Report documents torture by US-backed Iraqi police

By Joseph Kay / from www.WSWS.org website

29 January 2005

A new report published by Human Rights Watch, “The New Iraq? Torture and Ill-treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody,” documents the systematic torture of prisoners in the hands of Iraqi police. As the headline of the report suggests, it questions whether the new force set up and trained by American advisers (including, among others, former New York City police chief Bernard Kerik) represents a significant change from the methods which prevailed under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

The report is based on interviews with 90 current and former prisoners between July and October 2004. Of these, 72 individuals, or 80 percent of those interviewed, claimed that they had been tortured or abused at the hands of Iraqi police. This is an astonishing rate, and suggests a level of abuse that would rival the worst dictatorships.

Out of the 90 people interviewed, the organization said that 21 had been arrested for their alleged affiliation with a political party opposed to the Iraqi regime of Iyad Allawi. Many of these were suspected members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The interviews were carried out during and immediately following an uprising led by al-Sadr against the American occupation and its puppet government. Those interviewed included individuals who had been arrested in both Baghdad and Najaf.

Many of those arrested for political purposes were seized by an agency, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS), which reports directly to Allawi. The Allawi government, wrote Human Rights Watch, “appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights.”

An additional 54 were “criminal suspects,” arrested for supposedly participating in terrorism, abduction and similar acts that fall under the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court. The rest were arrested for allegedly engaging in other criminal acts such as theft or murder.

On the basis of these interviews, Human Rights Watch concluded that “the abuse of detainees by the Iraqi police and intelligence forces has become routine and commonplace.” It found that arrests were generally made without warrants, and many prisoners reported being beaten at the time of their arrest. “The vast majority had been held without appearing before a judge for far longer [than 24 hours]—in some cases for almost four months.”

Further, the report found, “Methods of ill-treatment included routine beatings to the body using a variety of implements such as cables, hosepipes and metal rods. Detainees reported kicking, slapping and punching; prolonged suspension from the wrists with the hands tied behind the back; electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, including the earlobes and genitals; and being kept blindfolded and/or handcuffed continuously for several days. In several cases, the detainees suffered what may be permanent physical disability.”

Several of those who were interviewed by Human Rights Watch had visible injuries consistent with the type of treatment they reported.

Murtadha Mahdi, 24, had been picked up in Baghdad during the time of the Shiite uprising. He said, “They took us upstairs and put us in a small cell that had no air conditioning. There were other detainees there, altogether 15 or 17 people. We stayed there eight days. They blindfolded us during interrogation, and accused us of having blown up a shop that sells alcohol. They said we belonged to the Mahdi Army. I was beaten with cables. They threw water over my face and then attached electric wires to my ears.”

Ali, 29, was picked up in Najaf: “When we entered headquarters, the [Iraqi] officer told us to kneel before him. We were hit on the back of our necks with a rifle butt. Then they took us upstairs to the first floor and told us to face the wall and began beating us severely. The Americans were there, standing some five or six meters away. They just stood and watched. I was beaten with a wooden stick on my forehead, and all of us were beaten all over the body with cables and hosepipes. That happened even before the interrogation began.”

Others interviewed had similar stories to tell.

Ali’s interview highlights the fact that the Iraqi police have been operating under the guidance of American troops and private “consultants.” For its report, Human Rights Watch did not interview any of the thousands of prisoners who have been held by American forces, and those who were interviewed did not report US troops participating directly in the torture. It is clear, however, that the US government has encouraged the type of treatment that is being meted out.

Human Rights Watch recounted the story of Captain Jarrell Southall, an American soldier in the Oregon Army National Guard, who reported coming across a group of Iraqi detainees who had been beaten by Iraqi police. The troops in Southall’s unit attempted to halt the abuse, and radioed their commanders for orders on what to do. They were told to “Stand Down.” [See “US commanders stop troops from protecting Iraqi torture victims”]

General Richard Meyers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reported as saying in reference to the incident, “It is critically important to our success in Iraq that we reinforce, whenever possible, the authority and responsibility of the Iraqi government to handle its internal affairs.”

The report quotes Steven Casteel, the Ministry of Interior’s senior international adviser, who told the Boston Globe in 2004, “There’s always a pendulum between freedom and security, and in the Middle Eastern culture they’ve always allowed that pendulum to swing more towards security. The Iraqi people are looking for this government to take a strong stance.... Obviously, we support human rights. And the Iraqi police understand they’re not supposed to do anything outside the Iraqi legal framework, but that legal framework is not the US legal framework.”

Exactly what legal framework Casteel was referring to is not clear; however it appears to include the legal framework employed by the Hussein regime. The Bush administration has repeatedly stated that the invasion of Iraq was necessary because Hussein “killed and tortured his own people.” Many of those who are now serving in the Iraqi police, however, also served under Saddam Hussein.

According to the figures of Brigadier General Andrew McCay, head of the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team during the period of the interviews, of the some 60,000 Iraqi police, 27,000 to 28,000 were what he called “former regime police officers.” In comments to Human Rights Watch, he pointed to the importance of these former officers under Saddam Hussein for the United States today: There is a “brutal insurgency” which “has to be beaten.... In this fight, the police are on the frontlines.”

One Iraqi police officer, who had apparently also worked under Hussein, told Human Rights Watch that torture was necessary in order to extract information from the prisoners. “We were using these interrogation methods long before the Americans came,” he said, “and we will continue to use them long after the Americans are gone.”

From the report, it is also clear that the torture is closely intertwined with massive corruption. The American forces have recruited the most criminal layers of the Iraqi population, comprised of individuals who see a job in the police force as a way to extort money out of those who they capture. The police officials regularly threatened prisoners with indefinite detention unless they were paid off.

A businessman, aged 40, was arrested in Najaf. He told Human Rights Watch that after being tortured and held for eight days, “they began negotiating with me over the price for my release. Of course here everything is with money. If you want to get word to your family, you have to pay. If you want to eat, you have to pay. I was told that the captain was asking for one million dinars for my release. I said that was a lot of money.... We finally settled for 350,000 dinars.”

Those who have been tortured include children. One woman told the group that her 14-year-old brother-in-law was arrested in the Baghdad district of al-Bataween in June 2004. “When he was brought to court, the judicial investigator told him that according to his file, he had confessed to possessing drugs at the time of his arrest. But he replied that he made no confession, that he had been made to sign a statement while blindfolded, and that he was beaten on his back and with falaqa [beatings on the soles of the feet].”

Many of those interviewed reported being forced to sign confessions that they had not been allowed to read.

The report was based on interviews because no human rights organizations have been allowed to visit detention centers run by Iraqi police.

Commenting on the response that the report has received, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, noted that there has been no official response from either the Bush administration or the Iraqi government. Human Rights Watch met with representatives of the Iraqi government several months ago to report the conclusions of the interviews, however Whitson noted that “apparently it did not have much effect.”

“One would expect that out of all of this, the Iraqi people would end up with a government that is significantly different from its predecessor,” Whitson said. “However, the new government is engaged in the same types of activities as the old.”

Who's Dying in Our War?

The answer is Army Reservists and National Guardsmen such as Californian Patrick McCaffrey.
By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer

CAMP ANACONDA — Some months after the Americans took over the sprawling Balad Air Base, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, someone posted an enigmatic sign on the main gate asking: "Is Today the Day?" Soldiers at the base, which the U.S. military renamed Logistics Support Area Anaconda, or Camp Anaconda, take turns speculating about what the sign means. In the tense months leading up to today's planned national elections in Iraq, the population at the base has swollen to more than 22,000 soldiers and civilian contractors. Some Camp Anaconda residents—installed in relative comfort inside the 15-square-mile compound that now features four dining halls, two swimming pools, a first-run movie theater and a Burger King franchise—have concluded that the sign is a military safety message: "Stay Alert!"

For the 90 California National Guard soldiers who make up Alpha Company, a Petaluma-based arm of the 579th Engineer Battalion of Santa Rosa, and regularly venture outside the base to patrol the treacherous canal-veined perimeter, the sign carries a more ominous meaning. The soldiers are part of one of the most star-crossed National Guard units in Iraq. Since arriving at Anaconda last March, one out of five in Alpha Company has been killed or wounded. Three of the nine California National Guardsmen killed in Iraq by the end of 2004 were from Alpha Company.

"A lot of the guys hate the sign," says Alpha Company Sgt. Timothy "T.J." McClurg, a 27-year-old welder from Chico sent home to recover after shrapnel from a roadside bomb ripped into his foot on Nov. 11. "They think it means today is the day we get hit, or today is the day we die."

For Patrick Ryan McCaffrey, a 34-year-old father of two from the Bay Area suburb of Tracy, the day was June 22, 2004. McCaffrey, a rising auto-body shop manager in Palo Alto, signed up for the National Guard during the wave of patriotism that swept the country after Sept. 11, 2001. "Can you believe what's happening?" McCaffrey asked Marlene Cather, one of his co-workers at Akins Collision Repair. "We need to do something."

Exactly one month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, McCaffrey joined a National Guard unit with a mission statement that emphasizes its engineering support role to "provide mobility, counter-mobility and survivability support to a combat arms brigade" as well as "providing manpower and engineering expertise" during stateside crises. In the troubling days after Sept. 11, National Guard units across the land reported hundreds of similar enlistments. But like many of the other 50,000-plus National Guard soldiers now serving alongside about 20,000 Army Reserve troops in Iraq, McCaffrey didn't foresee that he would one day find himself in deadly combat on the other side of the world. McCaffrey's unit had not been in overseas combat since World War II.

In the half century before Iraq, the engineers had been deployed on missions ranging from forest fires to the 1965 Watts riots. Their duties included temporary assignments to search for weapons in state prisons, remove snow from blocked mountain passes and, in May 1993, to bury a gray whale that had washed up on the beach near Eureka. McCaffrey told friends when he enlisted that he expected to be assigned to homeland security duties, such as guarding the Golden Gate Bridge or Shasta Dam.

"Patrick thought by joining the engineers he would be doing something constructive to fight terrorism on the West Coast," recalls his father, Bob McCaffrey.

But as the U.S. campaign in Iraq bogged down in the summer of 2003, the Pentagon turned to its legions of "citizen soldiers," serving mostly weekend duty in crumbling state armories, and ordered them to relieve exhausted regular Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Authorized by a presidential emergency order issued only two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the historic deployment took place with relatively little public notice or fanfare. It wasn't until later, when the Guard and reserve troops began dying and getting injured in Iraq, that presidential candidate John Kerry and others began describing their overseas service as a "backdoor draft." Today more than 40% of the 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq are either National Guardsmen or reserves. By the end of the spring, that percentage is expected to rise to more than 50%.

Despite McCaffrey's expectations as a National Guard engineer, his marching orders were quite different. Once the U.S. moved into Iraq, he was converted into an infantryman and sent into combat, one of more than 5,000 California National Guard soldiers mustered for service in the war. As the Pentagon scrambled to adjust to long-term military occupation, similarly abrupt job reclassifications became widespread. After years of developing caste pride as engineers, their transformation into foot soldiers was unsettling.

"It's like telling the Lakers that they are not going to play basketball but are now going to be Ping-Pong champs," says retired Army Col. David H. Hackworth, a critic of the current National Guard policy.

It also meant that some of the soldiers got less training than the regular Army infantry they were replacing. Army infantrymen receive 14 weeks of training in their specialty. A National Guard engineer normally undergoes eight weeks of basic infantry training and six weeks in engineering school, where they learn how to plant mines, detonate explosives and lay concertina wire, among other skills.

McCaffrey's company was called to active duty on Jan. 17, 2004, after a month of refresher training in Ft. Lewis, Wash., followed by another month of more Iraq-specific maneuvers at Ft. Irwin, Calif. Problems occurred at both training camps. The Ft. Lewis routine was disrupted by the arrest of a Washington National Guardsman, a member of the same 81st Brigade as the Californians, for attempting to sell military secrets to undercover federal agents posing as members of Al Qaeda. The Ft. Irwin training came to an unpleasant conclusion after someone stole the 9-millimeter handguns of a California battalion commander and his first sergeant, setting off a security crisis.

After the inauspicious start, the 579th Alpha Company, under the command of Capt. William C. Turner, a computer chip designer from Mountain View, arrived in Iraq in early April 2004. McCaffrey was initially gung-ho about the assignment. He regularly wrote to his family about the children he met in the villages and often asked for hard candy or soccer balls to distribute to the Iraqi kids. But after only a month of daily patrols along the dangerous periphery of the base, McCaffrey confided to family and friends that he had become disillusioned with the American war effort, particularly after the revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In a May 16 e-mail to his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, he described how the abuse scandal had inflamed anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.

McCaffrey also was troubled by the behavior of the Iraqi national guard units, then called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, that he and his fellow soldiers had been assigned to train. The line between friend and foe had become increasingly blurred in a country where brown-and-tan camouflage Iraqi uniforms are for sale in many markets. On April 20, McCaffrey and other members of the 2nd platoon, 2nd squad—nicknamed "Double-Deuce"—were called out in the middle of the night to find the source of a rocket that had hit inside the base. McCaffrey's unit stopped two Iraqis on a motorcycle, one of whom McCaffrey recognized as a man he had been training earlier in the day at Camp Anaconda.

The two Iraqis were "swiped" for explosives and tested positive for TNT and another explosive known as RDX. Suspected of participating in the rocket attack, both were arrested as insurgents. When McCaffrey called home the day after the arrests, he told his father how distressed he was about the incident.

"That episode cut Patrick and all the soldiers right to the quick," says his father, a San Jose building contractor. "It made them all realize that things were not going the way they were supposed to be going. It also made him mad as hell because now they not only had to look in front of them, but they had to look behind as well."

The incident now seems a precursor of what happened later at the military base in Mosul. On Dec. 21, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi national guard uniform blew himself up in a crowded mess tent, killing 22 people, including 14 U.S. soldiers. Four of the dead were National Guardsmen from Maine and Virginia. For McCaffrey, the arrest of the two Iraqis also foreshadowed a devastating reality that would come two months later, on a narrow asphalt road surrounded by cotton fields outside Camp Anaconda.

THE GUARD GOES TO WAR

While the use of guard units in combat theaters has a long history in the U.S., they were almost always asked to play a supporting role. In addition, much of its combat service history faded from memory during the last 50 years as the National Guard was rarely called upon to fight. In the end, only 7,000 National Guard troops—only a handful from California—served among the 2.6 million military men and women who went to Vietnam. The last time large numbers of guardsmen were sent into long-term combat was during the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, when, for example, the California National Guard's 40th Infantry Division, based in Los Alamitos, participated in many bloody battles, including those at Chorwon, Heartbreak Ridge and Sandbag Castle. Three of its soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

But President Lyndon B. Johnson rejected advice to send the reserve components to Vietnam, and his reasons were political. The president felt that calling up the reserves would endanger his ambitious Great Society domestic agenda. To many military leaders, Johnson's decision not to call up the reserves was the greatest mistake of that war. The exclusion demoralized National Guard units and left the Guard with a reputation as an alternative for those hoping to avoid dangerous duty. As the 2004 presidential election demonstrated, resentment still runs deep over the Guard-as-safe-haven issue.

After Vietnam, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. vowed that the reserves would play an active role in all future conflicts. Since then, virtually all American military action has included the National Guard.

Sending the Guard into extended combat is a different story. Currently, National Guard soldiers deployed in Iraq account for nearly one-third of the U.S. ground forces. By the end of 2004, 154 National Guard soldiers had been killed and more than 1,000 wounded in the conflict. The first days of 2005 were even bloodier. Ten National Guardsmen were killed during the first week of this year.

Johnson, the visceral Texas politician, knew by intuition what Bush administration officials are learning today: In an unpopular war, National Guard troops and reserve soldiers represent a potential political land mine. They tend to be older, and are more likely married with children. They're also much more entrenched in their civilian communities than the regular military. In Iraq, for example, the average age of U.S. Marines killed in action is 21; the average age of guardsmen lost in combat is 10 years older.

Richard H. Kohn, history professor and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argues that the Iraq deployment violates the "citizen soldier" concept at the heart of the National Guard. "By transforming them into a very different armed force, you are robbing these people of a substantial part of their civilian lives, warping their careers and changing the kinds of people who can afford to be part-time soldiers," Kohn says. He adds that because many guardsmen are civilian police, fire and emergency medical workers, the deployment "steals people from very important civilian functions" while depriving state governors of crucial emergency forces.

As the military occupation of Iraq approaches its third year, morale and recruitment issues have begun to surface. A 2004 battlefield survey conducted in Iraq for the Secretary of the Army showed that morale among the National Guard soldiers was "markedly lower" than that of active-duty soldiers. At the heart of the complaints, the survey results said, is the feeling among guardsmen that they are "treated like second-class citizens in the Army." More recently in New Mexico, where the California National Guard's 184th Infantry Regiment was preparing to be deployed to Iraq, soldiers complained to a Los Angeles Times reporter about poor training and inadequate equipment. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one said.

In a celebrated incident on Dec. 8 in Kuwait, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson surprised Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld during an impromptu press conference, asking why Guard units were being sent into Iraq with inadequate armor on their vehicles. Cheered by his fellow soldiers, Wilson claimed that his unit was forced to rummage through local landfills for "rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass . . . to put on our vehicles to take into combat."

"I call it the 'question heard 'round the world,' " says military historian Col. Mike Doubler, a Tennessee native who served 14 years in the Army and nine years in the Guard. "There is a growing perception—among guardsmen and reservists—that there are two armies in Iraq."

It's likely no coincidence that on Dec. 17, National Guard Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum announced that, because of declining recruitment during the Iraq war, the service now will offer inducements to make reenlistment more attractive. Among the incentives: tripling retention bonuses from $5,000 to $15,000. Blum also announced that the number of Guard recruiters would be increased nationally from 2,700 to 4,100.

Experts predict that the first real test of the war's impact on the National Guard will come this spring, when soldiers returning from Iraq have their first opportunity to quit. "The fact is," says Kohn, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill professor, "we have worn these people out [and] taken advantage of their patriotism and service. Many of them are going to quit as soon as they get a chance."

Please read the rest of this story by clicking this link .....

New regime faces claims of abuse as bad as Saddam's

From Richard Beeston in Baghdad Times Newspapers Ltd. January 25, 2005

'Prisoners were bound, blinded, gagged. Many had terrible bruises and burns. One room contained hoses, broken lamps (electric shock) and chemicals' Captain Jarrell Southall, of Oregon National Guard

THE Iraqi Government stands accused today of some of the same human rights abuses as Saddam Hussein’s regime, including the torture of prisoners, illegally detaining suspects and arresting political opponents.

A Human Rights Watch report is likely to embarrass Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister, before the elections on Sunday. His party has vowed to respect human rights.

Most of the abuses were recorded in interviews with detainees. Of 90 prisoners questioned between July and October last year, 72 claimed that they had been tortured or ill-treated, the 94-page dossier says. They claimed variously to have been beaten with cables, hosepipes and metal rods; slapped, kicked and punched; bound and suspended in the air for long periods; and subjected to electric shocks to the genitals, ears and other sensitive parts of the body. Some of the victims were children.

Dr Allawi’s Government “appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights”, the report alleges.

“The people of Iraq were promised something better than this after the Government of Saddam Hussein fell,” Sarah Leah Whitson, head of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, said. “Sadly, the Iraqi people continue to suffer from a Government that acts with impunity in its treatment of detainees.”

The Iraqi security forces were fighting a brutal insurgency, she said, “but international law is unambiguous on this point: no government can justify torture of detainees in the name of security”.

Ali Rashid Abbadi, 24, said that he had been arrested in Baghdad last July and taken to the Central Intelligence Directorate, where he was accused of belonging to Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr’s rebel al-Mahdi Army. “They poured cold water over me and applied electric shocks to my genitals,” he said. “I was also beaten up by several people with cables on my arms and back.”

Faisal, 15, from west of Baghdad, said that he had been arrested in July with other relatives accused of kidnapping a Lebanese national and was taken to the Interior Ministry. “During interrogation, they blindfolded me and tied my hands behind my back, and then they beat me with cables,” he said.

The security forces also appear to be ignoring basic procedures, such as obtaining arrest warrants or granting suspects defence counsel. Police often demand bribes to release suspects or to allow family visits.

Some of the most troubling claims suggest that the authorities are prepared to use the intelligence services against political rivals, as Saddam did.

The newly formed secret police, now called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, are accused of illegally arresting scores of suspects, many of them belonging to Islamic political groups, some of which are running in the election.

American and British forces are accused of failing to stop the Iraqi authorities from mistreating prisoners. In one instance last June, soldiers of the Oregon National Guard did halt the abuse of detainees held by Iraqi police in al-Shaab district in Baghdad.

Captain Jarrell Southall, the only soldier who has come forward publicly about the abuses, said: “Prisoners were bound, blinded, gagged. Many had terrible bruises and burns. One room contained hoses, broken lamps (electric shock) and chemicals.”

When Lieutenant-Colonel Dan Hendrickson, their commander, radioed to his superiors, he was ordered to return the detainees to Iraqi custody.

The Iraqi Government had no comment on the report last night.

Torture in Iraq still routine, report says...Detainees beaten, shocked by Iraqi jailers, rights group finds

By Doug Struck Updated: 12:34 a.m. ET Jan. 25, 2005

BAGHDAD - Twenty months after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled and its torture chambers unlocked, Iraqis are again being routinely beaten, hung by their wrists and shocked with electrical wires, according to a report by a human rights organization.

Iraqi police, jailers and intelligence agents, many of them holding the same jobs they had under Hussein, are "committing systematic torture and other abuses" of detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released Tuesday.

Legal safeguards are being ignored, political opponents are targeted for arrest, and the government of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi "appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights," the report concludes.

A spokesman for Allawi declined to comment Monday and said "I will put this report on the prime minister's desk tomorrow to see if he has any reaction."

Officials defend 'security' measures
Ibrahim Jafari, an interim vice president, said in an interview Monday that security forces needed to be tougher to combat the campaign of violence by opponents of the election.

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"I think the security people are not arresting enough and are releasing them too quickly," Jafari said. "And many of the security people are cooperating with the criminals. I think we have to put security as our priority."

The Human Rights Watch report acknowledged that Iraq was "in the throes of a significant insurgency" in which 1,300 police officers and thousands of civilians were killed in the last four months of 2004. But it argued that "no government, not Saddam Hussein's, not the occupying powers and not the Iraqi Interim Government, can justify ill-treatment of persons in custody in the name of security."

The report was based on interviews with 90 current and former detainees in Iraq conducted between July and October last year, many of them interviewed when they were brought to court for initial proceedings. Of those, 72 said they were "tortured or ill-treated," the report says. It recounts numerous individual cases of torture, and says the victims often had fresh scars or bruises.

'Worse than Saddam's regime'
"I was beaten with cables and suspended by my hands tied behind my back," Dhia Fawzi Shaid, 30, a resident of Baghdad, told the human rights investigators, according to the report. "I saw young men there lying on the floor while police [stepped] on their heads with boots. It was worse than Saddam's regime."

Another, identified in the report as Ali Rashid Abbadi, 21, said he was arrested by police after the bombing of a liquor store on July 11. "The police came and started hitting us," he told Human Rights Watch. "They shouted at us to confess. . . . We were blindfolded and our hands were tied behind our backs. They poured cold water over me and applied electric shocks to my genitals."

Abbadi was later released by a judge for lack of evidence, the report says.

The report deals with the conduct of Iraqi authorities but not that of U.S. military forces at three U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. The three sites currently hold about 9,000 prisoners.

The Washington Post contacted several people whose cases were included in the report. They declined to speak to a reporter, saying they feared retaliation by police.

"The majority of detainees . . . stated that torture and ill-treatment during the initial period was commonplace" in jails run by the Interior Ministry, the report says. The abuses included "routine beatings . . . using cables, [rubber] hosepipes and metal rods . . . kicking, slapping and punching, prolonged suspension from the wrists," as well as electric shocks to the genitals and long periods spent blindfolded and handcuffed.

'Continuity of personnel and of mindset'
Hania Mufti, the Baghdad director of Human Rights Watch and chief author of the report, said she did not find examples of abuses that were on a par with the worst atrocities committed under Hussein's rule, such as mock executions, disfigurement with acid or sexually assaults on family members in front of prisoners. But in many other respects, she said, treatment of those swept up by police had changed little.

"Many of the same people who worked in Saddam's time are still doing those jobs today. So there is a continuity of personnel and of mindset," she said in an interview. "I think the Iraqi people themselves thought there was going to be a different system. Every day, they are finding it is not so different."

The report also says authorities made a mockery of legal safeguards. People said they were arrested without warrants and held without charges for days, weeks or months. Police officials ignored summonses from judges, and judges who became too demanding of authorities were removed from their jobs.

"The message has not gone out from the government that torture will not be tolerated," Mufti said. And foreign advisers hired to assist the Iraqi police have failed to object, she said.

Intervention by U.S. troops thwarted
The report relates "the only known case in which U.S. forces intervened to stop detainee abuse." It said scouts from an Oregon Army National Guard unit saw Iraqi guards at an Interior Ministry compound abusing detainees on June 29. A soldier took pictures through his rifle scope of detainees who were blindfolded and bound.

According to an account related in the report by Capt. Jarrell Southall of the National Guard, his soldiers entered the compound and found bound prisoners "writhing in pain" and complaining of lack of water. They gave water to the men, moved them out of the sun and then disarmed the Iraqi police. But when the Oregon soldiers radioed up their chain of command for instructions, they were ordered to "return the prisoners to the Iraqi authorities and leave the detention yard."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

HRW report on Iraqi torture: what the MSM isn't telling you

HRW report on Iraqi torture: what the MSM isn't telling you
Tue Jan 25th, 2005 at 08:35:11 PST

First, the Reuters report via Yahoo:

Iraqi authorities routinely torture prisoners, a leading human rights group said on Tuesday, citing examples of abuse which will sound all too familiar to those who suffered under Saddam Hussein. Prisoners have been beaten with cables and hose pipes, and suffered electric shocks to their earlobes and genitals, the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch said. Some have been starved of food and water and crammed into standing-room only cells.

As many people have said, remind me exactly why the U.S. invaded Iraq again? Except for the sole benefit of having Saddam Hussein, the individual, and his two sons removed from power, it seems little has changed. Iraq of course still has the same number of WMDs today as it did in 2003.

Saddam Hussein was a terrible man but it took a whole cadre of people to execute his orders, people who have been returned to power, including in the police and security departments. So now HRW is reporting that Saddam-like behavior has continued... who could've foreseen it?

And of course let's not forget the interim "president" of Iraq, Iyad Allawi, is a former Saddam cadre who seems to be running the place just like Saddam did using a combination of brutal violence and awarding favors to loyal sheikhs. Great...

But back to the HRW report, it's even worse than the Reuters article suggests. Here is the link to the entire thing but I want to focus on the section dealing with the "Major Crime" division. As many of you know, I spent many years working for an American "Major Crime" division but I can promise you we never acted like this:

At least twenty detainees seen by Human Rights Watch in the Major Crimes Room were blindfolded, and remained so until police led them before the investigative judge's door, and removed the blindfolds. Police officials assigned to the court told Human Rights Watch that this was to prevent suspected members of criminal gangs from identifying the officers responsible for their arrest and to protect them from retaliatory attacks in the future. In two such cases, the detainees were allowed to remove the blindfolds prior to being interviewed by Human Rights Watch, provided they remained facing the wall. They said that the police had blindfolded them continuously since their arrest several days earlier.

The majority of the detainees to whom Human Rights Watch spoke said that torture and ill-treatment under interrogation was routine. Some also said that the police also used violence against them at the time of arrest. The accounts of their treatment at the hands of the police were consistent to a high degree. Typically, detainees reported being blindfolded with their hands tied behind their back while undergoing interrogation. They said their interrogators or guards kicked, slapped and punched them, and beat them all over the body using hosepipes, wooden sticks, iron rods, and cables. Some of them bore visible traces of external trauma to the head, neck, arms, legs, and back when examined by Human Rights Watch. These traces appeared consistent with their accounts of having been repeatedly beaten. Several bore fresh bruises and lacerations, while others had scarring that appeared recent. In some cases, detainees also reported that their interrogators had subjected them to electric shocks, most commonly by having electric wires attached to their ears or genitals.

One detainee who was tried on an abduction charge and acquitted showed Human Rights Watch his dislocated shoulder, consistent with his account of interrogators suspending him for prolonged periods from a door handle by his hands, which they tied together behind his back.102 Another detainee, one of five people brought to court on a murder charge, appeared unable to walk unassisted. Two of his co-defendants brought him to the door of the holding cell at the Central Criminal Court, where Human Rights Watch spoke to him. He said he had sustained a strong blow to the head while being held at al-Bayya' police station following his arrest on August 13, 2003, affecting his central nervous system. He had lost partial use of his legs, and his speech was partially impaired. He said detaining officials took him to the Neurosurgical Center Hospital in the Bab al-Shaikh district of Baghdad on one occasion. He also showed Human Rights Watch a broken front tooth, which he said had resulted from a punch in the face.

The majority of detainees held in the custody of the Criminal Intelligence Directorate and the Major Crimes Directorate spoke of dire conditions of detention when interviewed by Human Rights Watch. In particular, they complained of severe overcrowding with no room to lie down to sleep at night. Some detainees said they took turns sleeping, while others said they sometimes slept while standing, as there was standing room only in the cell. Not surprisingly, under such conditions, hygiene was extremely poor - as attested by the physical appearance of most detainees Human Rights Watch saw in court. Such detainees complained of lack of washing and toilet facilities, a constant and overpowering stench of urine in the cells, and lack of basic medical care, including for a range of skin afflictions such as lice. Another complaint was lack of food or water. Most detainees reported that police officials in charge of these detention facilities rarely provided food, which detainees had to buy themselves if they happened to be carrying cash when arrested and if police did not take this money from them upon searching them.

So we've got overcrowding, clear and consistent reports of torture and the fact that prisoners are blindfolded or otherwise prevented from seeing the identity of the officers who arrested them.

On top of that, the Major Crimes division isn't even doing a good job of actually arresting real criminals:

Starting in late June 2004 the Iraqi Interim Government carried out several large-scale and high-profile raids on districts of Baghdad said to be strongholds of a number of organized criminal gangs. This report highlights two such raids conducted in late June and early July 2004 by Ministry of Interior personnel, with backup provided by Multinational Force personnel. Immediately after the raids, Ministry of Interior officials publicly claimed that they had broken up a number of criminal gangs as a result, and that they had carried out the arrests on the basis of good intelligence and weeks of surveillance of the targeted suspects. They invited selected international, local, and Arab journalists to photograph the detainees and observe them being interrogated, portraying the raid as a successful police operation. Local newspapers amply covered the raids in the ensuing days, creating the impression that the Iraqi authorities were making significant inroads in their fight against organized crime. In both examples detailed below, the police released the majority of the suspects within a day or two after the raids, though that received little press attention. Human Rights Watch followed the remaining cases through the court system, and found that in many of those, investigative judges ordered the suspects released because of insufficient evidence once they were brought before them. The police appear to have arrested a large number of them randomly during the operations, either because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or on the basis of unverified tip-offs from locals. By the time of the release of these detainees, the police had held them for weeks or months without bringing them to court, and in some cases certainly tortured or otherwise ill-treated them.

While Americans and other outsiders are clearly focused on the insurgents/resistance fighters/dead-enders/terrorists (whatever the name is), the average Iraqi is probably more affected by regular "street crime" including kidnappings and robberies. Yet the above paragraph shows that not only are the Iraqi police using torture, they're not even making valid arrests. They are failing the first job of all law enforcement divisions which is to provide public order. They're just rounding up people essentially for the "PR value" of having people in handcuffs on the news and then letting them go. The HRW report lists other incidents of a similar nature as well.

But yet it gets even worse. As mentioned in the above excerpt, these raids and other actions by the Iraqi police are backed up by "coalition" or "99.4% American" forces as I like to call them.

So are the "coalition" troops unaware of what the Iraqi police force are doing?

By mid-September 2004, the Multinational Force deployed 465 international police advisers, most from the United States, in thirty-seven locations across Iraq, with their numbers set to rise to 500 in the near future. With regard to their role in the monitoring of possible abuse of detainees by police officers, Brigadier General Mackay told Human Rights Watch:

It is their job to enter police stations and advise and check on detainees. They have discovered instances in police stations where detainees were clearly beaten up. In such situations, they prepare a report, with photographs where possible, and present it to the police chief to determine why this is so. I have not personally kept records of where this has happened. These cases emerge depending on the reaction of the international police advisers where they feel strongly about it. No one underestimates the difficulties we are facing, and the situation is exacerbated by a brutal insurgency campaign, which has to be beaten in order to bring stability to the country.

General Mackay used some extremely poor judgment in his choice of words. Nonetheless you can see that he establishes that the "coalition" forces are mandated to supervise the Iraqis and make sure they do not mistreat prisoners, although he has no records of where they've ever done it.

But wait, it gets even worse:

Human Rights Watch believes that the system currently in place for the reporting of police abuses remains woefully inadequate and is given low priority, judging by the apparent lack of follow-up and even knowledge of such abuses. Among the locations where international police advisers are deployed is the Major Crimes Directorate facility in al-`Amiriyya, where many of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment of detainees received by Human Rights Watch emanated. Brigadier General Mackay told Human Rights Watch that none of the international police advisers "had alerted me to any prisoner abuse" there. Yet one of investigative judges at the Central Criminal Court, who visited the al-`Amiriyya facility on a number of occasions, said he had fully apprised the chief police adviser there of the detainee abuse taking place, but that the adviser apparently took no action. With regard to torture allegations emanating from the Criminal Intelligence Directorate, Brigadier General Mackay said that to his knowledge, there were no advisers placed within the intelligence agencies. Human Rights Watch also raised with him the issue of general conditions of detention in such facilities, giving as one of several examples the failure to provide food to the detainees, who were obliged to buy their own. "I won't deny that this is occurring. Until we get proper security and stability to the country, we cannot tackle that issue," he responded.

Two Iraqi police officials attached to the Major Crimes Directorate, to whom Human Rights Watch spoke on a confidential basis in August and September 2004, freely admitted that Iraqi police used torture to extract information from detainees under interrogation. One said that until such time as adequate means for "normal criminal investigation" became available, including having a sufficient number of cells to hold suspects in the same case separately so that they did not concoct a story together, torture will continue to be used as the only sure means to obtain the necessary information from detainees. He commented that the presence of international police advisers had not changed anything: "We were using these interrogation methods long before the Americans came, and we will continue to use them long after the Americans are gone."

This whole thing is sick. It's sick that many of the same Iraqi thugs and henchman that Saddam Hussein used were re-hired and are back in their old jobs where it's business as usual. It's sick that all of this was done with the tacit approval of both American and Iraqi commanders.

It's even sicker that the people supposed to be watching to prevent this kind of thing, the "coalition" or "99.4% American" forces, aren't even doing that job either. And then General McKay, when confronted with this information, says essentially "oh well, we've got other fish to fry".

McKay is describing something not even Joseph Heller, god bless his soul, could ever imagine: the "coalition" is focused on providing "proper security and stability" to a country at a time when the same thugs that terrorized the country are in power, the police are mistreating and further alienating the people, the jails are overcrowded hellholes, torture is used - and all of this is going on and the Iraqi police can't even catch real criminals! It might occur to General McKay and his superiors in Washington one day that the innocent people being herded through these urine-soaked jails and being tortured might be returning to the streets to add to that insecurity and instability.

Saddam Hussein's goons used torture but they also provided public order. It sounds like I'm defending Saddam here but I'm not. As horrific and atrocious as his methods were, Iraq was not a country teeming with "street crime" such as kidnapping, robberies, prostitution, carjackings and drug trafficking. Under Allawi/Coalition, they're employing the same sadistic methods as Saddam Hussein without the corresponding "benefit" of providing public order.

Another horrific excerpt:

When Human Rights Watch gave examples of the instances of torture and ill-treatment it had recorded with regard to detainees held at the Major Crimes Directorate facility in al-`Amiriyya, one adviser replied that international advisers at the detention facility "don't meet with the detainees, and therefore don't see any abuse." Detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch confirmed the absence of direct contact between them and advisers. When asked, none said they had had any such contact, which the organization believes raises questions about the effectiveness of the role of advisers aiming, according to their own statements, to bring law enforcement in Iraq up to standards that comply with international human rights protections.

As bad as the Abu Ghraib Graner/Englund/etc abuse was, this seems to be far worse because it is all going on under American supervision and is not just "a few bad apples". Let me say this again: the world considers that what Iraqi officials do is de facto being done by America too.

I remind you once again that this report is talking about Iraqi police abuse of "criminal" prisoners not insurgents/terrorists/resistance fighters.

A very tragic coda to the HRW report:

During the course of its research for this report, Human Rights Watch was hard pressed to find evidence suggesting that Iraqi officials had conducted serious investigations into the abuse of detainees by the police, taken adequate disciplinary action or criminal proceedings against those found guilty of such abuse, or appropriately conveyed that message to act as a deterrent for others.

There was only one positive note in the entire report for the conduct of the American troops, which was well-documented on the internet but given short shrift on the mainstream media. I am referring to the outstanding conduct of the Oregon Army National Guard's 2nd Battallion, 162nd Infantry regiment:

On June 29, the third day after the police carried out the arrests, U.S. soldiers from an Oregon Army National Guard unit on patrol in the area close to the Ministry of Interior's compound witnessed Iraqi police abusing the detainees and made a decision to intervene. It was the only known case in which U.S. forces intervened to stop detainee abuse following the official transfer of sovereignty from the CPA to the Iraqi Interim Government. One of the battalion's scouts took photographs of the scene through his rifle scope, showing at least two dozen detainees sitting on the ground, with their hands tied behind their back and blindfolded. Several of them were semi-clad, bearing what appeared to be "fresh welts and bruises" on their backs and legs. One was thought to be aged fourteen.

The following is an extract from a written account made available to Human Rights Watch by Captain Jarrell Southall, a U.S. soldier serving with the Oregon Army National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry Regiment, of what he witnessed on that day:

As we entered the compound basically un-challenged I could see apparent prisoners bound by nylon ropes and rags. The prisoners were mostly all sitting, some writhing in pain as we approached the questioning or holding area. This holding area was completely outdoors and there was a desk with an IP [Iraqi Police] sitting by the desk overlooking this holding area. The prisoners tried to explain that they have had very little water and no food for three days. Many of these prisoners had bruises and cuts and belt or hose marks all over ...

We passed out water bottles to them and staged the prisoners near the back wall of this compound to relieve them from direct sunlight. At the same time CPT [Captain] Seth Morgulas, an Armor Officer, who is assigned as a company commander of a MP [Military Police] company, arrived and commenced to disarm and segregate the Iraqi Policemen.

According to Captain Southall's account, his battalion commander, Lt. Colonel Hendrickson, then asked to speak to the person in charge. One Iraqi official told him "that there was no prisoner abuse and that everything was under control and they were trying to conduct about 150 investigations as soon as possible." Another Iraqi police official "made sure to place blame for any misdoings to those who worked inside this facility. Whereas, he was only in charge of the `outer security'!":

All the while soldiers were applying aid to those prisoners who seemed that they would expire and started distributing water to those in need and carting the non-ambulatory patients away by stretcher. I witnessed prisoners who were barely able to walk and many of those wore soiled clothes.

Upon searching the premises, U.S. soldiers found some seventy-eight other detainees in a room measuring about 20 x 20 sq. feet. Captain Southall said most were Sudanese, arrested "because they had no identification." According to his account:

When we entered the office space adjacent to the crowded room there were several men in civilian clothes sitting around a conference room table. There was a tightly bound and gagged prisoner crumpled at the foot of these men sitting around this conference table smoking cigarettes... This room was heavily air-conditioned, which was a stark contrast to the rooms that contained prisoners. The IPs told me that these prisoners were all dangerous criminals and most were thieves, users of marijuana, and other types of bad people. No IPs there admitted to beating or abusing the prisoners. However, the abuse and neglect was quite apparent. As we traveled from room to room prisoners were bound, blinded, and gagged. Many had terrible bruises and burns. One room contained hoses, broken lamps (electric shock), and chemicals of some variety.

Accounts by other U.S. soldiers who were present at the Ministry of Interior compound at the time have since been made public. They included that of Staff Sergeant Kevin Maries who, according to The Oregonian:

reported that one prisoner lying facedown on the ground was struck repeatedly on the back with a rubber hose. Later, Marines watched another extended beating of a prisoner and took pictures through his spotting scope. A uniformed Iraqi policeman and civilian delivered a beating that was "more vicious and prolonged than previously observed," Maries' statement said. At one point, the prisoner's bare feet were tied to a bar and elevated, and the guards beat his bare feet with a rubber hose.

According to press reports based on interviews with several of the U.S. soldiers on the scene, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, the battalion commander, then "radioed up the chain of command in the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, relaying what he had seen and asking for instructions ... It wasn't long before the order came: Stand Down. Return the prisoners to the Iraqi authorities and leave the detention yard."

Pictures of what those Oregonian soldiers saw that day can be found here but I warn you that some of them are quite disgusting and graphic. They include the picture of a young boy (minus a shirt) who is being held prisoner with adults in those squalid conditions.

I am reminded once again of my article Why I Write in which I contrasted how the State Department and Bush administration regularly label themselves as being in the "forefront of the defense and promotion of human rights" around the world. Clearly this is not so and the HRW report issued today further confirms this.

I know in my heart that most Americans would never support these kinds of actions, all being done in our name. It's time for the people to speak up and make their leaders know that this is not the American way, this is not what our values are about and that we will not stand for it for even one more day.

This is cross-posted from my blog, where you are humbly invited to visit

Pax

Analysis: Iraqi insurgency growing larger, more effective

By Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. Landay Knight Ridder Newspapers Posted on Fri, Jan. 21, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick.

A Knight Ridder analysis of U.S. government statistics shows that through all the major turning points that raised hopes of peace in Iraq, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency, led mainly by Sunni Muslims, has become deadlier and more effective.

The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes - such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength - the United States won't win the war. It's axiomatic among military thinkers that insurgencies are especially hard to defeat because the insurgents' goal isn't to win in a conventional sense but merely to survive until the will of the occupying power is sapped. Recent polls already suggest an erosion of support among Americans for the war.

The unfavorable trends of the war are clear:
- U.S. military fatalities from hostile acts have risen from an average of about 17 per month just after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003, to an average of 82 per month.

- The average number of U.S. soldiers wounded by hostile acts per month has spiraled from 142 to 808 during the same period. Iraqi civilians have suffered even more deaths and injuries, although reliable statistics aren't available.

- Attacks on the U.S.-led coalition since November 2003, when statistics were first available, have risen from 735 a month to 2,400 in October. Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, the multinational forces' deputy operations director, told Knight Ridder on Friday that attacks were currently running at 75 a day, about 2,300 a month, well below a spike in November during the assault on Fallujah, but nearly as high as October's total.

- The average number of mass-casualty bombings has grown from zero in the first four months of the American occupation to an average of 13 per month.

- Electricity production has been below pre-war levels since October, largely because of sabotage by insurgents, with just 6.7 hours of power daily in Baghdad in early January, according to the State Department.

- Iraq is pumping about 500,000 barrels a day fewer than its pre-war peak of 2.5 million barrels per day as a result of attacks, according to the State Department.

"All the trend lines we can identify are all in the wrong direction," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy research organization. "We are not winning, and the security trend lines could almost lead you to believe that we are losing."

The combat numbers are based mainly on Defense Department releases compiled by O'Hanlon in an Iraq Index. Since the numbers can fluctuate significantly from month to month, Knight Ridder examined the statistics for fatalities, wounded and mass-casualty bombings using a technique mathematicians call a moving average - averaging the number of attacks in one month with the number of attacks in the two months immediately preceding it in order to better reveal the underlying trend.

Lessel said that since the U.S. assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah in November, "we have been making a lot of progress" against the insurgency.

He said the number of attacks, bombings and kidnappings is down from November, experienced insurgent leaders are being arrested or killed, U.S. and Iraqi forces remain on the offensive and more Iraqis have been providing intelligence on insurgents.

Other indications that "things are turning around" include surveys that show 80 percent of Iraqis wanting to vote in the Jan. 30 elections and more than 90 percent opposing violence as a solution to the crisis. In addition, the recruitment and training of Iraqi security forces are being stepped up, Lessel said.

"I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. We still have an insurgency that has a lot of capabilities," he said. "When you ask is the insurgency growing, you have to ask is it growing in terms of popular support, and I don't see that happening."
There are some additional bright spots.

In the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad and the southern town of Najaf, the scene of intense fighting last year with Shiite Muslim rebels, millions of dollars are pouring into reconstruction efforts.

Both places are now relatively peaceful and are counted as victories, with the danger of a spreading insurgency backed by Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority largely thwarted.

Some 14 million Iraqis, mostly Shiite, are registered to vote in the Jan. 30 elections for an interim 275-seat National Assembly. They'll choose among 111 slates comprising 7,785 candidates.

Roughly 1,500 U.S.-funded reconstruction projects are employing more than 100,000 Iraqis, and the insurgents' campaign of attacks and threats has failed to deter sign-ups for Iraq's new security forces.

These developments, however, have had little impact on the broader trends that have moved against the United States through all the spikes and lulls in violence.

Most worrisome, the insurgency is getting larger.

At the close of 2003, U.S. commanders put the number of insurgents at 5,000. Earlier this month, Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, the director of the Iraqi intelligence service, said there are 200,000 insurgents, including at least 40,000 hard-core fighters. The rest, he said, are part-time fighters and supporters who provide food, shelter, funds and intelligence.
"Many Iraqis respect these gunmen because they are fighting the invaders," said Nabil Mohammed, a Baghdad University political science professor.

The insurgents "are getting smarter all the time. We've seen a lot of changes in their tactics that say, one, they're getting help from outside, and two, they're learning," said Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, 35, of Houston, a 16-year Army veteran, after spending an hour recently greeting Iraqis on a foot patrol through a Baghdad neighborhood.

The resistance has grown despite suffering huge casualties to overwhelming U.S. firepower. Exact statistics aren't available.

Insurgent attacks have shifted from small groups of men shooting at tanks with AK-47s to powerful car bombs and roadside explosives, and well-planned assaults, kidnappings and assassinations.

American soldiers have subdued Sunni hotbeds such as Fallujah and Samarra. Yet these military victories have failed to achieve the broader goal of weakening the resistance.

Guerrilla fighters leave behind a rear guard force to fight while moving the bulk of their fighters and leadership elsewhere. During and after the Fallujah battle in November, for example, Mosul and several Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad became more violent.

Some Iraqis say these aggressive U.S. military moves are counterproductive because mass destruction and the killing of Iraqis create more recruits for the insurgency.

"The insurgency will grow larger," said Ghazi Bada al Faisal, an employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and a Fallujah resident. "The child whose brother and father were killed in the fighting will now seek revenge."

Some defense analysts are calling for a new strategy and more troops.

"We can only control the ground we stand on. We leave, and it falls apart," said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst at the Washington Center for Near East Policy.

White proposes sending 20,000 more troops.

But the Bush administration hopes to replace U.S. troops with well-trained Iraqis.

In late 2003, Iraqi recruits, many of them young and looking for a paycheck, were pushed through a week or so of training, given guns and uniforms and then declared graduated.

During the first major fight in Fallujah in April, many of them fled. In the second Fallujah confrontation, in November, they fought behind the main lines of battle and were infamous for spraying gunfire erratically and without warning, but fewer left their posts.

Even so, an entire national guard battalion in Mosul went absent without leave in November. Much of the Mosul police force simply collapsed under fire.

Bush administration officials say the program to train and equip new Iraqi security forces of more than 272,000 members is making progress.

Yet several independent experts said it would take at least two years before there are any meaningful numbers of Iraqi forces with counterinsurgency skills and as many as five years before the U.S. goal is attained.

"I think you can achieve success, but it will take a while and, unfortunately, there will be a lot more blood," said Peter Khalil, who was a senior security adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq.

Of course, success isn't assured and the United States will be forced to deal with an elected Iraqi government that may set limits on what U.S. troops can do - and could even ask them to leave.

U.S. military officials had repeatedly, and accurately, predicted more violence in the approach to the elections, which is likely to bring to power a Shiite-dominated government after nearly a century of Sunni rule in Iraq.

Yet hopes that the election might lead to less violence have recently given way to more dire warnings, with expectations that Sunni insurgents who feel disenfranchised in the new Iraq will turn their guns on the elected government.

"I think that we will enter a different but still dangerous period in the post-election time frame," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said on Jan. 15.

Bush has vowed to stay the course.

The Pentagon dispatched retired U.S. Army Gen. Gary Luck this month to examine the training of Iraqi forces and to put a fresh eye on the anti-insurgent campaign.

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For more information see: www.brookings.edu/iraqindex

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(Lasseter reported from Baghdad and Mosul, Landay from Washington. Knight Ridder correspondent Ken Dilanian and a special correspondent from Fallujah who cannot be named for security reasons contributed to this report.)

Few but Organized, Iraq Veterans Turn War Critics

New York Times By NEELA BANERJEE Published: January 23, 2005

Sean Huze enlisted in the Marine Corps right after the Sept. 11 attacks and was, in his own words, "red, white and blue all the way" when he deployed to Iraq 16 months later. Unquestioning in his support of the invasion, he grew irritated when his father, a former National Guardsman, expressed doubts about the war.

Today, all that has changed. Haunted by the civilian casualties he witnessed, Corporal Huze has become one of a small but increasing number of Iraq veterans who have formed or joined groups to oppose the war or to criticize the way it is being fought.

The two most visible organizations - Operation Truth, of which Corporal Huze is a member, and Iraq Veterans Against the War - were founded only last summer but are growing in membership and sophistication. The Internet has helped them spread their word and galvanize like-minded people in ways unimaginable to activist veterans of previous generations, who are also lending help.

"There's strength in numbers," Corporal Huze said. "By ourselves, we're lone voices, a whisper in a swarm of propaganda out there. Combined, we can become a roar and have an impact on the issues that we care about."

Those who turn to the groups are generally united in their disillusionment, though their responses to the war vary: Iraq Veterans seeks a quick withdrawal from Iraq; Operation Truth focuses on the day-to-day issues affecting troops and veterans.

Iraq Veterans Against the War, which started in July with 8 people, now has more than 150 members, including some still serving in Iraq, said Michael Hoffman, a former lance corporal in the Marines and a co-founder of the group.

Operation Truth, based in New York, began with 5 members and now has 300, with an e-mail list of more than 25,000 people. Its Web site is a compendium of soldiers and veterans' stories, a media digest on the war, and a rallying point on issues affecting troops.

Iraq veterans are keenly aware of the need to argue for their interests, given the struggles of veterans of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf war. The older veterans have offered a reservoir of knowledge and compassion to help Iraq veterans avoid the mistakes they made.

It took Vietnam Veterans of America almost 15 years to have an effect on government policy, said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group for gulf war veterans. Mr. Robinson said his group did not come into its own for about eight years, despite help from Vietnam Veterans of America.

Mr. Robinson is working closely with Operation Truth, which he said had already surpassed his operation in raising money.
For Corporal Huze, the transformation began when he returned home in fall 2003. Unable to forget the carnage he had seen in Iraq, he began to grapple with the justification for the war, he said.

"By sometime in December 2003, I came to the conclusion that W.M.D.'s weren't there and that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and now I'm left with all that I'd experienced in Iraq and nothing to balance it," Corporal Huze said, emphasizing that he was speaking as a citizen, not as a marine. "When I came to that conclusion, I felt this sense of betrayal. I was full of rage and depression."

That rage has since fueled Corporal Huze, a native of Baton Rouge, La., who is awaiting a medical discharge for a head injury. With the consent of his commanding officers at Camp Lejeune, he speaks regularly to the media and others as a representative for Operation Truth.

"Who I was before the war, who I was in Iraq and who I am now are three very different men," Corporal Huze said. "I don't think I can ever have the blind trust in the government like I had before. I think that my being over in Iraq as an active participant, I'm a bit more responsible than others for things there. And I think by speaking out now, it's my amends." He added, "I don't know if it will ever balance."

Operation Truth does not address the necessity of the war. David Chasteen of suburban Washington, a former Army captain in the Third Infantry Division and a member of the group's board, said Operation Truth hoped to stake out a nonpartisan position on aspects of the war that could realistically be changed, as opposed to tackling the administration's Middle East policy.

"Our attitude was 'Want to do something? Here's what you can do: get body armor to the guys on the ground, get interpreters to people on the ground, get people who know how to plan this stuff on the ground,' " said Mr. Chasteen, who said his experience in Iraq as an expert on unconventional weapons left him disillusioned about the war. "Maybe if we tell people what we saw, maybe some of these things can get fixed. I definitely think we added momentum to some issues."

Operation Truth points out that when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld took questions from soldiers in Kuwait last month about equipment shortages, the Web site's readers sent 3,400 e-mail messages in 24 hours to members of Congress asking for hearings into the issue, which are to be held in the next few months.

Organizing those who have recently returned from Iraq is an uphill battle, older veterans and Iraq veterans agreed. The first priority for many is resuming their lives. And unlike most Vietnam veterans, many Iraq veterans have remained in the military after returning, limiting their ability to participate in groups critical of the government.

Despite their different focuses, Operation Truth and Iraq Veterans Against the War overlap on some issues, most notably with lobbying the government to address what is expected by many veterans of Iraq and previous wars to be a high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among those who served in Iraq.

Some who served in Vietnam, like Tim Origer of the Santa Fe, N.M., chapter of Veterans for Peace, have said Iraq veterans face a more intense version of the stresses they experienced: constant threats inherent to guerrilla war, inability to distinguish friend from foe, and profound despair that often accompanies taking a life, especially a civilian's.

In March 2003, reports of suicide-bombing attacks on American soldiers had reached Sgt. Rob Sarra's Marine Corps unit in an Iraqi town called al-Shatra. A short time later, soldiers saw an older woman walking toward them with a small bundle. The marines, fearing that she might be a bomber, called to her to stop, but she kept walking.

"I was looking at her, and I thought 'I have to stop this woman,' " Mr. Sarra said. "So I fired on her, and then the other marines fired on her."

"When we got to her, we saw that she was pulling out a white flag," he said. "She had tea and bread in her bag. I kept thinking, 'Was she a grandmother? Was she a mother?' "

Mr. Sarra, who has left the Marines after nine years, struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq and at home in Chicago before seeking counseling and help from other veterans. Now he is one of the leaders of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

"When someone is wounded or goes through P.T.S.D., it brings what they went through to the forefront," Mr. Sarra said. "I knew when I joined the Marines that if I was going to be there for 20 years, I'd face combat. But the question is, why did we go?"

A grenade tossed into Robert Acosta's Humvee in Baghdad in July 2003 left him without his right hand and shattered his legs. Mr. Acosta, 21, spent months in hospitals surrounded by other young amputees, watching news about government commissions concluding that Iraq had no unconventional weapons.

He began reading, watching the news and talking to people, especially Vietnam veterans like Mr. Origer in Santa Fe. Last summer, his girlfriend heard Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Operation Truth, speak on the radio. Mr. Acosta contacted him. By the fall, Mr. Acosta had become the organization's public face, appearing in a provocative television advertisement.

Mr. Acosta, who is attending community college in Southern California, said he hoped to bring friends from his old unit in the First Armored Division into Operation Truth as they leave the Army, because they might start to experience some of the problems he faced. For instance, he said, he once used duct tape to hold his prosthesis together because he could not get it repaired quickly at the local Veterans Affairs hospital. And people often asked about his injury.

"People would just come up to me and say, 'How'd you lose your arm?' " Mr. Acosta said. "And I'd say, 'In the war.' And they would be like, 'What war?' "

Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain New Espionage Branch Delving Into CIA Territory

By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 23, 2005

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.

The defense secretary has a large responsibility to collect foreign intelligence, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin said. (Spec. Shawn Morris -- Fort Dix Public Affairs Office)

Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.

The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

Perhaps the most significant shift is the Defense Department's bid to conduct surreptitious missions, in friendly and unfriendly states, when conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect -- activities that have traditionally been the province of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Senior Rumsfeld advisers said those missions are central to what they called the department's predominant role in combating terrorist threats.

The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human intelligence. But the creation of the espionage branch, the scope of its clandestine operations and the breadth of Rumsfeld's asserted legal authority have not been detailed publicly before. Two longtime members of the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they knew no details before being interviewed for this article.

Pentagon officials said they established the Strategic Support Branch using "reprogrammed" funds, without explicit congressional authority or appropriation. Defense intelligence missions, they said, are subject to less stringent congressional oversight than comparable operations by the CIA. Rumsfeld's dissatisfaction with the CIA's operations directorate, and his determination to build what amounts in some respects to a rival service, follows struggles with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet over intelligence collection priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pentagon officials said the CIA naturally has interests that differ from those of military commanders, but they also criticized its operations directorate as understaffed, slow-moving and risk-averse. A recurring phrase in internal Pentagon documents is the requirement for a human intelligence branch "directly responsive to tasking from SecDef," or Rumsfeld.

The new unit's performance in the field -- and its latest commander, reserve Army Col. George Waldroup -- are controversial among those involved in the closely held program. Pentagon officials acknowledged that Waldroup and many of those brought quickly into his service lack the experience and training typical of intelligence officers and special operators. In his civilian career as a federal manager, according to a Justice Department inspector general's report, Waldroup was at the center of a 1996 probe into alleged deception of Congress concerning staffing problems at Miami International Airport. Navy Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, expressed "utmost confidence in Colonel Waldroup's capabilities" and said in an interview that Waldroup's unit has scored "a whole series of successes" that he could not reveal in public. He acknowledged the risks, however, of trying to expand human intelligence too fast: "It's not something you quickly constitute as a capability. It's going to take years to do."

Rumsfeld's ambitious plans rely principally on the Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and on its clandestine component, the Joint Special Operations Command. Rumsfeld has designated SOCOM's leader, Army Gen. Bryan D. Brown, as the military commander in chief in the war on terrorism. He has also given Brown's subordinates new authority to pay foreign agents. The Strategic Support Branch is intended to add missing capabilities -- such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for direct access to national intelligence databases -- to the military's much larger special operations squadrons. Some Pentagon officials refer to the combined units as the "secret army of Northern Virginia."

Known as "special mission units," Brown's elite forces are not acknowledged publicly. They include two squadrons of an Army unit popularly known as Delta Force, another Army squadron -- formerly code-named Gray Fox -- that specializes in close-in electronic surveillance, an Air Force human intelligence unit and the Navy unit popularly known as SEAL Team Six.

The Defense Department is planning for further growth. Among the proposals circulating are the establishment of a Pentagon-controlled espionage school, largely duplicating the CIA's Field Tradecraft Course at Camp Perry, Va., and of intelligence operations commands for every region overseas.

Rumsfeld's efforts, launched in October 2001, address two widely shared goals. One is to give combat forces, such as those fighting the insurgency in Iraq, more and better information about their immediate enemy. The other is to find new tools to penetrate and destroy the shadowy organizations, such as al Qaeda, that pose global threats to U.S. interests in conflicts with little resemblance to conventional war.

In pursuit of those aims, Rumsfeld is laying claim to greater independence of action as Congress seeks to subordinate the 15 U.S. intelligence departments and agencies -- most under Rumsfeld's control -- to the newly created and still unfilled position of national intelligence director. For months, Rumsfeld opposed the intelligence reorganization bill that created the position. He withdrew his objections late last year after House Republican leaders inserted language that he interprets as preserving much of the department's autonomy.

Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary for intelligence, acknowledged that Rumsfeld intends to direct some missions previously undertaken by the CIA. He added that it is wrong to make "an assumption that what the secretary is trying to say is, 'Get the CIA out of this business, and we'll take it.' I don't interpret it that way at all."

"The secretary actually has more responsibility to collect intelligence for the national foreign intelligence program . . . than does the CIA director," Boykin said. "That's why you hear all this information being published about the secretary having 80 percent of the [intelligence] budget. Well, yeah, but he has 80 percent of the responsibility for collection, as well."

CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher said the agency would grant no interviews for this article.

Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other things, foreign intelligence.

Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.

Under Title 50, all departments of the executive branch are obliged to keep Congress "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." The law exempts "traditional . . . military activities" and their "routine support." Advisers said Rumsfeld, after requesting a fresh legal review by the Pentagon's general counsel, interprets "traditional" and "routine" more expansively than his predecessors.

"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"

The enumeration by Myers of "emerging target countries" for clandestine intelligence work illustrates the breadth of the Pentagon's new concept. All those named, save Somalia, have allied themselves with the United States -- if unevenly -- against al Qaeda and its jihadist allies.

A high-ranking official with direct responsibility for the initiative, declining to speak on the record about espionage in friendly nations, said the Defense Department sometimes has to work undetected inside "a country that we're not at war with, if you will, a country that maybe has ungoverned spaces, or a country that is tacitly allowing some kind of threatening activity to go on."

Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas O'Connell, who oversees special operations policy, said Rumsfeld has discarded the "hide-bound way of thinking" and "risk-averse mentalities" of previous Pentagon officials under every president since Gerald R. Ford.

"Many of the restrictions imposed on the Defense Department were imposed by tradition, by legislation, and by interpretations of various leaders and legal advisors," O'Connell said in a written reply to follow-up questions. "The interpretations take on the force of law and may preclude activities that are legal. In my view, many of the authorities inherent to [the Defense Department] . . . were winnowed away over the years."

After reversing the restrictions, Boykin said, Rumsfeld's next question "was, 'Okay, do I have the capability?' And the answer was, 'No you don't have the capability. . . . And then it became a matter of, 'I want to build a capability to be able to do this.' "

Known by several names since its inception as Project Icon on April 25, 2002, the Strategic Support Branch is an arm of the DIA's nine-year-old Defense Human Intelligence Service, which until now has concentrated on managing military attachés assigned openly to U.S. embassies around the world.

Rumsfeld's initiatives are not connected to previously reported negotiations between the Defense Department and the CIA over control of paramilitary operations, such as the capture of individuals or the destruction of facilities.

...Four people with firsthand knowledge said defense personnel have already begun operating under "non-official cover" overseas, using false names and nationalities. Those missions, and others contemplated in the Pentagon, skirt the line between clandestine and covert operations. Under U.S. law, "clandestine" refers to actions that are meant to be undetected, and "covert" refers to those for which the U.S. government denies its responsibility. Covert action is subject to stricter legal requirements, including a written "finding" of necessity by the president and prompt notification of senior leaders of both parties in the House and Senate.

O'Connell, asked whether the Pentagon foresees greater involvement in covert action, said "that remains to be determined." He added: "A better answer yet might be, depends upon the situation. But no one I know of is raising their hand and saying at DOD, 'We want control of covert operations.' "

One scenario in which Pentagon operatives might play a role, O'Connell said, is this: "A hostile country close to our borders suddenly changes leadership. . . . We would want to make sure the successor is not hostile.