From Iraq's secret files, a trail of mass murder

Until they were moved to a US base at the former Iraqi military intelligence headquarters, the files had been gathered in a house belonging to Maher al-Tikriti, one of Hussein's top bodyguards. Some had been discovered there; others were brought in by people who had found them elsewhere in Baghdad.

"It looked like what happened was Iraqi intelligence officers had moved into buildings like this and moved the documents for their own protection from bombing or whatever and to make it harder to find those documents," says Billmyer. "And then it looks like they fled before they could destroy all the documents and now people are bringing them back."

No systematic effort to catalog the files has yet been made, and it is hard to know what they contain. A cursory examination of some of the folders, their contents tied with green string, yielded the bare facts of cases under investigation, lists of suspected Communists, and pages of cross-referencing with other files.

Some bore a scrawled and laconic inscription on their covers: "Executed."

The Committee of Free Prisoners agreed to hand the files to the Americans for safekeeping, says Mr. Robeh, because the committee's headquarters had come under attack by armed men four times.

Leaders of the former ruling Baath Party "could be incriminated by these documents; they want them destroyed and disappeared," he adds. "The plan for the documents is to move them just for their protection," says Captain Billmyer. "The same people here with the Committee of Free Prisoners will still have full access to the documents to continue their work, because they are really the ones that found the documents."

Some committee members, however, are worried by the prospect of association with US troops, and fear for the files' future now they are in US hands.

"The documents will be away from us and we will work under the Americans. That is difficult," says Dr. Attar. "We want it to be a purely Iraqi effort."

Foreign human rights activists say it is important that the documents be kept safely, in a manner that clarifies their provenance. "It is essential that the chain of custody be established to ensure [the documents'] authenticity," says Richard Dicker, an international-law expert with Human Rights Watch in New York. "That would be crucial for their use in any investigation or trial" that Iraqi or international tribunals might mount.

But he voices concern that "the documents given to the US not disappear, never to return." US officials have never allowed public access to files taken from security offices in Haiti after the US-led invasion there in 1994, he points out.

Such questions are of little concern, however, to Hassoun. He, at least, has discovered his cousin's fate. "When he killed people, he said nothing," he says, referring to Hussein. "It was secret. Now we know."

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