US intelligence and military police officers in Iraq are routinely freeing dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
In one case where the Independent has seen documents, police rescued a doctor after a gun battle with his kidnappers and arrested two of the kidnap gang, who made full confessions. But US military police took over custody of the two men and let them go. The doctor had to flee to Egypt after being threatened by the gang.
~Same as it ever was. Ironically this is standard operating procedure for all police departments. How else could police reward and cultivate informants if they couldn't keep them out of jail? (Or be able to hold the threat of jail over them?) More importantly how would police solve most crimes without a network of criminal informants? (One might also note that organized crime owes alot to the relationships built up over time between police and informants but that's not (yet) the issue here.)
The problem in Iraq is that USAs military police have little interest in Iraqi civilian police matters. A threatened doctor means nothing to an organization that has its own doctors.
In most of the world doctors are important, innocent civilians matter. Local cops have a vested interest in protecting valued citizens and rarely must they defer to military or intelligence police, especially those of an occupying country.
A few more terrorist attacks inside the US and a federal/military police presence like that in Iraq could become a reality here too.