Yuman spends year with Iraqi legal system

Although the work being done by the Law and Order Task Force has gone mostly unnoticed here in this country, Yuma attorney and former prosecutor Conrad Mallek says he knows the year he spent in Iraq was important, as part of it was crucial in helping to restore the war-torn country's legal system.

Mallek, who spent nearly 20 years with the Yuma County Attorney's Office, served as a civilian contractor with the task force for 12 months from June 4, 2008 until June 4, 2009.

"The task force's job was essentially to get the Iraqi judicial system going again so it could conduct investigations into major crimes and hold trials," said Mallek, who also retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in March 2004 after spending 12 years on active duty and another 16 years as a reservist. "Things are moving along really well over there now."

For his work, Mallek was awarded the Commander's Award for Civilian Service. He also received a Certificate of Appreciation from the ambassador to Iraq as well as a plaque from Assistant Attorney General Lanny Bruer of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Mallek said Iraq's legal system fell apart at the start of the war in 2003 and continued to deteriorate through the years as the war progressed. Civilian and military authorities, he said, realized that something had to be done to get it up and going again.

"I would sometimes go to the holding cells and talk to the prisoners," Mallek said. "One of them told me he had been held for four years for assault because he got into a fistfight at a wedding."

The solution — the Law and Order Task Force — was an idea presented to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, when he took command in February 2007. His staff judge advocate, Col. Mark Martins, liked the idea, and his backing helped make the task force a reality.

The task force was established at Forward Operating Base Shield  in Baghdad’s Rusafa district, near what is known as the Green Zone. The Baghdad Police College, the Rusafa prison and the Ministry of Interior headquarters were all in the same location, Mallek said.

It wasn't exactly the safest place to be either. Mallek said that the forward operating base was actually between the Green Zone and Sadr City, which was occupied by terrorists.

"Whenever the terrorists fired a mortar into the Green Zone, it would go over the base," Mallek said. "Sometimes they would come up short and we would get one."

Mallek said he was first contacted about joining the task force in late 2007 when a longtime friend he knew from the Marine Corps named Bill Gallo was appointed to be its director.

After three interviews with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Mallek left the Yuma County Attorney's Office just a month short of his 20-year anniversary to take a position on the task force.

"I was looking for something else to do. At first I had to get my wife's approval."

Mallek said he didn't think his wife would let him take the job because it was going to be dangerous and it would take him away from her and their four young children. But she did.

"She was really supportive. She said if I wanted to go do it that I should."

Although being away from his family for such a lengthy period of time was a hardship, Mallek said he was able to come home three times during the year he was in Iraqi.

"That was an enormous benefit. The traveling was tough, but it was good to be able to do that."

The job also entailed very long hours. Mallek said they were supposed to get a half-day off a week and one day a month, but it never happened. There was just too much work that needed to be done.

"All you do is work," he said.

Mallek's first job on the task force was as assistant director of the Investigative Support Unit, where he was in charge of three investigative teams.

"Traveling was the worst part of the job, and the investigative teams did a lot of traveling. You would have to wear a flak jacket and helmet when traveling."  

Mallek said he had three investigative teams composed of military and civilian attorneys, paralegals and investigators working for him. Most of them were Americans, he said, but some of the attorneys and investigators were from Great Britain and Australia.

The military investigators were from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and Navy masters-at-arms who receive special training to be investigators. The federal agents represented the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

In November 2008, Mallek became the leader of the Defense Bar Initiatives, which is a sort of public defenders office for the Iraqi detainees.  

In addition to being in charge of 25 Iraqi defense attorneys, Mallek administered a $900,000 federal grant.

The Rusafa Defense Clinic was located inside Rusafa prison, the largest in Iraq.

"We did a lot of training of Iraqi attorneys," Mallek said. "We trained them in things such as fingerprinting, writing motions, interview techniques and computers."

Iraq's legal system had many problems at the time, foremost being the large amount of detainees whose backlogged cases still needed to be processed to conclusion. All 8,000 of those cases were eventually processed and went on to trial, Mallek said.

Mallek said all of the cases were handled under Iraqi law, which calls for the main phase of recording evidence to take place before the trial. An investigative judge questions witnesses and prepares a report for the panel of judges to review.

Now, Mallek said, almost all the jails in Baghdad are within international standards for prisoner capacity.

Mallek said he really didn't get scared until the last two or three weeks he was there. With only a few days before he was to come home, he was told their trip to the prison was being delayed because an improvised explosive device had been placed along their route.

"They never found anything, but we wound up not going to the prison that day. You couldn't take any alternative routes because there is only one way to get there."

Mallek said the task force asked him to extend his contract but he declined. "I told them I would do a year and that is what I did."

Now, in an effort to expand on the progress of the Law and Order Task Force, military and civilian authorities are looking at building five similar task forces across the country.