Collection of reports shows Saddam's brutality

US intelligence agencies did not anticipate they would know in advance about any successful coup against Saddam Hussein, according to documents analysing the situation in Iraq over the past 25 years.

“Any group of anti-Saddam conspirators that cannot keep their plot secret from US intelligence is not likely to keep it secret from Saddam’s security services,” said a December 1993 national intelligence estimate. The estimates are considered the government’s most secretive and authoritative reviews.

The document, released this spring, was posted on George Washington University’s National Security Archive website yesterday as part of a library that previews some of the evidence the US government may be giving prosecutors for Saddam’s trial.

The opening session of the trial for Saddam and seven senior members of his Sunni-dominated government is to start today as they face charges for ordering the 1982 killings of nearly 150 people from the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, following a failed attempt to assassinate Saddam.

The 1993 estimate said Saddam’s long experience in Iraq’s volatile political culture shaped his brutal, pre-emptive leadership style. Imprisonment, exile, years of danger-filled underground existence and numerous assassination and coup attempts further honed his survival skills.

The archive’s collection includes a 2004 US Agency for International Development report on at least 270 mass graves that had been discovered in Iraq. Human rights groups say 290,000 Iraqis have disappeared over the past two decades, the agency’s report notes.

The document details the stories of three survivors who, through a series of fortunate events in March 1991, escaped mass burnings and shootings carried out by Saddam’s troops after the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings following the first Gulf war.

According to one account: “People were being escorted out to the buses in groups of about 20 at a time…. Those who were walking slowly, or whose feet were tied, were thrown in the fire.”

The buses took people to a swamp, where almost all were sprayed with bullets.

Another document details Saddam’s history of putting civilians at risk by using them as “human shields,” in violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which Iraq has signed.

According to one 10-page document, Saddam’s first and, to date, most aggressive use of human shields came during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in late 1990, before Operation Desert Storm.

Saddam held more than 800 Western, Japanese and Kuwaiti nationals at strategic installations in Iraq and Kuwait to deter military attacks by the US-led coalition. He also announced that thousands of other foreigners, including women and children, might be used as human shields.

As part of an effort to regain international credibility, however, Saddam released the civilians at the end of 1990, before Operation Desert Storm began.