[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Walking a Beat With Officer Muhammed

[michael at intrafi.com]

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.



/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

 I HEART HUCKABEES - OPENING IN SELECT CITIES OCTOBER 1

 From David O. Russell, writer and director of THREE KINGS
 and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER comes an existential comedy
 starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Hupert, Jude Law, Jason
 Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts.
 Watch the trailer now at:

 http://www.foxsearchlight.com/huckabees/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/


Walking a Beat With Officer Muhammed

October 11, 2004
 By SEAN FLYNN 



 

Swampscott, Mass. - When President Bush boasts, as he has
several times lately, of "100,000 fully trained" security
personnel in Iraq, he is talking about men like Adnan
Majeed Muhammed. I met Mr. Muhammed in February on the
sprawling, cratered campus in Baghdad where American Army
reservists were teaching him how to be a police officer. He
was a tool-and-die man by trade, but with unemployment
running at about 60 percent, Mr. Muhammed, who is 26,
signed on for one of the few relatively well-paying jobs to
be had in the new Iraq. 

After almost eight weeks at the academy, Mr. Muhammed had
learned the basics of law enforcement: how to handcuff
prisoners and search cars, how to properly detain a
suspect, the fundamentals of Iraqi law. "But what surprised
me totally," he told me through a translator, as his fellow
cadets nodded in wondrous agreement, "was this whole
concept of human rights!" 

A few days later, Officer Muhammed was sent out with a
pistol to protect and serve in a city under constant attack
from car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. 

"That's a standard of training Americans would never
accept," said Gerald F. Burke, a retired Massachusetts
State Police major who spent more than a year as an adviser
to Baghdad police commanders. "It's a standard the Iraqis
wouldn't accept if they didn't have to. Really, it's just
an excuse for us to be able to say, 'Hey, we tried.' '' 

So even if Mr. Bush's numbers are correct, to claim 125,000
Iraqis will be "fully trained" for the Iraqi Army, National
Guard, police and security services by year's end is to
redefine the term so far downward as to be meaningless.
Adnan Muhammed, in fact, is among the best trained police
officers, one of only about 8,000 raw recruits who
completed the full eight-week academy course. Thousands
more were simply handed a badge and blue shirt on their
first day. 

The blame does not lie with Mr. Burke or the other
civilians and American soldiers running the academies and
advising Iraqi commanders. Rather, the Iraqi security
forces are in such dreary shape for the same reason the
rest of the country is a spiraling disaster: the Bush
administration ignored the advice of its own people and
tried to do the job on the cheap. 

Mr. Burke was one of a half-dozen experts sent to Iraq by
the International Criminal Investigative Training
Assistance Program, a Justice Department group, in May 2003
to figure out how to build a credible police force. The
program sent other experts to assess prisons, courts and
the rest of the criminal justice system. 

The group's first and most critical recommendation was to
bring in 6,000 international police advisers - civilians
who would work in the stations and on the streets with
Iraqi officers. It's a reasonable number for a nation of 25
million, based on data from the program's efforts in dozens
of other war-torn countries. Yet more than a year later -
with conditions having deteriorated so horrifically that
the advisers could only travel in heavily armed convoys -
there were still fewer than 500 outside experts. 

It's part of a broader pattern of half-steps and shortcuts.
Officer Muhammed's academy program was initially scheduled
to be 16 weeks, still dangerously minimal (a Massachusetts
state trooper, by comparison, is trained for nearly six
months before he's allowed to patrol the turnpike, where
he'll probably never be attacked with a roadside bomb). Yet
American officials, in a rush to improve the numbers of
cops on the street, ordered the curriculum cut in half.
Given that every lecture, question and answer has to be
translated from English into Arabic and back again, Mr.
Burke said the Iraqi recruits are being let loose into a
war zone with the equivalent of roughly four weeks of
instruction. 

And that may be a generous estimate, considering that
Iraqis begin with little, if any, understanding of how law
enforcement is supposed to function in a democracy. They
might have seen a bootlegged "Dirty Harry'' movie or a few
pirated TV shows, but the only flesh-and-blood police
officers they've ever known were Saddam Hussein's. 

Under the Baathist regime, the police were at best lazy
extortionists and at worst outright criminals. Corruption
was endemic; even good officers took cash "tips" from the
citizenry to supplement their poverty-level wages. A
tempering legacy is that they were outranked by at least 13
other security agencies, so they were a relatively minor
source of terror. 

Thousands of those former officers, though, are back on the
job - only with a lot more authority. "Now," one grinning
colonel told me, "we are the only ones." Some 32,000 have
been put through a three-week reprogramming course. These
lessons are also taught through translators, and some seem
more intended to satisfy political constituencies abroad
than to improve Iraq. Case in point: a two-hour seminar on
domestic violence seems futile in a country were honor
killings are common and, in some cases, legal. One police
major I met dismissed that short lecture and the rest of
the course-work: "Your system," he told me, "will not work
in our country." 

Of course, right now the lack of law-enforcement training
might not be so important, because the Iraqi police aren't
being used for what they've ostensibly been trained for,
anyway. "We're not even asking them to protect the public,"
said Mr. Burke. "We're asking them to protect the new
regime. We're not sending them out to walk a beat - we're
sending them into Najaf and Samarra and Sadr City. We're
sending them into a combat role." 

And so Adnan Muhammed finds himself billeted to a Baghdad
police station surrounded by canyons of blast barriers and
strips of tire spikes to keep the car bombers at bay. He
told me he hopes the old men, the holdovers who control the
precincts, won't corrupt him; that his station won't get
mortared; that his family won't be killed as collaborators;
and that he won't be one of the hundreds of Iraqi officers
blown up or shot since the invasion. He thanks Allah for
the Americans who taught him and gave him a pistol. He
believes he is fully trained to protect his country, and
so, apparently, does George W. Bush. 

Sean Flynn is the author of "3,000 Degrees: The True Story
of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11flynn.html?ex=1098513681&ei=1&en=252e669f208f7701


---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help at nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company