every right not to be. He was fifty-seven years old and retired because of a bad heart that had required doctors to splice veins around the clogged spots in his arteries, and he’d given up cigarette only five months earlier, which will make any man irritable.

A given: By most Americans' standards, Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul is probably a bad guy. To believe that requires only a certain perspective--namely, one that does not favor the bloody imposition of an Islamist theocracy--and a very short leap of faith, barely more than a hop, to span the gap between what al Bahlul admits and what the U.S. Department of Defense alleges.