ABSTRACT
The Iraq War had started several weeks earlier, and the US Government was nearing the likelihood of a military occupation of Iraq. At the Kuwaiti Hilton, in Kuwait City, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, US Army was busily preparing to travel up to Baghdad to assist in the post-conflict planning effort. By the time of the Iraq War, it was generally believed that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been massacred by Saddam's regime and were lying in mass graves throughout the country, with another million or so who had been tortured or imprisoned. The human rights abuses began shortly after the 1968 coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein, which brought the Ba'ath Party to power. Today, the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights and the IHT both are still providing human rights and transitional justice assistance to the Iraqi people.
