Army Seizes Massive Files On Iraq's Secret Prisoners

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, April 30, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 29 -- Backed by tanks, U.S. troops have seized millions of Iraqi intelligence files from a citizens group involved in a daunting search for those who disappeared into the secret prisons of fallen president Saddam Hussein.

U.S. Army officers said the operation was meant to protect the files from former government officials who might have an interest in destroying evidence. The records will be translated from Arabic and reviewed before eventually being returned to an interim Iraqi government once it is in place, U.S. officers said.

But watching U.S. troops remove what the citizens group said were the last of 4.2 million files gathered since Baghdad's fall on April 9 infuriated many officials of the Committee of Free Iraqi Prisoners and angered other Iraqis who gather each day in a small courtyard to read lists of prisoners' names. Shouts of anger and groans rose from the crowd, as some surged forward to see the files before they were removed.

The files taken today were largely looted from the homes of senior officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party, gathered up by local residents and delivered to U.S. military officials and Iraqi activists involved in helping to find the legions of missing. They are part of emerging archives kept by a government obsessed with internal vigilance and the careful record-keeping it entails.

U.S. forces are working to consolidate those files as much as possible, assembling them at local military commands for eventual translation and analysis by U.S. intelligence officials. Taken together, the files seized at the committee, and millions of others that have filtered out of Hussein's security agencies since the war began, could form a documentary foundation of crimes committed by the Baath Party over the last four decades and Iraq's best hope for a tangible accounting of the past.

Although they are to be granted limited access to the material, committee members who dreamed for years of seeing the archives said the United States was complicating their search for justice. "These are sacred to our people," said Adel Hadi Marhoun, the committee member responsible for the archives, as he watched them carried away. "We found them. We demand the right to keep them."

The dispute highlighted an increasingly uneasy relationship between occupied and occupier in the wake of a war that many Iraqis had celebrated for ending Hussein's three decades in power. U.S. intelligence interests and Iraqi hopes for a full accounting have clashed not only over the bountiful archives but also over access to former symbols of state terror.

The strains emerging over who owns Iraq's past are complicating an enormous recovery effort at a time when U.S. officials are trying to unite the country's disparate religious groups and ethnic populations behind an interim government. At stake is how Iraqis, or others, will be able to punish those responsible for years of state-sponsored abuse, and who will be allowed to bring those crimes to light.

Iraqis worry that, in seizing files and sealing off many sites used by Hussein's security apparatus, the United States is hindering their ability to prepare criminal cases against former Baath Party members for future trials inside Iraq. More immediately, many Iraqis want to know the identities of civilian informants whose names are contained in the musty files, a frightening if potentially cathartic process for the country.

But with much of the emerging evidence ending up in U.S. hands, many Iraqis fear that the United States intends instead to build an international war crimes case against Hussein and his allies.

A hectic scene played out today at the Committee of Free Iraqi Prisoners, operating out of an ostentatious home along the Tigris River that once belonged to a leader of Hussein's Republican Guard. U.S. soldiers hauled off the last stacks of files, most still in the battered metal drawers in which they have rested for decades, to an Iraqi intelligence compound now serving as a base for U.S. forces.

"The threat was real and I wanted everyone to know that the documents are now in the hands of American forces," said Lt. Col. J.R. Sanderson, commander of Task Force 269 of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, who called the records "coalition property." "Eventually, everything here [we] will turn back over to the Iraqi people."

As U.S. forces gathered on the outskirts of Baghdad during the final days of the war, neighborhood residents overran the by-then deserted headquarters of the 5th Directorate, part of a government security agency, in the middle-class neighborhood of Kadhimiya. Committee members said they freed hundreds of prisoners, some of them women with their hair shorn to the scalp.

U.S. forces have sealed off the compound since fighting their way into Kadhimiya, preventing Iraqis from pursuing the search for prisoners they insist are still there. The place has a strong hold on those who have lived in its shadow, and what Sanderson described as "urban legends" have hardened into fact.

An old woman who dropped bread into two ventilation pipes just outside the complex after her son disappeared told U.S. forces that she had heard groans coming from them for years. A fisherman informed U.S. officials that he saw a window beneath the Tigris with prisoners peering out. Mindful of public relations, Sanderson brought in engineers, plumbers and even a Navy SEAL diver to check out the tips. Nothing has turned up.

"We are sure we would find prisoners there underground," said Firas Hashim, a teacher with the Hawza, the centuries-old seminary in the city of Najaf that acts as the supreme religious authority for Shiite Muslims in Iraq. "We are from this neighborhood. We know the people who worked there."

In the days preceding Baghdad's fall, Iraqi officials removed files from many state security buildings, stashing them in private homes before fleeing. Files rich in intelligence and history began to be discovered soon after U.S. forces arrived, prompting Sanderson to send trucks to help empty "dozens and dozens of houses."

When he heard that files had also arrived at the Committee of Free Iraqi Prisoners, he visited the offices Saturday and told members that the files belonged to him. The removal began at night, but Sanderson said it was stepped up when he received fresh intelligence that an attack by former Baath Party members on the lightly guarded offices was imminent.

The transfer concluded today with an M1 Abrams tank standing guard in the swarming street. Of the files reviewed so far, Sanderson said 5 percent contain useful intelligence. Most, he said, appear to involve Hussein's efforts to spy on members of his own party.

Small black-and-white photographs appear with each opened file: a mustachioed university student in 1963 believed to be a communist, a suspicious army lieutenant in 1968. Children of prisoners will likely use the records to retrieve property lost as a result of their parents' disappearances.

Under a tentative agreement, 20 committee members will be allowed to work on the original files and make copies. Sanderson bought them a photocopier, although power has yet to be restored to the building, and he will pay them each $3 a day for organizing the material now sitting in a jumbled pile of drawers in several rooms.

But committee members, many of whom hope to discover news of their lost loved ones in the files, fear for their safety in the building.

Nineteen former Iraqi police officers were sworn in today as members of an embryonic local police force. They received a two-day crash course in the U.S. Bill of Rights, "Army values" and situational ethics. Much of their work will be to guard intersections or bridge crossings, freeing up U.S. forces for other security work. They will also have access to the files, frightening committee members who worry about their past allegiances.

"I had to be diplomatic and forceful with both sides on this," Sanderson said. "But my message to them was that you have to start trusting someone sometime."

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