Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 16, 2008 By David Johnston
BAGHDAD — A mob had gathered by the time the F.B.I. agents arrived at the house where an assassin’s bomb killed nine people last year, narrowly missing a deputy prime minister. Fearing their own lives might be at risk, the agents gave themselves no more than 30 minutes to collect evidence.
As agents worked inside the house, an Iraqi police commander outside ordered the arrest of a man on the fringe of the crowd, according to American agents who were at the scene. The man later confessed to complicity in the attack. The case, if it could be called that, was quickly closed.
But it was never really clear to American investigators whether the man was actually guilty, or whether the Iraqi police coerced his confession. As an attempt at Iraqi-American cooperation in law enforcement, the investigators said, the episode was clearly disappointing.
The attempted assassination of the deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, in March, is just one of many episodes American law enforcement agents recounted as they described their often frustrating efforts to bring the rule of law to Iraq. In other examples, a suspect arrested after a brazen, deadly armed robbery managed to escape, and officials implicated in the abuse of prisoners have gone unpunished. Investigators cannot easily visit crime scenes, and judges live in fear and hiding.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, in a visit this week to Iraq, claimed “significant progress” in strengthening law enforcement here. He said the United States would “continue to pursue ways to help the Iraqi people to achieve a stable and transparent government.”
At the heart of the effort is an Iraqi-American unit called the Major Crimes Task Force, meant as the nucleus of a professional investigative agency. It has investigated bombings, killings, torture cases and corruption, including the notorious Iraqi prison known as Site 4, where Shiite guards had savagely abused mostly Sunni detainees.
Many of the cases are politically volatile referrals from the Iraqi government, focusing on sectarian violence in a country whose criminal justice system has been riddled by dysfunction and corruption.
The group has opened a widening investigation into a smuggling ring trafficking in antiquities dug from Iraq’s archaeologically significant sites. In a case pointing toward complicity of Iraqi officials in the sale of hundreds of irreplaceable artifacts, one American police officer worked under cover, posing as a buyer.
Even as American investigators assert that the cases have built the Iraqis’ experience, professional skill and credibility, they acknowledge that many of the inquiries have yielded mixed results.
James H. Davis, who until recently was the F.B.I.’s legal attaché in Baghdad, said that American investigators were frustrated by the problems that they encountered. But he said the task force was gaining a reputation for integrity and could become a model for a different Iraqi approach in the future.
“I think there is a feeling within the Iraqi government, the State Department and our military that when something happens, the task force is a group you can turn to and know that the investigative work is going to be done properly and fairly, free of sectarian influences,” he said.
Thomas V. Fuentes, chief of international operations at the F.B.I., said the bureau had partnerships in other countries, but “Iraq is the only place we are doing it in war zone, where there is such extreme violence and the people who are doing it are taking such extreme risks to themselves and their families.”
“When policing takes the place of soldiering as the primary method of guaranteeing the rule of law, we’ll know we’re succeeding in Iraq,” Mr. Fuentes said.
So far, an Iraqi in uniform is not necessarily a comforting sight.
Last year, a group of uniformed Iraqi special operations officers stormed the offices of Iraqna, the country’s major cellphone company, in a robbery. In the course of it, the officers terrorized employees and shot dead a company guard.
The task force investigated. Agents noticed on a surveillance video an unusual scene reflected in the bulletproof glass inside the office. The tape was sent to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Va., where an enhanced version clearly showed a group of police officers dragging the guard outside, where he was shot.
A police commander who was the son of an influential army general was identified from the video. He was arrested and charged with the crime, but later escaped, almost certainly aided by inside help.
Iraqis on the task force are under constant threat. A brother of one Iraqi investigator has been killed. Another investigator has been wounded. Their cars have been burned. Still, most of them live outside the Green Zone, relying on their own resources for security. Some move from house to house to avoid being targets.
The unit is led by the F.B.I., and its investigators also include agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration, serving in Iraq on three-month rotations from their offices in cities like San Antonio, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Iraqi investigators on the team are hand-picked by top officials at their parent police agencies in the Interior Ministry. The American authorities subject the candidates to intensive interviews, including a final polygraph examination intended to weed out possible double agents.
Working inside the relative safety of the Green Zone, guarded by its own heavily armed security force, the team occupies squad rooms lighted with computer screens. On the walls are poster-size sheets of paper on which are scrawled, in English and Arabic, words familiar to the police the world over: who, what, why, where and when.
In its biggest cases the task force works with a single investigative judge, a court officer who in the Iraqi legal system functions as a prosecutor and a magistrate combined. The judge has signed dozens of arrest warrants, including some against powerful officials in the government.
In a country where three dozen judges have been killed in the last five years, American officials said the judge had been a courageous and valuable ally. But his life has been threatened. Along with his wife and children, he has moved to guarded living quarters.
“These cases are dangerous because 70 percent of them involve militias or powerful people in the government,” said the judge, who spoke only on the condition that his name be withheld. “We are all in some danger. I don’t think about it, but I don’t go out anymore.”
In Iraq, civil institutions of law have only a tenuous foothold.
In determining guilt or innocence, Iraqi judges have been accustomed to concentrating on whether a defendant has confessed — an emphasis that American officials said encouraged abusive interrogations. Mr. Davis, the former F.B.I. legal attaché in Baghdad, said the task force allowed only nonconfrontational interview techniques used in the United States.
Iraqi courts are only slowly accepting some of the staple techniques of American law enforcement, like forensic evidence. In one case, American officials said, a judge dismissed DNA evidence as unbelievable. In a bomb case, agents said their Iraqi counterparts marveled as they identified a possible suspect from a fingerprint taken from a shred of skin found at a crime scene.
American investigators may not venture outside the Green Zone unless they are accompanied by convoys of heavily armed escorts. Short of launching military-style operations, they have found it nearly impossible to get into neighborhoods where witnesses and suspects live.
The task force evolved from F.B.I. investigative and training efforts that began shortly after the American-led invasion almost five years ago. At first operating only in an advisory role, the agents on the task force now engage directly in investigative work, helping to teach their methods to Iraqi investigators.
But solving crimes has not always meant that defendants have been brought to justice in Iraqi courts.
The inquiry into the abuses at Site 4 are a case in point. It followed longstanding complaints by human rights groups and uncovered systematic and severe abuse — one photograph taken by the F.B.I. showed a ceiling hook from which detainees were hung and savagely beaten. Inmates were shoved out of the prison’s gates, apparently into the hands of death squads. Their bodies were recovered days later far from the detention center.
Task force investigators interviewed surviving detainees and the victims’ families, and succeeded in turning some guards into cooperating witnesses. Lower-level employees implicated superiors in what emerged as a grisly pattern of abuse.
The case appeared to break open in late 2006 when the Interior Ministry announced human rights charges against 57 officials, including senior prison officers.
“We limited this torturing and beating of prisoners,” said an Iraqi investigator who took part in the inquiry. “The situation is now these officers know somebody is watching them.”
But the aftermath of the inquiry has been disappointing. Only three people have been arrested, and one senior commander at the prison has received legal immunity from the Interior Ministry, placing him beyond the reach of Iraqi courts.
Human rights groups have said the failure to bring suspects to trial has reinforced a different message: that the Iraqi government still lacks the will to crack down on its own security forces.
February 16, 2008 By David Johnston
BAGHDAD — A mob had gathered by the time the F.B.I. agents arrived at the house where an assassin’s bomb killed nine people last year, narrowly missing a deputy prime minister. Fearing their own lives might be at risk, the agents gave themselves no more than 30 minutes to collect evidence.
As agents worked inside the house, an Iraqi police commander outside ordered the arrest of a man on the fringe of the crowd, according to American agents who were at the scene. The man later confessed to complicity in the attack. The case, if it could be called that, was quickly closed.
But it was never really clear to American investigators whether the man was actually guilty, or whether the Iraqi police coerced his confession. As an attempt at Iraqi-American cooperation in law enforcement, the investigators said, the episode was clearly disappointing.
The attempted assassination of the deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, in March, is just one of many episodes American law enforcement agents recounted as they described their often frustrating efforts to bring the rule of law to Iraq. In other examples, a suspect arrested after a brazen, deadly armed robbery managed to escape, and officials implicated in the abuse of prisoners have gone unpunished. Investigators cannot easily visit crime scenes, and judges live in fear and hiding.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, in a visit this week to Iraq, claimed “significant progress” in strengthening law enforcement here. He said the United States would “continue to pursue ways to help the Iraqi people to achieve a stable and transparent government.”
At the heart of the effort is an Iraqi-American unit called the Major Crimes Task Force, meant as the nucleus of a professional investigative agency. It has investigated bombings, killings, torture cases and corruption, including the notorious Iraqi prison known as Site 4, where Shiite guards had savagely abused mostly Sunni detainees.
Many of the cases are politically volatile referrals from the Iraqi government, focusing on sectarian violence in a country whose criminal justice system has been riddled by dysfunction and corruption.
The group has opened a widening investigation into a smuggling ring trafficking in antiquities dug from Iraq’s archaeologically significant sites. In a case pointing toward complicity of Iraqi officials in the sale of hundreds of irreplaceable artifacts, one American police officer worked under cover, posing as a buyer.
Even as American investigators assert that the cases have built the Iraqis’ experience, professional skill and credibility, they acknowledge that many of the inquiries have yielded mixed results.
James H. Davis, who until recently was the F.B.I.’s legal attaché in Baghdad, said that American investigators were frustrated by the problems that they encountered. But he said the task force was gaining a reputation for integrity and could become a model for a different Iraqi approach in the future.
“I think there is a feeling within the Iraqi government, the State Department and our military that when something happens, the task force is a group you can turn to and know that the investigative work is going to be done properly and fairly, free of sectarian influences,” he said.
Thomas V. Fuentes, chief of international operations at the F.B.I., said the bureau had partnerships in other countries, but “Iraq is the only place we are doing it in war zone, where there is such extreme violence and the people who are doing it are taking such extreme risks to themselves and their families.”
“When policing takes the place of soldiering as the primary method of guaranteeing the rule of law, we’ll know we’re succeeding in Iraq,” Mr. Fuentes said.
So far, an Iraqi in uniform is not necessarily a comforting sight.
Last year, a group of uniformed Iraqi special operations officers stormed the offices of Iraqna, the country’s major cellphone company, in a robbery. In the course of it, the officers terrorized employees and shot dead a company guard.
The task force investigated. Agents noticed on a surveillance video an unusual scene reflected in the bulletproof glass inside the office. The tape was sent to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Va., where an enhanced version clearly showed a group of police officers dragging the guard outside, where he was shot.
A police commander who was the son of an influential army general was identified from the video. He was arrested and charged with the crime, but later escaped, almost certainly aided by inside help.
Iraqis on the task force are under constant threat. A brother of one Iraqi investigator has been killed. Another investigator has been wounded. Their cars have been burned. Still, most of them live outside the Green Zone, relying on their own resources for security. Some move from house to house to avoid being targets.
The unit is led by the F.B.I., and its investigators also include agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration, serving in Iraq on three-month rotations from their offices in cities like San Antonio, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Iraqi investigators on the team are hand-picked by top officials at their parent police agencies in the Interior Ministry. The American authorities subject the candidates to intensive interviews, including a final polygraph examination intended to weed out possible double agents.
Working inside the relative safety of the Green Zone, guarded by its own heavily armed security force, the team occupies squad rooms lighted with computer screens. On the walls are poster-size sheets of paper on which are scrawled, in English and Arabic, words familiar to the police the world over: who, what, why, where and when.
In its biggest cases the task force works with a single investigative judge, a court officer who in the Iraqi legal system functions as a prosecutor and a magistrate combined. The judge has signed dozens of arrest warrants, including some against powerful officials in the government.
In a country where three dozen judges have been killed in the last five years, American officials said the judge had been a courageous and valuable ally. But his life has been threatened. Along with his wife and children, he has moved to guarded living quarters.
“These cases are dangerous because 70 percent of them involve militias or powerful people in the government,” said the judge, who spoke only on the condition that his name be withheld. “We are all in some danger. I don’t think about it, but I don’t go out anymore.”
In Iraq, civil institutions of law have only a tenuous foothold.
In determining guilt or innocence, Iraqi judges have been accustomed to concentrating on whether a defendant has confessed — an emphasis that American officials said encouraged abusive interrogations. Mr. Davis, the former F.B.I. legal attaché in Baghdad, said the task force allowed only nonconfrontational interview techniques used in the United States.
Iraqi courts are only slowly accepting some of the staple techniques of American law enforcement, like forensic evidence. In one case, American officials said, a judge dismissed DNA evidence as unbelievable. In a bomb case, agents said their Iraqi counterparts marveled as they identified a possible suspect from a fingerprint taken from a shred of skin found at a crime scene.
American investigators may not venture outside the Green Zone unless they are accompanied by convoys of heavily armed escorts. Short of launching military-style operations, they have found it nearly impossible to get into neighborhoods where witnesses and suspects live.
The task force evolved from F.B.I. investigative and training efforts that began shortly after the American-led invasion almost five years ago. At first operating only in an advisory role, the agents on the task force now engage directly in investigative work, helping to teach their methods to Iraqi investigators.
But solving crimes has not always meant that defendants have been brought to justice in Iraqi courts.
The inquiry into the abuses at Site 4 are a case in point. It followed longstanding complaints by human rights groups and uncovered systematic and severe abuse — one photograph taken by the F.B.I. showed a ceiling hook from which detainees were hung and savagely beaten. Inmates were shoved out of the prison’s gates, apparently into the hands of death squads. Their bodies were recovered days later far from the detention center.
Task force investigators interviewed surviving detainees and the victims’ families, and succeeded in turning some guards into cooperating witnesses. Lower-level employees implicated superiors in what emerged as a grisly pattern of abuse.
The case appeared to break open in late 2006 when the Interior Ministry announced human rights charges against 57 officials, including senior prison officers.
“We limited this torturing and beating of prisoners,” said an Iraqi investigator who took part in the inquiry. “The situation is now these officers know somebody is watching them.”
But the aftermath of the inquiry has been disappointing. Only three people have been arrested, and one senior commander at the prison has received legal immunity from the Interior Ministry, placing him beyond the reach of Iraqi courts.
Human rights groups have said the failure to bring suspects to trial has reinforced a different message: that the Iraqi government still lacks the will to crack down on its own security forces.