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A. Background

(U) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) reviewed approximately 90 documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) concerning Saddam Hussein's human rights record. The documents included short, current intelligence articles, formal analysis documents produced at the intelligence agencies, and other assessments written at the Intelligence Community (IC) level. These reports covered a wide range of atrocities and abuses over the 12-year period from the end of the 1991 Gulf War until early 2003 before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the quantity of analysis was limited and the IC stressed its inability to judge the veracity of all of the intelligence and other information it received, analysts appeared to agree on the major aspects of human rights abuses in Iraq over this period.

(U) Iraq's long history of human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is well documented in publicly available records. Intelligence analysis also indicated that Iraq under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship practiced a full range of abuses that included political imprisonment, rape, torture, intimidation, murder and killing on a massive scale.

(U) Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, three broad categories of abuses were reported in both the intelligence and public records and defined the nature of human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein:

• Atrocities against the Iraqi Kurdish minority, including the use of chemical weapons.
• Use of chemical weapons against the Iranian military during the Iran-Iraq War.
• Political retribution against the Shia and the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq prior to, and following, the 1991 Gulf War.

(U) The most comprehensive treatment of human rights abuses in the period between 1991 and 2003 was contained in the State Department's unclassified annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,⁶⁵ providing a running account of abuses inside Iraq. The record included reporting on executions, the use of torture and chemical weapons against political opponents, abuses based on ethnicity and religion, and abuses against women and children. The Intelligence Community (IC) drew on those reports as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and other technical collection methods to build its body of knowledge about human rights abuses.

(  ) The intelligence record, though, did not reflect the depth of reporting in the public record. As far as the Committee was able to determine from review of the analysis and discussions with analysts, lack of detail in intelligence reporting and analysis is attributable to the IC's inability to gain full and regular access to the locations of atrocities on Iraqi territory.                      SENTENCE DELETED                      By 2003, much of the intelligence record amounted to stories of persecution and oppression that filtered out of Iraq through opposition groups and refugees. The IC eventually developed a monitoring approach that improved its ability to anticipate potential atrocities - or at least to better assess some of the DELETED information it received. That monitoring approach is discussed later in this report.

footnotes

⁶⁵ (U) See also Human Rights Abuses of Saddam Hussein's Regime 1991-2003 (Congressional Research Service (CRS), July 9, 2003). The CRS report drew on a wide range of publicly available documents.