US-led forces round up suspects ahead of Iraq elections

BAGHDAD (AFP) - US-led forces stepped up operations against insurgents, rounding up almost 50 suspects in raids ahead of the January 30 elections which the White House acknowledged will be far from perfect.
As the country prepared for its first free and fair elections in half a century, Washington conceded that it has wrapped up a fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction, which was the main rationale for the March 2003 war against Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime.
US and Iraqi forces are cracking down on rebels in a bid to thwart attacks on voters, officials and polling stations in the run-up to the vote, which Iraqi and US officials insist will go ahead despite the deadly insurgency.
The US military said Thursday that nearly 50 people have been detained in joint raids overnight, many of them in the town of Bajawan near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.
"The purpose was to kill or capture 17 known anti-Iraqi force members. The 17 wanted AIF members were captured along with 14 others," it said in a statement, adding that the raid also netted several assault rifles, 2,500 dollars and 18 vials of the drug atropine.
In Dhuluiya, near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit north of Baghdad, nine people were arrested, the military said. Another eight were rounded up in various operations around Baghdad and north of the capital which also uncovered weapons and explosives.
Separately a Turkish truck driver was gunned down by assailants Thursday near the rebel bastion of Samarra in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad, police said.
The unrelenting dose of daily car bombs and assassinations has forced a hard reality check on the White House and US-backed interim government.
Asked if he agreed with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that violence will make voting impossible in some areas of the war-torn country, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "We all recognize that the election is not going to be perfect."
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told an Egyptian newspaper the election would go ahead as planned on January 30 but conceded there would be problems in ensuring a nationwide vote.
"The elections will not be perfect, nor organised 100 percent. There will be problems but we will hold them because the majority of people want them."
The resistance movement has been fanned in part by widespread concern among the Sunni Arab elite, which dominated Saddam Hussein's regime and all previous Iraqi governments, that the new parliament will be dominated by the long-oppressed Shiite majority.
The elections are also expected to be the focus of talks in Paris between Iraqi interim President Ghazi al-Yawar and French President Jacques Chirac.
Meanwhile, McClellan also confirmed Washington's hunt for Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction has basically ended and that an interim report by top US arms inspector Charles Duelfer saying there are no weapons to be found will likely stand.
A report authored by Duelfer's Iraq (news - web sites) Survey group, which is to be released to the US Congress in the coming weeks, will resemble a September draft in which the weapons inspector said there were no such arms, the spokesman said.
The report contradicted one of US President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s chief reasons for the war that led to the toppling of Saddam in April 2003 and ushered in the current era of chaos.
Bush, meanwhile, told ABC television the invasion of Iraq was "absolutely" worth it, even though no weapons of mass destruction have been found.
In Texas, a witness at the trial of Specialist Charles Graner, the alleged reingleader of abuse of prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad, hailed the stacking up of naked detainees as "a creative technique" and said he too would have photographed it.
But the defense suffered several setbacks as witnesses it called denied that any orders had been given to conduct the kind of brutal beatings and sexual humiliations for which it is being court-martialed.
The New York Times reported that the White House put pressure on senators to block a legislative measure that would have stopped the CIA (news - web sites) from using extreme interrogation methods on suspected top-level terrorist suspects.
The measure, included in the intelligence reform bill, would have banned intelligence officials from using torture or inhumane treatment and required the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) as well as the Pentagon (news - web sites) to report to Congress about the interrogation methods they were using.
Under pressure from the prisoner abuse scandal involving US forces in Iraq, the United States has cracked down on extreme interrogation methods it had deemed acceptable in the war on terrorism, and has dropped a definition of torture limited to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."