Marshalling In Martial Law
American lawyers and legal officials in military uniform, toting weighty law books and ready to establish martial law, are traveling with U.S. and British troops surging into Iraq.
The legal experts are hoping, however, that the Iraqi justice system won't fall apart in the event of a coalition victory, and will be able to maintain order once the shooting stops.
"The U.S. cannot take over the mantle of law enforcement for the Iraqi people," said Lt. Col. Richard Vanderlinden, commander of the 709th Military Police Battalion. "The expectation is that the Iraqi law enforcement structure will remain intact."
So far, contact between advancing U.S. troops and local authorities has been limited, but as coalition forces take control of territory they, in effect, become the law.
But when Vanderlinden saw civilian looters hauling away crates and aircraft parts from Tallil Airbase in southern Iraq he let them go, since the Iraqi civilian authorities had vanished when the airbase and its surroundings were overrun by the 3rd Infantry Division.
Vanderlinden of Gladstone, Mich., also felt the looters didn't pose a threat to U.S. troops.
Officers do say they will step in to prevent murders, rapes, arson and other serious crimes and to quash violence between supporters and opponents of Saddam Hussein and Iraq's various other antagonistic factions.
"Any riots and we are going to put them down. We're going to send in the infantry. Restoring civil authority and peace is the highest priority. We are not going to let people run riot and rampant," said Capt. Jim Wherry of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the army's legal arm.
Offenders, Wherry said, could then be tried under the U.S. Code of Military Justice, detained for post-war trials by civil authorities or face punishment meted out by the Americans under Iraqi laws. The entire Iraqi judicial code has been translated into English and made available to the U.S. military.
"This band of war criminals has been put on notice. The day of Iraq's liberation will also be a day of justice," President Bush said Wednesday.
Iraqi civilians likely to be detained by the Americans include those posing perceived risks to U.S. troops, common criminals and people who may provide valuable intelligence, such as members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party.
"If we catch any terrorists we're going to whisk them off to Guantanamo," Wherry said, referring to the U.S. interrogation center in Cuba where suspected al Qaeda members from Afghanistan are being held.
The more than 4,000 Iraqis captured by coalition forces could be treated as prisoners of war, and released after the conflict ends, or battlefield detainees — a status created by the U.S. to describe people it seized in Afghanistan.
How the coalition will establish the boundary between U.S. military and Iraqi laws remains a "work in progress," Wherry said.
"We're still making it up as we go along and hope for the best," Wherry, of Rock Island, Ill., said. "We are trying to have as little to do with this country as possible while, in effect, taking it over."
Still, Saddam's vast security apparatus is expected to be purged of loyalists and those suspected of torture and other human rights violations. Some supporters of the regime, however, will have to be kept in place.
"After World War II, we got rid of all the Nazis in six months and then found out we could not run the country without the Nazis," Wherry said.
A nightmare scenario would be a postwar, revenge-based bloodbath, with the police and judiciary melting away and the United States having to become cop, judge and jailer.
The U.S. military police say they're eager to work side-by-side with Iraqi authorities after the war, much as they did in Kosovo and Bosnia.
Vanderlinden, who served for six months in Kosovo, said he expected to conduct joint patrols and sweeps, share police intelligence and make arrests with his counterparts.
"They (Iraqi police) will have a wealth of information, for example, on the high crime rate areas in Baghdad, places where crime will probably escalate after the war," he said.
As in Kosovo, a sweep of such an area might unearth a weapons cache, information on a car theft ring or even intelligence about terrorists.
The Americans would act on the weapons and terrorists and the Iraqis would take care of the car thieves, he said.