In yet another sign that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is coming to an end, the last U.S. military prison in the country, Camp Cropper, was transferred in July to the control of the Iraqi government, which took custody of hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, and former Baathist officials -- some of whom were complicit in the crimes perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's regime.
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But there was also a detainee with a rather different pedigree: Saddam's former oil minister, Amer Mohammed Rasheed al-Obeidi. His continued detention represents a sign of a different sort -- the continued corruption and politicization of the new Iraqi government's judicial system.
Rasheed, now 70 years old, was detained by U.S. forces in April 2003. He was immortalized as the six of spades on the deck of playing cards that the U.S. military produced as its blacklist of the most-wanted regime members following the invasion, due to his role in Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the 1980s.
However, the reason that Rasheed continues to rot in jail has nothing to do with WMD: His former position as oil minister made him privy to information regarding corruption among the current characters vying for power in the new Iraq -- as well as among some very senior Russian officials.
I directed the final investigation of Iraq's WMD program as the head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group in 2004. In my final report, I included an annex emphatically stating that there was no longer any purpose in detaining those Iraqis who had been captured due to their connection to these programs. We had our answers, and these individuals presented no further risk to Iraqi society -- indeed, many were extremely talented and could contribute to Iraq's reconstruction.
So why is Rasheed still lingering in jail, five years later? The answer has much to do with the struggle between Iraq's many centers of power after Saddam's fall. Authority over detainees on the U.S. blacklist passed to the Iraqi government in June 2004, when the United States officially transferred sovereignty. However, the prisoners remained at Camp Cropper under the control of the U.S. military. Saddam himself was Camp Cropper's most prominent resident until he was delivered to Iraqi hands to be hanged in December 2006.
The nascent Iraqi "justice system" that was developing in 2005 laid the foundation for Rasheed's continued detention. A court issued a warrant accusing him of "wasting the national wealth through his position that led to the loss of a great amount of money and Iraqi national wealth." He has been waiting in jail without action ever since.
In fact, Rasheed was one of the more careful Iraqi bureaucrats when it came to accounting for resources. When we debriefed Rasheed and other former Oil Ministry officials, it became clear that the normal operations of the ministry -- directed by Rasheed -- were conducted appropriately. It was when the inner circle of Saddam's coterie got involved that oil contracts were allocated to the benefit of those who bent to Saddam's will.
My own experience with Rasheed dates back to the early 1990s, when I served as the deputy executive chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons-inspection team established to verify that Saddam had destroyed his old stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and halted production of more advanced WMDs. Rasheed was one of the top technocrats Saddam assigned to deal with the U.N. inspectors. A former general in the Iraqi Army, Rasheed was a brilliant -- if sometimes loud and difficult -- technical program manager for some of Iraq's most advanced military-development efforts.
His talent was recognized by the regime, and he was rapidly given greater responsibilities. He was particularly proud of the construction of the so-called 14th of July Bridge over the Tigris River, which was quickly constructed to replace the crossings that were destroyed during the Gulf War.
In 1995, Saddam appointed Rasheed oil minister, a position he held for virtually the rest of the regime's existence, including during the critical period when the United Nations permitted Iraq to export under the so-called Oil-for-Food program.
Saddam wanted out of sanctions one way or another -- either by convincing the U.N. Security Council to lift them, which would require a judgment that Iraq had fully disarmed, or by undermining their effectiveness through illicit means, eventually causing them to collapse. It was this latter course that had made the most headway before the 2003 invasion, and its success was the result of carefully dispensed allocations of oil to those who could influence the sanctions on Iraq.
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