From his prison cell, Hilal Aboud al-Bayati used to dream of U.S. troops overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime. A member of Iraq's Academy of Sciences and father of its national computer center, he was arrested in March 2000 at his University of Baghdad office and, in a secret trial, convicted of espionage. "All we discussed in prison was when the Americans were coming," says al-Bayati, who spent nearly three years behind bars with thousands of other political prisoners.
Today U.S. troops guard the entrance to Baghdad University, but al-Bayati, who gained his freedom in October 2002 in a general amnesty granted by...