B. Highlights of The Intelligence Record
(U) Overall, the IC's intelligence collection and analysis on the human rights situation in Iraq never equaled the efforts involved in monitoring regional security, terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. The IC, though, was able to rely on a body of reporting from public sources that helped analysts and collectors focus on critical human rights events inside Iraq. None of the documents provided to the Committee could be considered a coordinated IC-level assessment of the full range of abuses inside Iraq. But the IC did produce periodic reports on a wide range of abuses it was monitoring.66 The following documents are representative of the issues covered by the IC in the body of its reporting.
( )In 1993, CIA's office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) wrote an assessment entitled Humanitarian Situation in the Marshes (SIM 006/93, 20 August 1993). According to NESA, the IC took seriously some press accounts about systematic repression of Shia and the Ma'adan or marsh dwellers in Southern Iraq. But the IC could not confirm some of the reports because of lack of access to Iraqi territory. SENTENCE DELETED The IC assessed that those actions damaged and destroyed roughly 1,300 square kilometers or 40 per cent of two marsh areas. DELETED the environmental impacts and confirming the corresponding growth of refugee camps outside of the marshes indicated IC analysis was accurate.
(U) According to DIA analysts, writing in Iraq: Ecological Warfare, (MID-47-94, 14 March 1994), Baghdad had demonstrated its willingness to use environmental destruction as a weapon during the 1991 Gulf War, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells and pumping crude oil into the Persian Gulf. DIA analysts believed Iraq was continuing a pattern of ecological warfare by draining southern marshes. According to DIA, ecological attacks were aimed at eliminating rebel strongholds and generally destroying the habitat and culture of the Marsh Arabs.
(U) According to a late 1994 estimate that drew on information from IC agencies, the United Nations (UN) and non-governmental organizations (NGO), the IC judged that Iraq had created a situation inside the country that could require large-scale emergency humanitarian assistance in 1995. For instance, in the report. National Intelligence Estimate: Global Humanitarian Emergencies, 1995 Vol. II: Country Estimates, (NIE 94-33/11, December 1994), analysts pointed to UN information that indicated hostile Iraqi actions had put approximately 1.3 million people at risk across Iraq. Approximately 750,000 of them were in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and, that number included about 30,000 Iraqi Kurds displaced by fighting and an additional 10,000 Kurds who were fleeing into Turkey to stay clear of fighting inside Iraq.
(U) According to a CIA publication, Facts on Iraq's Humanitarian Situation (17 July 1998), the IC believed Iraq's 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja was still causing serious health problems as late as 1998. Beyond those killed in the raid at the time, the Kurds continued to suffer from infertility, congenital malformations and cancers at a high rate. The IC conceded that it was unable to confirm much of the reporting about the Iraqi chemical attacks, but speculated - based on information from a NGO - that there may have been multiple attacks on villages in 1987 and 1988 in areas close to both the Iranian and Turkish borders. There was virtually no analysis on the possible use of biological and chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians in the years between 1990 and 2003. Where it was mentioned, analysts made clear that they were unable to confirm the intelligence. The lack of intelligence on this unique type of atrocity mirrors the difficulty that the IC had in collecting and verifying intelligence reports from inside Iraq on other atrocities, including the IC's difficulty in confirming the details of known chemical attacks in 1987 - 1988.
(U) In a May 1999 comment in an IC human rights monitoring report called The Warning Committee's Atrocities Watchlist, the IC noted that the Iraqi government was repressing large segments of the civilian population as a way of controlling opposition groups and reestablishing territorial control. The report stated that the Iraqi government had attacked Shia clerics to curb their influence, for example in the May 1999 time frame, when the Iraqi government announced it had executed about 12 Shia clerics and seminary students and had deployed military units to Shia-occupied areas. The IC viewed these particular abuses as a matter of immediate concern and believed the situation could lead to a major humanitarian emergency in the course of 2000.
(U) In the October 1999 issue of The Warning Committee's Atrocities Watchlist, the IC reported that Baghdad had recently emphasized a policy of collective punishment to coerce tribal leaders into supporting Saddam Hussein's regime. The coercion included threats of destroying the homes, villages and fields of suspected oppositionists. According to opposition sources who passed information to the U.S. government, the regime may have carried out mass executions as part of its campaign.
(U) The CIA's Office of Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs published Iraq: Ethnic Relocation Bolsters Regime Security in May 2000 (NESAF IR 2000- 40115CX), outlining Saddam Hussein's systematic efforts to forcibly relocate ethnic groups. The CIA based its assessments about treatment of Iraqi ethnic groups on what it called episodic and irregular information sources and noted the difficulty of corroborating the reporting. According to the CIA, however, Saddam's objective was to bolster internal security, stabilize Baghdad itself and to undermine potential dissident activities. The CIA believed Saddam's regime had sent about 4,000 Shia and Kurdish families away from Baghdad and other cities in 1999 alone, shifting them to southern and western Iraq in retaliation for causing disturbances in urban areas. The relocations were a decades-old measure used by Saddam's regime to weaken any potential rivals. For example, CIA reported that in 1971, Saddam's government expelled 100,000 Shia Arabs and Shia Kurds to Iran. He repeated that tactic in 1980, expelling about 40,000 Shia to Iran. In 1975, his regime moved more than 250,000 Kurds to southern Iraq and razed Kurdish villages along the Iranian border. Saddam's final action was to repopulate the cleared areas with loyal Sunni Arabs and, at times, with Palestinians.
(U) The IC listed Iraq as one of four countries of greatest humanitarian concern in Global Humanitarian Emergencies: Trends & Projections 2001- 2002, (NIC 2001-04, Sep 2001). According to IC analysts, conditions in central and southern Iraq were unlikely to improve as Saddam Hussein's regime continued to manipulate the UN oil-for-food program. The IC believed Saddam Hussein was using the UN program both for political leverage and to gain more control over oil revenues. Despite Iraqi abuse of the oil-for-food program, though, analysts judged that conditions in northern Iraq were likely to improve because UN management of the aid program would help limit the impact of economic and relief disruptions caused by Baghdad.
(U) The IC produced an unclassified document in January 2003 entitled, Putting Noncombatants at Risk: Saddam's Use of "Human Shields." Analysts reported that Saddam Hussein had used several variations of a "human shield" tactic since 1988 as a way of blocking military actions against Iraq or to otherwise manipulate public opinion during confrontations. The IC was able to draw on confirmed intelligence from the 1990 Gulf War about abuse of human shields, on testimonies from Americans and other foreign hostages and on imagery evidence to demonstrate the extent of Iraqi abuses. By late 2002, the IC had obtained imagery that showed military deployments in civilian areas of Baghdad. The Iraqi military positioned different kinds of weapons among noncombatants and rounded up civilians to use as human shields.
footnotes
66 (U) The CIA's closest approach to an IC-level assessment was Iraq: A Sustained Pattern of Civilian Repression, written in January 2003 by the Office of Near Eastern, and South Asian Analysis (NESA) (NESA IA 2003-20011CX). This document is a broad look at abuses under Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, and is a convenient summary and history of reporting about human rights abuses from both classified and unclassified sources. The NESA document supports the findings in this Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report section. It also includes a rich list of reference materials that would have helped to substantiate and explain the IC's approach to analysis of human rights abuses. However, the CIA only delivered the NESA document to the Committee on June 4, 2004.
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