It's Still a Mystery

By JOHN F. BURNS BAGHDAD, Iraq AT a lunch with a senior American commander here last week, the raid that uncovered a secret Interior Ministry torture center in Baghdad prompted a question: Why had the Americans waited so long to act, when Iraq had been swept for months by stories of state-sponsored terror? The accounts have hinted at the beginning of a march back toward the horrors of Saddam Hussein: police death squads and shadowy militias, masked men and middle-of-the-night raids, bodies dumped by roadsides, and an archipelago of makeshift prisons like the one that was raided, just a mile from the main American command center in the capital. There, last Sunday, troops found 173 starving inmates, pervasive evidence of torture, and signs that pointed to a ruthless Shiite religious militia group that has infiltrated the police, the Badr Organization, as responsible. It was a discovery that helped inflame an intensifying debate in Washington over whether the time had come for the United States to set a timetable for withdrawing. In Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., commander of the Third Infantry Division, whose troops conducted the raid, had an answer to the query on the raid, and it was one that pointed to the shadowlands America fell into when it led the invasion of Iraq more than 30 months ago - shadows that still obscure an understanding of the landscape. American forces, he said, had heard the stories of secret prisons and torture, many of them telephoned to hotlines set up last year for tips in the hunt for insurgents. The center, in Jadriya, he said, was "notorious" before the raid was triggered by a mother's appeal for help in finding her 15-year-old son. So why wasn't it raided sooner? Because, the general said in so many words, Iraq is so washed by rumor, and fact is so elusive, that the 153,000 American troops here have simply been overwhelmed. As an example of the obscurities that have enveloped the American enterprise here,

Re: It's Still a Mystery

American forces, he said, had heard the stories of secret prisons and torture, many of them telephoned to hotlines set up last year for tips in the hunt for insurgents. The center, in Jadriya, he said, was "notorious" before the raid was triggered by a mother's appeal for help in finding her 15-year-old son. So why wasn't it raided sooner? Because, the general said in so many words, Iraq is so washed by rumor, and fact is so elusive, that the 153,000 American troops here have simply been overwhelmed. As an example of the obscurities that have enveloped the American enterprise here, the general cited the difficulty the Americans have in distinguishing between the 320,000 members of the Iraqi Army and the police, and the thousands of other armed irregulars now stalking the land. Some of these irregulars, he said, were members of Kurdish and Shiite militias; some, private security forces recruited by ministers; still others, bodyguards to other prominent Iraqis. Along with these, he said there are Sunni insurgents and other killers and kidnappers who steal uniforms and unit badges and masquerade as army and police commandos. In Baghdad alone, he said, three truckloads of uniforms have been hijacked in recent weeks. "We get lots and lots of reports, tips and rumors, and we have to sort out which are real, and which are not," he said. "We get a call and somebody tells us that these men came during the night and took 25 men, and that they were found dead in the road the next morning, and they tell us that the American Army came with these men and stood by and did nothing. By the time we get the call, the next morning, we have to figure out whether this was the Iraqi Army or police, or a militia, or a gang that has used stolen trucks and painted them and used stolen uniforms. It's very hard for those of us who are fighting this war to ferret this all out." The detention abuse, which Iraqi and American officials described as involving Shiite policemen bludgeoning

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