U.S. on Paper Trail to War Crimes Evidence

U.S. military officers in Baghdad combed through captured Iraqi intelligence dossiers Thursday -- including “snitch files” containing even the shoe sizes of suspect citizens -- to try to find evidence of war crimes and the presence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, officials debated how much of a role, if any, the international community should play in prosecuting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants for atrocities, and how best to make Iraqi war crimes trials legitimate in the eyes of a skeptical world.

Bush administration officials indicated that they do not intend to ask the bitterly politicized U.N. Security Council to set up special tribunals of the sort created to try alleged war criminals from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Instead, the administration wants “an Iraqi-led process, possibly ranging from tribunals to truth and reconciliation commissions,” to hold the Hussein regime accountable for nearly a quarter of a century of crimes against Iraqi citizens, the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, told a Senate panel Thursday.

“Iraqis should lead the efforts to judge those who have committed the greatest crimes against their people,” Prosper said. He argued that international tribunals should be the courts “of last resort,” whereas credible prosecutions of Iraqis by their own people would plant the seeds of reform and rule of law in the dictatorship.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) questioned whether that approach would be perceived as legitimate, both within Iraq and in the rest of the Arab world. And human rights officials and other legal experts argued that neither corrupt Iraqi court officers who survived the Hussein regime nor exiled Iraqi jurists brought back by the allied occupation to remake the legal system would have sufficient credibility.

Moreover, legal experts warned, without international legal authority, the Iraqi tribunals could have trouble summoning witnesses or getting documents from Syria, Iran or other nations.

But the legal experts differed on whether U.N. involvement was necessary or desirable, or which of the many examples of modern war crimes tribunals would be most appropriate.

Before anyone can be prosecuted, the U.S. has to capture top Iraqi officials, find witnesses to testify against them and unearth evidence of crimes. In the chaos of the war came reports that files have already been burned, shredded or carted away from police stations and Baath Party headquarters. And the United States suspects that Iraqi scientists who might know the whereabouts of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons may have been rounded up in the waning days of the Hussein regime, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that rewards would be offered for information on significant individuals, documents and materials. He added that American officials are also seeking evidence of how Iraq obtained banned weapons from other nations, as well as the records of the Baath Party, the Iraqi intelligence service, the Special Security Organization, the Fedayeen Saddam militia and the Special Republican Guard.

Moreover, Rumsfeld said, “we must locate the wealth of the Iraqi regime inside of Iraq and outside of the country so it can be returned to the rightful owners -- the Iraqi people.”

Intelligence officials said collecting and sifting through the documents of Hussein’s regime could take years. Although detailed records were kept, few appear to have been computerized.

The United States already has a number of document exploitation teams in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency is in charge of the effort, which also involves Army intelligence officials, the CIA and other agencies.

Large quantities of electronic equipment, including copiers, scanners and digital cameras, have been in place since before the war began. Every document recovered is tagged, scanned and entered into a classified database that is accessible to analysts and experts across the U.S. intelligence community.

In Baghdad, Marine civil affairs officers and Army psychological operations officers, with the assistance of Iraqi translators, were at work Thursday reviewing documents seized from police stations and from an office of the Iraqi intelligence service.

There were resumes of job applicants, thousands of passports and reports filed by intelligence agents and neighborhood snoops. Many dossiers were so detailed that they even included shoe sizes. Other notes were tightly wrapped inside small pieces of cloth, apparently to make them easier to hand over covertly.

“This is the manifestation of a snitch society,” Marine Lt. Tom Klysa said. “The whole country has been told to watch everybody else -- a typical dictatorship.”

Picking a document at random, an Iraqi translator said it detailed the case of an Iraqi father of seven who was jailed as a “mouth threat” because he was overheard criticizing Hussein and his Baath Party.

“Many people this happened to -- many people have been hurt,” said the translator, an Iraqi who fled to the U.S. after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In Afghanistan, spy agencies mainly focused on finding information on terrorist networks and plots, an intelligence agent said. In Iraq, the emphasis will be on gathering evidence for war crimes trials and assembling information about banned weapons programs.

“These efforts are related but separate,” the official said, indicating that separate teams are pursuing evidence on the two issues.

Intelligence and human rights officials warned Thursday that looting of documents was of grave concern and must be stopped immediately.

Between 250,000 and 290,000 Iraqis “disappeared” under Baath Party rule, and Iraqi security archives could finally enable their families to find out what happened to them, Human Rights Watch, an independent human rights organization, said in a statement Thursday. Iraqis expelled from their homes will need records to prove their identities and property claims. And records that could identify tens of thousands of security agents and informers, if looted, might expose them to revenge attacks, the group warned.

At the Senate, Prosper laid out the administration’s three-tier approach to handling various types of war crimes.

Crimes committed against U.S. personnel in Iraq, such as mistreatment of American prisoners, would be prosecuted by the United States in military tribunals. Human rights advocates and legal scholars agreed that such an approach is appropriate and is specified by the Geneva Conventions.

Governments of other countries whose citizens have been victims of Iraqi violence -- Iranians gassed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, for example -- could prosecute the Iraqi suspects, Prosper said.

However, crimes by the Iraqi regime against its own citizens should be prosecuted by Iraqis, he said. The prosecutors and judges should include exiles and Iraqi jurists untainted by the past, with unspecified legal or financial help from abroad, he added, noting that the degree of international involvement had yet to be decided.

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Efron reported from Washington and Perry from Iraq. Times staff writers Greg Miller and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.