Flaws Showing in New Iraqi Forces
Pace of Police Recruiting Leads to Shortcuts
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- The interview for aspiring police officers lasts two minutes and goes something like this: Col. Hussein Mehdi, the dean of the training academy, scans the candidate from head to toe for signs that he is shifty. He asks a question to verify his résumé. If the applicant says he studied electrical engineering, for instance, Mehdi inquires about the properties of a light bulb.
Then he gets to the heart of his probe: How do you feel about the "liberation war"?
"We want them to understand that the coalition forces are saviors, not occupiers," said Mehdi, 45. If a candidate has a different opinion, Mehdi said, he will be rejected.
As the U.S.-led governing authority in Iraq attempts to build a security force of 220,000 in the next few months, the competing priorities of speed and thoroughness have prompted shortcuts in the recruiting and training process. The consequences are starting to become apparent.
According to investigations over the past four months by a newly formed internal affairs unit at the Interior Ministry, more than 200 Iraqi policemen in Baghdad have been dismissed and dozens of others have had their pay slashed for crimes ranging from pawning government equipment to extortion and kidnapping.
In addition, roughly 2,500 people on the payroll of the Facilities Protection Service, which guards government buildings, either do not exist or have not been showing up to work, investigators say. And a number of Border Patrol officers have been disciplined for accepting bribes in exchange for allowing people without proper identification to enter Iraq.
Steve Casteel, the Coalition Provisional Authority's senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, said safeguards were built into the hiring and training process, such as checks of two computer databases to determine whether candidates served in the Iraqi security forces when Saddam Hussein was president or if they were among the thousands of convicts Hussein released from Iraqi prisons shortly before the war.
But criminal records compiled by Hussein's Baath Party apparatus, which much of the world considered criminal in its own right, are inherently ambiguous. Security and language issues, as well as resource and time constraints, make background investigations difficult. And with Iraq in transition among three governments -- a foreign-run occupation authority, an appointed Iraqi council and, if all goes according to plan, an elected Iraqi government -- defining "right" loyalties can be tricky.
In the end, those responsible for hiring the new protection forces have had little choice but to rely mostly on recruits' assurances and, as Casteel put it, an interviewer's "gut sense."
"It's a weak system," Casteel acknowledged, "but it's the best we got."
U.S. Army Capt. Jason Brandt, who assists with recruiting and vetting for Iraqi police, acknowledged: "There are probably some people on the police force who shouldn't be there."
A Lead Role for Police
The occupation authority is spending hundreds of millions of dollars from Iraqi oil production and seized assets and $3.3 billion of U.S. taxpayers' money to create five security organizations -- the police, an army, the Civil Defense Corps, the Border Patrol and the Facilities Protection Service -- plus court and prison systems. The U.S. military oversees the army, civil defense and border agencies while a new Iraqi entity, a kind of defense ministry, is created. The Iraqi Interior Ministry runs the police and shares jurisdiction over the Border Patrol with U.S. forces; other ministries individually employ the Facilities Protection Service to guard their buildings.
In the authority's plan to stabilize Iraq, the key is the police force, which is projected to number 85,000 by next year. The police already have taken a lead role in trying to secure the country, providing tips to occupation officials about planned terrorist attacks and investigating such common crimes as robberies and assaults.
"It's as simple as, when have you ever seen the police lead a coup?" Casteel explained. "If you build a strong police force, you have a republic. If you build a strong military, you have a banana republic."
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