Inside The Pentagon

Lesser-known insurgents sometimes seem to cycle in and out of
detention as they continue to perpetrate violence in local
communities, some U.S.
officials report.

“We’ve captured [many of] these insurgents several times,” says one
senior non-commissioned officer serving in a front line combat unit in
Iraq. “You can recognize them [when] they’ve been captured or they’re
dead.”

Like most of the U.S. military personnel interviewed for this article,
this NCO spoke solely on condition of anonymity, citing the issue’s
sensitivity.

U.S. military leaders initially drew up rules to govern the detainment
of suspected insurgents based on broad powers, outlined in June 2004
in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546, for “internment where this
is necessary for imperative reasons of security.”

U.S. forces in Iraq must move detainees they have captured from
forward operating locations to regional facilities within 24 hours and
develop a “prosecutable case” within 72 hours, military sources tell
ITP. A combined U.S.-Iraqi judicial board reviews the case and, if it
finds a preponderance of evidence against the suspect, the detainee is
passed to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq for trial.

A prisoner is either moved to a central facility within two weeks for
his case to begin moving through the Iraqi justice system, or he must
be released, officials say.

More than half of those captured across Iraq are released during the
initial step of the judicial review process. The so-called “Combined
Review and Release Board” has since its August 2004 inception
recommended a total 12,052 detainees for release and 9,903 for
continued internment, according to data posted this week to a
coalition force Web site.

In Baghdad alone, an average of 550 suspected insurgents are captured
each month and, of those, about half are released within two weeks,
according to Army Brig. Gen. Mark O’Neill, an assistant commander of
the 3rd Infantry Division, which is operating in the Iraqi capital.
Interviewed Nov. 18, he told ITP his troops “haven’t seen a lot” of
the same insurgents rounded up multiple times and, of the cases that
make it to the central Iraqi court, “the vast majority” result in a
conviction.

Across Iraq, the central court has convicted just over half of the
1,301 alleged insurgents tried since the tribunal’s October 2003
inception, according to the coalition Web site.

Current guidelines demand that the evidence coalition forces assemble
against a captured insurgent include two sworn statements describing
the crime, photographs of the target and any contraband discovered,
and a completed apprehension form and evidence voucher, according to
U.S.
officials.

But the time line imposed on U.S. forces for putting together a case
against each suspected insurgent in custody “is very difficult and
does not allow time for adequate interrogation or investigation,” says
one official.

A top U.S. officer at Multinational Force-Iraq headquarters in Baghdad
recently made that job even tougher.

On Aug. 5, Army Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg — the coalition’s
deputy commanding general for detainee operations — issued new
instructions that will increase the standard of evidence required to
keep Iraqi civilians in custody, sources say. The changes are meant to
lay the groundwork for a constitutionally elected government that
effectively replaces the U.N. resolution’s mandates by the end of the
year.

Beginning this month, “all witnesses must have direct knowledge of the
[suspected insurgent’s] criminal activity and they must be available
to testify” in Iraqi court, according to one official in Iraq familiar
with the new rules.

Witnesses can no longer include confidential sources that have
provided crucial tips and tactical intelligence to U.S. forces to
date, according to officials. In the future, witnesses will not only
be publicly identified but their credibility must also be established
before an Iraqi court, these sources say.

Demanding that confidential tipsters be exposed and their backgrounds
scrutinized is a “bad idea” in fighting a counterinsurgency campaign,
asserts one officer in Iraq. “We will never get the support of the
population when they risk their lives to give us information and, when
the mission is over, 14 days later or less the insurgents are
released.

We are now putting the informant’s life and family at risk.”

Even as U.S. forces have begun this fall to transition to the stricter
rules, insurgent retribution against Iraqi informants exposed in the
judicial process “has occurred several times,” this officer says.

Heightened fear among local Iraqi communities appears to be affecting
the military’s ability to gather intelligence on insurgent activity,
sources say. The number of calls to a nationwide tip line in Iraq
dropped from more than 3,000 in September to less than 300 in October,
according to one U.S. official in Iraq.

The new policy also expands the amount of documentation U.S. forces
are required to provide on each person captured.

The evidence packet now must also include the two direct-witness
statements; diagrams of the target area that depict the locations and
distances between any pieces of incriminating evidence; a chronology
of events; photos of the suspect, target area, contraband and its
original location, and sight lines between the suspect and the
location where contraband was found; and the methodology and results
of any explosives testing performed.

The demand for higher standards of evidence reflects an intention to
transition from using captured insurgents as potential sources of
intelligence through interrogation to regarding them more as suspected
“criminals for prosecution in the Iraqi judicial system,” says one
official familiar with Brandenburg’s August memo.

Part of the hurdle is in meeting Iraqi judicial tests of proof that a
crime has been committed. Judges in Iraq are given enormous latitude
in determining cases based on “the weight of the evidence,” and may
choose to implement standards laid out in any of three, often
conflicting sources — the 1971 Iraqi Law on Criminal Proceedings,
religious texts or precedents established by prior cases. Moreover,
the Iraqi legal system does not recognize Western concepts such as
probable cause, preponderance of evidence or reasonable suspicion,
officials say.

To help guide its own rules for detainment, the U.S. military in Iraq
has imposed probable cause standards on itself, officers report.

The bottom line is that Iraqi judges tend to demand overwhelming
physical evidence before deciding to keep a suspected insurgent locked
up, U.S. officials say. Iraqi prosecutors — cognizant of that fact
and reluctant to bring forward cases a judge will throw out —
sometimes simply refuse to refer a case to the Central Criminal Court
of Iraq, U.S. officials tell ITP.

“Having decided to send captured insurgents to the Iraqi central
criminal court, the coalition has to abide by its rules,” responds one
counterinsurgency expert who has worked in Iraq. “Some units haven’t
mastered the Iraqi legal process yet.”

At the same time, even some cases backed by strong evidence have been
thrown out by “judges who appear sympathetic to the enemy,” says one
U.S. military official.

“The rules assume a functioning Iraqi legal system,” the official
says.
“It is nonexistent in many areas.”

For all the desire to transition to a normally functioning — if
underdeveloped — Iraqi judicial process, the insurgency continues to
undermine civil order in Iraq and should not be treated on a par with
the day-to-day crime seen in stable societies, many officers are
arguing.

The continued level of insurgent violence against U.S.-led forces and
Iraqi civilians is out of sync with political progress in the nation,
defense officials and experts observe. Although the first
constitutional government is to be elected this month, insurgent
attacks across Iraq have risen to a weekly average of 600 — nearly
twice the level of early last year. Loss of life among U.S. troops in
Iraq has peaked this fall as voting day approaches.

“We are a nation of rule-of-law proponents and, conceptually, [we]
don’t want to unjustly keep anyone in jail who [has] done nothing
wrong,” says one U.S. military officer in the region. “But at the same
time, we’re trying to win a war against an enemy that is keenly aware
of the dilemma.”

In fact, “this is exactly the objective of guerrilla warfare — to
provoke [those in power] to overreact and alienate the population,”
says Vali Nasr, a Middle East and South Asia professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.

Indeed, a number of Iraqis have turned against the U.S.-led occupation
only after they were mistakenly detained in broad security sweeps of
contested areas, officials and experts say.

“There is no easy answer to this,” says Nasr, “other than more
manpower, greater intelligence capability and a more disciplined
exercise of force.”

Yet a number of officers in Iraq say they lack sufficient resources to
consistently construct prosecutable cases for Iraqi courts — and at
the same time fight the insurgency, protect the population from
attack, and build and train new Iraqi security forces.

Top commanders and policymakers in Washington “are asking our soldiers
and Marines to . . . be law clerks and expert crime scene detectives,”
says one officer. “Most tactical commanders do not have [the]
operational patience necessary to develop the type of [insurgent]
targets we are going after.”

Sometimes military units in Iraq “stumble on a big fish [who is]
subsequently turned loose for lack of evidence” because the
investigative groundwork typical of police detective work has not been
laid, this officer says. The “result is their cells go deeper
underground and are thus harder to target.”

In fact, the bigger the fish, the less likely it is he will be found
with incriminating evidence, according to U.S. military personnel in
Iraq. (It is the insurgent foot soldiers, rather than their
commanders, who typically are found with weapons and ammunition in
their car trunks, officials say.)

Like mafia bosses, the “high-value” insurgent leaders often instill
great fear among those who might be able to identify them, some
officials say.

“In these cases, continued detention will be determined by the numbers
of eyewitnesses willing to testify and [have] their credibility
[questioned]. Fat chance,” says one officer. “For the type of
operations being conducted in Iraq, this is crippling our ability to
impact those [insurgents] that have the greatest effect.”

“It is almost impossible to get witnesses to testify,” says another.

The Mosul insurgent who shot Army Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla three times in
the leg and arm in August had been released, along with two other
suspects, just four days earlier by an Iraqi judge who cited a “lack
of evidence” for keeping the men behind bars, according to Lt. Col.
Brad Becker, a fellow battalion commander under the Stryker brigade
deployed in the area at that time.

Khalid Jasim Noe initially was apprehended last December with a sniper
rifle, silencer, day and night scopes and associated paraphernalia —
and, “most disturbingly, a picture of Brig. Gen. [Malooh Atala] Ali,
who was a very successful Iraqi army commander in my area,” Becker
tells ITP.

Despite a treasure trove of physical evidence — and a confession by
Noe that “they had been paid a large sum of money to assassinate Brig.
Gen.
Ali” — in this case “the Iraqi court system didn’t work and Erik paid
the price,” Becker says.

But he also notes that in other cases, “we had hundreds of detainees
who were sentenced to jail by the Iraqi courts.”

“We have not had any problem with the rules as they have been laid out
for us,” says O’Neill. “There is sufficient opportunity for us to
establish our case and to gather the information we need to either
prosecute these detainees, follow up on the information that they
provide,” or let them go, he said.

Rather than tighten up the rules governing insurgent detention, U.S.
military leaders in Iraq have agreed to a number of “goodwill
releases”
in recent months. Several officials anticipate more such releases
following the Dec. 15 elections as a gesture of reconciliation across
Iraq’s ethnic and tribal groups.

But “the result is increased risk to soldiers — ours and Iraqis’ —
and the population is more reluctant to give us intelligence because
terrorists and criminals return to their neighborhoods,” says one U.S.
official. “Goodwill releases actually create ill will among the good
people of Iraq.”

The new policies are also affecting U.S. troop morale, according to
some.

“Demanding better evidence packets shifts the blame for releases on
the back of the soldier, when in fact the reason for these insurgents
getting back on the streets are the senior officials that have made
these releases possible,” says one officer in Iraq.

Others say military leaders are attempting to strike a delicate
balance between political pressures and military imperatives — all
against a backdrop of increasing calls from both Iraqi and U.S.
lawmakers to begin sending American troops home.

“In an insurgent war,” says an officer in the region, “not only are
there no tactical front lines or rear areas, even matters of law
enforcement and justice are blurred.”