NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ..................................................................... ... PANORAMA The Price of Victory RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 28:09:03 ..................................................................... ... MAJ. SCOTT PATTON: Tell him (injured Iraqi resistance fighter) that if he cooperates with us we might be able to save his life because we have very good doctors, okay, but tell him if he doesn't cooperate with us, it's bad for him, it's bad for his health. Tell him that. REPORTER: For three months we've been on the streets of Baghdad chronicling a long, hot and bloody summer. PATTON: Tell him if he's lying he's going to piss me off really bad. SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO: You occupy with a military force but you can't restore law and order with the military. This is why an occupation cannot last. REPORTER: We've been following a battalion of American troops as they take on an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable enemy. PATTON: We're going to help you if you help us. If you don’t help us you can forget it, okay? We came here to help you. PAUL BREMER: The American people have undertaken with the British and our other coalition allies here a noble exercise and we will see it through. REPORTER: But that noble exercise requires America to show the same commitment for nation building as it did to removing Saddam. This is the story of three months in Baghdad with the occupiers as they face up to that challenge. PATTON: (addressing troops) I'd like to welcome everybody to 'Thunder Run 6'. We've got some credible intelligence…. REPORTER: Major Scott Patton has just received a tip off about some paramilitaries who targeted his battalion in a recent grenade attack. He's about to send in nearly 300 troops in one of the units biggest counter insurgency operations to date. PATTON: Reggie, your task is to secure objective Tammy. REPORTER: These men are from the 427 field artillery. They call themselves Thunder Battalion. They arrived just after the war. They're artillery specialists used to firing shells across a battlefield, now they're in the middle of Baghdad experiencing for the very first time an urban guerrilla war. We joined Captain Reggie Harris in one of the lead vehicles. CAPT. REGGIE HARRIS: Right now we've got about close to 100 US forces that's operating on the street right now. We suspect ?? that have weapons cachets that might have been involved in recent attacks that's going on against US forces. We don’t know if they're Fedayeen, Ba'athist, but we do know they have talks with Saddam. (to driver) Stop right here, stop right here. Block the road, block the road. REPORTER: The gang they're looking for are believed to be operating out of a high rise apartment block in Sheik Marouf, Baghdad's oldest quarter. As Reggie Harris' troops secure the building, a group of elite snipers head to a nearby roof to provide covering fire. Poised outside the target flat, Thunder's lead assault team moves in. But the resistance are one step ahead. Inside there's nothing. No paramilitaries, no guns, just an empty flat. A block away, the US army snipers have just spotted an Iraqi in the street below armed with a Kalashnikov. (sounds of gunfire) SOLDIER: He's gone down that hole again. Did you shoot that one? SOLDIER 2: I might have got him. I don’t see anyone. A man was across the wall in a green shirt, he was being handed an AK by a man in white shorts. I shot the wall. I don’t think I hit him. I suppose I didn't hit him. REPORTER: Thunder Run 6 is aborted but the soldiers are left exposed, bunched in a small area of town with few exit routes, and their vulnerability is not lost on the resistance. SOLDIER: (on radio) Right now they've got contacts out-fired and exposed right now. They've got one MP that's critical. Right now they're moving to the FOB to the Medivac point. Over. REPORTER: Two American soldiers and one Iraqi civilian have been injured. There are 550 soldiers in Thunder Battalion. They've been attacked 40 times in the last month alone. SOLDIER: I felt the percussion wave, it kind of stunned me. I closed my eyes and opened my eyes and I could see the dust and debris were all around us, the windshield was cracked, both of 'em, driver's and passenger's side had fallen out, and we… exited and set up security and started assisting wounded. And what they say about everything going into slow motion, I found out today it's true. From the time the percussion waves hit, everything for the next minute or so were slow motion. REPORTER: It is now July and attacks on coalition troops are averaging over 80 a week. A soldier is being killed almost every day, and this more than two months after President Bush declared an end to Major combat operations. By mid July the US commander in the Middle East finally admits they're engaged in a classic guerrilla type campaign. And the Americans say they know who the insurgence are, remnants of the former regime, still free, still loyal to Saddam and still heavily armed. A resistance President Bush had once challenged with the phrase: "Bring 'em on". Drafted in to help the military hunt them down in a country awash with weapons is the former New York Police Chief Bernard Kerik. Effectively he's Iraq's temporary interior minister, nicknamed the Baghdad terminator for his 'no-nonsense' approach. BERNARD KERIK Coalition Provisional Authority These (referring to range of displayed weapons) were seized over the last day and a half by the same group of individuals. This information was given to us civilians, came forward to talk about possible attacks on the coalition. The objective here is to create a free Iraq. You don’t do that by cowering, you don’t do that by backing down. We're going to deal with the resistance in two ways, we're going to either arrest them, or we're going to kill them. This job to me is very personal. On September 11th 2001 I was the Police Commissioner of New York City. I respond to the towers when they were hit. I stood beneath tower one when tower two was struck by flight 175. I watched over the next 24 hours as 23 members of my department were in fact missing inside those buildings. They never came out. I lost 23 people. They were responding to defend the freedom of the United States. This country was the threat to that freedom. This country was a threat to the freedom of the UK. We have now freed this country. We have liberated Iraq and I think I owe it to the 23 people I lost. REPORTER: Iraq is officially under military occupation with 140,000 troops in the country. Britain is the other main occupier, but it remains essentially an American show with the UN, in peace as in war, relegated to the sidelines. The occupiers go by the name of the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA, now based in the sumptuous palaces of the old regime. The vision, to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East. Would you say the Americans are a good nation at peacekeeping? PAUL BREMER Head of Coalition Provisional Authority We are learning about peacekeeping. It's not something we have done in a long time. We have had experience now in Germany, Japan, to some extent Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. So we have got some experience in it. The problem with nation building is that it takes time, and it takes a lot of patience, and Americans are not usually renowned for their patience, but I'm encouraged by my conversations with people in both our executive branch in Congress that our country understands that we have a solemn obligation now to see this through and to see it through well and to put the time and resources behind it so we succeed. REPORTER: Baghdad, two months after the end of the war. When we first arrived we found a city still scarred by battle but free of the apocalyptic scenario some had predicted. There was no famine, no mass refuge crisis, no religious civil war. But at the street level the city was barely functioning. Once regarded as the most advanced in the Arab world, now buried in its own waste and just about anything else which had served its purpose (carcass of dead horse in the road). Many people were struggling just to get enough electricity and water, and, for that matter, money. With so many fraudulent back notes in circulation since the war, the genuine high denomination notes had lost their value. This is the 10,000 dinar note. Most people's savings and salaries are in this denomination. But they're finding it extremely difficult to use these notes. A lot of the traders wont accept it and money exchanges like this will only pay 70% of its value. But the coalition came up with a solution. Ad hoc money exchanges for people to swap their savings for smaller, usable bank notes. The problem was, they opened at only a few locations leaving a small group of soldiers – in this case from the 1.6 Infantry Battalion – to deal with thousands of anxious civilians. Precisely the sort of scenario where Iraqis get to judge Americans as peacekeepers. SOLDIER: Men and women are poor, they're not able to get to the bank, and then they come and we try and have a number system where they get in, they got a number to get through the line. Some people are cutting. Once one person comes in, five or six will try to push through the line. That's when we have to defend ourselves and push them back to keep the flow of movement going the way we want it to. SOLDIER: (to woman in surging crowd) Do you want these (cuffs) on your fucking hands? Then get the fuck out! IRAQI MAN: You know it's very difficult for Iraqi people to hear the soldiers shouting on a woman. We respect the woman here so much. So you have to tell those soldiers how the Iraqi people respect each other. 2nd IRAQI MAN: He said: "fuck Iraq". REPORTER: Who did? 2nd IRAQI MAN: He… this army. I don’t know what his name. REPORTER: What did you say? 2nd IRAQI MAN: I say? If I have gun in my hand I tell him what I say by gun. REPORTER: In the torrid heat of an Iraqi summer and struggling to pacify, let alone understand, a people who'd been asking them for help, for some soldiers discipline becomes a casualty. (footage of ferocious attack by several soldiers on one Iraqi pinned motionless and helpless on the ground) The soldiers would later claim that they had to use such force because the man, a suspected pickpocket, was resisting arrest and fighting them on the ground. The Americans release him a few minutes later to go to hospital to get treatment for the injuries he's just received. While we were filming the money exchange a more serious situation had developed outside Assassin's Gate, the entrance the CPA headquarters. 400,000 Iraqi soldiers had been dismissed, unpaid, as part of the coalition's purge of the old regime. And now some of them were on the street demanding emergency payment. But the protest became violent, rocks were thrown at an army convoy, and in response and American soldier shot into the crowd. Two of the demonstrators, apparently unarmed, were killed. We were directed to the house of one of the men who'd been shot. Tarik Al-Mashhadani, a father of five. His family had just received his body in a US army body bag. For many in Iraq, and especially Ala, now sniffing the blood of his younger brother, the occupiers have little margin for error. ALA AL-MASHHADANI: The martyr is alive forever and his blood is always fresh. It smells good. I can't get dirt from it. I want to know who shot my brother and bring him to trial. If this doesn't happen I wont keep silent and neither will the Iraq people. REPORTER: The Americans say that there is an investigation continuing into this matter. AL-MASHHADANI: They wont do anything. The Iraqi people know why the Americans and British are here – oil, and to allow Israel to grow across the Middle East. These are his five children. Who will feed them now? We have our tribal system of justice. Either the killer is killed, or the victim's family receive compensation. If we don’t get justice, we will punish them. We will kill four for the one they killed. REPORTER: As the brother's coffin was being led through the streets, the US military had already issued a press release claiming someone on the crowd had begun shooting at their soldiers so one of them fired back. But when we found a senior army doctor who'd actually witnessed the incident, his version of events was somewhat different. Major MATTHEW JENNINGS 82nd Airborne Division My instinct of the shooting was… well I hate to say this but I don’t think it was necessary. I believe someone felt threatened. You know, the American military police company that was coming by in their vehicles, someone felt threat enough, great enough, to open fire on the crowd. Yet where was no weapons to be seen within the crowd. REPORTER: You didn't see any? JENNINGS: I did not see any weapons. Now granted we're in Baghdad. There probably were weapons there, but I did not see any, nor was any fire that I heard, returned back on the soldiers. REPORTER: The conduct of some in the US military was also worrying the UN's then main trouble shooter and head of mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. He worked closely with the CPA Chief Paul Bremer. A highly regarded diplomat, he would later be murdered in a suicide bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. This was his last television interview. SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO UN Special Envoy to Ira I have discovered in my career, and I've been in six or seven peacekeeping operations that soldiers are bad policemen, they are not trained for that, and as a rule one should never use the military for law and order tasks which is why so many mistakes are being committed here. MAJ. JENNINGS: With a little bit of the morale deficit that we have here, you put us in a situation where do we shoot or do we not shoot? We're still the shooters, and there's a great possibility that we'll shoot first, and then let things sort out and fill out the reports and do the investigations afterwards. REPORTER: We've since found out there was no investigation into the shooting of Ala's brother, Tarik. Not since the Second World War has the US Military been in control of a city of 5 million people responsible with the CPA for making it function at every level, and that can even mean rebuilding soccer pitches, the latest task for Reggie Harris. Are you any good at soccer? REGGIE HARRIS: I'm pretty good, I'm average. It's a sport so I'm good at him. (laughs) We're going to head out now and get motivated. Today we're here to work on the football field and give these young kids like this a chance to play soccer. Okay? That's what we're here for, alright? REPORTER: A lot of the reconstruction of Iraq has been painfully slow. Coalition attempts to revive the antiquated oil and electricity networks have been hindered by sabotage, and community projects like this are limited. The soldiers know only too well that the longer they stay in any one place, the greater the risk of attack. HARRIS: This is a project that was brought to my attention. I'm kind of the sheriff, mayor, so to speak of this neighbourhood, me and my forces here. So we decided to give something back to the community, and one project that we're doing, we've called the Taskforce Neighbourhood Project, and what we're calling it is 'Completing a Kid's Dream". We're not only here to provide peace, security and civility, we're also here to help rebuild Iraq. Will you present the first ball to the people. SOLDIER: On behalf of the Iron Thunder Battalion and the Gators we hope the children can continue to be children and have fun. REPORTER: The US military is also involved in constructing a grass roots political framework for Iraq. Reggie Harris' extensive portfolio now includes chairing one of the city's newly established neighbourhood council's, essentially a forum for local communities, to highlight their immediate concern. How many jobs are you actually doing here? CAPT. HARRIS: (laughing) I'm a negotiator, I'm a police officer, I'm a mayor, I'm the sheriff of my neighbourhood. I'm a councilman, sometimes I'm an unemployment officer. REPORTER: Without wanting to sound rude, what makes you qualified? What qualifications do you have for all these jobs? Captain REGGIE HARRRIS 27th Field Artillery Regiment Well honestly, I have a degree in several of the… (laughs) no, I don’t know. I guess when you wear the uniform the people here automatically assume that you can provide a lot of assets for them. REPORTER: Many, many Iraqis are grateful to the soldiers for ridding their country of Saddam's tyranny. In video stalls across Baghdad there's now a macabre trade in DVDs where the full horror of the old regime is finally laid bare. This footage is thought to have been taken in a Baghdad prison. (horrific scene of whipping of prisoner, on the ground, amongst others apparently whipped to death) The systematic brutality that became a hallmark of the Saddam regime dehumanised the nation. We came across Ali one morning in the west of the city. He told us how they cut off his ear when he tried to desert the army. Can I ask you how you feel about the Americans? IRAQI MAN: Good bush, no Saddam. REPORTER: Good bush? IRAQI MAN: Yes. No Saddam. REPORTER: Then in a coffee house a local GP articulated why it meant so much to him that Bush and Blair had gone to war. Dr GAITH AL SAUD I can't forget what the previous regime have done to us. There is no sense of forgiveness. It was so bad. So bad. So many of my colleagues were executed. (emotional, close to tears) Excuse me. I remember them, they were true Iraqis, true people, keen to do help to others. They have been executed for political reasons, nothing else. REPORTER: These are friends of yours? AL SAUD: Yes, close friends of mine, with the same graduation. They were brilliant people. I don’t know how to forgive them. Forgiveness has lost its meaning. REPORTER: By the middle of the summer the coalition concluded Saddam was still alive and still somewhere in Iraq and they wanted to believe that it was his die hard supporters, the so called dead enders who were leading the resistance. So they assumed they'd struck at the heart of the movement when they killed his sons Uday and Qusay after a 6 hour fire fight in the northern city of Mosul. The coalition paraded their bodies on TV so that no one was in any doubt that they were dead. And now everyone wanted to know when would they get Saddam. BERNARD KERIK Coalition Provisional Authority The bottom line is he will be caught. He will be captured or killed, just like his sons. As confident as I am sitting here right now, we will have him in custody dead or alive some time in the future. REPORTER: Dead or alive. KERIK: Dead or alive. REPORTER: What's preferable? KERIK: (pause) Dead or alive. REPORTER: Another day, another fractious gathering at a Baghdad money exchange. Life in the city is still far from normal. As before, the CPA has opted for only a few locations to set up their exchanges which means once again that thousands of people are descending on one street having to wait for hours to get their money in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius. This time the Americans who are still doing most of the policing in the city have brought riot batons. What techniques are you using to control this crowd? SOLDIER: There's nothing, it seems, that this mob understands except an iron fist. At first you come in and you try to be polite and try to say: "Look, we need you to move back, you just stand over there" and you get no response. You get no response. REPORTER: How old are you? SOLDIER: 28 years old, college student. I'm actually an art major at school, which is totally different than this. I'd rather be studying fine literature and art. REPORTER: Do you think as soldiers you're getting satisfactory support from the senior civil administrators in this country? SOLDIER: I'll leave it at this. I think the people that are in charge very high up don’t see what's actually happening, and that's how I feel. There's a definite disconnect between what needs to happen and what's actually happening, and I think the administration needs to take that in effect. We need to get these people food, water, housing and government fast. REPORTER: But that can't happen overnight. SOLDIER: I know it can't happen overnight but something has to be implemented to get this plan moving because here on the lowest level of military hierarchy I don’t see it happening. I see nothing of this happening and I'm sure there are plans being made, papers drafted, whatnot, but these people don’t see that and I don’t see it and that's what makes them angry and that's what makes them want to attack us, and day by day more and more soldiers are going down. REPORTER: It's not just junior ranking soldiers who are prepared to openly criticise the way the coalition is running Iraq. Matthew Jennings is a Westpoint graduate, a major with 12 years experience as a professional soldier. Having fought a war he still believes in, it's now early summer and he thought he'd be home. Major MATTHEW JENNINGS 82nd Airborne Division I know personally I'm upset because people seem to be dragging their feet. I wonder how often many of these folks in these large palaces, how often do they come visit these hospitals here? How often do they see the actual problems that are there? REPORTER: Do you listen to your boss in CPA, Paul Bremer, electricity is back, a number of courts are up, the schools are running, everyone seems a lot happier than many people would suggest on the streets. JENNINGS: You're on the streets, I'm on the streets. I'd like to report the same things they're reporting. I don’t know – maybe the emperor is not wearing any clothes. REPORTER: Ambassador, there's a strong perception among many Iraqis and not a few American soldiers that the CPA is far too detached from the situation on the ground. How do you respond to that? PAUL BREMER Head of Coalition Provision Authority Well I don’t think it's true. We've got hundreds of people working for us all across the country. We have officers now in all 18 provincial capitals, and we have people working every day in the ministries both here and in capitals. We have a lot of people out all the time. REPORTER: But a panel of experts sent out by the Pentagon recently concluded that there is a disconnect between on the ground realities and policy formation at CPA HQ. One member of the group described the CPA as "living in a cocoon inside a bubble". Do you really know what the Iraq people are experiencing day to day? BREMER: Oh yes, I think so, they're pretty clear about it. They make it clear in their demonstrations and their newspaper stories. We have a pretty good understanding of the problems they have. They have problems with security and with power and water and those are the problems that we spend a great deal of our time on, those are our top priority issues, just as they are their top priority problems. REPORTER: Under international law an occupying power has a duty to restore civic order, but in Baghdad the coalition has been finding it difficult, especially when it comes to restoring power even to pre war levels. As in any modern city, electricity is its life blood, the essential provider of light, heat and water. But supply here hardly ever exceeds 12 hours a day. Some homes get just three, and the slow pace of progress is feeding a growing discontent within the city. Saturday night, the centre of Baghdad and the electricity has gone again. What people around here can't understand is how a superpower which took their country in just 21 days can't even get the lights to work. Perhaps the most important and most onerous of all the obligations facing the occupiers is the duty to restore law and order, and in Baghdad in particular this has been a problem. It's not possible to verify levels of crime before the war, but there's a widespread perception in Baghdad that the number of shootings and stabbings in the city has risen sharply since the occupation. This man has just received bullet wounds to his shoulder and head. Baghdad Central Morgue - nearly four months after the toppling of Saddam we filmed coffin after coffin being brought to the building. We were told that in the previous two days 91 bodies had been registered here. The Morgue's director told me that in a similar period before the war that figure would rarely have exceeded 5. You don’t have to stay here very long to get a clear picture of just how far law and order has broken down in the city. There's an almost constant stream of coffins, nearly all of them containing bodies of people who've been killed by gunshot. (footage of procession of chanting Iraqis carrying coffing) Apparently this is a 20 year old Iraqi whose family are claiming was shot by American troops. Now they said it was time for retribution. His family and friends had no qualms about telling me they were ready to fight the Americans. But hang on, they liberated you and Iraq from Saddam Hussein, he's no longer here and that is thanks to the Americans and in a small part the British. IRAQI MAN: Saddam is a hero and will continue to be a hero. Every Iraqi is a soldier for Saddam. The Americans are killing us and looting our oil. I'm in Saddam's Fedayeen. I love Saddam and I want to drink the blood of all American soldiers. REPORTER: Whatever the true circumstances surrounding the death of this young Iraqi, these mourners made no attempt to hide their deep hatred of the Americans, and they left with one final show of defiance. (several bursts of gunshot from departing procession) Getting Iraqi police, or IPs as they're known, back to work has been a priority for the coalition. But the old police are still being retrained leaving just over half the numbers they need on the ground. Towards the end of August we found a police station near Thunder Battalion being rebuilt. It had minimal resources. And outside, Baghdad's by now familiar sound (gunshot and machinegun fire) was becoming relentless. Now this is the funeral… Is that a machine gun? SOLDIER: Yes they are, and AK47. REPORTER: The shooting is in fact illegal but neither the soldiers, nor the Iraqi police are inclined to intervene. SOLDIER: Now if you don’t mind I'm going to move you out of this area for your own safety. REPORTER: Okay. I mean this has been going on for half an hour now, this shooting. Do you think law and order has been more or less re-established in Baghdad? SOLDIER: Slowly, yes. REPORTER: What, when you hear this constant gunfire? SOLDIER: Well they have been practicing doing this for 35 years, so it's not like overnight you're going to stop performing acts and deeds that you've been performing. REPORTER: But I think Saad, my translator, you were saying that before the…. SAAD: Yeah, before the coming of the American troops, anyone who shoots a bullet in a funeral or in a wedding party, he would be put in prison for six months. REPORTER: If they were caught firing like this? SAAD: Well, they will be sent to death. This is a battle. This is not a…. It is a battlefield. They are showing their power. REPORTER: I mean that was.. that was just extraordinary. I mean the whole.. I mean for about half an hour this area was just reverberating to the sound of gunfire and the police, the soldiers, you can't do anything… no one can do anything about it. SOLDIER: This station itself is used to a 118 IPs. We have a total of 48 here at this station. It is going to take more larger amounts of people on the ground in order to stop these type of activities. REPORTER: When are you going to get these extra people? SOLDIER: I have no idea. BERNARD KERIK Coalition Provisional Authority If you want a safer and more secure environment then do something about it. You can't just say well it's all the Americans and all Britain's fault. We're losing people protecting the lives of Iraqis, many of whom aren't doing anything to protect themselves. REPORTER: But you… Britain and America are legally bound under the Geneva Convention to restore law and order. KERIK: Well we're doing that. We're doing that. What do you think, it happens overnight? People here, they want it done in 120 days, and they want it done without any infrastructure, any, zero, like no police stations, no cars, no telephones, no internet, no technology, none. No forensic people, no papers to write a report on, and if we had the paper we don’t have a desk and a chair to sit at. REPORTER: Reggie Harris and his men will be in Iraq until next year. Thousands of others who fought the war are still waiting to go home. Today's Pentagon favours a lean, high-tech military using the minimum number of troops. But in Washington there are now those who are convinced that America came into Iraq with a force large enough to win the war but too small to secure the peace. A lot of these soldiers will be away from their families for at least a year. Reggie Harris is about to miss a milestone in the life of any first time parent. REGGIE HARRIS: I miss em.. you know.. definitely, and I'm definitely going to miss his 6th birthday and I'm going to miss him going to school and getting first day.. his first day at school now, and I told my wife if by some chance.. you know.. I don’t make it out of here, and I don’t make it back to him, you just keep telling him that daddy always told him to accomplish the mission, you know.. and tell my soldiers that now. But I tell her to tell him that, and whatever he put his mind to, you know.. he'll accomplish it and he'll do it regardless of what anybody else tell him, he'll accomplish the mission (controlled voice – visible tears) you know.. and I just… I just pray that I make it out and I can tell him that myself. But he's going to be alright. I know God is watching over him and he's going to be alright. He's going to be fine. REPORTER: On the battalion are professional and highly committed soldiers who believe fervently in the US cause in Iraq. But the methods some American soldiers are using in this highly volatile and fragile environment raise questions about their suitability as peacekeepers. Last month Thunder got another tip- off. A man suspected of being behind a recent attack on the battalion was in hospital. He'd been shot and his condition was thought to be critical. Thunder dispatch a team. Major SCOTT PATTON Head of Operations "Thunder Battalion" If it turns out that we have and we can keep him alive to try to get some more intelligence from him, it'll be a pretty significant find for us. PATTON: (arriving at hospital) How you been? SOLDIER: I'm doing fine sir. PATTON: What kind of condition is he in? SOLDIER: He don’t look too good sir. PATTON: Not looking good? Okay. Alright. I'm going to go check out your patient. Okay? REPORTER: In fact the man Thunder's head of operations is about to interrogate has been shot in the stomach in a gunfight near his home. PATTON: Okay, we're going to ask him some questions. Tell him that if he cooperates with us we might be able to save his life. (translated) PATTON: Because we have very good doctors. Okay? But tell him if he doesn't cooperate with us…. INTERPRETER: He's dead. PATTON: Yes, it's bad for him, it's bad for his health. Tell him that. (translated) PATTON: Tell him I need to know who else was with him the day he shot an RPG at US forces on Haifa Street. (translated) PATTON: Tell him if he's lying then he's going to piss me off really bad. Eight other people have mentioned your name and your brother's name. I'm not…. Look at me, I'm not stupid, okay? I'm not stupid. And it's going to… we're going to help you if you help us. If you don’t help us you can forget it. Okay? We came here to help you. Alright? So it behoves you to give help. Alright. Come on. (To reporter) He's lying. They all do. Well I mean when you have 12 other sources and they're all independent and they're not interlinked so it's not like a family feud… Most of them are very scared to tell the truth and I don’t think he… he looks like he's in pretty decent shape so he doesn't look like… REPORTER: Has he been… he's been shot, has he? PATTON: Yes. Looks like it's somewhere in the abdomen. We're going to have our doc check him out in a minute and then what we'll do is we'll take him back to the… REPORTER: After the interview, if he doesn't cooperate, what's going to happen to him? PATTON: We're still going to… ah… I mean.. we'll still give him medical care, I mean that's… you know.. that's our way. But we're going to put him in jail. He'll eventually give us information. REPORTER: After Thunder's medics have examined him, the patient, now detainee, is given the all clear to be moved. He'll be handed over to the military police for more questioning. As Scott Patton and his team move out, the man's mother is left bewildered, not knowing what will happen to her son. PATTON: We've always tried to use approach of.. you know.. the carrot and the stick. We're going to be very polite and nice and you've seen our soldiers be that way. And then if somebody gives us a reason to be ugly, we'll be ugly. REPORTER: One tactic the American troops employ in Iraq is the cordon and search operation. In this case a whole section of Thunder's neighbourhood has been sealed off. It's 2 o'clock in the morning and 600 troops have been brought in to search every single home for any evidence of paramilitary activity. But so far no weapons have been found. REPORTER: Are you concerned that you could do more damage by these house to house raids ultimately because you're not… I mean you haven't found weapons. PATTON: No, but as you see, we engage the people, we tell them why we're here, and most of them have been pretty receptive. REPORTER: In the past such raids such raids have yielded important weapon finds and paramilitaries have been detained. But the whole process is driven often by low grade intelligence and as a result the raids are very hit and miss. It's all eerily reminiscent of what happened in Belfast in the early days of the troubles. As for the detainees, questions have been raised about their treatment. The use of hoods, we were told, is so that they don’t try to escape on their way back to the base. And this is what awaits them when they get there – a temporary detention centre where, with their hands still cuffed and with no access to bedding or chairs – they'll have to spend the rest of the night. What do you think of the conditions in which people are being arrested? They're being hooded, taken off to barbed wire compounds, made to sit in these compounds for hours on end. SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO August 2003 UN Special Envoy in Iraq Unnecessarily rough. I have made that point. Then again, not always respecting, often not respecting local sensitivities, the culture and religion, and that is unnecessary because I presume you can achieve the same purpose by displaying more respect for local traditions and local culture. REPORTER: Are the soldiers using excessive force? PAUL BREMER Head of Coalition Provisional Authority I don’t think so. I think they do their very best. Their rules of engagement are very clear. They do their very best to avoid unnecessary force, and I think while there are mistakes as there always are in any kind of combat situations, on the whole they're doing a very good job. REPORTER: For all the criticism and for all the set backs there has bee significant progress in Iraq. The new power sharing, governing council offers a tantalising glimpse of what both occupiers and occupied ultimately desire, a democratic Iraq. As their holidays near an end, in October Iraq's children will be back at school. Universities will also open. A new press has been born with 150 newspaper titles heralding new freedoms of speech. Baghdad is finally being cleaned up, and although the bulk of the reconstruction work has yet to be done, smaller projects are beginning to appear across the city. BREMER: I think we have made enormous progress in the last three months. We've carried out several thousand reconstruction programmes. The larger projects which take a little time to get cranked up are now beginning to show progress, particularly in the area; reconstructing roads, bridges, airports and of course the power system. These are big projects which require time to get worked up and you don’t spend hundreds of billions of dollars overnight. REPORTER: But undermining all of these advances is the constant problem of security – or lack of it. One morning we went into the centre of Baghdad to film a shop selling an item previously banned under Saddam, the TV satellite dish, now one of many defining images of the new Iraq. But then, an hour later, on our return to the shop, we found this – the area, one of the city's most affluent neighbourhoods had become a battle zone, and the TV satellite shop we'd filmed earlier was now being pulverised by heavy cannon and machinegun fire. A group of American soldiers had just taken a hit on one of their vehicles and they decided to hit back with another overwhelming show of force. But this was a busy shopping district and in the confusion the soldiers opened fire on a group of onlookers. (devastating scenes of those shot and grief stricken relative) REPORTER: Since the end of the war, how many Iraqis have been killed by American soldiers? PAUL BREMER: I don’t really know. I don’t know. I don’t keep numbers. It's been a very restricted number and it's been in fact what… it's.. it's a… it follows on, probably the war that killed the fewest civilians and did the least collateral damage of any war in history. SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO: You occupy with a military force but you can't restore law and order with the military. This is why an occupation cannot last. This is why occupation is, by definition, good for the short-term – if it is good at all as a matter of fact. I don’t think it is. It think it is anachronistic. But since this country is occupied, the occupation should be kept as short as possible, particularly when it comes to the security sector. REPORTER: Is too much being asked of the military in this reconstruction period? Major SCOTT PATTON 27th Field Artillery Regiment Who else will do it? REPORTER: Civilians, could bring in civilians from the United Nations, give the United Nations a bigger role. PATTON: Yeah, this could. But if you look at.. if there's one organisation in the world that could make this happen, you're looking at 'em. Not me but the US Army. REPORTER: Iraq is fragmented but determined resistance movement has grown bolder in its public defiance of the occupiers. By August the coalition's insistence that these remained principally diehard Ba'athists looked increasingly unconvincing. In these propaganda videos the majority of fighters claim they were killing on behalf of Islam and not Saddam. And at the street level the men of Thunder Battalion now realise they're facing a very different threat to the one they first encountered. PATTON: Okay, what have we got? REGGIE HARRIS: (holding up document for filming) Osama Bin Laden, this is ?? word tracing. REPORTER: A picture of Osama Bin Laden. The irony of such an image will not be lost on Washington and London. PATTON: Why do they have Osama Bin Laden pictures in their house? REPORTER: Few things could undermine the coalition's sense of victory more than the realisation that their war may now be helping to swell Bin Laden's movement. PATTON: (to Iraqi captive) I've been hearing some bad things about you. (Translated) PATTON: That you want to plan attacks. REPORTER: In Washington some officials are now describing Iraq as a magnet for Al-Qaeda. Last month a US military commander in Iraq conceded that the foreign fighters who've entered the country since the end of the war may have links to Al-Qaeda. The changing nature of Iraq's resistance was illustrated all too clearly last month when a car bomb ripped apart the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. Eleven people were killed and fifty injured. The sophistication and sheer scale of the attack represented a whole new terrorist threat. Is there a danger of the coalition getting trapped into a prolonged guerrilla war here? PAUL BREMER Head of Coalition Provisional Authority No. (long pause) REPORTER: That's it? BREMER: What's your next question? REPORTER: Well at this rate America is going to be stuck in Iraq for a long time. I mean you do not have the security situation under control. American soldiers are being killed every week. PAUL BREMER Head of Coalition Provisional Authority I fundamentally disagree with you. We do have the security situation under control. We have a problem of security in a small area of the country from Baghdad north to Tikrit where we are taking casualties, and every one of those casualties is a tragedy but the level of casualties is not substantial. We will of course be here a long time. We've always said we'd be here a long time. We will be here until the job is done. SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO August 2003 UN Special Envoy to Iraq We're all betting on a successful transition from the Saddam Hussein era to a democracy, a stable, united, peaceful Iraq that no longer threatens its neighbours as Saddam did for so long. And if this fails, obviously no one can predict what the architecture of the Middle East will look like. REPORTER: And if it were to fail? DE MELLO: I can't predict. I don’t have a crystal ball but it would be bad for Iraq. This country could turn into a true and long-term anarchy which by necessity would affect its neighbours and the region as a whole. REPORTER: 48 hours later Sergio Vieira de Mello was sitting in the same office when a truck, laden with explosives, drove into the UN compound; 22 people were killed in the attack including Sergio Vieira de Mello. (on site) About an hour ago a massive car bomb ripped out a corner of the building here and the casualties are coming out, they're being airlifted off to field hospitals and this is the United Nations which is here, it has one agenda, that is to help rebuild this country. Why anyone would target it in this fashion is baffling. What made the attack so surprising was that the UN always stated explicitly that it wanted to end the occupation as quickly as possible. But perhaps this was more of a message to America and everyone else willing to help them, a reminder of just how vulnerable they are in this part of the Middle East. What possible motivation could there be for an attack on the United Nations? BERNARD KERIK Coalition Provisional Authority (May-Sept 2003) Well it's obviously people that don’t want us to succeed. It's people that don’t… you know.. it's the same people that's fighting the coalition, fighting the resistance, they've got to learn – we're not leaving. The coalition is not leaving. The coalition is not going to be intimidated nor is the United Nations and they can speak for themselves. The bottom line is, this is the same type of people that's fighting the coalition that is doing this. They're cowards. REPORTER: Washington is now coming to terms with the fact that Iraq has become a common battlefield, not just for those wanting to end the occupation but also for the multitude of foreign fighters who've spotted a new arena for waging their Jihad against America. Earlier this week the UN's Baghdad office was bombed again. Nineteen people were injured, one killed. As a result the UN has decided to further reduce its international staff in Iraq, prompting many of the remaining aid agencies to reconsider their position. And in America there are some who are now calling for the troops to come home too. Some people in the States are advocating a withdrawal from Iraq. Is it time to cut and run? BREMER: Not at all, and I wouldn't pay very much attention to those voices. The American people have undertaken with the British and our other coalition allies here a noble exercise and we will see it through. REPORTER: On Friday the Pentagon announced the deployment of an extra 10,000 troops to Iraq. That Iraq has the potential to lead the Arab world one day as a wealthy, secure democracy is not in doubt. But as the debate at the UN this week has shown, the world is still divided on how the country should get there. America now wants help in Iraq but its reluctance to relinquish its dominant role in the country remains a hurdle for many nations who could offer support. And all the time in Iraq the patience of a grateful but hugely expectant people is wearing thin. Before we left the country at the end of August, we returned to one of Baghdad's busiest hospitals just over a mile away from Thunder Battalion. I mean this is extraordinary. We're back in emergency of Koran Hospital and it's empty, there are no doctors. It's empty! Look at it! That's the men's ward – absolutely empty. The women's ward – that's empty. It's extraordinary. The doctors have just vanished. Local residents suffering from repeated blackouts had tapped into the hospital's already struggling generator and caused a complete collapse of the system. No electricity – no power. One of the city's largest hospitals empty and unusable. While we were there we met one of the hospitals transplant surgeons, a man like so many inside and outside Iraq, is not counting the price of victory. What do you think of the coalition at the moment, progress being made? Dr HOTHAME KHALID Now the Iraqi people they are counting days. They have been here for two months – okay. They have been here for three months – okay. They have been four months – that's okay too. But when they have been here for five or six months you can expect explosion here. (Sounds of gunfire) KHALID: You can see now – gunfire. REPORTER: Would you ever take up arms against the American troops? KHALID: Yes. Yes. In the right moment – yes. REPORTER: Why would you take a gun to the Americans if you felt the time was right? KHALID: This is something built inside me. I cannot tolerate occupationists. I cannot tolerate something that break my freedom. You see the Americans are playing with dangerous traits in the Iraqi personality now. They are putting the nose of Iraqi people to the earth and this is a very dangerous point. REPORTER: But they came here to give you your freedom. They freed you from Saddam Hussein. KHALID: Well that's what keep my mouth shut for the moment. _________ INSIDE GUANTANAMO 5th October 10:15pm Next week, Panorama goes inside the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and tracks down suspects who've now been released. With special military trials about to start, can this system of justice ever be fair. You can find out more and comment on tonight's programme by visiting our newly designed website: www.bbc.co.uk/panorama CREDITS Reporter ANDY DAVIES VT Editor BOYD NAGLE Colourist GEOFF HOCKNEY Dubbing Mixer Rowan Jennings Production Co-ordinator EMMA HILL Production Assistant SOPHIE LHERNOULT Web Producer ADAM FLINTER Film Research KATE REDMAN SUE MALDEN Research AMANDA VAUGHAN-BARRATT Graphic Design KEY YIP LAM ALEX NEWBERRY Production Manager GINNY WILLIAMS Unit Manager LAURA GOVETT Additional Filming EUGENE MCVEIGH Film Editor ANDY KEMP Producer DARREN KEMP Deputy Editors ANDREW BELL SAM COLLYNS Editor MIKE ROBINSON Deputy Editors Clive Edwards Karen O’Connor Editor Mark Robinson 17 _____________________________________________________________________ ________________________ Transcribed: 1-Stop Express Tel: 020 7724 7953 Fax: 020 7402 8434 E-mail: onestopexpress@hotmail.com