A Bradley Fighting Vehicle keeps guard at a gas station in Tikrit, Iraq, Wednesday May 14, 2003. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)
Posted on 05/14/2003 6:44:12 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Under pressure to impose order in the lawless Iraqi capital, the U.S. military on Wednesday defended its law-enforcement efforts and said it was "aggressively targeting" looters.
The officials denied, however, a published report that the American military had new orders to shoot looters on sight.
"We're not going to go out and shoot children that are picking up a piece of wood out of a factory and carrying it away or a bag of cement," Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad.
"Our soldiers have the right to defend themselves and have. And if a looter is carrying a weapon and the soldier feels threatened, of course he is going to engage," Blount said. "We are aggressively targeting looters."
Blount said arrested looters now were being held for about three weeks, as opposed to two days previously. He said 600 captured looters were held in a temporary jail at Baghdad International Airport.
Looters who carried a weapon, he said, would be kept in jail until Iraq's courts were working and ready to deal with the alleged criminals.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the 49,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad would increase their efforts to keep order.
"The one thing central to success is security. We have a full-court press on that," Rumsfeld told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. "The forces there will be using muscle to see that the people who are trying to disrupt what is taking place in that city are stopped and are either captured or killed."
Rumsfeld said two-thirds to three-quarters of Baghdad is stable, but acknowledged that many criminals take to the streets at night. He said most of the country's jails were emptied during the war.
An additional 15,000 American troops would arrive in Iraq within the next three weeks, Rumsfeld said.
Since Monday, 200 Iraqis have been arrested for criminal acts, said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground forces.
Blount and McKiernan made their remarks at a joint news conference in Baghdad's Conventions Hall. The room, once home to Saddam Hussein's rubber-stamp parliament, was plunged into darkness halfway through the session - a stark reminder of the formidable challenges facing the two officers as they work to restore services to Baghdad more than a month after the war ended.
McKiernan said overall security in the city was improving, but he acknowledged unemployment among young Iraqi men was feeding resentment of U.S. forces.
He also said holdouts from Saddam's Baath party and the Saddam Fedayeen, a militia led by the former leader's son Odai, remained a security threat and was targeting repair work already completed.
McKiernan said he and L. Paul Bremer, who took over Monday as chief civilian administrator for Iraq, were working on a policy to regulate the possession of firearms by Iraqis. He did not elaborate.
Before the news conference, local U.N. agency heads told Bremer in Baghdad that security must be reinforced quickly to protect food supplies and other elements of postwar recovery. The top U.N. humanitarian official in Baghdad said equipment at water plants, for example, remained vulnerable to gangs of thieves, threatening restoration of clean water service.
"Our immediate concerns are related to security in the broad sense, law and order, not for us as persons, but for the society," Ramiro Lopes da Silva said after a one-hour meeting with Bremer.
In a brief statement, Bremer focused on a U.S. request that an unspecified amount of Iraqi oil revenues, held in a U.N.-administered escrow account, be put toward buying the winter wheat and barley that Iraqi farmers are now harvesting.
Since 1996, those funds have been used to buy food imports under the "oil-for-food" program, devised to provide for Iraq's humanitarian needs while the country remained under U.N. economic sanctions.
"Mr. da Silva has agreed that we should plan on the World Food Program to spend that money starting as early as next week" on the homegrown cereals, Bremer said.
Da Silva, however, said reinforced security was closely related to purchases of the Iraqi harvest, "so we can move money, and technicians can go around and make purchases."
Iraqi officials say food warehouses have been among the targets of pillagers who stripped government buildings, banks and other sites of everything from commodities to cash to electrical fixtures, shortly after U.S. troops took control of Baghdad on April 9.
Bremer's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance put out a call May 4 for Baghdad police officers to report back to duty, and so far an estimated 5,000 of 9,000 have.
The current numbers have not restored a sense of security in a city where people still openly loot and set fires, and where automatic gunfire resounds through the night.
Again, for the record. That story came from the New York Times.
"US Military Leader Denies He Beats His Wife"
Tsk, tsk.
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