Documents detail life under dictator.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis

Like the Nazi Regime, Saddam Hussein and his ruling Baath party kept meticulous, thorough records on everything from payoffs to tribal leaders to quotas for cheering crowds in attendance at Hussein's birthday celebrations.

After British and U.S. military forces gained control over Basra and began searching the Mother of All Battles Branch of Iraq's ruling Baath party, they found thousands of documents revealing details about life in Iraq under Hussein. At the chief party headquarters in Iraq's second-largest city, officials kept copious files on every comrade in their ranks, tracked thousands of army deserters, and passed on intelligence warnings about spies and saboteurs. One hand-drawn map that was found indicated the location of "traitors in the city's marshes."

The Washington Post reported that no detail was too small to escape the party's attention--from making sure women showed up at military parades to determining the location of machine guns to defend local party buildings. The documents offer a grim portrait of a regime that ruled with money and intimidation. The records left behind reveal the weaknesses of Hussein's regime, including a lack of food and water for Iraqi troops and a failure to meet recruiting quotas. Army deserters were perhaps the single biggest preoccupation, as revealed by hundreds of pages that document the party's payoffs to guards who caught deserters. The files show that the Baath party released false statistics on military recruits, employed an elaborate ranking system for paying...