Forces comb through documents

The administration wants ‘‘an Iraqi-led process, possibly ranging from tribunals to truth and reconciliation commissions,’’ to hold the Saddam regime accountable for crimes against Iraqis, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, told a Senate panel on Thursday.

Rights officials and legal experts argued that neither corrupt Iraqi court officers nor exiled Iraqi jurists would have credibility to do the job. Moreover, experts warned, without international legal authority, Iraqi tribunals could have trouble summoning witnesses or getting documents from Syria, Iran or other nations.

Before anyone can be prosecuted, the US must capture top Iraqi officials, find witnesses against them and unearth evidence.

Reports have come in that files were destroyed in police stations and Baath Party headquarters. And the US suspects that Iraqi scientists who might know the whereabouts of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons may have been rounded up, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said.

Intelligence officials said sifting through the documents could take years. While minute records were kept, few appear to have been computerised. In Baghdad, Marine civil affairs officers and Army psychological operations reviewed documents seized from police stations and Iraqi Intelligence.

Marine Lieutenant 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 who was jailed as a because he was overheard criticising Saddam and Baath Party.

‘‘Many people this happened to; many people have been hurt,’’ said the translator, an Iraqi who fled to the US after the 1991 Gulf War.

At the Senate, Prosper laid out the administration’s three-tier approach to handling war crimes. Crimes committed against US personnel in Iraq, such as mistreatment of American prisoners, would be prosecuted by the US in military tribunals. Human rights advocates and legal scholars agreed that that approach is appropriate and is specified by the Geneva Conventions.

Governments of other countries whose citizens have been victims of Iraqi violence could be prosecuted by those governments, he said. However, crimes by the Iraqi regime against its own citizens should be prosecuted by Iraqis, Prosper said. (LAT-WP)