Germany Investigating Iraq, Al-Qaeda Link, DPA
Al-Qaeda-Iraq link being investigated in Germany, report says Wed Feb 5 2003 13:11:03 ET Munich, Germany (dpa) - Federal investigators in Germany are looking into a possible threat of attacks by a Jordanian linked by the United States to the Iraqi regime, according to a published report. The report, due to hit newsstands in Thursday's edition of Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, says investigators believe Abu Mossab Al Zarqawi was planning assassinations and other attacks in Europe. The 36-year-old terrorist is believed to be the ``operative head'' of the El Tawhid group which planned attacks in Germany last year. The United States believes he may be a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. German investigators base their suspicions on evidence obtained during raids last April on El Tawhid suspects in several German cities. The raids netted videos, forged identity papers, computers and mobile phones. Germany's Chief Prosecutor Kay Nehm said at the time that ``evidence pointed to'' impending attacks on targets in Germany. The newspaper report says investigators turned up evidence in the form of bugged phone calls and eyewitness testimony by a mole who worked for both sides, all of it implicating Zarqawi directly. A mole was quoted as saying Zarqawi had called him the previous year from a hideout in Iran and had ``ordered'' him to carry out attacks in Germany in retaliation for Israeli incursions in the West Bank and Gaza. The attacks were to target ``Israeli installations'' in Germany such as synagogues. The mole was quoted as being told by Zarqawi that Germans were to be spared if possible, but that Jewish blood must be shed.
NY Sun: Key White House Iraq Aide is Out
The New York Sun February 7, 2003 Key White House Iraq Aide Is Out Miller and Leverett Of CIA Will Leave By ADAM DAIFALLAH Staff Reporter of the Sun WASHINGTON - In what appears to be the beginning of a significant personnel shakeup at President Bush's National Security Council, a key aide on Iraq, Ben Miller, has departed. Members of the free Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein had criticized Mr. Miller,who was on loan to the NSC from the Central Intelligence Agency, for what they said was a hostility toward Iraqi democrats and President Bush's policy of a democratic future for Iraq. The Bush administration has been criticized for what some say is a slow pace in planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. Mr. Miller previously worked on the Iraq file at the CIA. The agency has tried without success for years to foment coups to remove Saddam from power. The NSC shakeup comes as Mr. Bush continued to heat up his rhetoric on Iraq, the State Department issued a warning for Americans abroad that new attacks using chemical or biological weapons could occur, and the Homeland Security Department said it is considering raising the threat level to orange - the second highest on a six-level scale. It is not clear whether Mr. Miller was fired or left on his own volition, but his departure comes at a critical time as America and its allies prepare for a war to liberate Iraq and as Iraqi opposition figures prepare to establish a provisional government to take power after Saddam's ouster. Another NSC staffer on loan from the CIA is also leaving. Flynt Leverett was a senior director for Middle East Initiatives and an advocate of Mr. Bush's roadmap for Arab-Israeli peace. The departures are being interpreted as a sign that Elliott Abrams, the NSC' s recently appointed senior director for Near East, Southwest Asian and North African affairs with responsibility for Arab-Israeli issues, is exerting his influence. There is also speculation that Hillary Mann, a National Security Council director under Mr.Abrams who is on loan from the State Department, is on her way out as well. Ms. Mann is Mr. Leverett's fiancée. A spokesman for the NSC, Michael Anton, confirmed Messrs. Miller and Leverett's departures and said he did not have information on potential replacements. It's part of usual staff turnover. NSC staff comes and goes, Mr. Anton said. Sources familiar with the NSC say Mr. Miller's exit was unplanned.One conservative close to the administration characterized it as a late-night departure. An expert on Iraq who follows the Iraqi opposition movement, Laurie Mylroie, called Mr. Miller's leaving very important. You need people there who will carry out the administration's policies. He was reflecting the CIA's position, which is to be hostile to a democratic future for Iraq, Ms. Mylroie said. Meanwhile, in his clearest signal yet that time is running out for a peaceful solution to the conflict, Mr. Bush said that world leaders must not back down from Saddam Hussein and demanded quick action to disarm the Iraqi dictator. Saddam Hussein was given a final chance, Mr. Bush said, referring to the resolution approved unanimously in November by the Security Council that launched new U.N. inspections. He is throwing that chance away. The game is over, Mr. Said. Saddam Hussein will be stopped. Mr.Bush said he would welcome a second U.N.resolution on Iraq,following up on one approved last November, but only if it led to prompt disarmament. Britain is likely to introduce such a resolution authorizing force after top weapons inspectors return from Baghdad and report to the Security Council on February 14, British and American diplomats said. Unlike Britain, France has balked at the idea of war, and Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, French ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday, the time has not come for a second resolution. The Security Council must not back down when those demands are defied and mocked by a dictator, Mr. Bush said. If the U.N. fails to act,The United States, along with a growing coalition of nations, is resolved to take whatever action is necessary to defend ourselves and disarm the Iraqi regime, he said. At the United Nations at New York, the Iraqi representative, Mohammed Al-Douri, said of Mr. Bush, It sounds like he wants a resolution for war. In Baghdad, an Iraqi arms expert submitted to a private interview with U.N. weapons inspectors, the first sign of cooperation in that area. Secretary of State Powell appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday where he said that the creation of a democratic regime in Iraq could fundamentally reshape the Middle East and make it easier to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. That's the language normally used by the more hawkish officials at the Pentagon, who want to use a liberated, democratic Iraq as a catalyst for a democratic chain reaction in the Middle East,where dictators govern almost all nations. But in the last few weeks
Rumsfeld, Munich Conference Speech
There is a momentous fact of life that we must come to terms with and it is the nexus between weapons of mass destruction, terrorist states and terrorist networks. On September 11th, terrorist states discovered that missiles are not the only way to strike Washington-or Paris, or Berlin or Rome or any of our capitals. There are other means of delivery-terrorist networks. To the extent a terrorist state transfers weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, they could conceal their responsibility for an attack. To this day, we still do not know with certainty who was behind the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. We still do not know who was responsible for the anthrax attacks in the United States. The nature of terrorist attacks is that it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to identify those responsible. And a terrorist state that can conceal its responsibility for an attack certainly would not be deterred. United States Department of Defense News Transcript On the web: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2003/t02082003_t0208sdmunich.html Media contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or +1 (703) 697-5131 Public contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or +1 (703) 428-0711 Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Saturday, February 08, 2003 Secretary Rumsfeld Address to the Munich Conference on European Security Policy (Address to the Munich Conference on European Security Policy in Munich, Germany) Dr. Horst Teltschik, ministers, parliamentarians, distinguished guests, friends, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you so much. Horst, I'm delighted to be with you. Indeed it is most certainly not my first visit to this conference. I've come off and on over many decades. It's a particular pleasure to be back in Europe! I'm told that when I used the phase old Europe the other day, it caused a bit of a stir. I don't quite understand what the fuss is about. As I said at the time -at my age, I consider old a term of endearment. Like an old friend. As a matter of fact, you mentioned, I forget quite how you said I say things, but I'm told one of the German newspapers referenced the fact that my ancestors came from northern Germany and that it is an area known for plain, straight talk. One of the advantages of age, and I've got some, when you are as old as I am, you've seen a lot of history. I lived through our depression and World War II. A young man when the NATO Alliance was founded, the names Churchill, Roosevelt, Adenauer, Marshall and Truman were not figures I learned about from history, but leaders that we all followed over the years, as Europe drifted into war and then was lifted from the ashes of World War II. They helped build our transatlantic Alliance and fashioned it into a bulwark against tyranny and in defense of common values and our freedom. When the President appointed me Ambassador to NATO in the early 1970s, it was a defining moment in my life. I worked closely with dedicated and highly skilled diplomats such as Andre de Starke, the former dean of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, my close friend Francois de Rose, then the French Ambassador to NATO, Franz Krapf from the Federal Republic of Germany, and so many other very talented diplomats. None of us could have imagined then that NATO leaders would one day meet in Prague, where they would invite Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania to become members of the Atlantic Alliance. It is remarkable how Europe has changed just over the course of my lifetime. Thanks to NATO's efforts, the center of Europe has indeed shifted eastward-and our Alliance is stronger for it. Not only is the map of Europe being transformed, but so too is the map of the world. Out of the tragedy of September 11th came great responsibilities to be sure, but also unprecedented opportunities-to tear down calcified barriers left over from earlier eras and build new relationships with countries that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. And that is precisely what we have been doing in the global war on terror. Our coalition for the global war on terror today includes some 90 nations-almost half the world. It is the largest coalition in human history. We are fighting alongside old allies and new friends alike. (Whoops-there's that word old again.) Some are involved in the military effort in Afghanistan. Others are helping elsewhere in the world-in Asia, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa. Some are helping with stability operations; still others are providing basing, re-fueling, over-flight, and intelligence. Some are not participating in the military effort but are helping in the financial, diplomatic and law enforcement efforts. All of these are important and deeply appreciated by all nations committed to the global war on terrorism. As to Iraq, we still hope that force may not be necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein. If it comes to that; however, we already know that the same will hold true-some countries will
US War Plan: Shock Awe, Newsweek
Newsweek February 17, 2003 Boots, Bytes and Bombs The Pentagon calls it 'shock and awe.' Iraq will call it a nightmare. The military's new high-tech road map for taking out Saddam-and how he might fight back By John Barry and Evan Thomas Feb. 17 issue - It's called the E-bomb. Delivered by a cruise missile, the E-bomb is a warhead that explodes to emit a high-energy pulse that, like a bolt of lightning, will fuse any electrical equipment within range. THE E-BOMB HAS been more than a little temperamental in testing, and engineers would still like another year to work out the bugs, but on the first night of the war against Iraq, E-bombs will detonate over President Saddam Hussein's key command-and-control bunkers in and around Baghdad. If all goes according to plan, lights will blink out, computers will melt down, phones will go silent. Saddam and his lieutenants will be left shivering in silent darkness, alone and waiting to die. The desired effect of the first night's bombing, in the expression commonly used by military planners, is shock and awe. The overall goal of the American blitz against Iraq will be to so stun and demoralize the Iraqi Army that Saddam's forces will quickly give up. The Iraqis will realize that resistance is futile and throw down their weapons-or turn them on Saddam. In the first 48 hours of the attack, the United States armed forces are expected to rain some 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles on-Iraqi air defenses, command-and-control, WMD sites and leadership targets, which is to say they will try to kill Saddam, his sons and their closest followers. WHAT IF? But what if they miss? What if Saddam succeeds in going underground and fomenting a guerrilla war in the streets of Baghdad? (He is said to have several doubles; he could hang one, vanish, then come back from the dead.) What if Saddam hits back with chemical and biological weapons against American troops, Israel-or Washington or New York? What if Saddam does not patiently await his doom but decides to strike first? Because Saddam knows we're coming to get him this time, he will not be reluctant to use all the weapons at his disposal, says former White House national-security aide and retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, commander of U.S. Special Forces in the first gulf war. All the more reason to strike as hard and as quickly as possible. The U.S. invasion force will not be at full strength until mid-March, but an earlier rolling start is not out of the question. President George W. Bush and his war cabinet may want to paralyze Saddam before he can hit back-or execute some kind of Gotterdmmerung strategy, burning oil fields or gassing his own people. With all the war talk and the accelerating buildup of troops and forces, America cannot hope for true surprise. Rather, the battle planners are counting on a new kind of war to oust Saddam without wrecking Iraq in the process. It may be the first war of the Information Age. Battlefields are usually murky and chaotic. Troops get lost, orders are bungled, bombs go astray. Historically, American armies have tried to cut through the fog of war with brute force: by slowly, ponderously grinding down the enemy with overwhelming firepower. This war will be different, say the planners. They use buzzwords like simultaneity, agility and effects-based targeting. What they mean is the creation of a nimble force that can see the whole battlefield and act quickly, using its superior information and its high-precision firepower to strike deep and fast, enveloping and disabling enemy units before they can mount a coherent defense. The concepts, and the high technology to carry them out, have been in the works for some years. But they have never before been tested on such a grand scale. High-tech forces are smart, even brilliant. But they can also be fragile. Sandstorms can blind eye-in-the-sky satellites and crash helicopters, communication links can go down, and some of the new gizmos have never been battle-tested. Indeed, a run through for the war at Gen. Tommy Franks's new CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar last month was a blizzard of computer glitches. Gulf War II will bear only a superficial resemblance to Gulf War I. Many of the weapons will look the same: Abrams main battle tanks, Apache helicopters, F-14, -15, -16, -18 warplanes. But look a little closer. That odd black drum poised over the rotor shaft on the Apache is a new targeting system, called a Longbow, that allows the chopper to target 16 enemy tanks at once. That extra aerial sticking up from the Abrams is for GPS-Global Positioning System-which allows every vehicle commander to know precisely where he is. And the bombs hanging from the warplanes are JDAMS, equipped with minicomputers and GP systems to steer themselves within, on average, 10 feet of their targets. (In Gulf War I, less than 10 percent of bombs were smart; in Gulf War II, old-fashioned dumb bombs will account for less than a tenth of payloads.) OLD WAR,
Ed Epstein, Anthrax Letters 9-11
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/teamb/2.htm Ed Epstein Team B Analysis Team B Issue #2: The Case that the Anthrax Mailings Were Related to the 9-11 attacks On September 18th, 2001, one week after the aerial attack, an anonymous party mailed two letters containing dry anthrax bacteria to the New York Post and NBC. Two more letters were mailed 3 weeks later to U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle containing more lethal dosages of the same strain of anthrax. All four letters connected themselves to the aerial attack by beginning, in bold print, 09-11-01. The last two letters also stated We Have This Anthrax. But who is the We? After 16 months of investigation, the FBI has not solved the mystery. It did not find the person(s) who mailed the letters, the photocopier on which the messages were reproduced, the equipment for inserting the powdered anthrax into the envelopes, or the laboratory establishment where the anthrax was grown, dried and processed into a micron-sized weapon that aerosolized into a lethal mist. As of February 8, 2003, Secretary Of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the status of the investigtion: We still do not know who was responsible for the anthrax attacks in the United States. A possible explanation for this investigative failure is that the perpetrators and labs were not within the usual jurisdiction of the FBI. If so, the heading of 09-11-01 on all the letters may be relevant. Like the four 9-11 aerial attacks, the four anthrax letters presumably were aimed at damaging America. They all carried the message Death To America. If the attacks by separate aircrafts on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were assumed to be part of the same event by the government (and insurers), why exclude the possibility that the anthrax attacks were also part of that event- especially since they were labeled 09-11-01? To consider it as a part of the same conspiracy, three issues have to be addressed: 1) Did the parties that organized the aerial attacks have an interest in powdered anthrax? American intelligence, according to Secretary of State Powell, has established that al-Qaeda had demonstrated an interest in biological weapons over a year before the 9-11 attack. Powell stated in his UN speech that al- Qaeda prisoners revealed that Iraq had offered chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. Iraq, which had 35,000 liters of dry anthrax, certainly had the ability to provide what it offered. Even earlier than that offer, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, who merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad into al-Qaeda in 1998, had sought anthrax for use against US targets, according to the March 1999 statement of an al-Qaeda member who had been working for the Egyptian intelligence services. And he apparently got it. When Dr. Zawahari's home in Kabul was subsequently examined after the fall of the Taliban, it tested positive for anthrax. So al-Qaeda had the means as well as the intent of using anthrax. 2) Did the hijacking conspirators in America have any contact with anthrax bacteria? The first encounter with anthrax may have occurred in Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, three months before 9-11. In June 2001, Dr. Christos Tsonas examined an ugly black lesion on the leg of Ahmed Alhaznawi. Dr. Tsonas had not previously seen a black lesion of that type, and, at the time, was unable to identify the cause. Alhaznawi identified himself as a pilot, as did the friend who had brought him to the emergency room with the lesion. Dr. Tsonas prescribed an antibiotic for the infection which was found in Ahmed Alhaznawi's room after he was identified as one of the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93. In October 2001, after the first confirmed anthrax case, Dr. Tsonas was shown pictures of black lesions caused by anthrax by experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. He concluded from these photos and other information about anthrax that the lesion he had examined in June had been caused by handling anthrax. He stated for the record that the lesion was consistent with cutaneous (skin) anthrax. If so, Alhaznawi and his associate had lied to Dr. Tsonas to conceal their contact with anthrax bacteria. This would mean that at least two of the hijackers were involved in with anthrax bacteria. The proximity of these men's residences to the headquarters of American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, is also of interest. On October 2, 2001, Robert Stevens, an employee, died of anthrax. Although the anthrax proved to be the same strain as the subsequent letter, it could have been delivered to the building before or after September 11th (since the incubation period prior to symptoms can be up to a month). Because the entire 66,000 square foot office building was contaminated with anthrax spores, its point of origin is unknown. Nor do traces of anthrax found in local post offices solve the mystery since they could have been the result of cross-
Iraq intimidates Scientists, ABC News
ABC News February 10, 2003 Iraqi scientists remain tight-lipped in weapons inquiry. By Christopher Isham and Brian Ross Feb. 10 - In the last 10 days, United Nations inspectors have been given what are described as important, new and credible leads from a recent defector, who also told ABCNEWS that Iraqi scientists involved in the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program were systematically intimidated. The defector, interviewed by ABCNEWS in an undisclosed European country, is an engineer described as close to several of the weapons scientists who, he said, live in fear. Many of the scientists are eager to cooperate with the United Nations, but the intimidation is so effective that the scientists are terrified of meeting in private with the inspectors. One scientist who met with the inspectors this week was so frightened, it took an hour for him to stop shaking, according to U.N. sources. Iraqi scientists and researchers are under a lot of pressure and influence by the Iraqi authorities, the Iraqi defector told ABCNEWS. They were scared and threatened in different ways, including threatening to go after their families if they leave Iraq to meet with inspectors and going after their relatives if their families go with them and going after them even if they were in exile. For these reasons, the scientist or researcher becomes scared to tell the secrets, even though he knows it's a way to lift the difficult, miserable conditions the Iraqi people are living under. According to the Iraqi, many of the scientists involved in the weapons of mass destruction program are housed with their families at a secret compound in downtown Baghdad. In mid-October 2002, when it became clear that U.N. inspectors would be returning to Iraq, the security at the compound was upgraded substantially and the personnel elevated from low-level Iraqi police officers to members of the elite Special Security Organization, which is responsible for ensuring the loyalty of all security and military personnel, protecting the president and controlling the weapons of mass destruction launch platforms. Scientists Detained, 'Loyalty' Questioned At about the same time, a group of approximately seven to 10 scientists involved in the secret weapons of mass destruction programs were detained and taken to another secret location. These scientists were detained because their loyalties to the regime were in question. According to the Iraqi, the scientists were not permitted to communicate with their families. They went to their work as usual, as any other day, he said. They were detained there and taken to unknown places. Afterwards, their families were contacted and assured that they will return shortly and that they were in good condition. Most of the scientists were released between one to two months later. One of the scientists who was released in late November was killed in a mysterious automobile crash less than a week after he returned. The message to the other scientists was clear: This was a clear message from the Iraqi authorities to all scientists and researchers to stay away from the inspection teams and not to tell any secrets or give any piece of information that could harm the Iraqi government, said the Iraqi defector, because if they do, their fate would be the same as their colleague's. . . . Held Legally Responsible The Iraqi also revealed, for the first time, how the scientists were compelled to sign two documents. The first was a declaration that he would cooperate fully with the U.N. inspectors. The second declaration negates the first, obliging every Iraqi researcher and scientist not to cooperate with the U.N. teams and hide the information. If he causes any harm to the Iraqi authorities, he is considered legally responsible, said the defector. The first pledge is public and a copy is sent to the U.N., while the second is only for some Iraqi security agencies. The words legally responsible have a particular meaning in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The penalty: killing and torture and going after the family, even if in exile. American intelligence sources say this defector was one of those whose information was used in Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council last week. Powell said, Some of these sources have put their lives on the line to talk to us. . . . The Iraqi has been interviewed by U.S. intelligence officials who have found his story to be credible and have verified certain key details. The defector's information about the intimidation of the scientists is being pursued this week in Baghdad, according to U.N. sources.
Manila PNG's Iraq Diplomat for Abu Sayyaf Link, Reuters
Manila Expels Iraqi Diplomat It Linked to Rebels Wed Feb 12, 7:00 AM ET By Ruben Alabastro MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines ordered the expulsion of an Iraqi diplomat Wednesday for alleged links to Muslim radicals blamed for a bombing that killed a U.S. soldier and three Filipinos in October. Second Secretary Husham Husain was the second Iraqi diplomat in 12 years to be ejected by the Philippines. Foreign Secretary Blas Ople said he had summoned Iraqi charge d'affaires Samir Bolus and told him that Husain should leave within 48 hours. The Philippines today formally informed the Iraqi government that Second Secretary Husham Husain of the Iraqi embassy has ceased to enjoy the rights and privileges of a diplomat, Ople said in a statement. The embassy has earlier denied allegations that Husain was involved with members of Abu Sayyaf, a militant Muslim group which the United States has blacklisted as a terrorist organization. Ople said Husain was being expelled after the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency traced cellular phone calls from Abu Sayyaf members to the diplomat immediately after the bombing of a karaoke bar in Zamboanga City. He did not elaborate on why the Philippines was taking action now, more than four months after the bomb blast on Oct. 2. Husain and other embassy officials could not be reached for comment. Ople said Bolus, the charge d'affaires, did not question our decision, nor did he ask for the reasons. A U.S. special forces soldier and three Filipinos died in the bombing, which came 10 days before blasts on the Indonesian island of Bali killed more than 190 people, mostly tourists. Abu Sayyaf is mainly a kidnap-for-ransom gang which has preyed on foreigners, although it claims to fight for an Islamic state in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country. Asked by reporters whether Manila expected Iraq to expel a Philippine diplomat from Baghdad, Ople said: In matters like this, there is usually retaliation. The Iraqi embassy said in a statement Monday that no one of its staff did or will do any kind of communications with dissident groups. In 1991, the Philippines ordered the Iraqi embassy's first secretary to leave over alleged links to two Iraqi nationals accused of setting off a bomb at a library in central Manila run by the U.S. embassy. One of the two Iraqis was killed in the blast at the Thomas Jefferson Center, which came five months after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and triggered the Gulf War.
More on US Mishandling of Iraqi Opposition
IRAQ NEWS, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2003 I. PACHACHI SLAMS HAWKS, AFP, FEB 14 II. US COURTS PACHACHI, NYT, FEB 11 III. KUBBA OPPOSED IRAQ LIBERATION ACT, NY SUN, DEC 23 It is very hard to understand what the US is doing in regards to planning for a post-war Iraq. AFP reported yesterday that Adnan Pachachi--whom the White House enovy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, travelled to the United Arab Emirates to meet earlier this week--blasted as a 'Zioinst lobby' the hawks in the administration. Indeed, the NY Sun, Feb 12 (previously distributed), detailed Pachachi's views: an old-style Arab nationalist, essentially hostile to the US and its allies. The NYT, Feb 11, noted Pachachi's public declaration in 1961 that Kuwait was part of Iraq and had no right to exist independently, a position he held in 1991 and did not change until 1999, 38 years later. Among those who praised Pachachi to the NYT was Laith Kubba, who called Pachachi a voice of authority and wisdom. Kubba is another State Dep't favorite, as the NY Sun, Dec 23, explained. And who is Kubba? Once a member of the al-Dawa party, he opposed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Why should the US promote such individuals? Moreover, Kubba is, somewhat surprisingly, a grants officer at the National Endowment for Democracy. Some Iraqis have asked Iraq News whether there isn't some conflict between being a US official, responsible for distributing money to Iraqis, and, at the same time, seeking to be a figure within Iraqi opposition politics, which includes standing for election before a group of people, some number of whom may well hope that you'll okay their grant proposal? I. PACHACHI SLAMS HAWKS Iraqi exile Pachachi ready to serve post-Saddam Iraq February 14, 2003 Agence France-Presse ABU DHABI, Feb 14 (AFP) - Iraqi exile Adnan Pachachi said Friday he was ready to serve Iraq in the difficult transitional period the country might go through should the regime of Saddam Hussein be toppled. Pachachi, 80, told AFP he held talks in the United Arab Emirates, where he has lived for 30 years, on Tuesday with Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis. While denying having received a specific American offer, Pachachi pleaded that the United Nations mandate a civilian Iraqi leadership to manage Iraq during the transitional period. After or before the US offensive in Iraq, the UN Security Council should adopt a new resolution giving the UN secretary-general the ability to name a representative in Iraq to cooperate with the civilian Iraqi administration. Pachachi, a former Iraqi ambassador to the UN and foreign minister, blasted as a Zionist lobby the hawks in the administration of US President George W.Bush. This lobby is opposed to me playing any role (in Iraq), through the instigation of Ahmad Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress (INC) umbrella opposition group, Pachachi said. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Pachachi, who has Emirati nationality, is being considered by Washington to play a major role in post-Saddam Iraq. However, he is hindered by his 1961 statement that neighbouring Kuwait is a province of Iraq, a statement he only retracted in 1999. The octogenarian added that recognition of Israel was dependent on a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accepted by the Palestinians. II. US COURTS PACHACHI, NYT February 11, 2003 THE OPPOSITION Envoy's Effort to Recruit Iraqi Exile for Possible Future Government Sparks Protests By JUDITH MILLER WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition is quietly trying to recruit a former senior Iraqi official to help provide a transition to democracy in the event that Saddam Hussein is ousted, administration officials said today. But the effort by Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House envoy, to woo Adnan Pachachi, an octogenarian exile who once served as a foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations for Iraq, has sparked opposition within the administration and among other Iraqi exiles. Mr. Pachachi declared publicly in 1961 that Kuwait was part of Iraq and had no right to exist independently, a statement he renounced in 1999. Laith Kubba, another exile and a researcher at the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, defended Mr. Pachachi, calling him a voice of authority and wisdom and saying that he must be allowed to play a role. Mr. Khalilzad recently traveled to the United Arab Emirates to recruit Mr. Pachachi. But officials said that several Pentagon officials and Iraq experts had warned Mr. Khalilzad that the effort at this late stage would backfire politically and could alienate Kuwait, an essential base of operations in any gulf war. The outreach to Mr. Pachachi, a once ardent Arab nationalist and Sunni Muslim, the minority branch of Islam in Iraq, suggests that the United States is mainly interested in perpetuating the status quo in a post-Saddam
Kanan Makiya, Our Hopes Betrayed, Observer
IRAQ NEWS, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2003 I. KANAN MAKIYA, OUR HOPES BETRAYED, OBSERVER, FEB 16 II. IRAQI OPPOSITION SLAMS US PLAN, OBSERVER, FEB 16 I. KANAN MAKIYA, OUR HOPES BETRAYED Our hopes betrayed How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic Iraqis. Kanan Makiya Sunday February 16, 2003 The Observer The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities. The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government. The plan reverses a decade-long moral and financial commitment by the US to the Iraqi opposition, and is guaranteed to turn that opposition from the close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation. The bureaucrats responsible for this plan are drawn from those parts of the administration that have always been hostile to the idea of a US-assisted democratic transformation of Iraq, a transformation that necessarily includes such radical departures for the region as the de-Baathification of Iraq (along the lines of the de-Nazification of post-war Germany), and the redesign of the Iraqi state as a non-ethnically based federal and democratic entity. The plan is the brainchild of the would-be coup-makers of the CIA and their allies in the Department of State, who now wish to achieve through direct American control over the people of Iraq what they so dismally failed to achieve on the ground since 1991. Its driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate right to self-determine their future. In particular it is a plan designed to humiliate the Kurdish people of Iraq and their experiment of self-rule in northern Iraq of the last 10 years, an experiment made possible by the protection granted to the Kurds by the United States itself. That protection is about to be lifted with the entry into northern Iraq of much-feared Turkish troops (apparently not under American command), infamous throughout the region for their decades-long hostility to Kurdish aspirations. All of this is very likely to turn into an unmitigated disaster for a healthy long-term and necessarily special relationship between the United States and post-Saddam Iraq, something that virtually every Iraqi not complicit in the existing Baathist order wants. I write as someone personally committed to that relationship. Every word that I have committed to paper in the last quarter of a century is, in one way or another, an application of the universal values that I have absorbed from many years of living and working in the West to the very particular conditions of Iraq. The government of the United States is about to betray, as it has done so many times in the past, those core human values of self-determination and individual liberty. We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab and Middle Eastern brethren, over and over again, that American mistakes of the past did not have to be repeated in the future. Were we wrong? Are the enemies of a democratic Iraq, the 'anti-imperialists' and 'anti-Zionists' of the Arab world, the supporters of 'armed struggle', and the upholders of the politics of blaming everything on the US who are dictating the agenda of the anti-war movement in Europe and the US, are all of these people to be proved right? Is the President who so graciously invited me to his Oval Office only a few weeks ago to discuss democracy, about to have his wishes subverted by advisers who owe their careers to those mistakes? We, the democratic Iraqi opposition, are the natural friends and allies of the United States. We share its values and long-term goals of peace, stability, freedom and democracy for Iraq. We are here in Iraqi Kurdistan 40 miles from Saddam's troops and a few days away from a conference to plan our next move, a conference that some key administration officials have done everything in their power to postpone. None the less, after weeks of effort in Tehran and northern Iraq, we have prevailed. The meeting will take place. It will discuss a detailed plan for the creation of an Iraqi leadership, one that is in a position to assume power at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place. We will be opposed no doubt by an American delegation if it chooses to attend. Whether or not they do join us in the coming few days in northern Iraq, we will fight their attempts
Fury as Chirac threatens new EU states, Daily Telegraph
Daily Telegraph February 18, 2003 Fury as Chirac threatens new EU states By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels President Jacques Chirac made himself Europe's most unpopular leader at the emergency summit in Brussels last night, lashing out petulantly at the East European states that back the American policy on Iraq and inviting accusations of empty grandstanding from fellow EU leaders. In a stunning outburst after dinner, he made a veiled threat to block the accession of former Communist countries lining up to join the EU as a punishment for breaking ranks with France and Germany over the Iraqi crisis. He described the behaviour of the New Europe caste - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Estonia, Lithunia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia and Albania - as childish and dangerous. They missed a good opportunity to keep silent, he said, referring to their signatures on two sets of statements demanding that Saddam Hussein comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1441. These countries are very rude and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too quickly with the Americans. Their situation is very delicate. If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining the EU, they couldn't have chosen a better way, he added, reminding these governments that a referendum in any one EU state could still block the entire enlargement process. The comments caused consternation in Brussels where the 13 candidate states, including Turkey, were already fuming at having been disinvited from yesterday's dinner debate on Iraq. The snub was a result of a last-minute manoeuvre by Chancellor Schröder who feared that these Anglophone, Atlanticist, pro-American states would transform the gathering. Instead, they were fobbed off with a post-summit chat scheduled for this morning. M Chirac's wild language betrayed his frustration at the outcome of the summit, where most EU leaders brushed aside his attempts to take charge of events and dictate a pan-European policy that would string out the weapons inspections in Iraq and allow Saddam to play for time. When M Chirac launched into a moral discourse on the danger of inflicting suffering on the Iraqi people, he was interrupted by an irate Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian leader, who thundered across the table that France had no monopoly on moral judgment. Everybody in the room was worried about life and death, citing September 11, the Bali bombing, and the fear that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction would fall into the wrong hands, he said. A day of frantic talks had restored the unity of EU foreign policy but not in a way that France and especially Germany had anticipated when Chancellor Schröder pressed behind the scenes to convene the summit, despite grave misgivings in Downing Street. They arrived in Brussels with the wind in their sails, boosted by the spectacular peace marches across Europe and the opaque report to the United Nations by the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. But the day slipped away as the pendulum swung back to the New Europe, coalescing around the leadership of Tony Blair and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, and a tough communique that backed the use of force against Iraq as a last resort. Old Europe's Franco-German core has rarely looked so enfeebled. Mr Schröder was reduced to pleading that Germany had not abandoned her fundamental position yesterday and could live with the compromise. The day before, Paris and Berlin had acquiesced in a face-saving deal at Nato headquarters to allow Patriot missiles, Awacs surveillance aircraft and chemical and biological warfare units to be shipped to Turkey. The climb-down ended the nastiest dispute in the 54-year history of the Atlantic alliance. Whether or not it is enough to save Nato remains to be seen. Turkey said yesterday that confidence in Nato had now been restored, but the month-long refusal by France, Belgium, and Germany to fulfil their treaty obligations to a fellow member has already caused such disgust in Washington that the Bush administration may turn its back on an alliance seen to cause more problems than it solves.
W F Deedes, The UN the League of Nations, Daily Telegraph
NB: Lord Deedes covered the events in Abyssinia as a cub reporter in the 1930s. After World War II, he became a politician and was appointed a minister by Winston Churchill. He was editor of the Daily Telegraph from 1974-86. Daily Telegraph Friday 21 February 2003 The world was weak in 1935 - and Mussolini had his way By W F Deedes If we're seeking lessons from the past to help us deal with Saddam Hussein, then the way we dealt with Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia in 1935 is - as the Prime Minister understands - the place to look. I was particularly reminded of my own Abyssinia moment when I read about Saturday's anti-war march - hauntingly matched by the Peace Ballot of 1935, the national referendum in which millions voted for peace at almost any price, thus unwittingly persuading Hitler and Mussolini that bold predators had not much to fear. Then, as now, the authority of what was then the League of Nations and is now the United Nations was at stake. Then, as now, many felt reluctant to take action against a dangerous dictator, even with the authority of a body like the League or the UN, lest it lead to war. Then, as now, our difficulties were compounded by the duplicitous behaviour of the French. In 1935, after many brave words and much wriggling, we fudged it. So Mussolini took all he wanted in Abyssinia, without hindrance. He and others drew conclusions from this display of impotence. In 1936, the same year as Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia was completed, the Spanish Civil War began. Germany and Italy felt free to play a military role in that affair, without reprisals. Then, it has always seemed to me, our slide towards the Second World War became unstoppable. Oddly, seeing how it turned out, the behaviour of the government (then a coalition) won widespread approval in Britain at the time. This was partly because ministers kept repeating that Britain would stand firm by all its obligations to the League. Both Sir Samuel Hoare, the foreign secretary, and Anthony Eden, the minister without portfolio for League of Nations affairs, first sought to reason with Mussolini and dissuade him from his African adventure. We even offered him a strip of British territory in Somaliland if he would waive his demands on Abyssinia. When that was rebuffed, we declared that we had gone to the limit of concessions to Italy and, if these were rejected, we would not hesitate to call upon the League to take action. Relations between the League and Mussolini were much as they are now between the United Nations and Saddam Hussein. On September 11, 1935, three weeks before Mussolini plunged into Abyssinia, Sam Hoare delivered a resounding speech at Geneva, declaring our unswerving support for the League but making it clear that our undertaking was conditional on other members of the League doing their share. Acclaimed by the assembly, praised by the British press, and music to the ears of the Liberal and Labour parties, this speech was questioned only by those with the wit to perceive that, if we were to take the lead in sanctions against Italy, then we must be prepared for war. We did, in fact, as a precautionary measure, move British warships into the Mediterranean, and we reinforced British garrisons, rather as we have been doing in the Gulf. But reckoning this build-up might provoke a sudden Italian attack on the British fleet, our naval authorities insisted they must withdraw part of the fleet unless better provision were made for its security. The French were asked whether, in the event of an Italian attack, we could use their ports. They agreed in return for reciprocal treatment. The crisis in 1935 came closest to where we are now after October 4, when Mussolini launched his attack on Abyssinia. Britain's eagerness to set in motion the machinery of the League against Italy ran into immediate difficulties with France. Pierre Laval, the French foreign minister, was unwilling to antagonise Mussolini. The sticking point was the likelihood of action by the League, involving sanctions strong enough to thwart Mussolini, precipitating war. Though never a strong believer in the principle of sanctions, Eden believed that on this occasion they would be effective. He wanted the League to apply sanctions - including oil sanctions - to bring Mussolini to the negotiating table. Without the co-operation of France, this became a farce. When I passed through the Suez Canal in 1935 en route for Abyssinia, Mussolini's ships were drawing all the oil they wanted. Financial backing for Italy, I was told, came from the Banque de France. When I came back a few months later, the same conditions prevailed. In Britain, we had a section of the Labour Party protesting against endorsing a policy - namely effective sanctions against Italy - which might ultimately lead to a capitalist war. The leader of the party, George Lansbury, declared that he could not support the use of armed force either by the League of Nations or by
Stephen Hayes, Horrors of Peace, Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard March 10, 2003 The Horrors of Peace Saddam's victims tell their stories. by Stephen F. Hayes Dearborn, Michigan Do you know when? It is the question on all minds these days--those of stockbrokers, journalists, financiers, world leaders, soldiers and their families. When will the United States lead a coalition to end Saddam Hussein's tyranny over Iraq? The answer matters most to the tyrant's subjects--like the man who asked the question of his friend in an early-morning phone conversation on Monday, February 24. The call came from Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, to the home of an Iraqi exile in suburban Detroit. It used to be that Iraqis trapped inside their country would speak to each other and to friends outside in veiled language. For years, Saddam's regime has tapped the phone lines of all those suspected of disloyalty, so an inquiry about the timing of a possible attack would be concealed behind seemingly unrelated questions. On what date will you sell your business? When does school end? When are you expecting your next child? But few Iraqis speak in puzzles anymore. They ask direct questions. Here is the rest of that Monday morning conversation: Do you know when? I'm not sure. Are you coming? Yes. I am coming. We will . . . The second speaker, an Iraqi in Michigan, began to provide details but quickly reconsidered, ending his thought in mid-sentence. He says he was shocked by the candor coming from Iraq. Never in the history of Iraq do people talk like this, he said later. Why are you silent? I'm afraid that you'll be in danger. Don't be afraid. We are not afraid. This time is serious. I am coming with the American Army. Is there a way that we can register our names with the American forces to work with them when they arrive? Will you call my house at the first moment you arrive? I will help. For more than a year now, the world has been engaged in an intense debate about what to do with Saddam Hussein. For much of that time, the focus has been on the dictator's refusal to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, his sponsorship of terrorism, his serial violations of international law, and his history of aggression. Those arguments have in common an emphasis on interests, on threats. Absent from this debate--or at best peripheral to it--is the moral case for ending the rule of a tyrant who has terrorized his people for more than two decades. It's a strange oversight since, by some estimates, Saddam Hussein is responsible for more than 1million Iraqi deaths since he took power in 1979. Advocates of his overthrow are fond of pointing out that he gassed his own people, but this often has the feel of a bulleted talking point, not an argument. Their opponents readily concede that Saddam is a brutal dictator, and that the world would be better off without him. But they usually grant these things as a rhetorical device, as if to buy credibility on their way to opposing the one step sure to end that brutality--removal by force. Those who oppose taking action say we can safely ignore Saddam Hussein because he is in a box. Even if they were right and Saddam were no longer a threat, they would ignore this other urgent problem: the 23 million Iraqi people who are in the box with him. No one wants war. I am a pacifist, says Ramsey Jiddou, an Iraqi American who has lived in the United States since the late 1970s. But it will take a war to remove Saddam Hussein, and of course I'm for such a war. Iraqi Americans overwhelmingly agree with Jiddou. Many of them are recent arrivals who came here after the Gulf War left Saddam in power in 1991. And many are in regular contact with friends and relatives still trapped in Iraq. The views of those Iraqis back home are the same as the Iraqi Americans, says Peter Antone, an Iraqi-American immigration lawyer in Southfield, Michigan. They are not free to speak, so we speak for them. ONE OF MY HOSTS had another question for me as we walked up to a modest one-story home in Dearborn Heights on the snowy afternoon of Saturday, February 22. Do you know the decisionmakers? asked Abu Muslim al-Haydar, a former University of Baghdad professor and one of three English-speakers in the group of 20 Iraqi Shiites assembling here to talk with a reporter about Iraq. His tone was urgent, almost desperate, as he repeated himself. Do you know the decisionmakers? The Iraqi Americans who live in suburban Detroit, some 150,000 of them, are the largest concentration of Iraqis outside Iraq. That's saying something, since according to the United Nations, Iraqis are the second-largest group of refugees in the world. Some 4 million of them have left their homes since Saddam Hussein took power--an astonishing 17 percent of the country's population. Despite the size of the Iraqi-American population, and despite the fact that no one is better acquainted with the ways of Saddam Hussein's regime, their voices have largely been missing from the national debate. In the
Taliban promised to reveal Iraq link, FT
Financial Times Taliban promised to reveal Iraq link By Mark Huband, Security Correspondent, in Washington March 6 2003 Senior officials from Afghanistan's Taliban regime undertook to provide the US with detailed information showing links between Iraq and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, but abandoned the offer when the bombing of Afghanistan started in October 2001. Taliban officials who opposed the Islamist fundamentalist regime's readiness to protect al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington told an unofficial US delegation led by a New York financier that they were prepared to discuss what they knew of Iraq's relations with al-Qaeda. During discussions before a planned meeting with the American group, they said they had hosted at least one meeting between Iraqi and al-Qaeda officials at the Afghanistan embassy in Pakistan as long ago as 1997. The Bush administration has sought to prove a link between the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as part of its justification for invading Iraq but has been criticised for providing only circumstantial evidence. However, to date US officials have not firmly cited evidence from Taliban sources. The Taliban officials, several of whom are now in US custody, told the US delegation they were prepared to discuss what they knew of these ties. But a meeting scheduled to be held in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar about October 8 2001 was cancelled after the bombing started. The unofficial US delegation was led by Mansour Ijaz, an American hedge fund manager of Pakistani origin. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, agreed to go as an observer, on condition that the Taliban released eight Americans being held on charges of spreading Christianity. Two others - a senior American journalist and an influential member of Pakistan's Islamist movement - were also to be part of the delegation. The Taliban apparently hoped that the impending bombing campaign against Afghanistan could be averted. The readiness to meet the delegation was the result of growing suspicion within the Taliban of Osama bin Laden's motives and the realisation that al-Qaeda's leader was prepared to sacrifice the regime in pursuit of al-Qaeda's aims. In a letter to Mr Ijaz and Mr Woolsey dated October 7 2001, seen by the FT, Alhaj Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, agreed to the terms of a meeting discussed earlier on the telephone and in faxed correspondence. These written terms made it clear that the Taliban would be prepared to expand on your expressed interest to provide us with information about the nature and extent of relationships between Iraq and terror groups in the region, including potentially to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation. The terms of the discussions agreed by the Taliban would also give the Americans an insight into whether allegations of Iraqi support for terrorist groups represents a uniform opinion within the Taliban leadership or a factional view. In his letter of October 7, which was faxed to the delegation while it was in Copenhagen en route to Afghanistan, Mr Zaeef confirmed receipt of the specific terms of the discussion and said the regime was ready to discuss issues of mutual interest related to the horrendous events of September 11. The visit would include a lengthy meeting with the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Mr Ijaz, who acted during President Bill Clinton's administration to try to repair US relations with Sudan in 1996-97, believes that the Taliban were being exploited by al-Qaeda just as the Sudanese Islamist government had been before it expelled Mr bin Laden in May 1996.
Jim Hoagland, Who is Khalid Sheik Mohammed?
The U.S. media and government officials describe Mohammed and Yousef as masters of disguise, and then assume they are who they say they are this time. There is scant reason to be so trusting. When Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy sentenced Yousef to life plus 240 years in 1998, he said: We don't even know what your real name is. The Washington Post 9/11 Mysteries In Plain Sight By Jim Hoagland Sunday, March 9, 2003 Analysis and commentary are my bread and my butter. But detached perspective is in short supply when it comes to Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I hate this murdering terrorist chieftain even for being captured. Why? Because the news of the capture of al Qaeda's No. 3 in Pakistan stirs up the raw memories of the pain, suffering and dread of 9/11 -- and a spasm of self-reproach for not recalling directly what that day was like more often than I do. Worse: more often than I promised myself I would. It is like treading on a live electric wire after stepping over it for much of the past 18 months. There is a song I avoid playing when I don't want to risk tears rolling down my cheeks. For me, Bruce Springsteen captures both the anger and the consolation of time passing since that Lonesome Day: House is on fire, Viper's in the grass, A little revenge and This too shall pass. I put the Boss's album on the instant I heard of the capture. And listened in tears and in hope that the day of lawful, judicious revenge does not pass too quickly for this man known as Mohammed. The capture of this particular viper may well be even more important than nabbing or killing Osama bin Laden, both in solving the mysteries of 9/11 and in reaching the tipping point in the war on terrorism. Long years of interviewing Middle East terrorist leaders and my reading of human nature suggest this: It is one thing to give up your life to advance a glorious cause toward victory and the final removal of evil. It is quite another, much harder thing to sacrifice yourself to a losing cause in full retreat. There is no scientific way of knowing where that tipping point is. But that it exists is shown by the cyclical pattern of terrorism through the ages. Civilization can never rid itself of murdering fanatics. But it can disrupt, disband and contain their operations, and organize defenses against them. The capture of Mohammed is a big step forward. He knows the answer to these two central questions: How did al Qaeda, within two or three years, go from obscurity to becoming super-terrorists capable of blowing up U.S. embassies, warships and skyscrapers with astonishing precision? And what are the links between 9/11 and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Ramzi Yousef, who authorities say is Mohammed's nephew? The captured viper also knows the answer to another question that should not be rushed past just because it is obvious: Why did he choose to hide in Rawalpindi, which is the headquarters of Pakistan's military and Inter-Service Intelligence agency, and which is immediately adjacent to the Pakistani diplomatic capital of Islamabad, where Ramzi Yousef was captured in 1995? The U.S. media and government officials describe Mohammed and Yousef as masters of disguise, and then assume they are who they say they are this time. There is scant reason to be so trusting. When Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy sentenced Yousef to life plus 240 years in 1998, he said: We don't even know what your real name is. Why two men from the remote and ungoverned Pakistani province of Baluchistan who grew up in Kuwait would devote their lives to killing Americans is a mystery. How they acquired prodigious masterminding skills and, at least in Mohammed's case, rabid Islamic fanaticism after lives of intellectual mediocrity and pleasure-seeking, also is a mystery. So is their connection, if any, to al Qaeda at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing. So is their instinctive flight in extremis to the power centers of Pakistan. Mohammed migrated from the identity of small-time freelance terrorist to the top ranks of bin Laden's ultra-secretive band not long after the 1993 bombing resulted in the breakup of Yousef's U.S. network. Could al Qaeda have been the target of a takeover operation by an intelligence service with good legend-manufacturing skills and a great, burning desire for revenge on the United States? That is a question U.S. investigators should push more actively. In Study of Revenge, author Laurie Mylroie sketches the strong ties that Iraq's intelligence services have developed in Pakistani Baluchistan. And the Iraqi Embassy in Islamabad has been publicly identified by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a center for contact with al Qaeda. Why did the two master terrorists get chased to earth a handful of miles from that embassy? The answer to the 9/11 mysteries may be hiding in plain sight.
L. Mylroie, Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role, NY Sun
The New York Sun March 12, 2003 Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role By LAURIE MYLROIE A retired American general, close to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, once explained that the single, most important element in the war against terrorism was situational awareness - understanding what is going on as correctly and precisely as possible. That may seem incontrovertible, but it is lacking as America goes to war with Iraq. The reasons for the war have not been explained properly,and the public is ignorant of the dangers, even as this is a war that must be fought. Iraq, along with Al Qaeda, was most probably involved in the September 11 attacks, and President Bush understands that. Already on September 17, six days later, Mr. Bush affirmed, I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now, as Bob Woodward's Bush at War discloses. Indeed, at Thursday's press conference, Mr. Bush said that Iraq has financed and trained Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups. That is why Mr. Bush is willing to take the risk entailed in war against Iraq. Saddam may well try to hurt us badly, and that includes biological terrorism, which could kill many people.Tens of thousands is a modest estimate. Yet Mr. Bush is inhibited from clearly linking Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone tying Iraq to September 11, because every time a senior official suggests such a link, leaks to the contrary, mostly anonymous, flow from those in the bureaucracies who made the mistakes that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans in two hours on what was otherwise a beautiful fall morning. The last war with Iraq caused an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism; the same is happening again. It is not rational; haters rarely are. Last time the anti-Semitism disappeared when the war proved a stunning success (except for the decision to end the war with Saddam still in power). What will happen this time, if things go awry and there are many casualties on American soil? American Jews, one would think, would have every interest in helping to ensure the war is understood properly.The war is not being fought for Israel, which would actually prefer America fight Iran. Rather, it is being fought, in the first place, to promote the safety and well-being of all American citizens,just as the president has repeatedly said, even if in the short term there could be substantial casualties. To understand that, however, one has to understand Iraq's decade-long involvement with Islamic militants in carrying out terrorist attacks against America. Here the American Jewish leadership falls very short. The lion's share of responsibility for this blunder lies with the Clinton administration, which, starting with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, promoted the notion that a new kind of terrorism had emerged that did not involve states, but was carried out by loose networks of militant Muslims. Every other intelligence service was dependent on America for that judgment. Every Western intelligence agency accepted it, and then became professionally attached to that assessment. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, famously cautioned against loving one's opinion like one's children, but that is an all too human failing, and perhaps it is particularly strong in the intelligence agencies.After all, they have more, and presumably better, information than anyone else, so how could they know less? In Israel, the issue became further confused with the quasi-messianic expectations accompanying the peace process. A key premise of that ill-fated diplomacy was that a clear division existed between the Islamic militants and entities like Syria and the PLO. Figures like Hafiz al-Assad and Yasser Arafat, it was said, had little choice but to negotiate with Israel, given America's demonstrated strength, after its victory in the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War. Only irrational parties, like Islamic extremists, did not recognize and act upon this new reality. That was wrong, as Israelis have painfully learned.The PLO and Hamas can be strategic rivals, but also tactical allies. And Iraq can work with Al Qaeda, as it in fact has. Yet agendas developed in the 1990s. These were issues promoted by the major Jewish organizations, based on the flawed understanding of the Middle East that emerged a decade ago, when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. Above all, these agendas focused on Iran and Islamic militants. Iraq was forgotten, reflecting a major Israeli error. Many Israelis, like Americans, are supportive of the war yet do not understand why America is going to war with Iraq. A friend of mine, retired from a high position in Israel's military intelligence, who maintains contacts with senior officials, recently asserted that the principal reason for the war is to change the Iraqi regime and make the Middle East a better, more democratic place. That is among the reasons, but the least of them. Mr. Bush is not endangering the lives of Americans, at least in the short
L. Mylroie, The Baluch Connection to Iraq, WSJ
The Wall Street Journal AT WAR The Baluch Connection Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tied to Baghdad? BY LAURIE MYLROIE Tuesday, March 18, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a Pakistani Baluch. So is Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, together with a third Baluch, Abdul Hakam Murad, the two collaborated in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. Years later, as head of al Qaeda's military committee, Mohammed reportedly planned the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Why should the Baluch seek to kill Americans? Sunni Muslims, they live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan. The U.S. has little to do with them; there is no evident motive for this murderous obsession. The Baluch do, however, have longstanding ties to Iraqi intelligence, reflecting their militant opposition to the Shiite regime in Tehran. Wafiq Samarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, explains that Iraqi intelligence worked with the Baluch during the Iran-Iraq war. According to Mr. Samarrai, Iraqi intelligence has well-established contacts with the Baluch in both Iran and Pakistan. Mohammed, Yousef and Murad, supposedly born and raised in Kuwait, are part of a tight circle. Mohammed is said to be Yousef's maternal uncle; Murad is supposed to be Yousef's childhood friend. And U.S. authorities have identified as major al Qaeda figures three other Baluch: two brothers of Yousef and a cousin. The official position is thus that a single family is at the center of almost all the major terrorist attacks against U.S. targets since 1993. The existence of intelligence ties between Iraq and the Baluch is scarcely noted. Indeed, these Baluch terrorists began attacking the U.S. long before al Qaeda did. Notably, this Baluch family is from Kuwait. Their identities are based on documents from Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation, and which are therefore unreliable. While in Kuwait, Iraqi intelligence could have tampered with files to create false identities (or legends) for its agents. So, rather than one family, these terrorists are, quite plausibly, elements of Iraq's Baluch network, given legends by Iraqi intelligence. SOMEONE NAMED Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents on April 19, 1965. After high school in Kuwait, he enrolled at Chowan College in North Carolina in January 1984, before transferring to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he received his degree in December 1986. Is the Sept. 11 mastermind the same person as the student? He need not be. Perhaps the real Mohammed died (possibly during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait), and a terrorist assumed his identity. Mohammed should now be just under 38, but the terrorist's arrest photo, showing graying sideburns and heavy jowls, seems to suggest an older man (admittedly, a subjective judgment). Yet this question can be pursued more reliably. Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: information from U.S. sources from the 1980s (INS and college documents, as well as individuals who may remember him); Kuwaiti documents; and information since the liberation of Kuwait (from his arrest, the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and the investigation into the 1995 plane-bombing plot). The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for irregularities that suggest tampering. The information about Mohammed from the '80s needs to be compared with the information that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. Interrogators might ask him what he remembers of the colleges he is claimed to have attended. Acquaintances--like Gaith Faile, who taught Mohammed at Chowan and who told the Journal, He wasn't a radical--should be asked to provide a positive identification. Along these lines, Kuwait's file on Yousef is telling. Yousef entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, but fled on a passport in the name of Mohammed's supposed nephew, Abdul Basit Karim. But Kuwait's file on Karim was tampered with. The file should contain copies of the front pages of his passport, including picture and signature. They are missing. Extraneous information was inserted--a notation that he and his family left Kuwait on Aug. 26, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, entering Iran at Salamcheh on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan. But people do not provide authorities an itinerary when crossing a border. Moreover, there was no Kuwaiti government then. Iraq occupied Kuwait and would have had to put that information into the file. KARIM ATTENDED college in Britain. His teachers there strongly doubted that their student was the terrorist mastermind. Most notably, Karim was short, at most 5-foot-8; Yousef is 6 feet tall. Nevertheless, Yousef's fingerprints are in Karim's file
Iraqi Conscripts shoot officers, rather than fight, London Times
London Times March 22, 2003 Conscripts shoot their own officers rather than fight From Tom Newton Dunn with 40 Commando near al-Faw, southern Iraq IRAQI conscripts shot their own officers in the chest yesterday to avoid a fruitless fight over the oil terminals at al-Faw. British soldiers from 40 Commando's Charlie Company found a bunker full of the dead officers, with spent shells from an AK47 rifle around them. Stuck between the US Seals and the Royal Marines, whom they did not want to fight, and a regime that would kill them if they refused, it was the conscripts' only way out. In total, 40 Commando had collected more than 100 prisoners of war yesterday from the few square miles of the al-Faw peninsula that they controlled. Two of them were a general in the regular Iraqi Army and a brigadier. They came out from the command bunker where they had been hiding after 40 Commando's Bravo Company fired two anti-tank missiles into it. With them was a large sports holdall stuffed with money. They insisted that they had been about to pay their troops, to the disbelief of their captors. These were the men who had left their soldiers hungry, poorly armed and almost destitute for weeks, judging by the state we had seen them in, while appearing to keep the money for themselves. It was only as dawn broke that the 900 Royal Marine commandos, who had moved forward during the night, realised the pitiful shape of the enemy. The first white flag was hoisted by three soldiers in a trench just outside the complex's north gate, which had been surrounded by heavy machinegunners from Command Company. They were taken prisoner by Corporal Fergus Gask, 26, who may have accepted the first surrender of the war. We started engaging their positions with GPMGs (general purpose machineguns) when I noticed this white flag go up, he said. I didn't know whether it was a trick or not, but I approached the trench anyway, probably a pretty silly thing to do if I think about it. But as soon as I saw their faces I knew they were genuine. They actually looked very relieved they didn't have to fight any more. And they became very pleased to see us when they realised we weren't going to do them any harm. The dawn light appeared to have provoked an exodus. Small groups of dishevelled Iraqis were standing up all around us with their hands in the air, or with a dirty white T-shirt tied to a stick waving above them. Every time you turned around, a new trickle of silhouettes emerged from the horizon walking slowly towards us. One Marine joked: Oh no. They' re surrendering at us from all sides. Each prisoner was thoroughly searched before he was accepted into captivity in a procedure that the commandos had clearly practised many times. The injured were quickly treated and a handful received almost immediate helicopter evacuation from the oil terminal to HMS Ocean, where a temporary hospital for PoWs has been set up. As a new day began, so did the Marines' gradual expansion outwards into the large expanse of waste ground that is still pockmarked with shell craters from the Iran-Iraq War.To save them having to translate from Arabic maps, 40 Commando named the clear paths they had established or wanted to seize with London street names: Downing Street, Abbey Road or Fulham Road. Engineers, meanwhile, began the work of shutting down the many oil pipeline valves. This is a pooled dispatch for the British press
David Frum, A Perle Before, NRO
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Posted: April 4, 2003 Publication Date: April 21, 2003 A Perle before . . . By David Frum It's 1974. U.S. presidents are clinking champagne glasses with the masters of the Kremlin--and foreign-policy realists are quietly urging Americans to take whatever deals they can get from the Soviets: Our side is losing the Cold War, and the next deal will be much, much worse. There aren't many people around who still think the United States might actually win the Cold War. One of them is a then-young aide on the staff of Sen. Henry M. Scoop Jackson. The aide's name is Richard Perle--and that very year, he and his boss would astonish just about everyone by passing a law, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, denying access to the U.S. market to Communist countries that prevented their people from emigrating. It's 1979. The world situation seems, if possible, even worse than in 1974. President Jimmy Carter has just sent the Senate a new arms-control treaty that would lock in forever the nuclear advantages the Soviets grabbed during the 1970s. The treaty looks unstoppable: When has a Democratic Senate ever rejected a treaty sent up by a Democratic president? But Jackson and Perle organize the opposition--and early the following year, Carter has to surrender and withdraw the treaty. It's 1983. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans are protesting Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy Pershing missiles. A nervous State Department is desperately trying to placate the protesters by offering the Soviets one deal after another. Perle, now an assistant secretary of defense, scuppers one concession after another. The Soviets, he consistently points out, are already cheating on every existing agreement--there should be no new agreements until the old ones are honored. It's 1986. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland. Gorbachev startles the American delegation by offering up just about everything that U.S. arms controllers had ever wished for in the 1980s--in exchange for Reagan's surrendering on the Strategic Defense Initiative. In a hasty conference, Reagan tallies the opinions of his top defense aides. Almost everyone present urges Reagan to say yes. Perle argues for a no. And no is the answer Reagan gives. These are only four moments from a long career of public service. Over three decades, few Americans have contributed more to the nation's security and the freedom of the world than Richard Perle. He fought to halt the transfer of military technology, first to the Soviets, then later to the Chinese. He spoke up for Communism's victims when they might otherwise have been forgotten. He warned early of the danger of Middle Eastern terrorism. Perle left government service in 1987. He went into business as a consultant and adviser. He was successful in his work and made some money--but nothing like the gigantic fortunes earned by his onetime colleagues, former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci and former secretary of state James Baker, to name just two. Though he had joined the private sector, his deepest concerns still lay with the public; he continued to care much more about national security than about publicly traded securities. In July 2001, he was asked by Secretary Rumsfeld to chair the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--and though the work is unpaid and hugely time-consuming, Perle gladly accepted. You have to understand all of this background to appreciate the full and horrifying injustice of the conflict-of-interest charges hurled at Richard Perle over the past few weeks. For each of those charges there is of course a specific reply. Seymour Hersh, for instance, charged in The New Yorker that Perle had met with two Saudi businessmen late last year with an eye to obtaining an investment in a company he was starting. In fact, Perle and the two Saudis all agree that the only subject discussed at the lunch was a Saudi plan to encourage Saddam Hussein to go into exile to avoid war. But there is a larger point that needs to be made--and it emerges from the basic truth of who Richard Perle is and what he has done. The New York Times followed the Seymour Hersh allegations with two stories of its own. Both involved companies that had hired Perle to help them satisfy the government's security concerns. In one case, a bankrupt telecom company called Global Crossing asked Perle to devise safeguards that would enable it to sell a chunk of itself to a Hong Kong investor without falling foul of technology-transfer rules. In the other, the satellite maker Loral--which had already been caught making such transfers to China--hired Perle to help it propose an appropriate penalty for its misdeeds. In the Global Crossing matter, Perle proposed a battery of safeguards--including the creation of a separate subsidiary with a board of directors entirely made up of U.S. citizens. In the Loral case, Perle helped persuade the company to pay the largest fine in the history of technology-transfer
Iraqi Torture Video, Wash Times
Video shows torture of prisoners overseen by Saddam's half brother THE WASHINGTON TIMES July 1, 2003 By Paul Martin (with thanks to W. Scott Malone) BAGHDAD - A graphic video to be broadcast today shows Saddam Hussein's half brother, ousted Interior Minister Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, exhorting his police officers as they beat and torture prisoners. Go on, go on, Hasan tells his khaki-clad ministry police as they repeatedly slash prisoners with sticks, electric cables and metal bars at a Baghdad detention center. The police kick the prisoners again and again. At one point, one of Hasan's own security guards is beaten with wooden poles, sticks and cables after pleading for mercy. Hasan was captured April 13 as he apparently attempted to flee to Syria and is being held in a coalition prison for high-value detainees. A Ba'ath Party official who has the same mother as Saddam and is one of Saddam's three half brothers, Hasan was the five of spades in the deck of 55 cards distributed to coalition soldiers in the search for the most-wanted Iraqi officials. A reporter for The Washington Times has seen the video pictures in their entirety. Excerpts will be shown today by the Al Arabiya satellite television channel, which obtained them from an undisclosed Iraqi source. The gruesome pictures, with testimony by one of the beaten prisoners, are expected to be of value in building a criminal prosecution against Hasan. The U.S.-led coalition or its successor will seek to prove that the interior minister ran a systematic reign of terror, coalition legal experts said. The video shows prisoners held in a small fenced courtyard. They at first move from side to side as blows rain down. Then, as their bodies and heads become increasingly bloodied and their flesh torn, most topple to the ground and curl up in a fetal position. As some try to stagger to their feet when blows are being inflicted on other prisoners, the police officers return, knocking them down again until many lie helplessly on their backs, motionless and apparently unconscious. Each of two VHS tapes, in perfect color, runs continuously for about an hour. They appear to have been recorded professionally. At one point, the interior minister becomes angry that a car apparently belonging to Uday Hussein, elder son of Saddam, gets precedence over his own vehicle in entering a security area. One of two guards at the gate begs forgiveness from Hasan, pleading: Sir, I did not realize that you were with Mr. Uday. ... I didn't realize. Please, please, in the name of Saddam Hussein, please. The guard, continuing wherever possible with his appeals, is stripped of his epaulet, then his shirt and his beret, and the beatings begin - with wooden poles, sticks and cables. After about 15 minutes, as he lies prone, the attention of the police officers and the cameraman switches to another victim. The officers regularly turn from their victims toward some authority figure off camera, presumably the interior minister, then quickly resume the torture. One of the men whose assault was filmed took the Al Arabiya satellite television team back to where beatings had occurred. The man, who gave his name as Ali, said, We were beaten everyday like this for a month. Typical charges involved buying stolen or unregistered goods, or were related to quarrels with neighbors or their wives. Police, Ali said, would show films of the beatings to Hasan, and if he thought a prisoner had escaped too lightly, that man would be pulled out of his crowded cell and beaten again. Hasan had a reputation for brutality, but this is the first time such actions have been displayed publicly on video. Documents showing the regime's illegal trading activities, coupled with the increasing evidence of state-organized mass killings and widespread repression, are expected to form the basis for trials. The likelihood is that Saddam's former officials will be arraigned only when a new constitution is approved and an Iraqi-led government is in place. Coalition officials say it's important to provide the basis for such trials through the painstaking collection of evidence. They say it will help solidify support for a new Iraqi government by exposing the previous rulers as corrupt and vicious criminals rather than as tough patriots.
More on Iraq 9/11 Commission, Boston Globe
With thanks to W. Scott Malone One member indicated that the panel has already seen documents that point to a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. ''There is evidence,'' said former Navy secretary John Lehman. ''There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons,'' including teaching operatives hijacking techniques at a camp in Salman Pak, Iraq. Boston Globe July 10, 2003 Sept. 11 panel discusses possibility of Iraq link Witnesses detail Al Qaeda theories By Bryan Bender Globe Correspondent WASHINGTON -- A terrorism specialist who long has argued that Saddam Hussein was behind terrorist strikes against the United States urged the commission investigating the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to study possible links between Iraq and the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Members of the bipartisan commission said they would aggressively pursue that controversial line of inquiry as they attempt to trace the history of the shadowy Al Qaeda network to better understand where intelligence agencies fell short in assessing the threat to targets in the United States. One member indicated that the panel has already seen documents that point to a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. ''There is evidence,'' said former Navy secretary John Lehman. ''There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons,'' including teaching operatives hijacking techniques at a camp in Salman Pak, Iraq. In its third public hearing yesterday, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States received testimony from academics and other specialists in a daylong give-and-take designed to answer what commission chairman Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said Tuesday is a key question to prevent future attacks: ''Where did Al Qaeda come from?'' The Bush administration has previously asserted that there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but many terrorism specialists and intelligence officials have publicly questioned the extent to which the radical Islamic cadres of Al Qaeda would have cooperated with Hussein's secular regime. They have also discounted reports that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the spring of 2001. Now, that official, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, is in US custody, and the possible role Iraq played in helping Al Qaeda is receiving fresh scrutiny. The most controversial theory of Iraqi involvement was aired yesterday by Laurie Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who has argued for years that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and subsequent attacks. She contends that at least some of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 plot are not simply members of a ''loose network'' with no ties to state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, she believes their ''legends'' may have been created by Iraqi intelligence following Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to exact revenge for Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War. ''The only party that, reasonably, could have created that legend is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait,'' she said. ''The failure to pursue the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds is a major lapse in the investigation.'' Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged operations chief of Al Qaeda now in US custody, as well as other purported top Al Qaeda planners Abdul Karim and Abdul Monim -- brothers of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef -- have been identified as Kuwaitis. But doubts remain about their true backgrounds, she said. At the time of his capture in Pakistan in March, US intelligence officials had said they only recently learned about Mohammed's connections to Al Qaeda, because he had no ties to the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Alleged Iraqi-Al Qaeda ties were also evident in the 1993 investigation, she said. Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the 1993 attack but still at large, came to the United States from Baghdad and returned there after the bombing. Mohammed Salameh, the Palestinian detained after he returned the Ryder truck that carried the bomb, made dozens of calls to Iraq in less than a month during 1992. Meanwhile, Mylroie said, Yousef's teachers in Britain did not recognize the man accused of the 1993 attack, which killed six people. She also said copies of the passport with the name Abdul Basit Karim, which Yousef used to flee the United States, appear to have been doctored. Others who testified, such as Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst who now teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, dismissed Mylroie's theory. ''Iraq's intelligence services did not show exceptional talent or success in long-range, long-time operational planning,'' she said. But Yaphe acknowledged that the Hussein regime was almost ''impossible'' to penetrate. Yaphe said that ''especially on this issue of Iraq
Oil for Food Sales Link Iraq, Al Qaeda, Forward
Forward JUNE 20, 2003 Oil for Food Sales Seen As Iraq Tie To Al Qaeda U.S. Probes Bank Network By MARC PERELMAN FORWARD STAFF The hunt for Saddam Hussein's money could provide some clues to one of the claims made by the Bush administration to justify its war in Iraq - the possible link between the former Iraqi regime and the Al Qaeda terrorist group. Two entities, a shadowy banking network linked by the administration to Al Qaeda and a Saudi oil company close to the Taliban regime, were involved in buying oil from Saddam Hussein under the United Nations' oil-for-food program, the Forward has learned. The now-defunct program allowed Iraq to buy food and medicine with its oil proceeds under U.N. supervision. Although the oil sales in question were legal and approved by the U.N., several observers say the system involved kickbacks and was used by Saddam to buy political support and to finance intelligence activities and even terrorist groups. It seems very plausible that some of the oil money went to terrorism financing, a terrorism-financing expert closely monitoring Iraq said on condition of anonymity. I believe this actually happened. Among Iraq's oil customers since 1997 is a Liechtenstein-based company called Galp International Trading Establishment, a subsidiary of Portugal's main oil company, according to a list of oil purchasers obtained by the Forward. The U.N. has not published the list. The company chose as its legal representative in Liechtenstein - a tax haven known for hosting thousands of shell companies - a company called Asat Trust, according to Liechtenstein business records. Asat Trust was designated by the United States and the U.N. as a financier of Al Qaeda through its links to Al Taqwa, a cluster of financial entities spanning the globe from the Bahamas to Italy and controlled by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation raises the possibility that Iraq quietly funneled money to Al Qaeda by deliberately choosing an oil company working with one of the terrorist group's alleged financial backers. Another oil company that contracted with Iraq, Delta Services, is a now-defunct, Geneva-based subsidiary of Delta Oil, a Saudi company that enjoyed a close relationship with the Taliban in Afghanistan at the time when they were harboring bin Laden. Delta Oil was a major actor in a major pipeline project to bring gas from Central Asia to Pakistan through Afghanistan in the mid-1990s alongside the American oil company Unocal and another Saudi oil company controlled by a controversial Saudi millionaire. Delta Services landed Iraqi oil export contracts in 2000 and 2001, according to U.N. sources and a trade journal. John Fawcett and Christine Negroni, two investigators working for the New York law firm Kreindler Kreindler, believe Delta Services won contracts to export 13 million barrels, meaning some $7 million were paid in kickbacks, or 70 cents per barrel. The law firm has already filed a massive lawsuit against Al Qaeda, Iraq, Saudi officials and an array of Islamic banks, charities and groups on behalf of a group of 9-11 family victims. It is now looking into the Iraqi oil deals to see if they can add defendants to the lawsuit. Galp Energia, the Portuguese national oil company controlling Galp International, did not answer a series of questions sent via e-mail. On November 7, 2001, President Bush said that the Al Taqwa network was raising, managing and distributing money for Al Qaeda under the guise of a legitimate banking business activity. The administration froze the assets of several companies linked to the bank, including Asat Trust. Swiss and Italian police raided the homes and offices of the top Al Taqwa officials the same day, as well as those of Erwin Wachter, the head of Asat Trust. His son Martin Wachter confirmed that Galp International was one of the companies represented by Asat Trust and that Galp was dealing with Iraq under the oil-for-food program. However, he told the Forward that Asat was only working as a representative of offshore companies and was not involved in their business operations. He stressed that Asat had been wrongfully targeted by the U.S. government because it once represented the Islamic bank Al Taqwa in a small real estate deal in Switzerland. The Americans, the local police and our financial intelligence unit did not find anything, Wachter told the Forward. The U.S. Treasury Department did not return a call seeking comment. The Bush administration has repeatedly stressed, when questioned about the scope of its anti-terrorist financial sanctions, that it was acting carefully. According to Liechtenstein business records, Galp International was created right after the imposition of sanctions against Iraq in December 1990. The company's Portuguese administrators and formal ownership changed several times over the years. In April 2002, six months after the Bush administration move against Asat, Galp changed its legal
WSJ, Making Policy is the President's Job, not the CIA's
The Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK Lack of Intelligence Making policy is the President's job, not the CIA's. Monday, July 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT The flap over who baked the yellowcake uranium story is so transparently political that it is tempting to ignore. But now that Democrats and other opponents of deposing Saddam Hussein are demanding a full-scale scapegoat hunt, by all means let's consider the uses and abuses of intelligence. The charge is that 16 of the words that President Bush uttered during his January State of the Union address may have been false. Here's what he said: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. We say this may be false, because in fact the British government continues to stand by this assertion even if the CIA does not. So what Mr. Bush said about what the British believe was true in January and is still true today. Based on this non-lie, then, we are all supposed to believe that the entire case for going to war was false and that--precisely what? Other than calling for someone's head, and for a Congressional probe that would give free TV time to Democrats running for President, the critics don't seem to be demanding anything specific about policy. Do John Kerry and Joe Lieberman now regret their vote to allow Mr. Bush to go to war in Iraq? We ask that question because policy decisions are what Presidents are elected to make, and the results of those judgments are what they should be held responsible for. The case for deposing Saddam was based on a dozen years of history, U.N. resolutions and virtual unanimity in the intelligence community that he had weapons of mass destruction and programs to build more. The furor over yellowcake intelligence is a sideshow about process, and even on this point the critics are working under a mistaken assumption about how intelligence ought to work. Michigan Senator Carl Levin, among others, seems to believe that somewhere in the bowels of the agency there are dispassionate analysts who scour the world for evidence and then make Olympian judgments about what is true or false. These judgments in turn are supposed to be binding on policy makers. Two callow writers at The New Republic even quoted with a straight face a CIA analyst who claimed that it was wrong for Vice President Dick Cheney to have visited Langley to inspect the Iraq evidence lest he upset the equilibrium of what is supposed to be an ivory tower. Anyone who believes this is naive or mischievous, and dangerously so. Intelligence is supposed to be a tool of policy, not a determiner of it. By its very nature intelligence is fragmentary and ambiguous. Analysts are supposed to look for patterns in the haystacks, form hypotheses about what they mean and then feed their best estimates to policy makers. The job of the users of intelligence is not to accept this as holy writ but to ask questions, challenge hypotheses and prod the spooks to look for other things or in other directions. The person who has stated this most clearly is none other than Donald Rumsfeld, who included a notable Intelligence Side Letter as part of the report filed by his Commission assessing the ballistic missile threat in 1999. (Mr. Levin could read it in the Green Room awaiting his many TV appearances.) The Commission's Side Letter found that in U.S. intelligence circles the ballistic missile and WMD threat are not normally treated as a strategic threat to the U.S., on a par with any other highest priority issues. Specifically, it blamed senior users of intelligence for failing to interact knowledgeably with the producers of intelligence. Contrary to the Ivory Tower school, the Side Letter added that unless and until senior users take time to engage analysts, question their assumptions and methods, seek from them what they know, what they don't know and ask them their opinions--and do so without penalizing the analysts when their opinions differ from those of the user--senior users cannot have a substantial impact in improving the intelligence product they receive. This adult view of intelligence contrasts with the Levin school, which puts an unfair burden on CIA analysts that most of them really don't want. It makes them the ultimate arbiter of facts that determine policy, turning them into political actors. In that sense, Joseph Wilson, the CIA consultant who last week wrote about his trip to Niger over yellowcake, is the one who has politicized intelligence. He is a well-known opponent of war with Iraq and clearly now wants to discredit the Bush policy after the fact. Which brings us back to the current half-baked outrage over yellowcake. The Democratic motive has very little to do with intelligence disputes. The campaign is really about assailing Mr. Bush's credibility, which Democrats realize is his greatest asset. That's why they throw the words lie and untruth around like loose change, as if Mr. Bush had deceived
INC Emerging in New Iraqi Council, NY Sun
The presence of Mr. Chalabi and 15 other former exiles on the council is seen as a triumph for the Pentagon and a considerable defeat for the State Department in their ongoing struggle over Iraq policy. The State Department was working overtime to sideline the former exiles, sources said. The New York Sun July 14, 2003 Chalabi and INC Emerging In the New Iraqi Council FIRST BABIES, NOW 'THE BIRTH OF A NEW COUNTRY' By ADAM DAIFALLAH Staff Reporter of the Sun WASHINGTON - A majority of members of Iraq's new governing council, announced yesterday, are or have been affiliated with the Iraqi National Congress, the main umbrella organization of opposition groups to Saddam Hussein that was founded in 1992. The naming of a 25-member governing council by L. Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator, is the first step toward self-government in Iraq and represents a major victory for formerly exiled political leaders, like the INC's Ahmad Chalabi, who fought Saddam from abroad. The presence of Mr. Chalabi and 15 other former exiles on the council is seen as a triumph for the Pentagon and a considerable defeat for the State Department in their ongoing struggle over Iraq policy. The State Department was working overtime to sideline the former exiles, sources said. The council, which will have limited authority under Mr. Bremer, is a colorful mix of personalities representing a broad range of ideologies, backgrounds, and political experience. Other than Mr. Chalabi of the INC, members include a deputy of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has strong backing from Tehran, Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim; the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a group mainly of former Baathists, Ayad Allawi, and the leaders of the two main Kurdish factions, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. An 80-year-old former Iraqi foreign minister who has strong backing from the Arab Gulf states, Adnan Pachachi, is also on the council, as is a member of the Iraqi Communist Party, Hamid Majid Moussa. The council held its first meeting yesterday and is expected to select leaders today. Three council members are women. Missing from the council is the formerly exiled Sharif Ali bin Al-Hussein, the head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement and Iraq's would-be king. The first order of business for the council was to abolish the national holidays established by Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and declaring April 9 - the day Saddam fell from power - as a new national holiday. A spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress, Entifadh Qanbar, said in an interview from Baghdad that his group is pleased with the composition of the council. I thought the meeting today was excellent. Considering it was 25 people, some of them have never met before,you would think some chaos would happen, but it didn't, Mr. Qanbar said. The council has 13 Shiites Muslims - members of the majority religious sect in Iraqi - five Kurds, five Sunnis, one Christian and one Turkoman.The Shiite majority is significant because of the oppression they suffered under Saddam's rule. I think this is a very positive step forward, Mr. Qanbar, himself a Sunni, said. Iraqi opposition leaders were originally pushing for a national conference of Iraqis this summer to select a sovereign interim government, but Mr. Bremer nixed that idea, saying he would appoint a consultative group of Iraqis to advise him instead. The creation of the appointed but still power-wielding governing council suggests Mr. Bremer met the Iraqi opposition halfway. Mr. Qanbar said that although the governing council has sufficient authority, it would work to get more and eventually all authority into the hands of Iraqis as soon as possible. The council will have the power to name ministers and approve the 2004 budget, but final control of Iraq still rests with Mr. Bremer. Yet to be seen is whether the council can convince the Iraqi people that it represents them, although they never had a chance to vote on its members. The Americans ruling Iraq say a national election there is not yet practical. The council members, some dressed in traditional robes, others in Islamic clerical garb and some in business suits, sat in a semicircle of chairs on a stage at a downtown Baghdad convention center. Mr. Bremer and other dignitaries watched from the front row. I helped deliver thousands of Iraqi babies, and now I am taking part in the birth of a new country and a new rule based on women's rights, humanity, unity and freedom, Raja Habib Al-Khuzaai, one of the female members and the director of a maternity hospital in southern Iraq, said. Many of the council members were vehemently pro-American in comments made during the news conference, and several criticized Arabic television channels and the British Broadcasting Corporation for coverage they saw as pro-Saddam. Mr. Chalabi condemned continuing attacks on American forces in the
Jim Hoagland, The Kurdish Example
The Washington Post The Kurdish Example By Jim Hoagland Sunday, July 27, 2003 SALAHADIN, Iraq -- Isolation in their remote mountain homeland and an intensely nurtured sense that they will inevitably be betrayed by foreigners who pretend to befriend them have formed the Kurds' identity. But that historical seclusion and distrust are both fading rapidly in the wake of -- and because of -- the American success in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Bringing Kurdistan back into Iraq and into the modern world is one of the major strategic accomplishments of the second Gulf War. Little noticed in a Washington increasingly consumed with presidential politics, important changes created by Operation Iraqi Freedom come sharply into focus here on the ground. The Kurds are aware that, for once, history is smiling on them. They are moving carefully to keep good fortune on their side. Local leaders who long have been bitter rivals are cooperating to inch toward joining a federal Iraq in which they will have a share in power and to form a quiet alliance with the United States that could help in the global war on terrorism. The Kurds still have mountains, and now they have friends too, Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said last week in welcoming American visitors here and updating an adage that holds that the Kurds cannot rely on others to keep their promises to help them. Roughly 25 million Kurds -- non-Arab descendants of a culture that is Indo-European and Muslim -- inhabit the highlands that straddle the border areas of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Determined to resist domination by others, the Kurdish tribes have a long heritage of fighting Turks, Arabs, Persians and, most of all, each other. That history will not vanish overnight. It will have to be worn away. A promising start toward that outcome is being made here among the 4 million Kurds of northern Iraq. Their leaders are cooperating fully with the American forces that landed here in March and have stayed on, among other reasons, to help maintain Iraq's territorial integrity. One important consequence of the war has been something that did not happen. President Bush was warned by Arab leaders and others that ethnic and religious bloodbaths of revenge would erupt if the Baathist dictatorship was taken down. Moreover, it was said, Turkey was poised to sweep in, pulverize the Kurds and grab the oil fields of northern Iraq if war came. Those predictions have not materialized. The Kurds have instead shown restraint and, with isolated exceptions, refrained from forcibly grabbing land and houses confiscated from them and turned over to Arab settlers during Saddam's reign. Under gentle prodding from U.S. occupation authorities, Barzani and the other major Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, have not sought to extend their presence into disputed areas beyond the informal green line that has separated Kurds and Arabs since 1991. For its part, the United States has leaned heavily on Turkey not to move its troops into Kurdistan or practice subversion here. While Turkish units might be useful in coming into Iraq as peacekeepers and then deploying to the Iraqi-Syrian border as a buffer force, U.S. intentions are to keep them out of the Kurdish heartland. That is an undertaking that Americans, as the Kurds' new best friends, must not abandon. Iraqi Kurdistan lies at the heart of the 6.4 million square miles of turmoil and trouble in the Middle East and Asia that the U.S. Central Command, the lead military headquarters in the war on terrorism, has been tasked to tame. For once, the Kurds' location may work to their benefit. A working alliance between Kurds and Americans was foretold by and then denied to Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Massoud's father and the late Kurdish patriarch, who launched the first serious attempt at regime change in Saddam's Iraq 30 years ago this summer. In a 1973 interview in his redoubt in the Zagros mountains, where he was building a rebel army, the elder Barzani appealed to American leaders for help in fighting the Baathists, who, he rightly predicted, would one day plunge the region into war after war. We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil, he told me. Covert U.S. aid was channeled through Iran to Barzani's pesh merga troops but abruptly halted when Saddam gained the upper hand in 1975 and launched a campaign of genocide that was halted only by the 1991 Gulf War. Last March, the pesh merga helped American troops chase the remaining Baathist troops from Kurdistan and usher in a new dawn of hope here. My father told me that he would never live to see this day, Massoud Barzani says as he contemplates the free and relatively prosperous Kurdistan that now exists. But he told me I would. In that way, he was with us as this happened.
Paul Gigot, Iraqis' Greatest Fear is US will cut and run
Which brings up the other large American mistake: The failure to enlist Iraqi allies into the fight from the very start. Pentagon officials had wanted to do this for months, but they were trumped by the CIA, State and former Centcom chief Tommy Franks. The result has been too many GIs doing jobs they shouldn't have to do, such as guarding banks, and making easier targets for the Baathist-jihadi insurgency. Wall Street Journal EUPHRATES WATCH 'This Was a Good Thing to Do' Iraqis' greatest fear is that America will cut and run. BY PAUL A. GIGOT Monday, July 28, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT NAJAF, Iraq--Toppling a statue is easier than killing a dictator. Not the man himself, but the idea of his despotism, the legacy of his torture and the fear of his return. This kind of reconstruction takes time. Just ask the 20-some members of the new city council in this holy city of Shiite Islam. Their chairs are arrayed in a circle to hear from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who invites questions. The first man to speak wants to know two things: There's a U.S. election next year, and if President Bush loses will the Americans go home? And second, are you secretly holding Saddam Hussein in custody as a way to intimidate us with the fear that he might return? Mr. Wolfowitz replies no to both points, with more conviction on the second than the first. But the question reveals the complicated anxiety of the post-Saddam Iraqi mind. Most reporting from Iraq suggests that the U.S. occupation isn't welcome here. But following Mr. Wolfowitz around the country I found precisely the opposite to be true. The majority aren't worried that we'll stay too long; they're petrified we'll leave too soon. Traumatized by 35 years of Saddam's terror, they fear we'll lose our nerve as casualties mount and leave them once again to the Baath Party's merciless revenge. That is certainly true in Najaf, which the press predicted in April would be the center of a pro-Iranian Shiite revolt. Only a week ago Sunday, Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable made Section A with a story titled Rumors Spark Iraqi Protests as Pentagon Official Stops By. Interesting, if true. But Ms. Constable hung her tale on the rant of a single Shiite cleric who wasn't chosen for the Najaf city council. Even granting that her details were accurate--there was a protest by this Shiite faction, though not when Mr. Wolfowitz was around--the story still gave a false impression of overall life in Najaf. On the same day, I saw Mr. Wolfowitz's caravan welcomed here and in nearby Karbala with waves and shouts of Thank you, Bush. The new Najaf council represents the city's ethnic mosaic, and its chairman is a Shiite cleric. Things improved dramatically once the Marines deposed a corrupt mayor who'd been installed by the CIA. Those same Marines have rebuilt schools and fired 80% of the police force. The city is now largely attack-free and Marines patrol without heavy armor and often without flak jackets. The entire south-central region is calm enough that the Marines will be turning over duty to Polish and Italian troops. This is the larger story I saw in Iraq, the slow rebuilding and political progress that is occurring even amid the daily guerrilla attacks in Baghdad and the Sunni north. Admittedly we were in, or near, the Wolfowitz bubble. But reporters elsewhere are also in a bubble, one created by the inevitable limits of travel, sourcing and access. In five days we visited eight cities, and I spoke to hundreds of soldiers and Iraqis. The Bush administration has made mistakes here since Saddam's statue fell on April 9. President Bush declared the war over much too soon, leaving Americans unprepared for the Baathist guerrilla campaign. (The Pentagon had to fight to get the word major inserted before combat operations in Iraq have ended in that famous May 1 Mission Accomplished speech.) But U.S. leaders, civilian and military, are learning from mistakes and making tangible progress. One error was underestimating Saddam's damage, both physical and psychic. The degradation of this oil-rich country is astonishing to behold. Like the Soviets, the dictator put more than a third of his GDP into his military--and his own palaces. The scale of military infrastructure here is staggering, says Maj. Gen. David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne. His troops found one new Iraqi base that is large enough to hold his entire 18,500-man division. Everything else looks like it hasn't been replaced in at least 30 years. The General Electric turbine at one power plant hails from 1965, the boiler at one factory from 1952. Textile looms are vintage 1930s. Peter McPherson, the top U.S. economic adviser here, estimates that rebuilding infrastructure will cost $150 billion over 10 years. All of this makes the reconstruction effort vulnerable to even small acts of sabotage. The night before we visited Basra, someone had blown up electrical transmission pylons, shutting down power to
Melanie Kirkpatrick, Clear Ideas Versus Foggy Bottom, WSJ
Wall Street Journal ANALYZE THIS Clear Ideas Versus Foggy Bottom The State Department is jealous of all the sound thinking going on at the Pentagon. BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK Tuesday, August 5, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT The ripest political target in Washington these days is a man who rarely gets his picture in the paper. Douglas Feith's sin is being Donald Rumsfeld's ideas man and one of the brains behind some of the most significant foreign policy and national security advances of the Bush administration. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith has transformed a once relatively obscure corner of the Pentagon into the world's most effective think tank. The fact that the president has adopted many of the ideas brewed there infuriates those who see Defense usurping a role that rightly belongs to the State Department. Without a doubt, the policy division has the most significant intellectual capabilities in the government, says former Defense Department official Richard Perle, who hired Mr. Feith for the Reagan Pentagon and now sits on the Defense Policy Board. It's a creative shop that produces a lot of good ideas, says Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser and one of the policy group's main customers. They are prepared to think differently. The urgency of the need to think differently became evident on Sept. 11, 2001, six weeks after Mr. Feith started on the job and the war on terrorism began. Soon after the war got started, Mr. Feith says, I had a talk with the secretary about how we could support him. He said, 'I need a few ideas every day lobbed in front of me.' Since then Mr. Feith has lobbed ideas with the ferocity of Andre Agassi. He and his team of 450 spend a great deal of time on Iraq and Afghanistan--they conceived the offensive strategy in the global war on terrorism--but their strategic focus extends to virtually every corner of the world. In Russia, they thought through the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and helped negotiate the Moscow Treaty, dramatically reducing nuclear warheads. They urged a rapid expansion of NATO and the development of a strategic relationship with India, moves that paid off in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Mideast, they pushed for U.S. support of the creation of a Palestinian state in return for Palestinian reform--the position announced by the president in his June 24, 2002 speech. The idea that fighting the war on terrorism requires a new military footprint world-wide was worked by Mr. Feith's policy staff. It led to decisions to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany and South Korea and negotiate basing rights in more places world-wide (Central Asia, for example), closer to where they might be needed. The new basing strategy will affect the way the military fights and the way we do diplomacy for decades. The policy organization represents Defense in the inter-agency process, where its proposals are thrashed out along with those from State, CIA, the National Security Council and others. There is not a lot of pride of authorship, says the NSC's Mr. Hadley. They are prepared to launch an idea and then let others modify and improve it. In the Pentagon, Mr. Feith was instrumental in forging a more collaborative relationship with the Joint Staff, which has its own independent policy organization. He and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, co-chair a daily meeting in Mr. Feith's office to share ideas and hash out differences of opinion before they reach Mr. Rumsfeld's desk. The Campaign Planning Committee--CapCom, in Pentagonspeak--has become an invaluable tool to work through complicated issues and provide the secretary with a coordinated product, says Gen. Pace. Success breeds enemies, and the influence of Mr. Feith's policy shop doesn't go down well in certain quarters of Foggy Bottom, which seem to resent that good ideas that don't originate in State can sometimes prevail over their own. Nor does it win friends at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which don't always welcome the competition in intelligence analysis. The result has been a nasty, mostly anonymous, campaign in the media to discredit Mr. Feith and his policy team. The first wave focused on the small Special Plans Office, set up last fall to prepare for possible war in Iraq. This cabal (the New Yorker), highly secretive group (Knight-Ridder), or shadowy Pentagon committee (Agence France Press) was the subject of so much false reporting that Mr. Feith and fellow cabalist William Luti took the rare step of calling a press conference in June to set the record straight. The latest attacks hold Mr. Feith's office responsible for flawed postwar planning in Iraq. A story in yesterday's Financial Times is typical: The Pentagon planning was hurried and ignored the extensive work done by the State Department. The criticism is preposterous if only for the fact that Defense's proposals for a provisional government,
Jim Hoagland, Bremer's Tug of War, Let Iraqis help him get on with it
The Washington Post Bremer's Tug of War By Jim Hoagland September 21, 2003 A man with $20 billion to spend is certain to accumulate a lot of things, including new troubles and determined rivals for control of that fortune. The hot seat that L. Paul Bremer occupies as America's proconsul in Iraq is about to get even hotter. Bremer of Baghdad has exercised uncontested authority with a toughness and dogmatism needed to surmount the chaotic conditions he found when he arrived in Baghdad in May. Those qualities won him support even from Iraqis and Americans he had to rebuff; in today's rapidly changing diplomatic and political environment, similar stubbornness could easily undermine Bremer's early successes. The maxim of the Watergate scandal -- follow the money -- is a good guide to understanding the heated scuffling that has erupted on Capitol Hill, in high-level diplomatic talks about a new U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq and in increasingly tense behind-closed-doors exchanges in the Bush administration over Bremer's place in the presidential chain of command. Bremer has little to fear from open challenges to his authority, whether they come from France at the Security Council, from congressional Democrats eager to force the administration into admitting error on Iraq or from Iraqi politicians. They are not likely to influence President Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the two officials to whom Bremer reports in Washington. It is the hidden agendas he must fear. A host of newfound friends will cluster around Bremer and the $20 billion that Bush proposes to spend on Iraqi reconstruction in the coming year. Saddled with weak U.S. staffing and infrastructure in Baghdad and still reluctant to share authority and information with Iraq's Governing Council, Bremer will personally decide how to spend sums so huge that they are difficult for most humans to comprehend. He also faces new pressures to accelerate his seven-point political plan to get Iraqis to write and ratify a new constitution and hold national elections before the coalition hands over sovereignty. Bremer is insisting on his timetable with a rigidity that is troubling other nations, Iraq's fledgling leadership and some of his colleagues -- who for a variety of motives are extraordinarily careful about saying anything critical of Bremer. The battle over a new Security Council resolution revolves around the desire of other nations to put Bremer -- not U.S. forces -- under U.N. control. That effort may provide the State Department with an opening to have more of a say in Bremer's operations as well. State Department officials have chafed at their exclusion from decision-making on Iraq since Rumsfeld chose Bremer, a hawkish retired career diplomat, from a White House list of 15 or so candidates to head the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The diplomats on Bremer's staff in Baghdad report directly to him, not to Washington. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told friends that he has to rely on newspapers and the diplomatic reporting of other nations that is shared with State to follow developments in Iraq. Powell no doubt has a point: The lack of communication within the Pentagon itself is a well-known problem, and the fierce rivalries between the two departments rule out what might be described as meaningful contact. This has become a severe problem for Bush, who has tolerated an unacknowledged but visible war between Powell and Rumsfeld. But having Bremer report to the United Nations or to State instead of Defense -- or giving State budget authority over the $20 billion reconstruction fund -- would not solve those or other problems. Such changes would add to the confusion and disarray that currently hobble the U.S. effort in Iraq. The path out of Iraq runs through Bremer's maintaining the unity of command that working with the Pentagon offers, and his moving with greater speed to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis on the Governing Council and in its cabinet. Bremer shows signs of increasing irritation with Iraqi politicians such as Ahmed Chalabi and others who easily rival the presidential envoy in displays of strong will and considerable ego as they push for greater power sooner. That is perhaps no bad thing: Chalabi and his colleagues must show that they are defending Iraq's national interests to maintain credibility with the Iraqi populace. Bremer should not mistake Iraqi prodding on a timetable as an attempt to sabotage him. In this administration, that is more likely to come in Washington. Bremer is in Baghdad to fix the country by working himself out of a job as soon as he can. It is time to let Iraqis help him get on with it. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WSJ, The Kerfuffle over Wilson's wife
The Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK Political Intelligence The agenda behind the kerfuffle over Joe Wilson's wife. Wednesday, October 1, 2003 We've been knocking our heads trying to figure out how a minor and well-known story about an alleged CIA outing has suddenly blossomed into a Beltway scandal-ette. The light bulb went off reading Monday's White House press briefing. Right out of the box, Helen Thomas asked if the President tried to find out who outed the CIA agent? And has he fired anyone in the White House yet? OK, the point of this exercise is to get President Bush to fire someone. But whom? That answer became clear when the press corps quickly uttered, and kept uttering for nearly an hour, the name Karl Rove. Of course! The reason this is suddenly a story is because Mr. Rove, the President's political strategist and confidant from Texas, has become the main target. Joseph Wilson, the CIA consultant at the center of this mini-tempest, had recently fingered Mr. Rove as the official who leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Mr. Wilson has offered no evidence for this, and he's since retreated to say only that he now believes Mr. Rove had condoned it. The White House has replied that the charge is simply not true. But no matter, the scandal game is afoot. The media, and the Democrats now slip-streaming behind them, understand that the what of this mystery matters much less than the who. It's no accident that Tony Blair's recent and evanescent scandal over WMD evidence concerned his long-time political aide and intimate, Alastair Campbell. We're also old enough to recall what happened to Jimmy Carter's Presidency once his old Georgia friend Bert Lance was run out of town. If they can take down Mr. Rove, the lead planner for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, they will have knocked the props out of his Presidency. The political goals must be paramount here because the substance of the story is so flimsy. The law against revealing the names of covert CIA agents was passed in 1982 as a reaction against leaks by Philip Agee and other hard-left types whose goal was to undermine CIA operations around the world. This case is all about a policy dispute over Iraq. The first outing here was the one Mr. Wilson did to himself by writing an op-ed in July for the New York Times. An avowed opponent of war with Iraq, Mr. Wilson was somehow hired as a consultant by the CIA to investigate a claim made by British intelligence about yellowcake uranium sought in Niger by Iraqi agents. Though we assume he signed the routine CIA confidentiality agreement, Mr. Wilson blew his own cover to denounce the war and attack the Bush Administration for lying. Never mind that the British still stand by their intelligence, and that the CIA's own October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, since partly declassified, lent some credence to the evidence. This is the context in which Mr. Novak was told that Mr. Wilson had been hired at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA employee. This is hardly blowing a state secret but is something the public had a right to know. When an intelligence operative essentially claims that a U.S. President sent American soldiers off to die for a lie, certainly that operative's own motives and history ought to be on the table. In any event, Mrs. Wilson was not an agent in the field but is ensconced at Langley headquarters. It remains far from clear that any law was violated. The real intelligence scandal is how an open opponent of the U.S. war on terror such as Mr. Wilson was allowed to become one of that policy's investigators. That egregious CIA decision echoes what has obviously been a long-running attempt by anonymous intelligence sources quoted in the media to undermine the Bush policy toward Iraq. Mr. Bush's policies of prevention and pursuing state sponsors of terror overturned more than 30 years of CIA anti-terror dogma, and some of the bureaucrats are hoping to defeat him in 2004. As recently as Monday, the New York Times hung its lead story around a leak that the Pentagon had somehow not got its money's worth from the $1 million it had spent mining some of Ahmed Chalabi's intelligence tips. We'd love to see a declassified bang-for-the-buck analysis of the tens of millions the CIA has spent paying sources who claimed to have Saddam Hussein in their sights. If CIA Director George Tenet can't control his bureaucracy, then President Bush should find a director who can. Which brings us back to the politics. The Democratic Presidential candidates are naturally all over this pseudo-story, calling for a special counsel and Congressional probe. They can suddenly posture as great defenders of the CIA and covert operations, though some of them spent the decades before 9/11 assailing both. And if they can't get Mr. Bush to
Clfford May, Was it really a secret that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?, NRO
National Review Online Clifford May September 29, 2003, 10:22 a.m.Spy GamesWas it really a secret that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA? It's the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA? What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?" I believe I was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson, a retired diplomat sent to Niger to look into reports that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium for his nuclear-weapons program. On July 6, Mr. Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." On July 11, I wrote a piece for NRO arguing that Mr. Wilson had no basis for that conclusion and that his political leanings and associations (not disclosed by the Times and others journalists interviewing him) cast serious doubt on his objectivity. On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. That wasn't news to me. I had been told that but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of. I chose not to include it (I wrote a second NRO piece on this issue on July 18) because it didn't seem particularly relevant to the question of whether or not Mr. Wilson should be regarded as a disinterested professional who had done a thorough investigation into Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. What did appear relevant could easily be found in what the CIA would call "open sources." For example, Mr. Wilson had long been a bitter critic of the current administration, writing in such left-wing publications as The Nation that under President Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness" and had "imperial ambitions." What's more, he was affiliated with the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute and he had recently been the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-Left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions and the no-fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam. Mr. Wilson is now saying (on C-SPAN this morning, for example) that he opposed military action in Iraq because he didn't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he foresaw the possibility of a difficult occupation. In fact, prior to the U.S. invasion, Mr. Wilson told ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat."Equally, important and also overlooked: Mr. Wilson had no apparent background or skill as an investigator. As Mr. Wilson himself acknowledged, his so-called investigation was nothing more than "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" at the U.S. embassy in Niger. Based on those conversations, he concluded that "it was highly doubtful that any [sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq] had ever taken place." That's hardly the same as disproving what British intelligence believed and continues to believe: that Saddam Hussein was actively attempting to purchase uranium from somewhere in Africa. (Whether Saddam succeeded or not isn't the point; were Saddam attempting to make such purchases it would suggest that his nuclear-weapons-development program was active and ongoing.) For some reason, this background and these questions have been consistently omitted in the Establishment media's reporting on Mr. Wilson and his charges. There also remains this intriguing question: Was it primarily due to the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked
Saddam's Money Stashed in Syria, Time
Time Magazie W O R L D Saddam's Syrian Stash Investigators think they've found some of Hussein's loot. Is the money funding terrorist attacks By ADAM ZAGORIN Saturday, Oct. 11, 2003 Since the fall of Baghdad in April, American officials have scoured the globe in search of Saddam Hussein's legendary fortune. Now they think they have found a big chunk. According to a U.S. estimate, as much as $3 billion in Iraqi assets is sitting in Syrian government- controlled banks, a senior U.S. official tells Time, and Washington is anxious to determine that the money is not funding violence against Americans in Iraq, or being drawn down by regime officials and supporters. For months the U.S. has quietly insisted that Damascus give up the funds. Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in May and made that unpublicized demand. Top Syrian officials have been given the names of at least two suspect banks and provided with account numbers. Syria's private response-that unspecified accounts were being frozen-was judged woefully inadequate. Publicly, Syria denies there is any Iraqi money in the country. But just over two weeks ago, the U.S. sent two American financial experts and two representatives of the Iraqi Central Bank to Syria to comb through records. U.S. officials now assert that Damascus has given them only limited cooperation. In the run-up to the war, Syria was among Iraq's principal trading partners, buying more than $1 billion worth of cheap oil annually in violation of U.N. sanctions. Since the war, U.S.-Syrian relations have deteriorated sharply. A congressional bill, which President Bush has signaled he won't veto, accuses Syria of sponsoring terrorism, seeking weapons of mass destruction and occupying Lebanon. It was approved by a House committee last week, three days after Israel attacked an alleged Palestinian terrorist camp outside Damascus-an act Bush, notably, did not condemn. Syria may also be courting economic isolation: its banks could face Bush-imposed sanctions under the Patriot Act, which would effectively bar them from world capital markets. Warns the senior official: We have made it plain that if access to records and cooperation continue to be restricted, we reserve the right to impose economic counter-measures. From the Oct. 20, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
Claudia Winkler, Journalists in Saddam's Iraq
The Weekly Standard Special Relationships It's becoming clear that some journalists in Saddam's Iraq had special relationships with the government. Others did it the right way. by Claudia Winkler September 17, 2003 IT'S WORTH RECYCLING John Burns's stunning denunciation of corruption in the media, already touted on Andrew Sullivan's indispensable blog on Tuesday and elsewhere since. The scandal of some Western media's silence about the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime, of course, is old news. It's already five months since CNN's news chief, Eason Jordan, wrote about his organization's blithe cover-up in the New York Times. But Burns's piece adds a dimension that needs to be underlined--and I don't mean the material bribes paid to Saddam's director of information. His account highlights the deadening of conscience that goes along with a policy of collusion, rationalized as the price of maintaining access to Iraq. Its counterpart is the quickening of conscience on the part of those who refuse to sell out. Burns, who won a Pulitzer prize for his war reporting from the Balkans, writes of his "fury" when people chided him for risking his life to cover Iraq--as if exposing evil were a thing no sensible journalist would inconvenience himself to do. And don't miss Burns's account of warning the Iraqis at the Ministry of Information in Baghdad that their building was to be bombed the next night. He personally went from floor to floor telling people to get out. When an Iraqi official later accused him of working for the CIA, he shot back, "I come from a newspaper and a country who cares about people. We were told [by colleagues in New York that the building would be attacked] on the basis of human decency. Not just for ourselves but also for Iraqis. They didn't want to kill innocent Iraqis." Burns's vehemence brings to mind another instance of healthy fury at colleagues' cravenness, on the part of another brave and honest reporter in Iraq. Michael Kelly, the late editor of the Atlantic Monthly, recalled being in Baghdad the night the first Gulf War began, in January 1991. CNN was the only news outfit that still had a line to the outside world, and Kelly slipped a note under their locked door asking them to contact some of the journalists' families to let them know they had come through the night all right. The wording of the CNN refusal and other details of the exchange are priceless. Here's how Kelly recalled them in an interview he gave six weeks before his death in Iraq on April 4: . . . There are a lot of individual stories from that night that you can't see because they're not what TV shows--how people react to things. Some of that I wrote about, some of that I didn't. Some people had reactions to that night that I didn't want to write about. There were a lot of people there who were mad at CNN--you didn't see that on TV. Because? Well, because CNN had this special relationship with the Iraqi government that they had earned, in part, through what I thought was corrupt reporting. Sort of the mouthpiece for Saddam. More than that. Specifically, they were allowed to fly on Iraqi planes to go into Kuwait City when it was occupied, and they were taken there by the Iraqi government for the specific purpose of shooting down the story that the Iraqi occupiers had killed babies in incubators. And they did shoot that story down for the government. As [Robert] Wiener, the producer for CNN, has written for his book, which has recently been made into a movie, they acquiesced to the Iraqi government's demand that they not tell the world the rest of the stuff they saw in Kuwait City. They did that to protect their special standing. Their special standing was not only access to interviews that nobody else could get, but they also had this land line that allowed them twenty-four-hour open telephone. So in effect, they were enabling. Well, I didn't blame them politically for that. But I thought the decision to suppress what they knew they had seen in Kuwait City was wholly corrupt and wrong and indefensible. That night, the people who were there--we all passed the same night. They passed it in glory on TV. But everybody was in the same hotel. In the morning--I was talking the other day to a guy I had spent a lot of time with that night, a reporter from a Sydney paper--and he reminded me that he and I had gone up to CNN's suite at dawn and knocked on the door. They had locked the door so nobody could get into their suite, because they had
Jim Hoagland, A Major US Error in Iraq
Bush has at times deliberately ruled out specific support to Iraqis who have lived under and fully understand Western democracy and who can promote its values in their own country. He has, I am told, accepted the argument made by Jordan's king, Egypt's president, the CIA and others that Iraqis who lived outside the borders of the Baathist terrorist rule are terminally out of touch and should not be given any advantages in organizing the country's political future. That reasoning led to the disastrous U.S. decision not to train large numbers of exiles to serve as interpreters, guides and military police officers arriving with the March invasion force. It is now a chief cause of the floundering of Bush postwar policy. . . Washington Post Intellectuals Who Distrust Freedom By Jim Hoagland Sunday, October 19, 2003 American and European intellectuals have a history of distrusting politicians and thinkers from oppressed countries who clamor for the same political and economic freedoms that our savants enjoy. The clamorers cannot represent authentic nationalism if all they want is to be just like us, the reasoning seems to go. I can understand les profs at the Sorbonne and would-be apparatchiks in the administrations-in-waiting at the Brookings Institution and Harvard's Kennedy School upholding this reverse spin on Groucho Marx's old saw: He refused to join any club that would have him as a member. The savants will not take in members who approve so heartily of the free-market club they inhabit. But it is much harder for me to understand why President Bush and some senior members of his administration take so readily to that kind of distrust of pro-democracy advocates when it comes to Iraq. This is not an intellectual bent they come by naturally. Bush has at times deliberately ruled out specific support to Iraqis who have lived under and fully understand Western democracy and who can promote its values in their own country. He has, I am told, accepted the argument made by Jordan's king, Egypt's president, the CIA and others that Iraqis who lived outside the borders of the Baathist terrorist rule are terminally out of touch and should not be given any advantages in organizing the country's political future. That reasoning led to the disastrous U.S. decision not to train large numbers of exiles to serve as interpreters, guides and military police officers arriving with the March invasion force. It is now a chief cause of the floundering of Bush postwar policy. Day after day, administration spokesmen make it clear the White House is being told -- and is agreeing -- that it must not trust the Iraqis whom U.S. forces fought to liberate. Some officials trash the Governing Council that the administration put in place, evidently to avoid having to give it real power anytime soon. The Governing Council is not seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people. They're not ready to take power, according to an unnamed senior official quoted by the State Department correspondent of the New York Times earlier this month. Talk about disloyal leaks from the upper echelons. How would you like to be dodging bombs in Baghdad while trying to write a constitution so that Colin Powell's people can deliberately undermine you in complete anonymity? The reasons for this distrust are varied. But much of it stems from the prominent role that Iraqi exiles such as Ayad Alawi, Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan Pachachi and Abdul Aziz Hakim play on the Governing Council. Bitter foes as they fought for scarce external support while they were living abroad, they have forged a relatively good working relationship since they came home. But a lingering prejudice in Iraq against political exiles blocks significant recognition of this positive development. Vladimir Nabokov called attention to the West's ingrained distrust of emigres in a reproachful letter he sent to Edmund Wilson, the essayist who had extravagantly praised Lenin's regime, which may have had a hand in the assassination of Nabokov's father in Berlin in 1922: American commentators saw us merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes who had only selfish and base motives for opposing Lenin. That stereotyping made their testimony unwelcome and unweighed, the great Russian novelist regretfully wrote to his future ex-friend. Martin Amis quotes Nabokov's letter in his recent book, Koba the Dread, and then argues that the emigres were very broadly the intelligentsia. They were the civil society, which was crushed and forced into exile by the professional revolutionaries of Bolshevism, who were perversely lionized by many in the chattering classes in the West. Raymond Aron, an outstanding French intellectual of the 20th century, would recognize today's strange postwar climate. Western writers, Washington politicians and Arab monarchs who never bothered to issue a single critical word about Saddam Hussein as he killed or tortured millions of Arabs and Iranians
WSJ, The Importance of Debt Relief
Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK Indebted to Saddam Debt relief is more important to Iraq than donations. Monday, October 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST Yesterday's rocket attack on the Al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad will no doubt dominate this morning's headlines, in part because of the narrow miss of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But the bigger news in the long run is still likely to be the weekend's Madrid donor conference and the progress it represents toward a self-governing Iraq. We'll save a full tally for another day, but consider what's happening on the donor and debt fronts. In one sense the 70 nations in Madrid were a tad stingy in coughing up about $13 billion for Iraq, much of it in the form of loans. Our former best friends, France and Germany, contributed zip and Arab nations offered only a modest amount. The better news is that many small and less financially flush states contributed--Vietnam offered rice and Sri Lanka promised tea. Nonetheless, the $33 billion total aid package, including $20 billion from the U.S. that Congress is expected to approve, will give the Iraqi economy a nice immediate boost. But the best news is that the conference is over and now the far more important consideration of what to do with Iraq's debts can begin. Although Iraq is potentially a rich, rich country, its economy cannot prosper unless it attracts private capital. And no investor is going to shovel in that capital until Iraq's debt is under control. The best current guess on Iraq's debt comes to $150-to-$200 billion. Worse, Iraq also needs somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year over the next five years for rebuilding power plants and other reconstruction. And worse still is that these amounts must be handled in a way that does not decimate Iraq's domestic operating budget, which needs to run in the neighborhood of $13 billion a year. The donor contributions will relieve some of this pressure and oil revenue should cover the operating budget. The hooker here is that although estimates for oil revenue are around $13-$18 billion for the next several years, 5% of any oil revenue must go to the United Nations for reparations payments. Simply put, things look tight. All of which explains why proper debt relief is so important to get Iraq's economy humming again. Debt restructuring involves four somewhat flexible parts: a haircut to the amount owed, the size of interest payments on remaining debt, the grace period during which no payments are made, and the length of time before the debt is extinguished. Obviously, these parts are related. A big haircut could call forth higher interest payments and vice versa, while a long grace period might require a shorter repayment period, and vice versa. There are thus lots of ways to produce a reasonable package. The Bush Administration says it plans to seek substantial debt reduction. To our mind, that would mean a haircut of 80%, interest of 5%, a grace period of five years and a maturity of 20 years. Big numbers, sure, but it is hard to feel sorry for global creditors who lent to Saddam Hussein's regime. A substantial haircut is also important to persuade balky Congresspersons that U.S. money will go to Iraqis and not to pay off French and Russian debt. The sheer size of Iraq's debt has prompted some people to call for repudiation under the doctrine of odious debt. This doctrine has two attractions. It relieves Iraqis from debt burdens undertaken by a hideous tyrant for hideous purposes, and it puts future creditors to other hideous tyrants on notice that such debts might go unpaid. But a complete repudiation would also have costs, notably to Iraq itself. The main point of economic reconstruction is to restore Iraq's access to global credit markets, and creditors are never thrilled to see contracts repudiated. Future creditors--especially private ones--would be encouraged to see Iraq making at least some payments on existing debt. Just as important, a repudiation of this magnitude would rattle debt markets and cause risk premiums to rise. The best solution is a balance that liberates a newly democratic Iraq from most of the burden of Saddam-era debt but also helps it to lure new private foreign capital. Iraq's economy needs some breathing room to get private capital in and working, and a generous but sensible program of debt reduction is the crucial next step.
Saddam Ally at Rashid Hotel?, Wash Times
October 27, 2003 The Washington Times Saddam ally an insider at hotel hit by rockets By Paul Martin BAGHDAD - A contractor supplying kitchen staff and secretaries for the Al Rasheed Hotel, the scene of yesterday's rocket attacks, was allied to Saddam Hussein's security services and might have been providing intelligence to the anti-U.S. resistance, an Iraqi informant said yesterday. The hotel is one of the most sensitive sites in Baghdad, serving as office and residence to top coalition officials as well as many members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Resistance fighters fired a barrage of rockets into the hotel yesterday, killing an American colonel and wounding 17 persons. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was staying at the hotel, was unhurt. The informant, who works with the newly trained Iraqi police, detailed his charges about a fifth column in the hotel kitchen in a letter to U.S. coalition officials almost two months ago but appears to have been ignored. The Washington Times turned over another copy of the letter to a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division yesterday and was told it would be investigated. The informant, who identifies himself fully in his letter but declined to have his name published, focuses his charges on Muslel Muhammed Farhan Al-Dilemi, 53, the manager of the Al-Tamoor Trading Co. which provides services to the hotel. Mr. Al-Dilemi used to meet with [Saddam´s] heads of security, intelligence and ... most of the Ba'ath Party officials, the Sept. 2 letter says, adding that the walls of his office are decorated with photographs of him posing with top Ba'athist officials. The letter says Mr. Al-Dilemi placed several people with jobs in the hotel kitchen and staffed the hotel with a number of beautiful secretaries for whom he arranged sexual liaisons. His people are the ones who get the hotel kitchen food ... and he gets half of what they get on a daily basis, said the letter, implying that Mr. Al-Dilemi was running a food-smuggling racket. It added: He already knows which the important floors are - such as floors 8, 9, 10 and 13 - and also that most of the Governing Council people live at the hotel. Mr. Wolfowitz is reported to have been sleeping in a room on the 13th floor when the rockets struck early yesterday. The letter claims that members of the hotel management are in league with Mr. Al-Dilemi. A hotel manager - named in the report - ensured Mr. Al-Dilemi got the best contracts from the hotel during the Saddam era and is still working there, the letter says. Who knows what information is being passed to the [pro-Saddam resistance] fighters? the informant said yesterday, suggesting that the most recent attack might have been avoided if he had been taken seriously. It's obvious that only an insider could have told the attackers that Mr. Wolfowitz was in the hotel, and that he was on the 13th floor, the informant concluded. That was disputed by Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey of the 1st Armored Division, Baghdad's effective military commander. He told reporters he believed the attack had been planned for two months and that the rockets had missed their targets because of an inaccurate propulsion system.
Wolfowitz Profile, Wash Post
Holding Their Ground As Critics Zero In, Paul Wolfowitz Is Unflinching On Iraq Policy By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 23, 2003; Page C01 In late September, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz appeared in Manhattan at an event sponsored by the New Yorker magazine. As he began to speak, he was interrupted by shouts of War criminal! and Murderer! I can't resist, he said evenly, surveying the audience. This is what is wonderful about this country. It is -- Another shout: Shame on you. Wolfowitz drove on: -- and what is finally wonderful is 50 million, roughly 50 million Afghans and Iraqis, are finally able to speak this way without having their tongues cut out. A few minutes later, a young man ran to the base of the stage, jabbed a finger at Wolfowitz and shouted: You should be tried for treason, you Nazi! If Wolfowitz was jarred by the attack, he showed no sign of it. Rather, he looked a bit distant as he coolly responded: Frankly, my own reading of history is that exactly this kind of tactic is what the Nazis did and what the totalitarians did in trying to stop people from listening and talking. Saddam Hussein, he went on to say, was a malevolent dictator who clearly needed to be removed for the good of both the American and the Iraqi peoples. I think anyone with the slightest bit of moral sense understood what an evil man Saddam was and how much better off the world would be with him gone. Later in the same session, he added, To me, it's almost beyond argument. No deputy secretary of defense has ever held the prominence that Wolfowitz has had over the last two years. He is widely seen inside the Pentagon as the most likely replacement if Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld steps down. And no figure in the administration, with the possible exception of Vice President Cheney, is as closely identified with the drive to invade Iraq and depose Hussein. This is Wolfowitz's baby, said one person who has served as a senior official of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led occupation power in Iraq. He feels responsible for it. To understand Paul Wolfowitz and the policies he advocates, notes a friend and former colleague, it is important to understand that Wolfowitz believes there is real evil in the world, and that he is confronting it. The lesson that Wolfowitz took away from the Cold War, says Eliot Cohen, who knew him at Johns Hopkins University, where Wolfowitz was a dean before moving to the Pentagon, is that the world really is a dangerous place, and that you have to do something about it. Paired with that is his belief that the United States can best respond to totalitarianism by emphasizing freedom and democracy. Wolfowitz possesses a basic optimism about the potential of human beings for moderation and self-governance, and a belief in the universal appeal of liberty, Cohen says. That combination of a hardheaded view of some men with an idealistic faith in mankind, Cohen concludes, adds up to a distinctively American take on the world. So when Wolfowitz talks with great intensity about Iraq, it isn't just because his political future and his place in history are likely to be determined by the course of events there. He sees the U.S. invasion as part of a larger campaign against terrorism, and that post-Sept. 11, 2001, fight as the third great American struggle against totalitarianism, the new century's successor to the great fights against Nazism and Soviet communism. A recent conversation with him in his Pentagon office skipped among those three eras, moving from the Holocaust to the crimes of Hussein to the Cold War's Cuban missile crisis. The differences are as great as the similarities in those three struggles, he says. But there is a basic similarity in that we're dealing with a fundamental existential threat to our way of life, to our values. The main parallel, he says, is not so much in the nature of the enemy we're confronting as in the nature of the challenge it presents to us. That is, it really does require mobilization of a major effort on our part. It requires contemplating a long-term struggle. This isn't just theorizing. Wolfowitz's own life runs through all three of those confrontations. Though he didn't say so that day in New York when he was accused of being a Nazi, he lost most of his extended family in the Holocaust, with his line surviving because his father had emigrated from Poland in 1920 as a child. Wolfowitz, who just turned 60, shies away from discussing his family's losses. Asked about it, his response is seemingly off point. The event that happened in my college years that had the biggest single impression on me, even more than Kennedy's assassination, was the Cuban missile crisis -- that is, the prospect of nuclear holocaust. Pressed, he says, It was a fairly poor family in Poland. Does he know how many relatives were lost, and where? I really don't, he says. Some observers of Wolfowitz speculate
John Lehman, On the CIA, Iraq, and Terrorism
[Lehman] said he sees a lack of nimbleness and creativity at the CIA, and a tendency to discourage dissenting points of view. A prime example, Lehman said, is the view among intelligence agencies that the Iraqis had nothing to do with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Sept. 11 attacks, and anthrax-tainted letters that killed several people in the fall of 2001. Shortly after anthrax-tainted letters arrived at several government buildings in Washington, the FBI concluded it was probably the work of a domestic loner operating out of a basement. But given the fact that there have been no arrests, Lehman said intelligence agencies should not discount the idea that the Iraqis were involved. Philadelphia Inquirer Posted on Mon, Dec. 22, 2003Ex-Navy secretary brings skepticism to Sept. 11 panelBy Chris MondicsInquirer Washington BureauWASHINGTON - For all his boyish enthusiasm, in evidence despite his 61 years, John Lehman has always been a skeptic at heart.A member of one of Philadelphia's oldest families and an acolyte of former President Ronald Reagan, Lehman was named Navy secretary in 1981 at 38, one of the youngest in U.S. history. Like Reagan, Lehman believed the American military had become too passive. He wanted to shake things up and was skeptical of government bureaucracies, particularly intelligence-gathering agencies.Time after time, Lehman said, he had seen the CIA get it wrong, misreading tactics of the Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong and failing to grasp the scope of the Soviet naval buildup. By the time Lehman left the Navy in 1987, he had presided over a huge buildup of U.S. naval forces and put in place a leadership team that endorsed Reagan's aim of pressuring the Soviet Union militarily.Lehman has been out of the Navy for 16 years, but his jaundiced view of American intelligence-gathering burns as hotly as ever and has come into play in his role as a member of an independent commission looking into the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.Lehman travels regularly from his Bucks County farm to Washington for hearings of the National Commission on Terror Attacks Upon the United States, which has been probing intelligence, law enforcement and military lapses that may have exposed the nation to attack. In keeping with his record in the Navy, Lehman's role is that of house skeptic. In December 2002, as the commission was being formed, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), at the behest of surviving victims and family members who worried the panel might pull its punches, insisted Lehman be named a member.The hope was that Lehman would push for disclosure of potentially embarrassing facts if other members were tempted to play politics. "I felt that Lehman was a guy we could trust," McCain said.So far, not everyone is satisfied.Family members and victims, who have mistrusted the Bush administration ever since it sought to block the formation of a commission, have criticized the panel for its lackluster hearings and for failing to press the White House more aggressively for information. Lehman is lauded for his accessibility to family members. But they said they are concerned about Lehman's oft-stated commitment to finishing the commission's work by the May 27 deadline set by Congress.Family members said that is an unrealistic time line given the scope of the investigation and stonewalling at the Pentagon and other agencies."He said they may not ask for an extension because [if the report] is released before the elections, they will have a better chance of having its recommendations enacted," said Lorie Van Auken, an East Brunswick, N.J., homemaker and a leader of a group representing victims' families. "I don't want a report to be rushed out in time for the presidential elections if things are going to be left out."Lehman said the families have reason to be skeptical because the instinct of government sometimes is to conceal information. But he said the commission has been given access to sensitive Bush administration documents that cast a harsh spotlight on enforcement of immigration laws and airline security."This is not hypothetical or speculative, but involves hard facts," Lehman said. "Negligence, bureaucratic incompetence. It is not a pretty picture."He said he sees a lack of nimbleness and creativity at the CIA, and a tendency to discourage dissenting points of view. A prime example, Lehman said, is the view among intelligence agencies that the Iraqis had nothing to do with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Sept. 11 attacks, and anthrax-tainted letters that killed several people in the fall of 2001. Shortly after anthrax-tainted letters arrived at several government buildings in Washington, the FBI concluded it was probably the work of a domestic loner operating out of a basement. But given the fact that there have been no arrests, Lehman said intelligence agencies should not discount the idea that the Iraqis were
CIA Fooled on Saddam's Whereabouts? Wash Times Iraq News Note
NB: It will be recalled that even after Saddam showed up on TV a few hours after this strike, the CIA continued to maintain that he was dead. Another US strike followed some days later, and the CIA once again pronounced Saddam dead. Indeed, as late as July, George Tenet was telling people that Saddam was dead. Inside the Ring By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm CIA Fooled? Military officials tell us the CIA was snookered by an agent who fed false information on the location of Saddam Hussein on the opening night of the Iraq war. The bogus intelligence was passed on to the U.S. Central Command, which then launched Tomahawk cruise missile and Stealth fighter strikes on a small palace facility near Baghdad known as Dora Farms. The March 19 raid was the opening salvo in the war, which sought to kill the Iraqi dictator before the start of military operations in the hope that all opposition to the advancing U.S. and allied forces would collapse. One official tells us the bad intelligence came from a bogus Humint source, intelligence-speak for a human agent. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said two days after the bombing that there's no question but that the strike on that leadership headquarters was successful. The question is: What was in there? The intelligence stated that the facility had bunkers underneath but a later search failed to uncover bunkers or tunnels. CIA officials claim the intelligence that Saddam was in the palace was accurate, but the bombing raid missed hitting the Iraqi leader. The Dora Farms site in southern Baghdad now houses a major U.S. military base and is sealed off from the public.
Jim Hoagland, Give the Shiites a Say
The Washington Post Give the Shiites a Say By Jim Hoagland Friday, January 23, 2004 Iraq's Shiite majority has begun to pry political control of the country from U.S. administrator Paul Bremer and his small, overwhelmed staff in Baghdad. The Bush administration should welcome and help shape this silent transition rather than fight to retain eroding power. That power will in any event be exhausted by June 30, the date on which the United States has agreed to return sovereignty to Iraq. That deadline is the one immovable object in a tangled web of U.S.-U.N.-Iraqi negotiations over ending an occupation that has essentially run its erratic course. Other details can and will be fudged. Bremer's once unshakable insistence on control over tiny details of occupation is being sapped by a nascent internal Iraqi political process, which triggered high-level meetings on Iraq's future in New York and Washington this week. The approach of the normally assertive U.S. administrator for Iraq ranged from reactive to passive at the United Nations and in the White House sessions, other participants report. Acting in concert more often than the Bush administration seems to realize, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and leading Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council agree on one overriding objective: The Shiite majority must not be cheated out of political control of Iraq or once again be subjugated by a domineering minority. Those fears haunt the Shiites nine months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-based regime. President Bush came face to face with the force of this fear on Tuesday at the White House, where a brief encounter may have done more to inform Bush's view of Iraq than dozens of lengthy briefing books or position papers. During Bush's spirited meeting with an ethnically and religiously balanced delegation from the Governing Council, Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim suddenly and gravely asked to speak privately with the president, according to several at the meeting. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials visibly tensed and tried to bypass the request. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, intervened to get Hakim and his interpreter five valuable minutes with the president. Rice sensed that Hakim had something important to say. We need your protection. Don't abandon us. That was the thrust of Hakim's direct and personal appeal to Bush, according to a reconstruction of the conversation provided by a U.S. source. The ayatollah's remarks clearly applied to Iraq's Shiites, who are thought to make up 60 percent of Iraq's 24 million people. The Shiites still fear that the Sunnis have their number, says a mid-level U.S. official who has worked closely with both groups in Iraq in recent months. Their fears may seem irrational to us, but those fears drive what Sistani and the others are doing. They remember when the United States stood by and let them be slaughtered during their 1991 revolt. The murderous insurgency in the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad and suicide bombings by terrorists elsewhere in Iraq have deepened Shiite fears that many Sunnis will fight majority rule as they have fought U.S. occupation. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi branch of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, left the Governing Council delegation in New York rather than come to Washington and be photographed visiting the White House. Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has joined Ibrahim Jafari and other leaders of Shiite Islamic parties and Ahmed Chalabi, a practicing Shiite who heads the secular Iraqi National Congress, to create an informal caucus of Governing Council members. The Shiite caucus has held two important strategy sessions with Sistani at his base in Najaf since the ayatollah raised objections to the Nov. 15 U.S. proposal for indirect elections, according to Iraqi sources. Sistani, the most respected Shiite cleric in the country, refuses to meet directly with Bremer and is not well known by the Sunni members of the Governing Council. Sistani and the Shiite politicians agree that democratic elections, conducted while U.S.-led coalition forces still provide security, should guarantee the Shiites political dominance. A U.N. statement fixing a date for direct elections later this year or in early 2005 would provide Sistani with political cover for accepting a short delay in majority rule. Neither his objections nor the recent Shiite street demonstrations should be seen in Washington as menacing developments. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that politics in Iraq is a good thing, says one Bush aide, who reported that the president successfully reassured Hakim and the other Governing Council members that he would press for democratic elections as soon as possible. American leadership on that agenda, rather than grudging acceptance of inevitable change, is the right course.
Mylroie, What went wrong, NRO
National Review Online January 23, 2004, 8:38 a.m.Mishandling TerrorismThe law-enforcement mistake. By Laurie Mylroie In his State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush identified the point at which America's response to terrorism went so badly awry: the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Bush also explained what went wrong: That attack was treated entirely as a law-enforcement issue; "some of the guilty were indicted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison." Following the speech, one National Public Radio commentator gasped that Bush seemed to be blaming former President Bill Clinton. That is, indeed, where blame lies. After every terrorist attack that occurred on his watch, Clinton would condemn the perpetrators and vow to bring them to justice. Yet there was a Catch-22: by treating terrorism as a law-enforcement issue, Clinton practically guaranteed that it would be understood as a law-enforcement issue and the critical question of state sponsorship would receive scant attention. In many respects, the U.S. legal system was, and still is, ill-suited to dealing with major terrorist attacks. A very significant flaw crept into that system after Watergate, with serious consequences in the 1990s, when several major terrorist assaults against the United States were followed by stunningly early arrests. Post-Watergate reforms prohibited the FBI from sharing the results of a criminal investigation with the CIA or any other national-security agency. Thus, once the FBI arrested even one suspect in the 1993 Trade Center bombing, that arrest cut off the flow of information to other agencies. Six days after the bombing, Mohammed Salameh, a 26-year-old Palestinian, was detained for the remarkably foolish act of returning to a Ryder rental agency for his deposit on the van that carried the bomb. From then on, the only purpose to which the FBI's investigation could be put was the prosecution of Salameh et al. And as long as even one individual remained a fugitive Abdul Rahman Yasin, who came to New York from Baghdad before the bombing and returned there afterwards, is still at large that information could not be passed on to other government agencies. The State Department's counterterrorism office, for example, is charged with determining whether any given act of terrorism is state-sponsored. But since it didn't have the results of the 1993 bombing investigation, how could it possibly make any such determination? Individuals in the U.S. bureaucracies could have obtained copies of the voluminous documentary evidence that was put into the public record through the trials, just as any private citizen can: by going to the courthouse. But bureaucracies are dominated by routine, and that did not happen, as I learned after providing Ramzi Yousef's fingerprints (evidence in the first Trade Center bombing trial) to an individual at the CIA's counterterrorism center, when the FBI refused to share the prints with him. Moreover, even as this information was not provided to agencies of the U.S. government, by law it had to be provided to the terrorist defendants and their lawyers, including Ramzi Yousef, the attack's mastermind. In the worst case, Yousef may have managed to pass back to his handlers some of that information, allowing them to sharpen the methods by which they evaded U.S. detection in subsequent assaults. Trials are narrowly focused. A prosecutor aims to secure convictions and maximal sentences for the defendants in the courtroom; pursuing the question of possible state sponsorship is rarely relevant to that task. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the accused a speedy trial. Yet the investigation into a major terrorist attack is a difficult, time-consuming task: After 9/11, it took authorities six months to learn that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who is supposedly Yousef's uncle) was the mastermind of those dreadful assaults. And that information came from the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah information that would been unavailable if, following his capture, Abu Zubaydah had been arrested and read his Miranda rights, as regularly happened in the Clinton years. Following the Trade Center bombing, Salameh's lawyer wanted the speediest trial possible, lest the government discover yet more evidence against his client. The legal system, in its normal operations, provides for just that it's a defendant's right. Thu
Saddam's International Web of Bribery, Daily Telegraph
Daily Telegraph Saddam's web of bribery 'went round the world' By Philip Delves Broughton in Paris and Jack Fairweather in Baghdad January 28, 2004 Saddam Hussein bribed his way around the world, buying the support of presidents, ministers, legislators, political parties and even Christian churches, according to documents published in Iraq. The list of those who allegedly benefited from Saddam's largesse spans 46 countries. According to the newspaper al-Mada, one of the new publications that have emerged since the removal of the dictator, Saddam offered each of his friends lucrative contracts to trade in millions of barrels of Iraqi crude under the United Nations oil-for-food programme. The 270 individuals and organisations alleged to be in his pay included the sons of a serving Arab president, Arab ministers, a prominent Indonesian leader, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the party led by the Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and even the Russian Orthodox Church. Abdul Sahib Qotob, an under-secretary in Iraq's oil ministry, said the documents reveal how Saddam jeopardised the oil wealth of Iraq on personalities who had supported him and turned a blind eye on the mass graves and injustice he inflicted on the sons of the Iraqi people. He said the ministry was building up a legal case and might seek the help of Interpol to recover the money. Interpol refused to comment. A senior official at the oil ministry said last night: This is oil money that should be used for reconstructing Iraq. We will use all means to get it back. Al-Mada based its list on documents allegedly obtained from the former State Oil Marketing Organisation, or Somo, the commercial arm of Saddam's oil ministry. The newspaper showed two sets of photocopied documents to The Daily Telegraph. One was a set of contracts signed by Sadam Zibn, director of Somo, and Ali Rajeb Hassan, his deputy in the late 1990s. The other was a list of recipients of oil contracts, arranged by nationality. Their awards o f oil were given in a spreadsheet over a three-year period. The editor of al-Mada, Fahkri Karim, claimed that he had many more. I have seen rooms of such documents. There is a lot more information, he said. He said the documents were salvaged from Somo in the chaotic hours when the Americans entered the city. Yesterday Le Monde named several Frenchmen alleged to have been on the list. Gilles Munier, secretary-general of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Association, said the list was confusing. He said he and his organisation introduced numerous businesses, oil and otherwise, to contacts in Iraq but that it was all perfectly legal. For each successful introduction, he received a commission. Everything was done within the rules of oil-for-food, he said. There was nothing illegal about it and it didn't deprive the Iraqi people of what they were owed under the programme. Patrick Maugein, the head of the French oil firm Soco International, said he did a lot of business in Iraq under the oil-for-food programme, but none of it was illegal. There isn't a refinery in the world which would have accepted a secret load, he said, noting that UN inspectors monitored every tanker. He said that unlike Africans, the Iraqis were not in the habit of giving their partners anything extra. The list published by al-Mada gives the numbers of barrels of oil attributed to each of those Saddam wished to reward. Al-Mada published its scoop in what was only its 45th edition.It said that millions of barrels of oil were offered to individuals who had nothing to do with the oil business in what it called the former regime's largest corruption operation.
Iraq's Weapons, World Magazine
Col. Spertzel believes many of those programs continued up until the war. In a Jan. 27 interview Col. Spertzel told WORLD that, despite Mr. Kay's recent statements, he has seen nothing in the work of the Iraq Survey Group-or from his own sources-to render his 2002 assessment obsolete: There is ample evidence of continuing programs and no reason to believe that they would instantly disappear. http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/02-07-04/international_1.asp World Magazine February 7, 2004 Volume 19 Number 5 WMD-gate? IRAQ: In the scandal over missing weapons of mass destruction, did George Bush lie? By Mindy Belz It will take more than David Kay saying it ain't so. But for some, it will be enough. The head of postwar weapons inspections for Iraq used his Jan. 23 resignation as opportunity to air a pent-up grievance: Mr. Kay said of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I don't think they exist. I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Kay said. We don't find the people, the documents, or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. During interviews with The New York Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Reuters, and others after his resignation, Mr. Kay said that Iraq gradually reduced stockpiles of potential weapons of mass destruction and that by the mid-1990s most stockpiles were eliminated. He blamed U.S. intelligence for creating a false impression of Iraq's WMD capability. If true, that assessment gives Democratic presidential candidates their own arsenal against President Bush, who based the invasion of Iraq last year in significant part on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threat. And what better way to nuke the president's reelection plans than using the words of his own mass weapons czar. Expect Mr. Kay's comments to recycle through the presidential debate season like cardboard ducks on a midway shooting range. But while war opponents believe Mr. Kay's statements are a clear indication that Mr. Bush misled Americans in the lead-up to war, key Iraq experts-including a former UN weapons inspector-say more questions are raised than answered by Mr. Kay's post-mortem. Critics have already pointed out that Mr. Kay's statements to reporters contradict more in-depth analysis he provided in an October 2002 interim report of the Iraq Survey Group. In it he said that, in spite of many obstacles to the WMD search, his Iraq Survey Group, or ISG, already had discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. He said the ISG found suspected WMD documents in a pile of warm ash in a prison in July 2003, and vials of botulinum in the home of an Iraqi scientist. The most recent assertion by Mr. Kay that Iraqi WMD do not exist also goes against his statements suggesting Iraq may have moved WMD to Syria. Mr. Kay's statements also contradict earlier findings of UN inspections teams without directly refuting them. Although the work of UN inspectors going back nearly a decade was hampered by Saddam Hussein and thwarted even by the Security Council, it produced volumes of evidence of extensive programs in unconventional warfare. The two agencies, UNSCOM and its predecessor, UNMOVIC, failed to halt the buildup of chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities but did document its worrying existence. He is trying to say that six months of work under Iraq Survey Group is as legitimate as nine years under UNSCOM, said Laurie Mylroie, a consultant on Iraq in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and author of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. A key former weapons inspector in Iraq, retired Army Col. Richard O. Spertzel, told WORLD: If Dr. Kay says there are currently no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he may be right. But the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Col. Spertzel joined UNSCOM in 1994 after a 28-year military career where he honed his expertise in bioweapons. As a condition of surrender at the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was to give up all weapons of mass destruction within 15 days. Those conditions were never met, and successive international teams would try to force his compliance. Col. Spertzel served as a weapons inspector and head of UNSCOM's biological weapons team for four years, making more than 40 trips to Baghdad, where he oversaw all inspections of bioweapons facilities and met with top-level officials, including Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. He discovered ample evidence that Saddam was directing a campaign to build and use unconventional weapons. He was part of a four-member team that discovered Iraq was using 18 metric tons of growing medium to produce anthrax and botulinum toxin-out of scale with any legitimate civilian purposes. They also discovered viral
INVITATION: Memorial Service for Victims of Erbil Bombings
The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) invite you to attend a joint memorial service for victims of the terrorist bombings in Erbil on February 1, 2004. Mourners and supporters of Kurdish liberty will gather on Sunday, February 8th, 2004 at 3:00 PM Location: Sheraton Hotel 1800 Jefferson Davis Highway Crystal City VA 22202 (USA) Please join us to honor more than 100 persons whose lives were taken and offer condolences to their families and the many injured. For directions, please call the hotel at: (703) 498- For other questions, please contact: (571) 331-8485 or (703) 533-5882 === Washington Kurdish Institute 605 G Street, SW Washington, D.C. 20024 202-484-0140 (tel) 202-484-0142 (fax) www.kurd.org
Danger of Iraq's Missing WMD, Wash Times
What's 'right' is relative, Mr. [Daniel] Gallington said. We always have to go with the most dangerous possible scenario with these guys. The one that troubles me most is that Saddam did know we were going to invade and he sent [weapons material] to possibly Syria. So, if you can't find it in country and you can't figure out how or where he disposed of it, then we should be looking elsewhere. It is extremely dangerous that we can't precisely account for any of it, at all. This is the point that all the commentators, in and out of government, seem to be missing. The Washington Times February 9, 2004 Intelligence hit mark on nuclear ambitions By Rowan Scarborough U.S. intelligence agencies may have wrongly estimated Iraqi weapons stockpiles, but on other key assessments--such as Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions--the CIA was right, say current and former government officials. Proponents of ousting the Iraqi dictator say the fact Saddam was actively seeking an atomic bomb and operating chemical and biological programs were sufficient reasons to go to war. The main benchmark for judging the CIA is a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed in October 2002 and partially declassified by the White House in July. The NIE--which is a consensus, but not a unanimous finding--by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, offered several main points: that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; that it was reconstituting its nuclear-bomb research and that Saddam still wanted atomic weapons; that it was producing missiles beyond the range allowed by United Nations resolutions; and that research continued into chemical and biological agents. On the first point, David Kay, who resigned last month as chief CIA weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded the Bush administration was wrong. He said the group he ran, the Iraq Survey Group, found no evidence of stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons since the 1990s. (CIA Director George J. Tenet says inspections continue and that the jury is still out.) But on the nuclear issue, Mr. Kay said the CIA was right on some important points. The NIE said: If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year. Mr. Kay, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, said: If they managed to acquire a sufficient amount of plutonium or high-enriched uranium from a place like the former Soviet Union stockpile, how long would it take to fashion that into a nuclear explosive device? And I think that estimate was actually fairly conservative. He added, Fortunately, from my point of view, Operation Iraqi Freedom intervened, and we don't know how or how fast that would have gone ahead. The NIE stated that reconstruction is under way of the Iraq nuclear program. Mr. Kay seemed to side with this view. It was in the early stages of renovating the program, building new buildings, he said. It was not a reconstituted, full-blown nuclear program. In addition to beginning the construction of sites to build atomic bombs, Iraq had brought together nuclear scientists who were already working together and conducting experiments. In 1991, Iraqi officials since have acknowledged, Baghdad was perhaps less than a year away from producing sufficient fissile material to produce Saddam's first nuclear bomb. The Desert Storm air war, and subsequent U.N. inspectors, foiled those plans. Given their history, Mr. Kay said, it was certainly an emerging program that I would not have looked forward to their continuing to pursue. It was not yet up as a full nuclear-production site again. The NIE also stated, Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to U.N. resolutions. On the missile issue, Mr. Kay found the NIE was correct. The missile program was actually moving ahead, he testified. I think you will have ... pretty compelling evidence that Saddam had the intention of continuing the pursuit of [weapons of mass destruction] when the opportunity arose, and that the first start on that, the long pole in the tent, was this restart of the long-range missile program. Mr. Kay, while not finding stockpiles, found proof that Saddam had programs in place to restart production of chemical and biological weapons. For example, Mr. Kay discovered a program to find a substitute for a precursor for deadly VX nerve agent. And there was research into the deadly anthrax germ. That's WMD-related work, he said. All such work violated U.N. resolutions. Daniel Gallington, an analyst at the conservative Potomac Institute and former counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Baghdad became skilled in the 1990s at counterintelligence that kept the CIA from developing spies. What's 'right' is relative, Mr. Gallington said. We always have to go with the most dangerous possible scenario with these guys. The one that troubles me most is that Saddam did
CIA Struggles to Spy in Iraq, Afghanistan, LAT
[M]any of the agency's personnel were there for just one to three months. That was true for the station as well as the [weapons search team], said David Kay, who resigned last month as special advisor in Iraq to Director Tenet. None of us were happy about that. So-called domain experts on Hussein and his associates were the clearest case, Kay said. They were over for 30 or 60 days and then get rotated back, he said. It was a real issue. Among many questions: How could Kay reach any definite conclusions to the difficult question of what happened to Iraq's weapons, if the personnel on which he relied had serious short-comings, like frequent rotations? Los Angeles Times February 20, 2004 THE WORLD CIA Struggles to Spy in Iraq, Afghanistan By Greg Miller and Bob Drogin, Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns about that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The previously undisclosed moves underscore the problems affecting the agency's clandestine service at a time when it is confronting insurgencies and the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, current and former CIA officers say. They said a series of stumbles and operational constraints have hampered the agency's ability to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, find Osama bin Laden and gain traction against terrorism in the Middle East. The CIA's Baghdad station has become the largest in agency history, eclipsing the size of its post in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, a U.S. official said. But sources said the agency has struggled to fill a number of key overseas posts. Many of those who do take sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve only 30- to 90-day rotations, a revolving-door approach that has undercut the agency's ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, sources said. There is such a shortage of Arabic speakers and qualified case officers willing to take dangerous assignments that the agency has been forced to hire dozens--if not hundreds--of CIA retirees, and to lean heavily on translators, sources said. The agency has also had to use soldiers for tasks that CIA officers normally perform, sources said. Even without the personnel challenges, Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as so dangerous that it is difficult for agency officers to venture outside guarded districts and compounds without security details, making covert meetings with informants extremely difficult, sources said. CIA officials said Thursday that the agency had no shortage of eager volunteers for tough assignments, or any lack of resolve in the war on terrorism. But current and former officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency was confronting one of the most difficult challenges in its history. One former officer who maintains close ties to the agency said it was stretched to the limit. With Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, with Iraq, I think they're just sucking wind, he said. But the officers also said the latest problems point to a deeper problem with the CIA leadership and culture. Some lamented that an agency once vaunted for its daring and reach now finds itself overstretched and hunkered down in secure zones. They claim that they've rebuilt the [clandestine service] and it's firing on all cylinders, said a former station chief in the Middle East. Is it? I would say not. Not if you don't have trained manpower. The CIA dismisses such criticism, and President Bush has recently voiced support for six-year CIA Director George J. Tenet. The president said he believed the agency was serving the country well. The CIA has also won praise for its role in dismantling the upper ranks of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and helping round up the top figures in Saddam Hussein's regime. But in many respects, the CIA is an agency under siege, with several inquiries underway into its prewar assessments on Iraq, and an independent commission still investigating intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Swift Rotation The U.S. official acknowledged that the CIA station chief in Baghdad was removed in December after weeks of increasingly deadly and sophisticated attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and civilian targets. There was just a belief that it was a huge operation and we needed a very senior, very experienced person to run it, the official said. The official declined to disclose the number of CIA personnel in Iraq, but other sources said it exceeded 500 people. The replacement of the station chief means that the high-profile post has been held by three senior officers since Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq in May, sources said. The job of Baghdad station chief is a demanding one
Jim Hoagland, Respect the Iraqi Council
The Washington Post Respect the Iraqi Council By Jim Hoagland Sunday, February 22, 2004 The Bush administration liberated Iraqis 10 months ago. But it still does not trust them -- not even the 25 Iraqis chosen to help manage their country's transition to freedom. They have been rewarded for their cooperation with disdain and denigration from Washington. The steady belittling of America's chosen allies and natural friends in Iraq sends a chilling signal throughout the Middle East, which President Bush has proclaimed to be the center of his forward strategy of democracy. An Egyptian or Saudi dissident tempted to take the chance of supporting Bush's vision will draw little comfort or encouragement from the treatment of Iraqi risk-takers, who are being told they are not ready to hold elections or exercise independent leadership. Bold in its destruction of Saddam Hussein's detested dictatorship, the administration's top echelon has been timid in its creation of the political structures needed to replace the tyrant. Washington has made the political mistake of trying to beat somebody with nobody -- of attaching more importance to mathematical formulas about representation of Iraq's population groups in government than to promoting local leaders and institutions ready to take on democratic rule. The problems began in the crucial opening phase of occupation, when the administration suddenly tossed out plans for installing an Iraqi coalition of leaders that had been carefully assembled over months of deliberation. Washington even tossed out the man who had drawn up the plans, Jay Garner, and named Paul Bremer to head the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer expanded Garner's nine-person leadership group into a 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. Bremer also carefully limited the council's powers and, when it displeased him, threatened to disband it and name a new one. Last week Bremer had to abruptly abandon his caucus plan for choosing an interim leadership to replace the Governing Council after the plan encountered stubborn opposition from the country's Shiite majority. The June 30 deadline for the transfer of sovereignty was left standing. But neither Bremer nor U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan could say what kind of caretaker government would take charge then or guess at how it would be chosen. That is a damaging admission this late in the game. It also ignores the obvious: A core group of Iraqi leaders, most of whom fought Saddam Hussein from exile or from the Kurdish regions protected by U.S. air power after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, has asserted itself over the past decade. Its members have shown that they can work together and promote democratic values. At conference after conference in the long run-up to the war and in the Governing Council since the occupation, leadership has gravitated to Kurdistan's Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, to Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, Adnan Pachachi, Abdul Aziz Hakim and a few others. To be sure, there is no Thomas Jefferson among them. But to wait for a Jefferson to emerge from the ruins of Baghdad would be to condemn the United States to eternal occupation. Moreover, to bypass this leadership group would undermine the historical legitimacy of the genuine Iraqi resistance, which Bush launched the March invasion to support. To expand the council's membership in a continuing, cosmetic pursuit of a mathematical balance of representation is a pointless, debilitating exercise at this late date. To disband or transmogrify the Governing Council on June 30 would also put the Bush administration in bed with its most knee-jerky critics -- those who maintain that mere association with the United States has somehow tainted and corrupted the Governing Council members. Any Iraqi who agrees with democratic values cannot possibly be an authentic Arab leader, this argument goes. Chalabi, who was educated in the United States and who relentlessly lobbied Democratic and Republican administrations to intervene in Iraq, is a lightning rod for such guilt by association. His quarrels with the CIA have also left him branded as uppity and uncontrollable, qualities that have not endeared him to the Bush White House, but that might stand him in good stead in Iraq's nationalistic politics. Now the entire council is being regularly denounced as feckless and corrupt by anonymous State Department and other U.S. officials quoted in The Post, the New York Times and elsewhere. One intended effect of this is to establish that whatever goes wrong in Iraq is the fault of the Iraqis, not the brilliant minds in Washington who were just trying to help. Who should organize Iraq's election? The answer lies in plain sight -- for those with eyes to see. Let the council be the council and get on with its work. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Woolsey Hosted by Iraqi he Helped Free, NY Sun
The New York Sun February 23, 2004 EX-CHIEF OF CIA KEEPS DATE FOR A POWER LUNCH His Host in Iraq Once Sat in U.S. Jail By ELI LAKE Staff Reporter of the Sun YETHREB, Iraq - When Haidar al-Bandar was released from his eighth Immigration and Naturalization Service prison in 2000, he invited his lawyer to lunch in his hometown once Saddam Hussein's regime fell. On Saturday, his lawyer, R. James Woolsey, finally took Mr. Bandar up on his invitation and was greeted with applause by his tribe, al-Timimi. When Haidar and I first met, Haidar was in prison in the United States and Saddam was in power. Now Saddam is in prison, and Haidar is quite rightly free.I'm glad to see it's the other guy behind bars, Mr. Woolsey said. He was speaking to an audience of American soldiers, tribal elders, and representatives of the Iraqi National Congress,under a painting of Imam Ali. Yethreb is a Shiite outpost in the heart of the Sunni triangle that has won a reputation as the center of Iraqi resistance to the American presence here. Mr. Woolsey is better known as President Clinton's first director of central intelligence and as a frequent commentator in the press before the war trumpeting the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Before the Iraq question became central in Washington, Mr.Woolsey represented a group known as the Iraqi six, members of the Iraqi resistance evacuated by America from northern Iraq in 1996 only to be detained on supposed national security grounds once arriving in America. In 1998, Mr.Woolsey was brought onto the case because the INS had used secret evidence provided by the CIA to suggest that the six resistance fighters once supported by the agency now presented a risk to America's national security. In 2000, Mr. Bandar moved to Lincoln, Neb., after Mr.Woolsey gained access to the secret evidence with pressure from Congress. But after the fall of Saddam he was able to move back home, where he is an adviser to the governing council on democracy and debaathification. He said he was renovating a vacant property on the banks of the Tigris near here that belonged to his family. I felt so happy when he came to my home. He released me from jail, Mr. Bandar said over a feast of noodles, rice, and lamb presented on large steel platters. The town was run down, relying on an electric pump and outside basin for water. Like so many Shiite villages, Yethreb was denied many basic services under Saddam. Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan, the commander of the 223rd military intelligence battalion that covers the Sunni triangle, said that when he was given money for rebuilding schools in the town, he had to improvise. We would rebuild a school from one brick or one piece of stone, he said. Since the fall of Baghdad, his soldiers have built seven schools in the area for $50,000 each. While constructing schools may not seem like the work of battalion responsible for gathering human intelligence, Colonel Ryan insists that it is vital. A big part of our job is to show people that there is no financial motivation to placing a bomb along the roadside, he said. Colonel Ryan is particularly close with al-Timimi. The hosts of the lunch here have even said he is an honorary member of the tribe, calling him Timothy Ryan al Timimi. And the colonel says this relationship has paid off. He said that a few weeks ago an unmanned aerial vehicle turned up near here, and he found out about it immediately. Before, a UAV would have been stripped clean before we would get to it. While the colonel did not have exact statistics on the number of attacks against Americans in the Sunni triangle since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, he said they had declined in the area. I will tell you that as the U.S. forces have developed techniques to counter insurgent activities, the former regime elements have begun to focus their attacks on soft targets like the police headquarters. They are trying to get the big media shocker, big bangs for less bucks, he said. The colonel also said the counterinsurgency has begun to run out of money. Colonel Ryan said individuals planning attacks often pay local villagers to carry out the attacks. Six months ago, someone might say, 'here's one hundred dollars to put a bomb on the road.' As democracy and the free market take hold, there is more to work with than to work against. The Timimi tribe is working with the American forces here. This weekend' s lunch in honor of Mr. Woolsey was the second one with Americans this month. As the tribe's elders gathered for tea at the end of the meal, a young girl handed a rose to an American adviser for the Iraqi National Congress who was accompanying Mr. Woolsey on the visit. The recipient of the flower, Francis Brooke, placed it in his lapel and said,See, I told you they would throw flowers.
Claudia Rosett, Oil-for-Food Scam?, WSJ
The Wall Street Journal THE REAL WORLD A New Job for Kay Let him investigate the U.N. Oil-for-Food scam. BY CLAUDIA ROSETT Wednesday, February 25, 2004 When David Kay recovers from his weapons hunt, there's another Iraq-related quest I'd like to send him on. It's time a top intelligence team went scavenging for the real numbers on the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Program--that gigantic setup through which the U.N. from 1996 through 2003 supervised more than $100 billion worth of Saddam Hussein's selling of oil and buying of goods. And, no, I am not talking about anything as exotic as the list of alleged bribe-takers from Saddam Hussein, published Jan. 25 by the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada, and now under investigation. I speak simply about the U.N.-supplied numbers on Oil-for-Food's operations. Over the past 18 months, I have periodically tried to get these figures to add up. I am starting to believe the words of an unusually forthright U.N. spokesman, who at one point told me, They won't. Basic integrity in bookkeeping seems little enough to ask of the U.N., where officials defending Oil-for-Food have been insisting that it wasn't their fault if Saddam was corrupt. They just did the job of meticulously recording the deals now beset by graft allegations, approving the contracts, and making sure the necessary funds went in and out of the U.N.-held escrow accounts. I'm sure there was some sort of logic to it. Though I have begun to wonder if maybe the same way the U.N. has its own arrangements for postal services and tax-exempt salaries, U.N. accounting has its own special system of arithmetic. It all added up fairly neatly, of course, in the summary offered by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when the U.N. turned over the remnants of Oil-for-Food to the Coalition Provisional Authority in November. Oil-for-Food, said Mr. Annan, had presided over $65 billion worth of Saddam's oil sales and in buying relief supplies had used some $46 billion of Iraqi export earnings on behalf of the Iraqi people. (Keep your eye on those numbers.) In doing so, the U.N. secretariat had collected a 2.2% commission on the oil, which, even after a portion was refunded for relief operations, netted out to more than $1 billion for U.N. administrative overhead. The U.N. also collected a 0.8% commission to pay for weapons inspections in Iraq--including when Saddam shut them out between 1998 and 2002--which comes to another $520 million or so. The keen observer will see that this adds up to payouts of just under $48 billion from Saddam's Oil-for-Food proceeds, which is about $17 billion less than what he took in. The difference is explained--near enough--by the $17.5 billion paid out of the same Oil-for-Food stream of Saddam's oil revenues but dispensed, under another part of the U.N. Iraq program, by the U.N. Compensation Commission to victims of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That gives us a grand total of $65 billion earned, and about $65 billion allocated for payments, all very tidy. Except the U.N. Compensation Commission states on its Web site that oil sales under Oil-for-Food totaled not Mr. Annan's $65 billion, but more than US$70 billion--a $5 billion discrepancy in U.N. figures. A phone call to the UNCC, based in Geneva, doesn't clear up much. A spokesman there says the oil total comes from the U.N. in New York, and adds, helpfully, Maybe it was an approximate figure, just rounded up. OK, but in some quarters, if not at the U.N., $5 billion here or there is big money. Halliburton has been pilloried, and rightly so, over questions involving less than 1% of such amounts. One turns for explanation to the U.N. headquarters in New York, where a spokesman confirms that though the U.N. program ended last November, the former executive director of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, is still on contract, still drawing a salary, but Mr. Sevan's secretary explains he is not giving interviews anymore. The spokesman, also still on salary, answers all requests for clarification with I don't know, and You have the Web site. All right. The Web site brings us a U.N. update issued Nov. 21, 2003, when the U.N. turned over the program to the CPA, which tells us that $31 billion worth of supplies and equipment had been delivered to Iraq, with another $8.2 billion in the pipeline. That comes to $39.2 billion. Again, even if you add in, say, $2 billion for U.N. commissions, that's still about $5 billion short of the $46 billion Mr. Annan says was used for supplies--which might make sense if the program at the end had been swimming in loose cash, except that Mr. Sevan was lamenting toward the end that there was not enough money to fund all the supply contracts he'd already approved. Returning to the U.N. Web site, nothing there discloses the amount of interest paid during the course of the program on the Oil-for-Food escrow accounts. That should have been substantial, because these U.N.-managed Iraq accounts in the final phases of the program held
WSJ Editors, Perle's Goodbye
Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK February 26, 2004 Perle's Goodbye Richard Perle has resigned from the Defense Policy Board, and therein lies a tale of modern Washington. Despite repeated disclaimers, my membership on the Defense Policy Board has led many people who see my articles, books and television appearances to associate my views with those of the administration or the Department of Defense, Mr. Perle wrote recently to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign. This is the country's loss. Mr. Perle is well known for his strong opinions, but that's precisely his value. The Policy Board's charter tasks it with providing independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of defense policy. Contrary to the myth that Mr. Perle's enemies have encouraged, the board does not make policy. Its sole purpose is to give the Secretary of Defense a broader point of view than he gets inside the Pentagon. Members are unpaid volunteers. But that no longer seems to count for much in today's toxic Washington environment. Mr. Perle became a political target because his board membership might tar Administration hawks by association. Conflicts of interest were alleged but proven to be phony. As chairman for a time, he was even attacked for the sin of inviting an expert on Saudi Arabia to explain why the U.S. ought to have a contingency plan for taking over the Saudi oil fields. That is precisely the kind of forward thinking any Defense Secretary needs to hear. Mr. Perle will still be heard in private life, but it'd be a shame if the defense board became just another gang of cautious Beltway time-servers.
Saddam's Regime Skimmed Billions from UN Aid, NYT
New York Times Hussein's Regime Skimmed Billions From Aid Program By SUSAN SACHS February 29, 2004 BAGHDAD, Iraq - In its final years in power, Saddam Hussein's government systematically extracted billions of dollars in kickbacks from companies doing business with Iraq, funneling most of the illicit funds through a network of foreign bank accounts in violation of United Nations sanctions. Millions of Iraqis were struggling to survive on rations of food and medicine. Yet the government's hidden slush funds were being fed by suppliers and oil traders from around the world who sometimes lugged suitcases full of cash to ministry offices, said Iraqi officials who supervised the skimming operation. The officials' accounts were enhanced by a trove of internal Iraqi government documents and financial records provided to The New York Times by members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Among the papers was secret correspondence from Mr. Hussein's top lieutenants setting up a formal mechanism to siphon cash from Iraq's business deals, an arrangement that went unnoticed by United Nations monitors. Under a United Nations program begun in 1997, Iraq was permitted to sell its oil only to buy food and other humanitarian goods. The kickback order went out from Mr. Hussein's inner circle three years later, when limits on the amount of oil sales were lifted and Iraq's oil revenues reached $10 billion a year. In an Aug. 3, 2000, letter marked urgent and confidential, the Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, informed government ministers that a high-command committee wanted extra revenues from the oil-for-food program. To that end, he wrote, all suppliers must be told to inflate their contracts by the biggest percentage possible and secretly transfer those amounts to Iraq's bank accounts in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Please acknowledge and certify that this is executed in an accurate and clear way, and under supervision of the specified minister, Mr. Ramadan wrote. Iraq's sanctions-busting has long been an open secret. Two years ago, the General Accounting Office estimated that oil smuggling had generated nearly $900 million a year for Iraq. Oil companies had complained that Iraq was squeezing them for illegal surcharges, and Mr. Hussein's lavish spending on palaces and monuments provided more evidence of his access to unrestricted cash. But the dimensions of the corruption have only lately become clear, from the newly available documents and from revelations by government officials who say they were too fearful to speak out before. They show the magnitude and organization of the payoff system, the complicity of the companies involved and the way Mr. Hussein bestowed contracts and gifts on those who praised him. Yet his policy of awarding contracts to gain political support often meant that Iraq received shoddy, even useless, goods in return. Perhaps the best measure of the corruption comes from a review of the $8.7 billion in outstanding oil for food contracts by the provisional Iraqi government with United Nations help. It found that 70 percent of the suppliers had inflated their prices and agreed to pay a 10 percent kickback, in cash or by transfer to accounts in Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian banks. At that rate, Iraq would have collected as much as $2.3 billion out of the $32.6 billion worth of contracts it signed since mid-2000, when the kickback system began. And some companies were willing to pay even more than the standard 10 percent, according to Trade and Oil Ministry employees. Iraq's suppliers included Russian factories, Arab trade brokers, European manufacturers and state-owned companies from China and the Middle East. Iraq generally refused to buy directly from American companies, which in any case needed special licenses to trade legally with Iraq. In one instance, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administrators in Iraq, found that Syria was prepared to kick back nearly 15 percent on its $57.5 million contract to sell wheat to Iraq. Syria has agreed to increase the amount of wheat to compensate for the inflated price, said an occupation official involved in the talks. Iraq also created a variety of other, less lucrative, methods of extorting money from its oil customers. It raised more than $228 million from illegal surcharges it imposed on companies that shipped Iraqi crude oil by sea after September 2000, according to an accounting prepared by the Iraqi Oil Ministry late last year. An additional $540 million was collected in under-the-table surcharges on oil shipped across Iraq's land borders, the documents show. A lot of it came in cash, recalled Shamkhi H. Faraj, who managed the Oil Ministry's finance department under the old government and is now general manager of the ministry's oil-marketing arm. I used to see people carrying it in briefcases and bringing it to the ministry. United Nations overseers say they were unaware of the systematic skimming of
INC Intel Program, NY Sun
The New York Sun March 1, 2004, p. 1 Jockeying Begins for Control of Iraqi Intelligence Agency By ELI LAKE Staff Reporter of the Sun BAGHDAD, Iraq One of the most significant battles going on here is one that hasn't yet hit the newspapers--the maneuvering over who is going to inherit the intelligence agency run by the Free Iraqi movement under Ahmad Chalabi. The intelligence operation, known as the Information Collection Program, was founded by the Iraqi National Congress and the State Department. In subsequent years it has been largely funded by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and has racked up a string of intelligence successes. The CIA station here has started negotiations with Mr. Chalabi's group in a bid to take over the operation, which has come under scrutiny from Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York, and others for peddling false information to the Bush administration before the war. But the intelligence unit, known as the Information Collection Program, has also led to the capture of U.S. Central Command's 55 most wanted Baathists, uncovered Saddam Hussein¹s illegal intelligence stations, and captured documents that uncover the role of foreign corporations in busting United Nations sanctions and trading with Iraq's military, according to a draft summary of the program's activities, obtained by The New York Sun. That summary says that between May 2003 and January 2004 the INC's operatives provided more than 1,300 intelligence reports to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Human Sources unit. Today, the ICP has evolved from its modest beginnings in the fall of 2000 as a State Department program to document war crimes against Kurds to an embryonic intelligence agency and counterterrorism strike force. Funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency at $340,000 a month since the fall of 2002 and before that by the State Department, the ICP has absorbed intelligence officers from the two major Kurdish parties, the Iraqi National Accord and the Iran-funded Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Last week, Mrs. Clinton said she hoped,this administration will strongly repudiate the statements recently reported by Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi. She cited a recent interview with the London Daily Telegraph, which Mr. Chalabi claimed he never granted and in which he was quoted as saying the intelligence his organization provided before the war was unimportant. Questions surrounding Mr. Chalabi¹s intelligence arose last month after the Knight Ridder newspaper chain published a story claiming that the DIA had determined a defector made available to American intelligence agencies in 2002 had lied about his knowledge of mobile biological weapons labs. That defector was cited as one of four human sources on the mobile labs in Secretary of State Powell¹s February 5, 2003, testimony to the United Nations Security Council, but the primary source of the information was a defector residing in a third country made available before the ICP even existed. A Washington adviser to the INC and ICP official, Francis Brooke, told the Sun last week that the information on weapons of mass destruction provided by ICP defectors was only part of a larger program to provide military intelligence to the Pentagon before the war. One of the things they were concerned about was weapons of mass destruction, he said.But we were also giving information on the order of battle and the physical lay out of Uday's home. Since the war, the task of the program has focused more on counterinsurgency. The summary of the program's activities says, Specifically, the mission of the office is to provide precise, timely, sensitive, actionable information to Coalition Forces. The Information Collection Program has saved American lives, one Pentagon official told the Sun last week. They have worked closely with the military. At a tour of the ICP bureau in Baghdad Thursday, uniformed Army officers were meeting with members of the bureau. Since May of 2003, the ICP has cooperated with the 1st Armored Division of the Army, the 82nd Airborne Division and special forces units in Baghdad to exchange intelligence information regarding the security issue in Iraq, according to the summary. The ICP arranged for coalition forces to first contact General Kamal Mustafa Abdullah Sultan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, where he was first interrogated at the INC¹s compound at the Hunting Club in May. The INC's Free Iraqi Forces, which worked on ICP intelligence, also arrested Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, Saddam's former deputy prime minister and member of the Baath regional command. ICP operatives also helped arrange for the surrender of the governor of Basra, Walid Hamid Tawfiq al-Tikriti, on April 29. To be sure, a number of Iraqis have provided coalition forces with information on former Baathists. It is rumored still in Iraq that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan came up with the tip that led to the capture
WSJ Editors, Breakthrough: Iraq's Interim Constitution
The Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK Breakthrough in Baghdad Iraqis agree to a remarkably liberal interim constitution. Tuesday, March 2, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST A paradox of post-Saddam Iraq is that American elites keep asserting that it's a quagmire even as progress keeps being made in Baghdad. The latest example is the unanimous weekend agreement by the 25 members of Iraq's Governing Council on the draft of an interim constitution. Yes, there will be further violence, as the Baathist and jihadi enemies of Iraqi democracy make a desperate stand to break American will. But with the unanimous vote of the Governing Council--including Kurdish and fundamentalist Shiite leaders--there is now an Iraqi national consensus on the timing and shape of future self-rule. What's more, that consensus is a remarkably liberal one. We've heard a lot of nonsense over the past two years that Muslims aren't ready for self-government, and that the Bush Administration was imperial in trying to impose it. But Iraqis of all stripes didn't need a lot of prodding to draft what is far and away the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, including what a senior coalition official calls an extraordinary bill of rights. Those include the rights to free speech and assembly, the free exercise of religion, habeas corpus and a fair and open trial. There will be gender equality and civilian control of the military. The interim government to be elected by next January will be parliamentary in nature, with a weak executive composed of a president and two deputies. The role of Islam and the extent of federalism were understandably the most contentious issues. In the end it was agreed that Islam would be a source of legislation among many, not the principal source some Council members had wanted. They were mollified by the addition of another clause saying legislation could not contravene the tenets of Islam. This is admittedly something of a fudge, and Iraqi liberals will have to be on guard lest judges interpret that provision overbroadly in the future, but the bill of rights should offer protection here. As for federalism, the Kurds won recognition that the future Iraq would be built around strong regional governments. They did not get the inclusion of oil-rich Kirkuk in their area for the time being, but they do get to keep their peshmerga militias for now. A big unresolved issue is the shape of the caretaker government that will serve between the June 30 sovereignty handover and the elections. Here U.S. regent L. Paul Bremer will be playing catch-up. It's been clear for well over a month that the Byzantine U.S. caucus proposal for selecting a transitional government lacked enough Iraqi support. But rather than figuring out how to hold elections as early as possible, Mr. Bremer and his staff continued to peddle overblown worries about the lack of voter rolls while hoping U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi would salvage their plan. This was obviously a stalling tactic, which needlessly risked the goodwill of Shiite leader Ayatollah Sistani. Fortunately, the Ayatollah's forceful advocacy of democracy has been tempered by a spirit of compromise. We are told he has signaled his acceptance of the emerging election timetable, as well as of an unelected caretaker government so long as its powers are limited. The simplest solution is to continue with the current Governing Council, since changes would likely become a source of needless contention. We also wish Mr. Bremer and his team showed more concern regarding the mechanics that will govern the coming Iraqi vote. Perhaps the worst idea in this interim constitution is its 25% target for female representation in parliament. This arbitrary threshold isn't attained by many mature democracies--e.g., Congress. And a serious effort at meeting it would likely require a system of proportional representation like those found in Israel or in continental Europe. A proportional system--with voters choosing among lists of candidates fielded by powerful party bosses--would likely empower Islamist groups, as well as make it possible for the radical fringe (say neo-Baathists) to win seats. The better idea is an Anglo-American constituency-based system, which would take advantage of Iraq's already evolving institutions of local democracy. Here voters in each district would choose a single deputy on a first-past-the-post basis. This would force candidates to run on centrist platforms, and best ensure that Iraq's many secular, middle-class neighborhoods would have like-minded representatives. Electoral mechanics are one of those crucial details that will play an outsized role in determining whether President Bush's vision of a democratic Iraq becomes a permanent reality. Mr. Bremer would be smart not to leave this one to the U.N., but to seal a deal on a process that maximizes liberals' chances before June 30 arrives. Meantime, he and the Governing Council deserve congratulations on their progress toward
Cheney's Gridiron Remarks, Weekly Standard
Dick Cheney's Gridiron Remarks Highlights of the vice president's remarks at last night's 2004 Gridiron dinner. by Special to The Daily Standard 03/07/2004 12:50:00 PM Editor's note: The following are highlights of Vice President Dick Cheney's remarks at last night's annual Gridiron dinner. Although the speech is off-the-record, they were obtained by The Daily Standard. Thank you, President [Al] Hunt, members of the Gridiron . . . at one point during your skits, I had a little scare. I felt a tightness in my chest. I started gasping for air and breathing irregularly. Then I realized it's called laughing. . . . Lots of familiar faces here tonight. I always feel a genuine bond whenever I see Senator Clinton. She's the only person who's the center of more conspiracy theories than I am. But enough of this camaraderie. This is the absolute truth: my last full-blown press conference was when I was Secretary of Defense in April of 1991. . . . Although it's only been 13 years . . . I thought you might have come up with some new questions by now. And I have here some cards on which you have done just that. . . . Here's an unsigned question. "Mr. Vice President, don't you think it's time to step down and let someone else add new energy and vitality to the ticket?" No . . . I don't. And Rudy [Guiliani], you need to do a better job disguising your handwriting. Oh . . . and Rudy has a follow up. "How can you be so sure you'll be on the ticket?" Because the CIA told me so! . . . Dave Broder: "How would you accurately describe your role in this administration? Be honest." I would say that I am a dark, insidious force pushing Bush toward war and confrontation. . . . Helen Thomas wants to know, "How do you justify attacking innocent dictators?" Helen, let me get back to you on that. I need to talk to Richard Perle. Terry Hunt of AP wants to know, "Has Senator Kerry had Botox treatments?" Terry, I have some guidance on that from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "The Administration takes this development seriously. Botox, of course, is related to the botulism toxin, which can be processed into high-grade biological weapons. We have dispatched Dr. David Kay . . . to search for the bio-warfare agents we believe hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead. If Senator Kerry has used botox as part of a wrinkle enrichment program, he is in violation of U.N. Resolution 752. Upon receiving Dr. Kay's report, the weapons of mass destruction that Senator Kerry so adamantly insists do not exist . . . may well be above his very nose." End of statement. Susan Page of USA Today asks, "What do you think of Senator John Edwards?" I think he's cute as a button. . . . Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, it's getting late . . . and Nino [Scalia] and I have to get up early to go duck hunting . . . so let me say a few words in closing. I have known some of the journalists in this room for many years. One of Dave Broder's guests tonight is my old friend and former Washington Post reporter, Lou Canon. The thing about reporters like Lou is that he is always looking for that scoop called truth. The effort, insight, and integrity of our finest journalists, like Lou, are especially critical to our understanding of the dangers that face America. From the hour our country was attacked on September 11th, up to the present, American journalism has produced some of its finest work ever. Some of you have been to Iraq or Afghanistan, or to a military installation at home or abroad. And as we close this evening, I think I can safely speak for all of us in expressing pride and admiration for our people in uniform. They have seen hard duty, long deployments, fierce fighting . . . and they have endured the loss of friends and comrades. Along the way, they have liberated 50
60 Minutes Does it Again--What is Treason? What is just Irresponsible Journalism?
IRAQ NEWS, TUESDAY, MARCH 9, 2004 Readers will recall an earlier "60 Minutes" blunder on Iraq, when it claimed, based on Ron Suskind's book on Paul O'Neill, that the Bush administration planned the Iraq War long before 9/11 and there were documents to prove it: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00216.html Last Sunday'sprogram was nearly as egregious.It included a segment which featured Ahmad Chalabi, head of the INC Chalabi defended the information the INC had provided regarding 1) Iraq's links to al Qaida and 2) Iraq's weapons programs. . Chalabi revealed that the INC had discovered an Iraqi document, linking Iraqi intelligence toUsama binLadin. Dated March 28, 1992,the documentlisted scores of Iraqiagents in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Reading from the document, Chalabi showed Leslie Stahl that it described "the Saudi, Usama bin Ladin" as an agent whomIraqi intelligence hadre-contacted. Leslie Stahl questioned the document's authenticity. Chalabireplied that it was initialed by four Iraqi intelligence officials and the INC knew who they were. "60 Minutes" subsequently asked the Defense Intelligence Agency (which runs the INC program) about the document. The DIA confirmed it was authentic. But the DIAdismissed it as beingof "little significance," because "it doesnot spell out what the relationshipwith Usama bin Ladin was or what, if anything, he did for the Iraqis." That is typical of how the U.S. intelligence community has dealt with the information suggesting an Iraqi link to terrorism, al Qaida, and even 9/11. It refuses to pursue leads or connect dots in areasonable way. Prior to 9/11, the dominant viewwithin the IC was that al Qaida represented a new form of stateless terrorism. That was also the view promoted by the Clinton White House, above all terrorism czar, Richard Clarke. To acknowledge that Iraqi intelligence worked with al Qaida is tantamount to acknowledging that all these people made a tremendous blunder--andthey are just not going to do it. Yet U.S. soldiers are daily asked to risk life and limb in Iraq. They are certainly entitled tounderstand why. Moreover, the war is not over. The question of whether significant contacts exist between Iraqi intelligence and Arab militants is important to fighting the ongoinginsurgency. Lest we forget, over 500 US soldiers have died and several thousand have been wounded, many quiteseriously,in this conflicthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39003-2004Mar7.html. The intelligence problem within the Defense Department is no less than thatwithin the CIA. How can it be that one part ofthe US governmentis asked to make the sacrifices we ask of the GI's, while another part--indeedanother part of the same department--just goes on covering its posterior, to borrow a phrase from William Safire? THROUGHOUT THE"60 Minutes" segment, Kenneth Pollack (a former Clinton administration official, now at Brookings and married to CNN's Andrea Koppel, daughter of Ted) commented on Chalabi's remarks.Chalabihad a "track record," Pollack claimed,with nodetails. But Pollack's target wasn't really Chalabi, it wasthe US officials responsible for the Iraq War. As Pollack stated, "We knew that this guy was not telling us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I think that U.S. officials who believed him - unwittingly or who used his information - both need to look hard at exactly what they were up to. Yet the show, itself, paradoxically suggested otherwise. Pollack complained the INC was still receiving $350,000/month, as part of a US intelligence program. How can this be? "60 Minutes" checked with the US government and reported that the INC had "truckloads of Iraqi intelligence documents, including the names of Iraqi intelligence officers all over the world." It is a "goldmine," according to US officials. If the INC is as worthless and feckless as Pollack/"60 Minutes" claim, how did it manage to acquire that goldmine of documents? Indeed, it would be interesting to compare the product of the INC from its documents with that of the CIA from its documents. Thesegmentalso included thequestion of Iraq's weapons. "60 Minutes" showed an INC defector talking about the purchase of refrigerated trucks for mobile BW (biological weapons) labs. The show, along with Pollack, assumed the information had been proven false and portrayed it as some wild invention. But no such conclusion has been reached. As George Tenet stated on Feb 5: "Let me also talk about the trailers discovered in Iraq last summer. We initially concluded that they resembled trailers described by a human source for mobile biological warfare agent production. There is no consensus within our intelligence community today over whetherthe trailers were for that use or if they were used for the production of hydrogen. "Everyone agrees that they are not ideally configured for either process
Claudia Rosett, Oil-for-Food Corruption, NRO
National Review Online March 10, 2004, 6:19 p.m. Kojo Kofi Unbelievable U.N. stories. By Claudia Rosett In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place. That's fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Saddam Hussein's widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam's regime. Cotecna was hired by the U.N. on December 31, 1998. Shortly afterward, press reports surfaced that Kojo was a partner in a private consulting firm doing work for Cotecna, and that just 13 months previously he had occupied a senior slot on Cotecna's own staff. Asked about this in 1999 by the London Telegraph, a U.N. spokesman, John Mills, replied that the U.N. had not been aware of the connection, and that The tender by Cotecna was the lowest by a significant margin. It seems there's a lot the U.N. managed not to be aware of. But the information that Cotecna - while employing Kofi's son in any capacity - put in the lowest bid by far for the job of authenticating Saddam's Oil-for-Food imports, is not necessarily reassuring. Cotecna, which got paid roughly $6 million for its services during that first year (the U.N. will not release figures on Cotecna's fees over the following years) was bidding on work that empowered its staff to inspect tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks as a routine part of business. The issue was never solely whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy. The whole setup raises disturbing questions. But this is a subject on which neither the U.N. nor Cotecna has been willing to offer illumination. Asked for details, both have stonewalled. The U.N. spokesman Mills, who fielded the question in 1999, is now deceased. A query to the U.N. Oil-for-Food elicits from a spokesman only the information that the five-year-old response by the late Mills stands, as provided by the U.N. A recent query to Cotecna, asking for at least some detail on ties to Kojo Annan, elicits nothing beyond the reply that: There is nothing else to add. It is possible of course, that Kojo Annan had nothing to do with the Iraq program per se, as he told the Telegraph back in 1999: I would never play any role in anything that involves the United Nations for obvious reasons. Though at the same time, in a comment that suggested at least nodding acquaintance with the Oil-for-Food program, Kojo added: The decision is made by the contracts committee, not by Kofi Annan. Then why the reluctance from the U.N., or Cotecna, for that matter, to provide any further details whatsoever? Beyond that, it is disingenuous to suggest Annan had no responsibility for the contracts. Oil-for-Food was run out of the U.N. Secretariat, reporting directly to Annan, who regularly signed off on the six-month phases of the program. Without his approval, the contracts would not have gone forward. Even if we assume that everyone on the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food staff, as well as Kofi Annan himself, was indeed ignorant of Kojo Annan's involvement with Cotecna, it is hard to buy the argument that Kofi, while signing off regularly on the program's workings, was simply oblivious to the details. Not only was Kofi Annan the boss, but he was directly involved from the beginning. Kofi Annan's official U.N. biography notes that shortly before his promotion to Secretary-General he led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid. It was Annan, who in October 1997 brought in as Oil-for-Food's executive director Benon Sevan, reporting directly to the Secretary-General, to consolidate Oil-for-Food's operations into the Office of Iraq Program. And it was shortly after Sevan took charge that Oil-for-Food, set up by Kofi Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with at least some transparency on individual deals, began treating as confidential such vital information as the names of
The New Pentagon Papers Carl Levin, Weekly Standard
The New Pentagon Papers and Carl Levin. From the March 22, 2004 issue: Karen Kwiatkowski is Ted Kennedy's new expert. 03/22/2004, Volume 009, Issue 27 Teddy Kennedy's New Expert The hottest foreign policy authority on the left is Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for several months in the Pentagon's Near East-South Asia office during the run-up to the war in Iraq. She was prominently cited by Senator Ted Kennedy in a March 5 address to the Council on Foreign Relations questioning the president's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Her work is getting the full promotional treatment from Salon and its new Washington Bureau chief Sidney Blumenthal, the former head conspiratorialist of the Clinton White House. Salon celebrated the opening of the new bureau by publishing a heavily hyped Kwiatkowski opus headlined "The new Pentagon papers." Kwiatkowski claims she witnessed "neoconservative agenda bearers within [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] usurp measured and carefully considered assessment, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president." Whether she's a reliable witness is something her new patrons may or may not have inquired into. But Kennedy staffers may want to Google her work for the antiwar libertarians at lewrockwell.com as well as the pseudonymous pieces she's acknowledged publishing on hackworth.com and Soldiers for the Truth when she was still in uniform and working at the Department of Defense. They will find no evidence of Kwiatkowski's reliability as a judge of "measured and carefully considered assessment." They will find plenty of evidence that their boss could use a new speechwriter. Consider: In her writings for Soldiers for the Truth, which ran under the heading "Deep Throat Returns," Kwiatkowski accused the Pentagon of planning to "build greater Zion" in the Middle East and decried the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed the E-Ring"--a reference to the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking Pentagon officials. In a later article on lewrockwell.com, written after she'd retired, Kwiatkowski conceded that these anonymous articles barely did justice to the frustration she'd experienced at the Pentagon: "Hard core anarchists and other purists might criticize me for not just throwing a few hand grenades over the office dividers and letting the chips fall where they may. But by this time I had already submitted my retirement request, and selfishly after my twenty [years of service], I wanted to spend the money, not time in Leavenworth." Other gems from Kwiatkowski's oeuvre: * "We went to war in Afghanistan--planned of course before 9/11/2001 due to some Taliban non-cooperation regarding a certain trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, and the requisite security for said pipeline." * "We once had something like a free market Republic, but all evidence now points to a maturing fascist state flexing its muscles." * "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers believe they are today's men of destiny. But the claim of destiny for a whole nation or a constructed state has long been the ultimate tool of the fascist, the super-nationalist, the propagandist worthy of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot." * "Two invasions and occupations in two years to reshape the Islamic world in preparation for World War IV is anything but conservative. Fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived can never, even with pretty please and sugar on top, be conservatism." Normally a collegial sort, THE SCRAPBOOK can't bring itself to congratulate Salon on the opening of its new bureau. Carl Levin's Faulty Memory Carl Levin gave a typical performance during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings last week. With the exception of Ted Kennedy, Levin has been the most outspoken of the many Democrats who warned ominously about Iraq's WMD threat before the war and now accuse the Bush
US: Saddam Took over $10 Billion from UN Oil Program
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) Text: New Data Indicate Saddam Took $10.1 Billion From U.N. Oil Program (GAO revises estimates of illegal revenues from 1997-2002) (1090) U.S. congressional investigators estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime received more than $10.1 billion in illegal revenues related to the United Nations' oil-for-food program from 1997 to 2002. In a March 18 preliminary report to a House of Representatives panel, Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) said that the former Iraqi government received $5.7 billion from oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq and $4.4 billion in illicit surcharges on oil sales and commissions from suppliers. An earlier GAO estimate covering oil-for-food program activities through 2001 found that Saddam Hussein's regime had taken $6.6 billion in illegal revenues from the UN program. The new estimate, submitted during a hearing of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight, includes 2002 data from oil revenues and contracts and newer estimates of illicit commissions from commodity suppliers, GAO said. Under the oil-for-food program, the Iraqi government was permitted to sell oil as long as the money was used to buy humanitarian goods and pay victims of the 1991 Gulf War. Other oil sales were prohibited under the U.N. embargo imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The oil-for-food program expired in November 2003. The GAO report warned that the U.S.-led campaign to find and repatriate Iraqi assets faces challenges, including the scheduled June 2004 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. It is uncertain whether the new government will allow the United States to continue its hunt for the former regime's assets, the report said. Overall, the United States has had varying results in its campaign to identify, freeze and repatriate Iraqi assets, GAO said. While the amount of hidden assets accumulated by the former Iraqi regime is unknown, estimates range from $10 [billion] to $40 billion in illicit earnings. In separate testimony before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight, Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Juan Zarate said that over the past year almost $2 billion in Iraqi assets outside the United States and Iraq have been newly identified and frozen. Other countries have transferred about $750 million dollars to the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and another $1.3 billion in cash and valuables has been recovered inside Iraq, he added. The Treasury Department on March 18 also moved to capture more Iraqi money hidden around the world by formally submitting to the U.N. the names of 16 members of Saddam Hussein's family and 191 quasi-governmental companies, Zarate said. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 requires member states to freeze accounts and financial assets that might hold Iraqi money and transfer the funds to the DFI. Every day, we are learning more about the maze of Hussein's money trails, and every day, we take concerted efforts to get other countries to identify Iraqi assets and transfer the funds that they have already frozen, Zarate said. This is a process that, by its very nature, will take time, he added. The full text of Zarate's testimony is available on the Web at: http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js1244.htm The text of the GAO report is available at: http://financialservices.house.gov/media/pdf/031804gao.pdf Following is an excerpt from the GAO report summarizing its findings to date: (begin text) United States General Accounting Office (GAO) Recovering Iraq's Assets Preliminary Observations on U.S. Efforts and Challenges March 18, 2004 Summary We estimate that from 1997 through 2002, the former Iraqi regime acquired $10.1 billion in illegal revenues related to the Oil for Food Program -- $5.7 billion in oil smuggled out of Iraq and $4.4 billion in illicit surcharges on oil sales and commissions from suppliers. This estimate is higher than our reported May 2002 estimate of $6.6 billion because it includes 2002 data from oil revenues and contracts under the Oil for Food Program, newer estimates of illicit commissions from commodity suppliers. The United States has tapped the services of several U.S. agencies and used recently developed domestic and international tools in its efforts to recover Iraqi assets worldwide. Led by the Department of the Treasury, about 20 government entities have combined efforts to identify, freeze, and transfer the former regime's assets to Iraq. The United States also used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), as amended by provisions in the USA Patriot Act of 2001, to confiscate the property of the former Iraqi regime under U.S. jurisdiction and vest the assets in the U.S. Treasury. Finally, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 required all U.N. members to freeze without delay and immediately transfer assets of the
Syria Restive under Impact of Iraq War, NYT
New York Times Hussein's Fall Leads Syrians to Test Government Limits By NEIL MacFARQUHAR March 20, 2004 DAMASCUS, Syria, March 19 - A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath. Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. It gave me the courage to do it, he said. When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next, he said. He has just completed another film, A Flood in Baath Country, for a European arts channel, saying, The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed. When the Bush administration toppled the Baghdad government, it announced that it wanted to establish a democratic, free-market Iraq that would prove a contagious model for the region. The bloodshed there makes that a distant prospect, yet the very act of humiliating the worst Arab tyrant spawned a sort of what if process in Syria and across the region. The Syrian Baath Party remains firmly in control, ruling through emergency laws that basically suspend all civil rights. The government says the laws are necessary as long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, 40 miles from Damascus, and the two nations remain at war. Yet subtle changes have begun, even if they amount to tiny fissures in a repressive state. Some Syrians are testing the limits, openly questioning government doctrine and challenging state oppression. Syrians who oppose the government do so with some trepidation because it used ferocious violence in the past to silence any challenge. Yet the fall of Mr. Hussein changed something inside people. I think the image, the sense of terror, has evaporated, said Mr. Amiralay, the filmmaker. On March 8, for instance, about 25 protesters demanding that repressive laws be lifted tried to demonstrate outside Parliament. Security forces squashed the sit-in as it started, but the event would have been unthinkable before the Iraq war. People here do not know what previously locked doors they can push open, but they are trying to find out. Take Mr. Amiralay. In 1970, he returned to Syria after a few years of graduate studies in Paris. Swept up in the pan-Arab nationalism spouted by Syrian leaders and enthralled with the economic development spurred by the Baath Party, his first documentary was a 16-minute, Soviet-style tribute to the Euphrates River dam that created Lake Assad. Years later, he said, he wanted to atone, not least because many dams from that era developed dangerous cracks, and one burst in 2002 with disastrous results. He wanted to expose government propaganda for what it is. His new film shows both elementary school students and teachers in Al Mashi, a tiny village 250 miles northeast of Damascus, shouting songs in praise of the president and endlessly mouthing Baath slogans. Their eyes dart about and their heads swivel periodically as they falter over a word, fearful they will be accused of diverting from the accepted vocabulary. Mr. Amiralay said students raised with such an empty education would prove as unlikely to defend their system as the Iraqis. Virtually no one wants an American intervention here. But the problem in Syria and across the region, activists like Mr. Amiralay say, is that no Arab government allows its people real power to press for change. Change is something effected by the palace, not the society, as he puts it. Yet the changes here are also reflected in the words of Mahdi Dakhlalah, the 56-year-old editor of the official Baath newspaper. A bald, burly man, Mr. Dakhlalah sat recently in his sprawling office on the sixth floor of the kind of boxy, Stalinist buildings that house most government bureaus in Damascus, ticking off recent reforms. Last month the government eliminated emergency economic courts, often used to jail opposition businessmen, he pointed out. It has allowed four private universities to open, and two private banks started accepting deposits in January, although they cannot deal in foreign exchange. A number of experts believe that the young President Assad is searching for a way to make Syria more like Jordan or Egypt. On the face of it, those countries have democratic institutions like a parliament and a fairly free press, but anyone who becomes too vocal in criticizing the man behind the palace walls gets a visit from the secret police. Even the president's many supporters concede that change here comes at a glacial pace. Article 8 of the Constitution enshrines the central role of the Baath Party, but many see the government as fishing for ways to jettison that provision without seeming to respond to American pressure. In December, the party mailed out complicated questionnaires to the 500,000 of its nearly two million members. It asked many
Iraq-al Qaeda Link, Wash Times
WashingtonTimes Inside the Ring March 19, 2004 Notes from the Pentagon Iraq-al Qaeda link We have obtained a document discovered in Iraq from the files of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). The report provides new evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The 1993 document, in Arabic, bears the logo of the Iraqi intelligence agency and is labeled "top secret" on each of its 20 pages. The report is a list of IIS agents who are described as "collaborators." On page 14, the report states that among the collaborators is "the Saudi Osama bin Laden." The document states that bin Laden is a "Saudi businessman and is in charge of the Saudi opposition in Afghanistan." "And he is in good relationship with our section in Syria," the document states, under the signature "Jabar." The document was obtained by the Iraqi National Congress and first disclosed on the CBS program "60 Minutes" by INC leader Ahmed Chalabi. A U.S. official said the document appears authentic.
9/11 Commission Hearing Excerpt
Excerpts from today's 9/11 Commission hearing (Commissioner John Lehman questioning former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) LEHMAN: Did you know about Abdel Rahman Yasin and his fleeing to Baghdad and his support and cooperation with Saddam's intelligence service? Did you see any significance in that? He being, of course, one of the main plotters of the '93 bombing. ALBRIGHT: I can't say that I remember that. LEHMAN: Just on that theme, the fact that Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas were there along with Yasin, would this have been a reason to begin to look a bit at what the Iraqi secret service was doing with Al Qaida, with or without Saddam's knowledge? ALBRIGHT: Again, my sense of all of this was that there were shadowy connections among a variety of groups. But in terms of this kind of specificity, frankly, that was not something that as secretary of state I would have been looking into. . . . LEHMAN: The reports at the time and subsequently have appeared in various places that the evidence involved with the pharmaceutical plant not only involved Al Qaida and specifically Osama, but also the Iraqi -- various programs within the Iraqi government, let us say. Did you see any significance in that as something to worry about, perhaps the Iraqis' involvement with Osama might be a bit more than it might appear? ALBRIGHT: I did not make the connection. But let me just say this, is that if you look at the record, I was as hawkish on Saddam Hussein as anybody, made more statements and took more actions, whether I was ambassador at the United Nations or secretary of state, in terms of trying to contain Saddam Hussein and make sure that he proceeded in terms of trying to live up to or fulfill the Security Council resolutions. ALBRIGHT: And so, I did not or do not remember making a link between what was happening in Sudan and the Iraqis. I don't know, Tom, whether you have anything. PICKERING: Mr. Secretary, I also participated in the meetings leading up to that decision. There were two pieces of evidence only that I was aware of that I thought were very, very important and that helped, I believe, to crystallize the decision. One was the report we had following chemical analysis of the actual sample of a precursor to VX nerve gas that did not occur in nature. It was very unique and was not used for any other known purpose. And the other was the connection that the secretary just talked to you about of the plant with investments of activities of Osama bin Laden in Sudan. As you know, he spent time in Sudan prior to the attack on the plant. And I was not aware of any Iraqi connection until after the attack.
Mylroie, Clarke's Responsibility for 9/11, NRO
National Review
Online
April 05, 2004,
8:47 a.m.Dont Look at
MeDick Clarkes reversed
reality.By Laurie Mylroie
In 1992, when Richard Clarke assumed the
counterterrorism portfolio in the White House, terrorism was not a serious
problem. Libya's downing of Pan Am 103 four years before had been the last
major attack on a U.S. target. Yet when Clarke left his post in October
2001, terrorism had become the single-greatest threat to America.
Clarke would have us believe this happened because of events beyond
anyone's ability to control. He argues, moreover, that the Bush
administration has adopted a fatally wrong approach to the war on terror
by including states, particularly Iraq, in its response to the 9/11
attacks.
Clarke's tenure as America's top counterterrorism
official is essentially contemporaneous with the Clinton administration.
Bill Clinton took what had been considered a national-security issue, in
which the U.S. focused on punishing and deterring terrorist states, and
turned it into a law-enforcement issue, focused on arresting and
convicting individual perpetrators. That was certainly an easier response,
but it was completely ineffectual. In fact, it had created a very serious
vulnerability long before September 11, 2001. Clarke's book, Against
All Enemies is, essentially, an attempt to blame the Bush
administration for 9/11, while exonerating Clinton (and therefore Clarke).
The reality is quite the reverse.
CLARKE VS. MEAn audacious series of terrorist attacks began in
the 1990's, starting with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center one
month into Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI was the lead
investigative agency, and senior officials there, including director Jim
Fox, believed Iraq was involved. As Fox wrote, "Although we are unable to
say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is
certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators"
(italics added).
Clarke vehemently rejects this view, calling it "the totally
discredited Laurie Mylroie theory." While this theory is indeed the
central thesis of my book, Study
of Revenge, one wonders why Clarke would not attribute it to Fox
and the other FBI agents who did the hard work to uncover the evidence of
Iraq's role. Gil Childers, lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center
bombing trial, was considered by other U.S. officials the expert on that
attack. Childers described Study of Revenge as "work the U.S.
government should have done."
Clarke's office was obliged to review the book in the spring of 2001.
He dismissed it then, as he does now. He systematically
ignores or distorts the information suggesting an Iraqi link to the 1993
bombing, including the critical question of the identity of its
mastermind, Ramzi Yousef; as well as the identity of Yousef's "uncle,"
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks; along with the
identities of other key terrorists in that remarkable "family."
Clarke maliciously misrepresents my argument on these points. After
stating the obvious that Yousef is indeed the terrorist the government
says he is, Clarke writes: "That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from
asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan
Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad."
Yet that is not my position: "Ramzi Yousef was arrested and
returned to the United States on February 7, 1995" (Study of
Revenge, p. 212). This very serious dispute relates instead to
Yousef's real identity. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has observed,
"For Clarke to say something like that is like the 13th chime of the
clock. Not only is it bizarre in and of itself, it calls into
question...everything from the same source."
But while Clarke totally rejects the possibility that Iraq was behind
the first attack on the Trade Center, he nevertheless entertains the
possibility of a foreign dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing: "Ramzi
Yousef and [Terry] Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same
days Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the
angry American?... We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his
Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that
Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the Unite
Ed Epstein, Did Clarke End Saddam's Support for Terrorism?
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/ClarkesIraq.htm Question: Richard Clarke credits himself, and President Clinton, with ending Saddam's support of terrorism. Following Saddam's failed attempt to assassinate ex-President George Bush Sr. in Kuwait, the U.S. had retaliated in June 1993 with a cruise missile attack on Baghdad. Although the missiles did little damage (other than accidentally killing a prominent female artist), Clarke writes (p. 84) in Against All Enemies: it seemed that Saddam had gotten the message. Subsequent to that June 1993 retaliation, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community never developed any evidence of further of Iraqi support for terrorism directed against Americans. Is it true that U.S. intelligence received no further evidence of Iraqi involvement in terrorism after June 1993? Answer: No, U.S. intelligence, and own Clarke's counterterrorism unit, received reports of Iraqi terrorist involvement. In 1998-199, for example, both CIA and FBI reported Iraqi intelligence service's plan to use terrorists to blow up America's Radio Free Europe facility in Prague (which also housed Radio Free Iraq.) Iraq tasked Jabir Salim, the Iraq consul in Prague, with the terrorist job, and provided him with $150,000 in two payments to recruit free-lance terrorists in 1998. The Iraqi plan failed because Salim, along with his family and the money, defected in December 1998 to British intelligence and revealed the plot plot to western intelligence services.
Ahmad Chalabi, Q A on the Fighting in Iraq, NYT
The New York Times April 9, 2004 QA: Ahmad Chalabi on the Fighting in Iraq From the Council on Foreign Relations, April 9, 2004 Ahmad Chalabi, head of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress and a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, says the council is working behind the scenes to stop the recent clashes between insurgents and coalition forces. The key, he says, is the fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urging an end to lawlessness in Najaf and other Shiite cities taken over by militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Governing council members have been very active for the past three days and are trying to resolve the situation in such a way that we uphold the rule of law in Iraq, and at the same time resolve this without further bloodshed, he says. Chalabi, a secular Iraqi Shiite with British citizenship, says the council members were disappointed by the poor performance of the Iraqi police, many of whom fled when violence first erupted. He says procedures to recruit and train members of the police force must be re-evaluated. He was interviewed from Baghdad via telephone by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on April 8, 2004. Q: There's been a lot of publicity about the fighting in Falluja and in the south, but what is going on in Baghdad and the Iraqi Governing Council? Are you working on, the build-up to the June 30 transition? A: No. We're working now on how to stop the fighting, provide relief to civilians, uphold the rule of law, and also take stock of the security apparatus of the Iraqi government and move forward, learning the lessons from the recent fighting. Q: Describe the fighting going on. A: There are two kinds of fighting going on. There is a sustained effort by the coalition forces in the Falluja area to systematically and rigorously find the criminals who killed and burned the U.S. contractors [on March 31], and also to disarm the terrorists that are found in Falluja. [The interview occurred about 12 hours before a temporary halt in the fighting in Falluja was announced April 9]. That is being conducted systematically and with the cooperation of the Iraqi 36th battalion of the ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps], which has demonstrated its capability and its courage in the current crisis. Q: And they're in Falluja? A: They're in Falluja now. Q: They're fighting together with the U.S. Marines? A: Yes. Q: Have you had recent reports of progress in Falluja? A: That operation is in its second phase, which is to methodically search for the criminals and disarm the terrorists. There is a great deal of suffering, and we spent a lot of time today to try to put together plans to provide humanitarian and medical aid to the people of Falluja, and we are cooperating with the coalition to achieve this. And we are urging extreme caution to spare the lives of innocent people in Falluja. That is one kind of operation. In the south, we have seen small-scale action in several cities involving tens [of fighters]--at most a few hundred--at various places. What has happened is that the Iraqi police who were recruited and trained by the coalition and trained in Jordan and other places have mostly disappeared or surrendered or joined the people who have taken over their stations. There has been very little opposition to the action of the armed people who attacked. Also, there are very few U.S. forces in the south. There are Ukrainians, Poles, Spanish, and Salvadorans. They have not done much fighting, except for the Salvadorans and, to some extent, the Ukrainians. The Italians fought in the city of Nasiriya. The situation is quiet there. The British in Basra and Amara had some fighting there, but the situation was restored with the efforts of the local leaders. The most serious situation in the south is in Najaf, which is a critical city. It's not an ordinary city, it's a holy city. It's much like the Vatican to the Shiites. There, the number of people fighting is a few hundred, although the police did not respond to the fighting. In the clashes, the Salvadorans lost four soldiers and a U.S. colonel was lost also. The Spanish garrison there, which is about 1,200 strong, has not engaged in any offensive action. It came under fire. The people in Najaf supporting Muqtada al-Sadr are mostly not from Najaf, they are mostly from a district in Baghdad where they have some support. There are hundreds of them. They are not in the thousands. And we have some reports today that some fundamentalist Sunnis, who came from Falluja to Najaf, have escalated the tension in the city. Q: Were you disappointed with the way the Iraqi police ran away? A: Everybody is disappointed. The coalition is disappointed, everyone is disappointed. It was not a surprise that the police would behave in this way. Not all the police ran away. Some did not, but we must make a re-evaluation of the way the police have been recruited, how they've been trained, and their morale. We must do better, it is
Anne Applebaum, Powell, Having it Both Ways
Washington Post Having It Both Ways By Anne Applebaum April 21, 2004 About five months ago, Colin Powell received an award named in honor of George C. Marshall, another American general who became secretary of state. In advance of that event, Powell indicated that he would like to give an interview to The Post -- and told a Post reporter to read up on two incidents in Marshall's career beforehand. The first concerned President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failure to name Marshall as commander of the D-Day invasion. Marshall, whatever disappointment he felt over that, he simply ate it, Powell said in the interview. It's what serving this nation is all about. The second involved Marshall's bitter objections to President Harry Truman's recognition of the state of Israel, and Marshall's decision not to air those objections in public. I think any subordinate accommodates himself to the wishes of his superior, Powell said. Any subordinate accommodates himself to the wishes of his superior. That's what serving this nation is all about. Whatever disappointment he felt, he simply ate it. In those few brief phrases, Colin Powell established, on the one hand, that he admired George Marshall for his loyalty. He also hinted -- strongly -- that he, like Marshall, disagrees with his president. So is Colin Powell loyal? Is he simply serving -- and eating it when disappointed -- or does he also want us to know that he would do things differently, if he were in charge? The question arises again this week, with the publication of Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, which dissects the administration's decision to fight the Iraq war. Powell has confirmed serving as a source for the book, and indeed some of its scenes -- such as accounts of how he tried to talk the president out of rushing to war -- seem to have come from him. Powell has now declared that he was committed as anyone else to the war, but the intent of the original leak, like the intent of his Marshall award interview, is clear. Once again Powell is trying to have it both ways, and it is not an attractive picture. Surely true loyalty means not only swallowing your pride when you disagree with your commander in chief but keeping quiet about it as well, at least while in office. Nor is this just about definitions of loyalty. For, unfortunately, Powell's mixed feelings had deeper consequences. There is no doubt that when he wants to, Powell can defend the president's policies abroad with more eloquence than anyone else in the administration. In the winter of 2002, following President Bush's axis of evil speech, the secretary of state suddenly appeared all over the European press. In a masterful interview with the Financial Times, he laughed off criticism from the European foreign affairs commissioner (I shall have to have a word with him, as they say in Britain) and the French foreign minister (he's just getting the vapours). On the opposite end of the political spectrum, he inspired the Daily Telegraph to run a gushing headline: We Americans know how to get a job done when we put our minds to it. In the fall of 2002, however -- right when Bush was pushing Powell's preferred diplomatic solution to the Iraq problem at the United Nations -- the U.S. secretary of state was nowhere to be seen. In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War in 1991, then-Secretary of State James Baker spent weeks at a time in Europe and the Middle East, including most of November 1990. Powell, by contrast, went to Europe once in the autumn of 2002, to the NATO summit in Prague, and then only on very brief trips the following spring. More importantly, he didn't play the role that he could have played in the European media, defending the decision to go to war. That is hardly surprising, because he opposed that decision -- and has never been shy about letting us know. His opposition would have been perfectly legitimate, of course, had he been an ordinary citizen, say, or even a member of Congress. But because he was secretary of state, his half-loyalty undermined further the diplomacy of an administration already inclined to scoff at the views of foreigners, and has continued to do so in the year since the war was launched. None of which is to say Powell is solely or even partly to blame for all of the mistakes that have been made in Iraq. But he can partly be held to account for the lack of international support, which it was his responsibility to rally, and for the failure of the U.N. process, which was his idea. He can also be held responsible for the fact that much of the State Department has apparently washed its hands of the entire country (to the extent that some senior State Department officials refuse to answer questions about Iraq at all). And if he doesn't want to be held responsible for a policy he dislikes -- then he should have resigned a long time ago. [EMAIL PROTECTED] © 2004 The Washington Post Company
UN Iraq Envoy Calls Israel Policy Biggest Poison, Ha'aretz
NB: Lakhdar Brahimi (former Algerian Foreign Minister and an Arab nationalist) is the figure promoted by the State Department to oversee the development of a future Iraqi government, and the White House has signed on to that. Is this really what we want? April 23, 2004 Report: UN envoy to Iraq calls Israeli policy 'biggest poison in region' By Haaretz Service United Nations special envoy for Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, claims there is a clear tie between the escalation of the situation in Iraq and Israeli policy, which he called the biggest poison in the region, Israel Radio quoted him as saying Friday. The spokesman for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Fred Eckhard, said it was not acceptable for a senior UN official to make such comments about a member nation and said the remarks do not reflect Annan's opinions, Israel Radio reported. The biggest poison in the region is the policy of Israeli power and the suffering of the Palestinians, Brahimi was quoted as telling a French radio station. He reportedly said many people both in the Mideast and outside it agree with the statement. Brahimi was also quoted as blaming Washington for supporting Israeli policy. Israel's deputy ambassador to the UN, Arye Mekel, said Jerusalem was considering how to respond to the comments, Israel Radio reported Friday.
Michael Rubin, Catastrophic US Concession to Baathists, NRO
National Review Online April 23, 2004 Catastrophic Concessions The Coalition dances with the devil. By Michael Rubin Local humor reflects society. Within Iraq's Shia community, there is a popular joke: Saddam dies and enters a special prison in hell for worst 100 offenders of all time. Residents are assigned cells according to relative degree of evil: Cell # 100 is for the absolute worst. One day at lunch, prisoners see Saddam has joined them. Who are you, and what cell are you in? one asks. I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am in cell 97, Saddam replies. Wow! You must have been evil, the other prisoner responds. I'm in cell 35, and all I did was kill Imam Hussein. Imam Hussein is Hussein bin Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, and a revered figure among Shia Muslims. The martyrdom of Hussein is central to Shia theology and practice. Hussein was cut down on the battlefield of Karbala in 683 A.D., his head sent back to the caliph Yezid in Damascus. That Iraqi Shia would suggest that Saddam Hussein - a man whose Baath party was responsible for the death or displacement of several hundred thousand of them - might be more evil than Hussein's murderer is significant. One of L. Paul Bremer's first actions as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to order the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government. The May 15, 2003, order was popular: It fulfilled the Iraqi desire for moral clarity and firmness of direction. Until Bremer's arrival, mixed messages confused Iraqis. Coalition figures spoke of freedom, but many Iraqis remained scarred by their abandonment to Saddam's death squads in the aftermath of the 1991 uprising. The initial failure of the CPA to remove the four huge busts of Saddam from atop the Republican Palace fueled conspiracy theorists, who pointed to the busts as proof that the U.S. was going to once again abandon Iraqis to the Baath party. Several career diplomats reestablished warm relations with Baathist contacts they had known while serving in Baghdad in the 1980s. Frequent meetings between Bremer predecessor Jay Garner and Saad al-Janabi, a close associate of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, also fueled Iraqi speculation that the U.S. was not willing to adhere to its promises. The Baath party was no ordinary political organization. Founded in 1944 by Michel Aflaq, Baathism was based upon contemporary Italian fascism and German Nazism. The party is ethnically chauvinist, blatantly advocating discrimination against Iraq's sizeable non-Arab communities. Baathism was the ideological basis for the Anfal ethnic-cleansing campaign, in which senior Iraqi army officers directed the slaughter of over 100,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians. Under the Baath party, Shia were second-class citizens. In Iraq, the structure of the Baath party was hierarchical. There may have been two million Baath party members, but de-Baathification applied only to the top 70,000 individuals out of a total population of 24 million. De-Baathification did not target the innocent; no educator could reach one of the top four tiers without actively reporting on peers and students. Teachers' pay slips show the result: Some received Iraqi government gifts inflating their salary by up to 700 percent over that of their peers. Proponents of re-Baathification - most of whom are not Iraqi - argue that CPA Order Number One deprived Iraq of technocrats and experienced educators. This is a myth. Under Saddam Hussein, government technocrats received promotions not on their merit, but rather on their political loyalty to the dictatorial regime. Skilled technocrats who happened to be Shia, Kurdish, or Turkmen were disqualified from most top-level ministry positions. De-Baathification did not ban top-tier Baathists from employment; they remained free to work in the private sector. No one is entitled to a government job. De-Baathification likewise did not hamper the Iraqi education system. Upon liberation, there was a glut of unemployed schoolteachers, many of whom had never compromised themselves with Baathist membership. Now these newly hired educators will be thrown onto the street, as Saddam's henchmen reclaim jobs. Iraqis will pay the price for years to come, as corrupt Baathist teachers exact revenge upon students, failing - as they did before - those who do not regurgitate Baathist interpretations or pay hefty bribes. The reverberations of the Coalition's decision to rehabilitate Saddam's support network will be long lasting and will lead to the deaths of Coalition soldiers. Death to the Baath Party banners hang throughout southern Iraq. Anti-Baath passion runs high among the vast majority of the Iraqi people. Eighty percent of the Iraqi population is not Sunni Arab, and the majority of the Sunni Arabs also welcomed liberation from 35 years of Baathist dictatorship. Many Iraqis see the U.S. as abandoning them yet again. We risk losing the silent majority. Iraqi Shia, most of whom viewed America as
Fouad Ajami, US Pandering to Old Arab Order in Iraq, WSJ
May 12, 2004 COMMENTARY The Curse of Pan-Arabia By FOUAD AJAMIMay12,2004;PageA14 Consider a tale of three cities: In Fallujah, there are the beginnings of wisdom, a recognition, after the bravado, that the insurgents cannot win in the face of a great military power. In Najaf, the clerical establishment and the shopkeepers have called on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr to quit their city, and to "pursue another way." It is in Washington where the lines are breaking, and where the faith in the gains that coalition soldiers have secured in Iraq at such a terrible price appears to have cracked. We have been doing Iraq by improvisation, we are now "dumping stock," just as our fortunes in that hard land may be taking a turn for the better. We pledged to give Iraqis a chance at a new political life. We now appear to be consigning them yet again to the same Arab malignancies that drove us to Iraq in the first place. We have stumbled in Abu Ghraib. But the logic of Abu Ghraib isn't the logic of the Iraq war. We should be able to know the Arab world as it is. We should see through the motives of those in Cairo and Amman and Ramallah and Jeddah, now outraged by Abu Ghraib, who looked away from the terrors of Iraq under the Baathists. Our account is with the Iraqi people: It is their country we liberated, and it is their trust that a few depraved men and women, on the margins of a noble military expedition, have violated. We ought to give the Iraqis the best thing we can do now, reeling as we are under the impact of Abu Ghraib -- give them the example of our courts and the transparency of our public life. What we should not be doing is to seek absolution in other Arab lands. Take this scene from last week, which smacks of the confusion -- and panic -- of our policies in the aftermath of a cruel April: President Bush apologizing to King Abdullah II of Jordan for the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Peculiar, that apology -- owed to Iraq's people, yet forwarded to Jordan. We are still held captive by Pan-Arab politics. We struck into Iraq to free that country from the curse of the Arabism that played havoc with its politics from its very inception as a nation-state. We had thought, or implied, or let Iraqis think, that a new political order would emerge, that the Pan-Arab vocation that had been Iraq's poison would be no more. The Arabs had let down Iraq, averted their gaze from the mass graves and the terrors inflicted on Kurdistan and the south, and on the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and their seminarians and scholars. Jordan in particular had shown no great sensitivity toward Iraq's suffering. This was a dark spot in the record of a Hashemite dynasty otherwise known for its prudence and mercy. It was a concession that the Hashemite court gave to Jordan's "street," to the Palestinians in refugee camps and to the swanky districts of Amman alike. Jordan in the 1980s was the one country where Saddam Hussein was a mythic hero: the crowd identified itself with his Pan-Arab dreams, and thrilled to his cruelty and historical revisionism. This is why the late king, Hussein, broke with his American ties -- as well as with his fellow Arab monarchs -- after the invasion of Kuwait. His son did better in this war; he noted the price that Jordan paid in the intervening decade. He took America's side, and let the crowd know that a price would be paid for riding with Saddam. But no apology was owed to him for Abu Ghraib. He was no more due an apology for what took place than were the rulers in Kathmandu. But this was of a piece with our broader retreat of late. We have dispatched the way of Iraqis an envoy of the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian of Pan-Arab orientation, with past service in the League of Arab States. It stood to reason (American reason, uninformed as to the terrible complications of Arab life) that Mr. Brahimi, "an Arab," would better understand Iraq's ways than Paul Bremer. But nothing in Mr. Brahimi's curriculum vitae gives him the tools, or the sympathy, to understand the life of Iraq's Shiite seminaries; nothing he did in his years of service in the Arab league exhibited concern for the cruelties visited on the Kurds in the 1980s. Mr. Brahimi hails from the very same political class that has wrecked the Arab world. He has partaken of the ways of that class: populism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism,
Fouad Ajami, US Pandering to Old Arab Order in Iraq, WSJ
May 12, 2004 COMMENTARY The Curse of Pan-Arabia By FOUAD AJAMIMay12,2004;PageA14 Consider a tale of three cities: In Fallujah, there are the beginnings of wisdom, a recognition, after the bravado, that the insurgents cannot win in the face of a great military power. In Najaf, the clerical establishment and the shopkeepers have called on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr to quit their city, and to "pursue another way." It is in Washington where the lines are breaking, and where the faith in the gains that coalition soldiers have secured in Iraq at such a terrible price appears to have cracked. We have been doing Iraq by improvisation, we are now "dumping stock," just as our fortunes in that hard land may be taking a turn for the better. We pledged to give Iraqis a chance at a new political life. We now appear to be consigning them yet again to the same Arab malignancies that drove us to Iraq in the first place. We have stumbled in Abu Ghraib. But the logic of Abu Ghraib isn't the logic of the Iraq war. We should be able to know the Arab world as it is. We should see through the motives of those in Cairo and Amman and Ramallah and Jeddah, now outraged by Abu Ghraib, who looked away from the terrors of Iraq under the Baathists. Our account is with the Iraqi people: It is their country we liberated, and it is their trust that a few depraved men and women, on the margins of a noble military expedition, have violated. We ought to give the Iraqis the best thing we can do now, reeling as we are under the impact of Abu Ghraib -- give them the example of our courts and the transparency of our public life. What we should not be doing is to seek absolution in other Arab lands. Take this scene from last week, which smacks of the confusion -- and panic -- of our policies in the aftermath of a cruel April: President Bush apologizing to King Abdullah II of Jordan for the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Peculiar, that apology -- owed to Iraq's people, yet forwarded to Jordan. We are still held captive by Pan-Arab politics. We struck into Iraq to free that country from the curse of the Arabism that played havoc with its politics from its very inception as a nation-state. We had thought, or implied, or let Iraqis think, that a new political order would emerge, that the Pan-Arab vocation that had been Iraq's poison would be no more. The Arabs had let down Iraq, averted their gaze from the mass graves and the terrors inflicted on Kurdistan and the south, and on the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and their seminarians and scholars. Jordan in particular had shown no great sensitivity toward Iraq's suffering. This was a dark spot in the record of a Hashemite dynasty otherwise known for its prudence and mercy. It was a concession that the Hashemite court gave to Jordan's "street," to the Palestinians in refugee camps and to the swanky districts of Amman alike. Jordan in the 1980s was the one country where Saddam Hussein was a mythic hero: the crowd identified itself with his Pan-Arab dreams, and thrilled to his cruelty and historical revisionism. This is why the late king, Hussein, broke with his American ties -- as well as with his fellow Arab monarchs -- after the invasion of Kuwait. His son did better in this war; he noted the price that Jordan paid in the intervening decade. He took America's side, and let the crowd know that a price would be paid for riding with Saddam. But no apology was owed to him for Abu Ghraib. He was no more due an apology for what took place than were the rulers in Kathmandu. But this was of a piece with our broader retreat of late. We have dispatched the way of Iraqis an envoy of the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian of Pan-Arab orientation, with past service in the League of Arab States. It stood to reason (American reason, uninformed as to the terrible complications of Arab life) that Mr. Brahimi, "an Arab," would better understand Iraq's ways than Paul Bremer. But nothing in Mr. Brahimi's curriculum vitae gives him the tools, or the sympathy, to understand the life of Iraq's Shiite seminaries; nothing he did in his years of service in the Arab league exhibited concern for the cruelties visited on the Kurds in the 1980s. Mr. Brahimi hails from the very same political class that has wrecked the Arab world. He has partaken of the ways of that class: populism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism,
Fouad Ajami, US Pandering to Old Arab Order in Iraq, WSJ
May 12, 2004 COMMENTARY The Curse of Pan-Arabia By FOUAD AJAMIMay12,2004;PageA14 Consider a tale of three cities: In Fallujah, there are the beginnings of wisdom, a recognition, after the bravado, that the insurgents cannot win in the face of a great military power. In Najaf, the clerical establishment and the shopkeepers have called on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr to quit their city, and to "pursue another way." It is in Washington where the lines are breaking, and where the faith in the gains that coalition soldiers have secured in Iraq at such a terrible price appears to have cracked. We have been doing Iraq by improvisation, we are now "dumping stock," just as our fortunes in that hard land may be taking a turn for the better. We pledged to give Iraqis a chance at a new political life. We now appear to be consigning them yet again to the same Arab malignancies that drove us to Iraq in the first place. We have stumbled in Abu Ghraib. But the logic of Abu Ghraib isn't the logic of the Iraq war. We should be able to know the Arab world as it is. We should see through the motives of those in Cairo and Amman and Ramallah and Jeddah, now outraged by Abu Ghraib, who looked away from the terrors of Iraq under the Baathists. Our account is with the Iraqi people: It is their country we liberated, and it is their trust that a few depraved men and women, on the margins of a noble military expedition, have violated. We ought to give the Iraqis the best thing we can do now, reeling as we are under the impact of Abu Ghraib -- give them the example of our courts and the transparency of our public life. What we should not be doing is to seek absolution in other Arab lands. Take this scene from last week, which smacks of the confusion -- and panic -- of our policies in the aftermath of a cruel April: President Bush apologizing to King Abdullah II of Jordan for the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Peculiar, that apology -- owed to Iraq's people, yet forwarded to Jordan. We are still held captive by Pan-Arab politics. We struck into Iraq to free that country from the curse of the Arabism that played havoc with its politics from its very inception as a nation-state. We had thought, or implied, or let Iraqis think, that a new political order would emerge, that the Pan-Arab vocation that had been Iraq's poison would be no more. The Arabs had let down Iraq, averted their gaze from the mass graves and the terrors inflicted on Kurdistan and the south, and on the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and their seminarians and scholars. Jordan in particular had shown no great sensitivity toward Iraq's suffering. This was a dark spot in the record of a Hashemite dynasty otherwise known for its prudence and mercy. It was a concession that the Hashemite court gave to Jordan's "street," to the Palestinians in refugee camps and to the swanky districts of Amman alike. Jordan in the 1980s was the one country where Saddam Hussein was a mythic hero: the crowd identified itself with his Pan-Arab dreams, and thrilled to his cruelty and historical revisionism. This is why the late king, Hussein, broke with his American ties -- as well as with his fellow Arab monarchs -- after the invasion of Kuwait. His son did better in this war; he noted the price that Jordan paid in the intervening decade. He took America's side, and let the crowd know that a price would be paid for riding with Saddam. But no apology was owed to him for Abu Ghraib. He was no more due an apology for what took place than were the rulers in Kathmandu. But this was of a piece with our broader retreat of late. We have dispatched the way of Iraqis an envoy of the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian of Pan-Arab orientation, with past service in the League of Arab States. It stood to reason (American reason, uninformed as to the terrible complications of Arab life) that Mr. Brahimi, "an Arab," would better understand Iraq's ways than Paul Bremer. But nothing in Mr. Brahimi's curriculum vitae gives him the tools, or the sympathy, to understand the life of Iraq's Shiite seminaries; nothing he did in his years of service in the Arab league exhibited concern for the cruelties visited on the Kurds in the 1980s. Mr. Brahimi hails from the very same political class that has wrecked the Arab world. He has partaken of the ways of that class: populism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism,
Mylroie, Saddam-9/11 Link Confirmed, Front Page
psteins work, Czech intelligence at that point had already informed their CIA liaison that they had tentatively identified Mohammed Atta as the Arab whom al-Ani had met on April 8, 2001. Evidence is something that indicates, according to Websters. Proof is conclusive demonstration. The report of a well-regarded allied intelligence service that a 9/11 hijacker appeared to have met with an Iraqi intelligence agent a few months before the attacks is certainly evidence of an Iraqi connection. Clarkes adamant refusal to even consider the possibility of an Iraqi role in the 9/11 attacks represents an enormous blunder committed by the Clinton administration. Following the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, senior officials in New York FBI, the lead investigative agency, believed that Iraq was involved. When Clinton launched a cruise missile attack on Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June 1993, saying publicly that the strike was punishment for Saddams attempt to kill former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in April, Clinton believed that the attack would also take care of the terrorism in New York, if New York FBI was correct. It would deter Saddam from all future acts of terrorism. Indeed, Clarke claims the strike did just that. The Clinton administration, Clarke explains in Against All Enemies, also sent a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis saying, If you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won't just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it'll be your whole government.' It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked. But if the entire 1991 Gulf War did not deter Saddam for long, why should one cruise missile strike accomplish that aim? Indeed, the Iraqi plot against Radio Free Europethe existence of which is confirmed by RFE officialsis clear demonstration that the June 1993 cruise missile strike did not permanently deter Saddam. Bush 41: A War Left Unfinished The claim that Iraq was involved in 9/11 is also strongly opposed by some senior figures in Bush 41. They include former National Security Council Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who wrote in the summer of 2002, There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks carries serious implications for judgments about the way that Bush 41 ended the 1991 war. As will be recalled, after 100 hours of a ground war, with Saddam still in power and Republican Guard units escaping across the Euphrates, Bush called for a cease-fire. Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushed for that decision, and Scowcroft backed him, although it was totally unnecessary, and many Arab members of the coalition were astounded at the decision. To err is human. And if one errs, one should correct the mistake and move on. The prevailing ethos, however, is quite different, even when serious national security issues are involved. Extraordinarily rare is a figure like Dick Cheney, who as Secretary of Defense, supported the decision to end the 1991 war with Saddam still in power, but after the 9/11 attacks was prepared to recognize the evidence suggesting an Iraqi role in those attacks and memorably remarked that it was rare in history to be able to correct a mistake like that. Why we are at war: Iraqs Involvement in 9/11 Never before in this countrys history has a president ordered American soldiers into battle, without fully explaining why they are asked to risk life and limb. One would never know from the administrations public stance that senior officials, including the President, believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Iraq was indeed involved in those assaults. There is considerable information to that effect, described in this piece and elsewhere. They include Iraqi documents discovered by U.S. forces in Baghdad that U.S. officials have not made public. We are now engaged in the most difficult military conflict this country has fought in thirty years. Even before the fiasco at Abu Ghraib became widely known, both the American public and international opinion were increasingly skeptical of U.S. war aims. In taking on and eliminating the Iraqi regime, Bush corrected a policy blunder of historic proportions. His decision for war was both courageous and necessary. Now, he needs to make it clear just why that decision was made. Laurie Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 campaign of Bill Clinton and is the author of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department tried to Stop the War on Terror. (HarperCollins) She can be reached through www.benadorassociates.com.
David Frum, What Next in Iraq?. NRO
David Frum National Review Online MAY. 11, 2004: WHAT NEXT IN IRAQ What now? War is a time of intense mood swings and the moods have been swinging fast over the past two weeks. Some prominent supporters of the Iraq campaign have sunk into uncertainty and even gloom (see eg Andrew Sullivan). And prominent people including for example Jessica Matthews of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace have begun to advocate immediate and unconditional withdrawal. Most mainstream Democrats by contrast have settled for scoring partisan points against President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld. But for those who remember why the US took its fight to terror to Baghdad, a couple of sustaining thoughts in a dark time. 1) The war on terror was and is and will remain hard. We all said that at the beginning of the war but words are easy to say. To win it, American institutions will have to be ready to learn and keep learning, adapt and keep adapting. From the abuses of Abu Ghraib, there are many valuable lessons to take. It seems to me for example that Max Boot argues correctly that the US Army needs a large permanent military police corps within the regular army. Prison guarding is not unskilled work, not in a war zone anyway. 2) Abu Ghraib is interpreted by some as evidence that Donald Rumsfelds original strategy--go in fast, go in light--was wrong; that it would have been better to go in with closer to 400,000 troops or something like it, as some generals argued beforehand. That strikes me as perverse. Isnt the truer lesson of Abu Ghraib that Rumsfeld was right--and that we should have stuck to his original plan to let Iraqis keep order in their own country? Those of us who championed Ahmed Chalabi did so not because we thought of him as an unflawed character, but because we thought that the Iraqi National Congress was the group most capable of rapidly recruiting and deploying an effective and decent Iraqi indigenous force. Many people have ridiculed that concept but I notice that the ridiculers are now proposing to do just the same thing, only using former Republican Guard generals rather than Iraqi democrats. Bad choice. 3) The most urgent task ahead for the United States is not the punishment of the offending soldiers of Abu Ghraib, important as that task is, but taking immediate steps to demonstrate to Iraqis that the US does not intend to colonize or occupy the country. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan recommend that the US commit now to accelerating the date of Iraqs elections to September 30. As they point out, this will a) send the right message to Iraq; b) minimize the UNs ability to do damage in Iraq since it will cut Lakhdar Brahimis mandate to just 90 days; c) offer a useful non-military role in Iraq to allies like Germany who wish to help but not to fight; and d) transform the nature of the combat in Iraq. Early elections will make clear that those who have taken up arms are really fighting--not the Americans and the Coalition--but popular government in Iraq. 4) The US should pay generous compensation to those abused in Abu Ghraib. Money cannot cure the sting of dishonor and humiliation--but nothing says sorry quite like a thick brick of cash. I wouldnt worry overmuch whether those who were abused were innocent or guilty. Even if guilty they were not leaders--those characters were incarcerated elsewhere. There are going to be mass releases from Abu Ghraib soon, and their story will have a very different meaning if they return home with something in their hands. 5) At the same time, the US must resume the offensive against organized resistance in Iraq. The atrocity against the four Americans murdered in Fallujah continues unavenged--a very dangerous omission, and more dangerous than ever at this moment when Washington is broadcasting its uncertainty to a watching world.08:06 AM http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary051104.asp
Mahdi al-Bassam, Let's Keep our Eyes on the Prize in Iraq, NRO
National Review Online May 07, 2004 Keeping the Promise Let's keep our eyes on the prize. By Mahdi al-Bassam Over the past week, the world has seen images of atrocious prisoner abuse in Iraq. There was outrage in Western Europe and the Arab world; France, Russia, and secular Arabs were particularly vocal in their condemnation of America. There were murmurs too from the United Nations. Were it not for their hypocrisy, these condemnations would be quite stirring. But just a decade or two ago, the same groups stood by while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dumped into mass graves. They even supplied Saddam with lethal chemicals subsequently used against the local population. Where were those great humanitarian voices when Saddam was carrying out his atrocities? The same Arabs and Muslims who today decry the behavior of a few American servicemen for years turned a blind eye to the mass murder, torture, and gassing of their fellow Muslims. They watched - and condemned America for - the suffering of the Iraqi people, all the while supporting the torturer himself and literally stealing food and medicine from the mouths of starving men, women, and children. This hypocrisy speaks volumes about the people who rejected the liberation of Iraq for there own greed. Saddam's orphans are guilty participants in his most serious crimes. If we are to ask for an apology on behalf of the Iraqi people, then we must begin closer to the source of their agony. That means getting at the underlying reasons for why the Coalition is in Iraq today and what can be done to keep the American promise of a democratic Iraq. We must find out why these governments, organizations, and individuals so vehemently opposed helping the oppressed Iraqis. Americans will certainly look deeper into what happened and why. America must find a new level of honesty in its introspection. We must get the facts straight before we can recommend a solution; Bush has promised as much. The facts will lead us to those who committed and facilitated the torture. It is wrong to prematurely blame Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for what we see on television, and it is absurd to reach a conclusion before all the facts are out. The battle against terror demands that we correct our errors and continue moving ahead. As for the Iraqi people, this will be one more step toward obtaining a sovereign democratic state. It would be just for them to be included in the process of decision-making regarding this atrocity. The greatest justice would be for the Iraqi people to come out of this ordeal with a truly democratic secular state. Bush, members of his cabinet, and the American people must hold true to the promise they made to the Iraqi people of freedom, democracy, and the chance for a better life. The president should make the bureaucracy implement his vision, and this atrocity should be turned to further strengthen the growing bond between the American and Iraqi people in their joint aspirations for peace and democracy. - Dr. Mahdi al-Bassam, a physician in Texas, is a founding member of the Iraqi National Congress. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/albassam200405070948.asp
David Frum, The Chalabi Smear, NRO
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MAY. 4, 2004: THE CHALABI SMEAR
Really, if the CIA and State Department fought this countrys enemies
with even one-half the ferocity with which they have waged war on Ahmed
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, the United States would be a
vastly safer place. Yesterday, the agencies launched their latest
offensive against this leader they so detest: They leaked Mark Hosenball
of Newsweek a story
claiming that Chalabi has betrayed US interests to the Iranians.
U.S. intelligence agencies have recently raised concerns that Chalabi
has become too close to Iran's theocratic rulers. NEWSWEEK has learned
that top Bush administration officials have been briefed on intelligence
indicating that Chalabi and some of his top aides have supplied Iran with
sensitive information on the American occupation in Iraq. U.S. officials
say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders
indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about
American political plans in Iraq. There are also indications that Chalabi
has provided details of U.S. security operations. According to one U.S.
government source, some of the information Chalabi turned over to Iran
could get people killed. (A Chalabi aide calls the allegations
absolutely false.)
You have to give credit where credit is due: This is an audacious
accusation. Audacious because it demands that the State Departments and
CIAs cheering sections in the media perform a cult-like reversal of
belief in everything they were saying about Iraq, Iran, and Chalabi
himself up until now.
But those of us with memories that extend back beyond the past 24 hours
will have some questions for Newsweek and its sources:
ITEM: Up until now we were supposed to believe that the INC produced no
useful intelligence that it dealt only in fantasies and lies. Now
suddenly the INC is accused of being in possession of accurate and
valuable sensitive information. How did Chalabi go from know-nothing to
valuable intelligence asset overnight?
ITEM: A government source says that the security information Chalabi
may or may not have provided could get people killed. Get them killed by
whom? Up until now, the CIA and State Department have resolutely refused
to acknowledge that Iran might be supporting the insurgency in Iraq. Now
they are willing to admit reality but only in order to use it against
what they perceive as the real threat: Chalabi.
ITEM: Chalabi has been caught talking on the phone to the Iranians. But
wait hasnt the State Department been arguing for months that the US
should talk to the Iranians about Iraq? In testimony to Congress in
October 2003, State number 2 Richard Armitage explicitly disavowed regime
change in Iran and called for discussions with Iran on appropriate
issues. In January 2004, Secretary of State Powell openly called for
dialogue and the Bush administration offered to send Elizabeth Dole
and a member of the presidents own family to deliver earthquake aid to
Iran. (The British sent Prince Charles.) Since then, the hinting and
suggesting have grown ever more explicit. What, pray, is the difference
between the policy Chalabi is pursuing and that which his State Department
critics want the US to pursue?
ITEM: Chalabi is now accused of playing a double game in Iraqi
politics, an offense for which he must forfeit all rights to a role in
Iraqs future. This no double game rule is a new and impressive standard
for judging our allies in the Arab Middle East. Question: Will that same
standard apply to those former Republican Guard generals whom the State
Department is now so assiduously promoting? Will it apply to the former
Baathists that Lakhdar Brahimi wishes to include in the provisional Iraqi
government? Will it apply to Lakhdar Brahimi himself? Will it apply to the
Saudi royal family? Will it apply to the Iranians? Or is it only Ahmed
Chalabi who must swear undeviating loyalty to the US policy-of-the-day in
Iraq?
ITEM: Salon magazine last night published a lengthy attack
on Chalabi by John Dizard. In it, former Chalabi business partner Marc
Zell calls Chalabi a treacherous, spineless turncoat, for failing to
Barbara Lerner, Rumsfeld's War, Powell's Occupation, NRO
NB: This is an outstanding analysis of what has gone wrong--and will continue to go wrong--in Iraq, unless it is addressed. National Review Online April 30, 2004, 9:29 a.m.Rumsfelds War, Powells OccupationRumsfeld wanted Iraqis in on the action right from the beginning.By Barbara Lerner The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation. There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard). First, it's not Rumsfeld's occupation; it's Colin Powell's and George Tenet's. Second, although it's painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, it's simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it. More troops may be needed now, but more of the same will not do the job. Something different is needed and was, right from the start.A Rumsfeld occupation would have been different, and still might be. Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference. Rumsfeld's plan was to train and equip and then transport to Iraq some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani. Jay Garner, the retired American general Rumsfeld chose to head the civilian administration of the new Iraq, planned to capitalize on that prestige immediately by appointing all three, along with six others, to head up Iraq's new transitional government. He planned to cede power to them in a matter of weeks not months or years and was confident that they would work with him, not against him, because two of them already had. General Garner, after all, is the man who headed the successful humanitarian rescue mission that saved the Kurds in the disastrous aftermath of Gulf War I, after the State Department-CIA crowd and like thinkers in the first Bush administration betrayed them. Kurds are not a small minority and they remember. The hero's welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear. Finally, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to cut way down on the infiltration of Syrian and Iranian agents and their foreign terrorist recruits, not just by trying to catch them at the border a losing game, given the length of those borders but by pursuing them across the border into Syria to strike hard at both the terrorists and their Syrian sponsors, a move that would have forced Iran as well as Syria to reconsider the price of trying to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq. None of this happened, however, because State and CIA fought against Rumsfeld's plans every step of the way. Instead of bringing a liberating Shia and Sunni force of 10,000 to Iraq, the Pentagon was only allowed to fly in a few hundred INC men. General Garner was unceremoniously dumped after only three weeks on the job, and permission for our military to pursue infiltrators across the border into Syria was denied. General Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a State Department man who kept most of the power in his own hands and diluted what little power Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani had by appointing not six but 22 other Iraqis to share power with them. This resulted in a rapidly rotating 25-man queen-for-a-day-type leadership that turned the Iraqi Governing Council into a faceless mass, leaving Bremer's face as the only one most Iraqis saw. By including fence-sitters and hostile elements as well as American friends in his big, unwieldy IGC and giving them all equal weight, Bremer hoped to display a kind of inclusive, above-it-all neutrality that would win over hostile segments of Iraqi society and convince them that a fully representative Iraqi democracy would emerge. But Iraqis didn't see it that way. Many saw a foreign occupation of potentially endless length, led by the sort of Americans who can't be trusted to back up their friends or punish their enemies. Iraqis saw, too, that Syria and Iran had no and were busily entrenching their agents and terrorist recruits into Iraqi society to organize, fund, and equip Sunni bitter-enders like those now terrorizing Fallujah and Shiite
Michael Rubin, Iraq Didn't Have to be this way, NRO
National Review Online May 3, 2004 Self-Fulfilling ProphecyState vs. Iraq planning.By Michael Rubin On May 1, insurgents in Fallujah rejoiced. American Marines surrounding the city began their withdrawal without arresting the perpetrators of a brutal March 31 attack on civilian contractors. The Arab satellite network al Jazeera reported insurgents celebrating in the streets, flashing victory signs. Militants drove through the streets shouting, "Islam, it's your day!" and "We redeem Islam with our blood." Minaret-mounted loudspeakers declared "victory over the Americans." Across the region, militants pointed to the Fallujah deal as evidence that they had forced the U.S. to withdraw from Fallujah, just as they had forced a withdrawal from Mogadishu in 1993, and Beirut in 1983. Speaking on Saturday, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said, "The occupiers have gotten themselves caught in a trap like a wolf." He added, "The ruling gang in America, with the Zionists pulling the strings, wants to swallow this rich part of the world through the greater Middle East plan, but contrary to their assumptions, the arrogant powers will choke on this mouthful." The cause of the militant celebration was the arrival in town of General Jasim Muhammad Salih al-Dulaymi. He entered the town wearing the Iraqi Army uniform in which he had sworn his lifelong allegiance to Saddam Hussein. Outside Fallujah, Iraqis expressed shock at the choice. I spoke with a former Iraqi army officer familiar with Jasim's career. After graduating from the Police College, Jasim entered the Republican Guard. His command in Karbala coincided with the Republican Guard's suppression of the 1991 uprising. Pleased with his actions, Saddam promoted Jasim to be chief of staff of a Republican Guard division charged with the protection of Baghdad. Between 1993 and 1997, Jasim led the 38th Division of the Iraqi army in Kirkuk. During his residence there, the Baath party and Iraqi army conducted an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the city's Kurdish and Turkmen residents. Not all Iraqi military officers were Baathists but Jasim was. The Baath party is strictly hierarchical. He rose to be udhu shubaa, the third-highest rank. No one could obtain such a rank without having blood on their hands. Iraqis say he is a cousin to Khamis Sarhan al-Muhammad, number 54 on Iraq's most wanted list. Unfortunately, it appears Coalition military spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt misspoke when he said that the U.S. military had vetted Jasim and found him satisfactory. STATE VS. PLANNING FOR THE FUTUREIraq did not have to be this way. Many journalists and pundits argue that had the Bush administration only given carte blanche to State Department "professionals," then the U.S. would not face the crisis in Iraq that we face today. David Phillips, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar who describes himself as an adviser to the "Future of Iraq Project," told Knight-Ridder that, "The administration's plan today is exactly what they rejected in the fall of 2002 because it wasn't ideologically compatible." Such claims are untrue, perpetuated either for partisan gain or because those making them were not as involved as they pretend. Firstly, deputy National Security Advisor Steven Hadley and Zalmay Khalilzad, then the National Security Council's point man on the Middle East, coordinated State Department and Defense Department planning. There was seldom a day when Hadley or Khalilzad did not preside over a meeting or video teleconference to identify problems and work through solutions. The Future of Iraq project was a valuable exercise, but it was more an academic seminar than a plan. Defense Department officials participated when invited. The Iraqis who participated in the Future of Iraq program also met regularly with Defense Department and National Security Council desk officers. I know. I worked on the Pentagon's Iran and Iraq desk for several months before the war. Ironically, it was the Defense Department and not the State Department which sought to implement the recommendations of the Future of Iraq Program's "Transition to Democracy" report. The report is worth reading. According to its preamble, "Nothing...requires the United Nations or United States to police or manage into existence the new and budding democratic institutions. That is a challenge that the people of Iraq must and will
Claudia Rosett, Oil-For-Terror, WSJ
Wall Street Journal April 28, 2004 THE REAL WORLD Oil-for-Terror U.N. Iraq money may have ended up in accounts tied to al Qaeda and the Taliban. BY CLAUDIA ROSETT Wednesday, April 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT It's looking more and more as if one of the best reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein was that it was probably the only way to get rid of Oil-for-Food. The problem wasn't simply that this huge United Nations relief program for Iraq became a gala of graft, theft, fraud, palace-building and global influence-peddling--though all that was quite bad enough. The picture now emerging is that under U.N. management the Oil-for-Food program, which ran from 1996-2003, served as a cover not only for Saddam's regime to cheat the Iraqi people, but to set up a vast and intricate global network of illicit finance. And though much debate has focused on the list published this past January in the Iraqi newspaper Al Mada--cataloguing some 270 individuals and entities world-wide alleged to have received illicit oil vouchers worth millions from Saddam--the Al Mada list may be the least of it (apart from the last name of the executive director of the Oil-for-Food program himself, Benon Sevan). Dwarfing the Al Mada list for size, scope and menace was the U.N.-piloted mothership, the entire $111 billion U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Supplied by Iraq's oil wells, the sums involved in Oil-for-Food's transactions were so enormous that even the routine rounding errors of a few hundred million here or there easily rivaled, for example, the $300 million or so in family money believed to have given Osama bin Laden his terrorist start. In a world beset right now by terrorist threats--which depend on terrorist financing--it's time to acknowledge that the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program was worse than simply a case of grand larceny. Given Saddam's proclivities for deceit and violence, Oil-for-Food was also a menace to security. By letting Saddam pick his own business partners and draw up his own shopping lists, by keeping the details of his contracts and accounts secret, and by then failing abjectly to supervise the process, the U.N.--through a program meant to aid the people of Iraq--enabled Saddam to line his pockets while bankrolling his pals world-wide. In return, precisely, for what? That is a question former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker might want to keep in mind as he heads up the official investigation, finally agreed to by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, into Oil-for-Food. In tallying various leaked lists, disturbing leads and appalling exposés to date, what becomes ever more clear is that Oil-for-Food quickly became a global maze of middlemen, shell companies, fronts and shadowy connections, all blessed by the U.N. From this labyrinth, via kickbacks on underpriced oil and overpriced goods, Saddam extracted, by conservative estimates of the General Accounting Office, at least $4.4 billion in graft, plus an additional $5.7 billion on oil smuggled out of Iraq. Meanwhile, Mr. Annan's Secretariat shrugged and rang up its $1.4 billion in Iraqi oil commissions for supervising the program. Worse, the GAO notes that anywhere from $10 billion to as much as $40 billion may have been socked away in secret by Saddam's regime. The assumption so far has been that most of the illicit money flowed back to Saddam in the form of fancy goods and illicit arms. But no one really knows right now just how much of those billions went where--or what portion of that kickback cash Saddam might have forwarded to whatever he deemed a worthy cause. A look at one of the secret U.N. lists of clients authorized by the U.N. to buy from Saddam is not reassuring. It includes more than 1,000 companies, scattered from Liberia to South Africa to oil-rich Russia. And though the U.N. was supposed to ensure that oil was sold to end-users at market price--thus minimizing the graft potential for Saddam and maximizing the funds for relief--there is an extraordinary confetti of clients in locations known less for their oil consumption than for their shell companies and financial secrecy. Why on earth, for instance, did the U.N. authorize Saddam to sell oil to at least 65 companies in the financial lockbox of Switzerland. What was the logic behind approving as oil buyers at least 45 firms in Cyprus, seven in Panama and four in Liechtenstein? At the other extreme, would Mr. Annan care to explain why the U.N. authorized Saddam to sell oil to at least 70 companies in the petroleum-soaked United Arab Emirates? In Oil-for-Food, Every contract tells a story, says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they
Iraqi Intelligence behind Berg Murder, Guardian
Beheading suspects 'led by Saddam's nephew' Luke Harding in Baghdad Saturday May 22, 2004 The Guardian The mystery of who killed Nick Berg, the freelance contractor beheaded on video, took a new twist last night when Iraqi police claimed they had arrested four suspects with links to Saddam Hussein's family. Iraqi security officials said Berg's alleged killers were part of a group led by a close relative of Saddam - his nephew Yasser al-Sabawi. The men were seized a week ago after a tip-off, they said. All were former members of the Fedayeen Saddam, the para military group notorious for its loyalty to Iraq's ex-president. But last night the US military spokesman, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said American forces had arrested four men linked to the Berg case after a raid in Baghdad. Two had been released and two were still being questioned. He said: 'I don't know their prior affiliations or prior organisations. We have some intelligence that would suggest they have knowledge, perhaps some culpability. It was not clear whether the two raids were related. The contradictory revelations add to the confusion in the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and execution of Berg, who disappeared after checking out of his Baghdad hotel on April 10. In a video released last week Berg is shown sitting in an orange jumpsuit in front of five masked and armed men. One of them declares that his killing is in revenge for the abuse of prisoners by US guards at Abu Ghraib. The same man then draws a long knife and cuts off Berg's head. The CIA claimed there was a high probability that Abu Musab al-Zaqawi, a Jordanian extremist with links to al-Qaida, was the masked man who beheaded Berg in a murder recorded and broadcast over the internet. Yesterday, however, the trail appeared to lead instead to Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. Iraqi officials said the men had been arrested in Salaheddin province, which includes Tikrit, shortly after Berg's headless body was dumped last week near a Baghdad flyover. Al-Sabawi was not among those arrested, the Iraqi official said. Police intelligence agents seized the men as they arrived to plot other major operations, the officer told the Associated Press, without elaborating. Four suspects had arrived early for the 7pm meeting and were inside the house, waiting for a fifth associate who escaped arrest, he said. The Iraqi police appear to have done a poor job of protecting their informant, who was killed by unidentified gunmen the following day, the official admitted. Police seized weapons and explosives at the scene. Last night the suspects were believed to be still in Iraqi hands. The case is extremely sensitive, with news of the apparent arrests leaking after days of rumours. The uncertainty surrounding Berg's kidnapping intensified after US officials confirmed the FBI had questioned him three times after his arrest in the northern city of Mosul. US occupation authorities have denied he was ever in American custody during his two weeks in detention there. But this week Berg's parents released an email from an American diplomat which confirmed he had been held by the US military and was safe.
Mylroie on C-SPAN tomorrow
Laurie Mylroie will appear on C-SPAN's Washington Journal tomorrow, May 26, from 7:45 to 8:30 AM to discuss U.S. policy toward Iraq. The show will take viewer calls
Iraq Appointee a Fraud a Danger
http://jobs.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=a9c8ef8fa5a90b9c13f58a840f933f39 U.S. Iraq Appointee a Fraud and a DangerAl Arab, Commentary, Dr. Haifa Al-Azawi, Feb 12, 2004 When I returned to the United States after a visit to Baghdad, I read an article from the Associated Press titled Exile Works to Win Influence in DC, by Ken Guggenheim. It described how Iyad Allawi, now a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi governing Council, was emerging as a prominent leader. Guggenheim reported Allawi has paid prominent Washington lobbyists and New York publicists more than $300,000 to help him make contacts with policy makers in Washington.Any physician who graduated from Baghdad Medical School between the years l962 and l970 will remember this big, husky man. The Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorizing the medical students, was a poor student and chose to spend his time standing in the school courtyard or chasing female students to their homes.When I entered medical school, Iyad Allawi was a student there and when I graduated he was still a student there. He tried to form a political party and, according to some friends of his, he faked names to make the party seem larger than it really was. His medical degree is bogus and was conferred upon him by the Baath party, soon after a WHO (World Health Organization) grant was orchestrated for him to go to England and study public health accompanied by his Christian wife, whom he dumped later to marry a Muslim woman. In England he was a poor student, visiting the Iraqi embassy at the end of each month to collect his salary as the Baath party representative. According to his first wife and her family members, he spent his time dealing with assassins doing the dirty work for the Iraqi government, until his time was up and he became their target. He went into hiding and came back as a double agent for the British and the CIA. Now, analysts have suggested that Allawis campaign might have been encouraged to counterbalance the influence of the much better known opposition figure Ahmed Chalabi. By the way, they are cousins. These kinds of people can put our U.S. government and our troops in bad positions and in danger. Laurie Mylroie, author of "Bush vs. the Beltway," and critical of the CIA handling of Iraq, blamed Allawi for what she said was faulty intelligence that endangered the U.S. troops at the end of the Gulf War. The United States plans to turn over power to Iraqis by July 1. We are all hoping to see reasonable, honest people in power; we do not want to see another potential Saddam.
Michael Rubin, Trust the Iraqis, TNR
THE NEW REPUBLIC TRUST THE IRAQIS. Silent Majority by Michael Rubin Post date: 05.27.04 Issue date: 06.07.04 Last August, I participated in a town-hall meeting hosted by the administrative council of Dibis, an ethnically mixed town 22 miles northwest of Kirkuk. Locals complained about everything from sporadic electricity to fertilizer shortages to potholes, and their Iraqi representatives listened attentively. It was an encouraging sight, all the more so because the month before, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head L. Paul Bremer had proudly announced, in a televised speech, that all of Iraq's main cities, and dozens of other towns, now have administrative councils. But there was a problem. Soon after his announcement, Bremer--not wanting to complicate planning for the Iraq donor's conference to be held in Madrid in October--refused to give the councils budgetary authority. As a result, council members in places like Dibis could listen to complaints but lacked the means to respond to them. Iraqis quickly decided that their local representatives were little more than props. In many other areas, the story has been the same. Iraqi farmers missed this year's planting season because the CPA's senior American adviser for agriculture (later fired) repeatedly refused the Iraqi minister of agriculture's request to order fertilizer. Despite problems restoring Iraq's electrical infrastructure, CPA electricity advisers never bothered to consult Saad Shakir Tawfiq, who oversaw its reconstruction after the Gulf war in 1991. In fact, they didn't even return Tawfiq's calls, a tiny example of the paternalism that has characterized the American occupiers' treatment of the Iraqi people. Iraqis, contrary to what many in Washington now believe, were not anti-American from the beginning. Many troops were greeted as liberators. The Boston Globe reported, the day after the fall of Baghdad, that [j]ubilant Iraqis greeted US troops with cheers, victory signs, and flowers. Many are anti-American today because the United States has refused, in ways big and small, to give them real control over the country. Unless that changes, the June 30 handover will be a fiasco and a farce. The paternalism began even before the war did. Fearing it could undermine prewar diplomacy, the State Department resisted efforts to create a Free Iraqi Force of exiles committed to fighting Saddam Hussein. On the first night of the war, the Free Iraqi Force huddled around radios at the Taszar Air Base in Hungary, 1,600 miles away from the country they were supposed to help liberate. The United States paid a price. Iraqi cheers turned to stunned silence when, on April 9, 2003, Corporal Edward Chin draped an American rather than an Iraqi flag over the face of Saddam's statue in Baghdad. The person climbing the statue should not have been an American carrying an Iraqi flag, but an Iraqi. Unfortunately, the forces most likely to have realized this were left cooling their heels in Central Europe. Occupation brought more of the same. Heeding Iraqis' pleas, the United States formed the Iraqi Governing Council in July 2003. Unfortunately, Bremer soon dashed Iraqi hopes by proclaiming his veto power. At the bottom, the [Coalition Provisional] Authority still has the ultimate authority here until we have a government in place, Bremer said five days before the Council's inauguration. As created, the Council presidency rotates each month, and no one leader gained the kind of longer-term power needed to negotiate with the CPA. When the Council tried to elect a prime minister, Bremer refused, saying it might undercut his own authority. Even the symbolism has been paternalistic. Rather than use Governing Council members to deliver weekly radio addresses, Bremer delivered them himself, and the CPA's Strategic Communication's Office focused more on outreach to The New York Times than to Iraqis. Many Iraqis are upset that, more than a year after Saddam's overthrow, they still see CPA spokesman Dan Senor and General Mark Kimmitt, rather than an Iraqi, delivering the daily briefing to reporters. In the U.S. press, the CPA is often portrayed as a force for liberalism, battling Iraqis' instinct for theocracy. But, in truth, liberal Iraqis have been given no more authority than their conservative countrymen. Kanan Makiya, one of Iraq's leading liberal intellectuals, spent the year following Saddam's overthrow developing the Iraq Memory Foundation, a museum that would commemorate the victims of Baathist tyranny and allow Iraqis to reflect on their history. Makiya's team catalogued documents and applied for CPA permits to build a museum accessible to all Iraqis. But, on April 23, 2004, with the stroke of a pen, Bremer undercut Makiya and established his own National Commission for Remembrance. Similarly, when Dr. Raja Al Khuzai, a liberal Shia member of the Governing Council, voiced concerns in a Council meeting in February 2004 about some of her colleagues' endorsement
Dave Marash, A Brighter View of Iraq, ABC News
ABC News.com Brighter View There Is More Than One Way to Look at Upheaval in Iraq Analysis by Dave Marash BAGHDAD, May 30, 2004 Most thinking these days on Iraq is decidedly pessimistic. Part of that is traditional political/intelligence cover your a--, worst case analysis. Part of it is a very justifiable fear of the unknown, because the surest thing to be said about Iraq's political future is that it is unknown. Nevertheless, here's a more, but not completely, optimistic view. First, the strategic threats to the state of Iraq are declining. In ascending order, they are civil war between Sunni and Shi'ites; a 3-way division of the country into Kurdish, Sunni and Shi'ite dominated mini-states; the guerilla threat of Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, and the threat from international terrorists, perhaps led by the Jordanian ally of al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Let's start with the easiest, the dismissable threat: civil war between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Although definable, the dividing line between Sunna and Shi'a in Iraq, has not been violent for hundreds of years. For decades, intermarriage between Sunna and Shi'a has been common, especially in Baghdad. Furthermore, each attempt to drive wedges between the communities, by assassination or mass murder, has been overwhelmingly rejected by public expressions of solidarity, We are all Muslims, nothing can divide us. Within days, thousands of pints of blood were collected for Shi'ite victims of the Ashoura attacks in Kerbala and Baghdad in March, by the 2 hardest-line cities of the so-called Sunni Triangle, Ramadi and Fallujah. Almost as remote, the threat most recently raised by the former US Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith: an Iraq tri-furcated along Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish lines. Please. Significantly, this is not a threat seriously raised in Iraq by Iraqis, this year, because it has no constituency here. The interests of none of the 3 parties would be served by partition; the interests of all of the parties are susceptible to compromise. Those who worry about the rhetoric unleashed in Iraqi media about national offices and ministries and oil revenues, and degrees of autonomy and immediately translate it into a real threat have never covered a New York City labor negotiation. Kurds, their political/paramilitary parties KDP and PUK, and their respective leading families, are all better off in a stable Iraqi Kurdistan than in any of the alternatives, including an infeasible independent Kurdish micro-state. Furthermore, the Kurds are guaranteed an acceptable, close to current, level of autonomy and oil money (the 2 big issues here) because no one in the region, including Turkey, the strongest remaining regional military power, wants to tangle with the Peshmerga, the 100,000 man strong Kurdish militia, more or less equally divided between adherents of the KDP and the PUK. Rest assured, Mssrs. Barzani and Talabani will negotiate a deal through which Kurdistan will be rich enough and autonomous enough to stay within an Iraqi state. Settling the future of Kirkuk, violently claimed by Kurds, Arabs, and Turcomen, will be the hardest single issue. Moqtada al-Sadr may once again emerge as a problem for the 95% of Iraq and the Shi'ite hierarchy that is to the right of him, but his threat to involve Coalition Forces in a half-national guerilla war is over. His skillfully managed but still, to Iraqis, unmistakable retreats from Kerbala and Najaf, following equally forcible, but less formally negotiated retreats from Nasiriya and Amarah, and the disintegration of his forces in Basra have left Moqtada considerably reduced and increasingly rejected by the people of the places he tried to take control of. His militia, the Mahdi Army, originally (perhaps under-) estimated at 2000, lately (perhaps over-) counted at 5000, lost a more painstakingly estimated 300-400 dead and 2 or 3 times that wounded, in a month-long campaign that wound up gaining nothing, and left al-Sadr with just 2 strongholds, the Najaf suburb of Kufa and the huge Shi'ite ghetto of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. Sayyid al-Sadr knows the US military is itching for an excuse for a final showdown. He's unlikely to stir up serious trouble before June 30, since he's been encouraged to think he will eventually be able to cut a deal on his murder charges with some future Iraqi government. That, and the hope of a political future in the elective Iraq, where at the very least his Sadr City stronghold should command him some respect, may be enough to keep harmless. The international terrorist threat is still very much with us in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. We call them the car bombers. But the terrorists' callousness about shedding Iraqi blood, their association with Salafist anti-Shi'ite extremism, their increasingly notorious refusal to accept guidance from local Sunni leaders in the Sunni Free City of Fallujah, and
WSJ, Tenet Resignation is Bush Opportunity
OpinionJournal WSJ Online REVIEW OUTLOOK A Better CIA Tenet's resignation gives Bush an opportunity. Friday, June 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT We have no reason to doubt that CIA Director George Tenet did in fact resign for personal reasons yesterday, and President Bush duly praised his service. Once the departure pleasantries are over, however, we hope Mr. Bush will use this opening to reshape our broken intelligence services. It's a compliment to Mr. Tenet's political savvy that he was able to leave on his own terms despite the Agency's mistakes during his seven-year tenure. The largest was the failure to penetrate al Qaeda before 9/11, and more recently the many misjudgments about Iraq, which go well beyond whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD. Mr. Tenet did inherit a demoralized agency in 1997, and since September 11 he has worked hard to revitalize human-intelligence gathering. Though it's impossible for outsiders to know, the CIA probably also deserves some credit for the lack of any further attacks on the U.S. homeland. For all of that, the CIA is still a long way from the anti-terror spearhead it needs to become. That's especially clear from its performance in Iraq, where the Agency has been consistently wrong since it told the first President Bush that Saddam would fall within two months of the Gulf War. The Agency has relied on a Sufi network of Iraqi agents that time and again proved inadequate. The CIA favored an anti-Saddam coup strategy it couldn't execute, predicted defections of Republican Guard units that never took place, and was twice wrong about having located and killed Saddam. It also failed to predict that the regime's strategy would be to melt away during the invasion and counterattack with a terrorist insurgency. We're more forgiving about Mr. Tenet's now famous statement to Mr. Bush that Saddam's possession of WMD was a slam dunk. Every intelligence service in the world shared that belief, as did the United Nations. The big prewar intelligence dispute over Iraq concerned the link between Saddam and al Qaeda; everyone agreed about WMD, as the October 2002 national intelligence estimate stated. The U.S. has also since found plenty of signs in Iraq that Saddam retained a just-in-time production capability for biological and chemical weapons. What is unforgivable is the Agency's ex post facto attempt to blame its WMD errors on everyone else. Leak after media leak citing intelligence sources has blamed the Pentagon, Vice President Cheney's advisers and now Iraqi exiles. The most recent stories offer the amazing theory that the CIA, Colin Powell and the New York Times were all somehow gulled on WMD by one man--former exile Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. We are apparently supposed to believe that our $40-billion-a-year intelligence services were duped by the same person our spooks have insisted could not be trusted ever since he called them out for a botched coup attempt in the middle of the 1990s. This is bad enough as political posterior-covering. But the blame-shifting has also done serious damage to U.S. policy in Iraq, by fanning internal warfare and unleashing prosecutors on colleagues. The Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair turned a trifling dispute over yellowcake uranium in Niger into a debilitating criminal hunt for leakers. And the latest attacks on Mr. Chalabi have now led to an FBI investigation of Pentagon officials who have a war to win. Whether or not Mr. Tenet has participated in any of this, he has been unwilling or unable to stop it. For his successor, Mr. Bush needs someone willing to both discipline the CIA and shake it up so it can go on the anti-terror offensive. If it's true that the President intends to let current deputy John McLaughlin continue as acting director through the election, he will have missed an opportunity. Whatever his virtues, Mr. McLaughlin does not bring a fresh eye or the willingness to fire or replace career officers who are engaging in what amounts to an insurgency against the President's policy. We can think of several better choices, from former CIA Director (under Bill Clinton) and sometime Agency critic Jim Woolsey, to California Congressman Chris Cox (who led the China nuclear probe of the late 1990s), to Rudy Giuliani. The point is to appoint someone who won't be co-opted by the Agency's culture of caution and self-preservation. Former Reagan CIA official Herbert Meyer put it well in these pages shortly after September 11 when he wrote that the CIA must be changed from a defensive agency into an offensive one. The World War II predecessor to the CIA, the famous OSS under Wild Bill Donovan, was a small outfit intent on defeating the enemy. Over the decades the CIA has evolved into a huge bureaucracy that values consensus over risk-taking. Mr. Meyer's suggestion that we need an OSS within the CIA makes eminent sense in this era of terrorists who have access to WMD but can't be deterred. If the White House is worried
Israel Cracked Iranian Code, J'lem Post (citing New Yorker)
The Jerusalem Post March 3, 2004, Wednesday SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 5 LENGTH: 269 words HEADLINE: Report says Israeli unit cracked Iranian code BYLINE: Yaakov Katz A secret intelligence unit, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code enabling Israel to monitor communications, including contacts with Pakistan regarding the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, The New Yorker reported on Tuesday. On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran's burgeoning nuclear weapons program, investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh wrote. According to the report, Israeli intelligence has created strong ties in Iran over the year, some of which still exist. Hersh writes that the investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency into Iranian nuclear capability was spurred by Israeli intelligence findings which were relayed to the agency via the National Council of Resistance of Iran. According to the report, the findings, which showed that senior officials in Teheran and Islamabad had frequent conversations regarding the IAEA. investigations, were also shared with US intelligence services. The interpretation is the issue here, a former intelligence official is quoted as saying. If you set the buzzwords aside, the substance is that the Iranians were saying, 'We've got to play with the IAEA. We don't want to blow our cover, but we have to show some movement. There's no way we're going against world public opinion - no way. We've got to show that we're cooperating and get the Europeans on our side.'
Danielle Pletka, US Wounded Itself when it Betrayed Chalabi, LAT
Los Angeles Times June 4, 2004 U.S. Only Wounded Itself When It Betrayed Chalabi By Danielle Pletka The recent reports detailing the alleged perfidy of Ahmad Chalabi actually say much more about his accusers in the U.S. government than they do about Chalabi himself. They reveal Washington as a faithless friend and its agencies as more concerned with carrying out vendettas than with pursuing the real enemies of the United States. But that is starting at the end of the story. The beginning is far different: Once, in the early 1990s, Chalabi was a trusted associate of the Central Intelligence Agency, the key player in a unsuccessful coup to overthrow Saddam Hussein and, as head of the Iraqi National Congress, one of the few effective Iraqi politicians in exile. Later, abandoned by the CIA, Chalabi was supported, albeit reluctantly, by the State Department. Today, however, Chalabi is being accused by unnamed administration officials of a laundry list of treachery, including revealing classified information to the government of Iran. From CIA co-conspirator to traitor in a few short years appears to be a stunning fall from grace. But, in this case, appearances are deceiving. The truth is that those who are now accusing him are the same people who have viewed him as an enemy for many years. They are the people inside our government - at State, in the CIA and elsewhere - who oppose the administration's policy in Iraq and who see Chalabi as its personification. Chalabi himself never changed. He was very consistent: He wanted the overthrow of Hussein. When the CIA dumped him, he went to Congress; when Congress lost interest, he went to the Pentagon. He has never taken no for an answer, never accepted the premise that it was better to accept a tyrant in Iraq than risk destabilizing the Middle East. In so doing, he earned himself the undying hostility of a variety of powerful Washington players. Throughout the 1990s, Chalabi was regularly accused of malfeasance by his enemies. He was convicted in absentia in Jordan of embezzling funds from the bank he ran. Those charges have never been documented. Then State Department officials accused his organization of playing loose with U.S. money. In every instance he was exonerated by the department's own inspector general. The latest charges have been dizzying. The Iraqi National Congress has been accused of providing bad intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. INC officials in Iraq are being investigated for a variety of crimes. Chalabi himself, according to unnamed sources, was supposedly obstructing an investigation of the United Nations oil-for-food program. And now he is accused of spying for Iran. But the charges don't ring true. Wasn't Chalabi, as chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council's finance committee, the moving force behind the oil-for-food investigation? (Yes, he was.) And since when is it the job of intelligence sources to vet the information they pass to the U.S.? Isn't that the CIA's brief? Of all the charges, passing secrets to Iran is the most serious. It is gravest, obviously, for the American who supposedly told Chalabi that we had broken Iranian codes. That person is governed by U.S. laws, and if he exists, he should be prosecuted. Chalabi, on the other hand, is a foreigner and owes us no fealty (although it is worth noting that he denies the charges). That he has been close to the Iranians has been well known for years; the United States even paid for his offices in Tehran. So there's no great surprise there. But when you think about it, why would he pass secrets to Iranian intelligence in Baghdad? Why would that station chief then use the very codes Chalabi told him were compromised to pass the news back home? And why would we openly break with Chalabi unless we wished to confirm to the Iranians that the codes had indeed been compromised? It makes no sense. In the end, little of this storm over Chalabi will matter to the man himself. As a target of American harassment, he has renewed his credibility in the eyes of his people. Rather, it is upon itself that the United States has inflicted a terrible wound. There were all too few Iraqis who were willing to risk life and limb to topple Hussein; and there were even fewer who believed in Western democratic values. Chalabi was one. As we search the region for others who will help us spread democracy and help us rid the Middle East of its many kings and presidents-for-life, we will discover that the word has spread: The United States is a faithless friend. Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Frank Gaffney, 9/11 Commission's Failure, Fox News
9/11 Commission Fails to Connect Terror Dots Friday, June 18, 2004 By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. The9/11 Commissions (search)conclusion that We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States does not augur well for the rest of the panels inquiry. If the members of the commission could not connect dots that are all too obvious or recognize their staffs inability to do so it seems likely that their work will fall short in other important areas as well. The commission has allowed itself to be used as a political instrument by critics of President Bush and his liberation of Iraq. This is the ineluctable result of the shortcomings of its staff report, so brilliantly illuminated byAndrew McCarthyin an essay published today by National Review Online. The staffs statement concerning Iraq andAl Qaeda (search)is internally inconsistent; it ignores key facts; it selectively addresses others; and it effectively condemns as incredible the considerable amount of evidence that suggests Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden did indeed have a collaborative relationship as President Bush and Vice President Cheney have insisted. Particularly egregious is the supposedly conclusive finding thatMohammed Atta (search)could not have been in Prague for his final meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer simply becausecalls were made in Florida onAtta's cell phone during thetime period the meeting was to have occurred.Czech intelligence contends Atta was in Prague and attended the meeting, and Mr. McCarthy observes that it would be entirely possible (to say nothing of prudent tradecraft) to have someone perhaps his co-conspiring roommate use the phone at a time whenAtta could not, becausehe wasoverseas wherethe phonewould not work. This sort of proof-by-assertion is all too familiar to those who used to confront the unwillingness of some in the U.S. intelligence community to recognize that the Soviet Union was a state sponsor of terror and a serial violator of arms control agreements. Perhaps, as the communists used to say, the similarity is no accident. As it happens, the staff member who reported to 9/11 Commission members yesterday that there was no collaborative relationship betweenIraq and Al Qaedawas none other thanDouglas MacEachin (search) a man who once held seniorpositions at the CIA, including posts with the Office of Soviet Analysis from 1984-1989, the Arms Control Intelligence Staff for the next few years, andthe job of Deputy Director for Intelligence from 1992 until 1995. In these capacities, MacEachin appeared to colleagues to get things wrong with some regularity. For example, he was reflexively averse to conclusions that the Soviets were responsible for supporting terrorism. He reportedly rejected as absurd analyses that suggested Moscow was illegally developing bioweapons. And, as DDI, he forced CIA analysts to tailor their assessments to please Clinton administration policy-makers. In short, in the old days, MacEachin refused to believe the Soviets were a threat.Now, he offers support to those who insist that Iraq was no threat.There may be a role for a "see-no-evil" sort of guy, but it should not be at the Central Intelligence Agency and certainly not at a commission whose charter is to connect the dots, no matter where they lead. Even as the press had a feeding-frenzy over MacEachins statement absolving Saddam of ties to Al Qaeda, fresh evidence ofmalevolent intentions toward the United States that would have madeanti-American collaboration between Saddam and Al Qaeda only naturalwas supplied by an unlikely source: another old intelligence hand, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin (search). According to Putin, his intelligence agencies shared sensitive information with the Bush administration after theSept. 11attacks and before the United States went to war with Iraq in March of 2003.According to Putin's intelligence, Saddam Husseins regime was crafting plans to execute terror attacks against America, both inside and outside of this country. Thus far, Putin has not elaborated on whether Al Qaeda was also involved with these particular plans.At the very least, however, this information confirms the Bush teams contention that Saddam dealt deeply in terror and its judgment that to leave Saddam in power would be to invite murderous attacks in the future. One wonders whether the 9/11 Commission was exposed to the Putin intelligence before it effectively dismissed the possibility that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 2001 attacks. For that matter, did they review the information contained in three highly informative books providing credible evidence of at least a circumstantialnature that Saddam had already acted on his desire to strike this country? Dr. Laurie Mylroies The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks A Study of Revenge, whi
Jim Hoagland, UN Plan for Iraq Elections Gravely Flawed, Wash Post
Washington Post 'Mickey Mouse' and the U.N. By Jim Hoagland June 20, 2004 The U.N. won't participate in Mickey Mouse elections, sniffed Carina Perelli during a recent news conference at the United Nations. Take that, Iraq and Afghanistan. Shape up or ship out. For all the good work it does, the only political world body we have threatens to become more hindrance than help as Iraqis and Afghans try to hold elections soon and establish some political stability. At a moment when they need the support and confidence of others, besieged indigenous politicians are being told their efforts do not measure up to the hothouse standards of international civil servants. The U.N.'s commitment to good deeds is not being matched by a clear commitment to rapid democratic change in two countries liberated by the U.S. military from brutal, dictatorial regimes. Particularly in Iraq, the United Nations seems to be lending itself to efforts to disadvantage the Shiite majority, which has the most to gain from democratic elections. The United Nations must not allow itself to be used in such fashion. Perelli, director of the U.N.'s electoral assistance division, announced last month that she would recommend postponing the crucial Iraqi national elections scheduled for January if the security situation does not improve. Ignoring the near-certainty that further delay would only inflame the security situation, she then invoked Walt Disney's emblematic rodent to prejudge what will happen if Iraqis do not follow her advice. No statement could cause more angst for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite religious and political leader, and his followers -- except perhaps the one that Perelli uttered a few weeks later, when she decreed a controversial electoral system for Iraq based on proportional representation. Perelli is either oblivious to, or party to, the furious effort by the Sunni governments of the Arab world, led by Jordan's King Abdullah, to prevent a Shiite majority from gaining control of Iraq through elections. She follows in the footsteps of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer III in using concern about minority rights (for Sunnis) to allow the system to be rigged against the Shiites. That at least is the impression that Sistani's advisers are forming of Perelli's efforts, one of his aides indicated to me last week. The Kurdish minority is also disadvantaged by the party-list electoral system she proposes, but Iraqi non-Arabs are even less of a concern for the U.N.'s ruling caste. The United Nations has taken on an outsized role in Iraq given the minimal resources that its staff, traumatized by last year's bombing of its headquarters, is prepared to invest in that country today. Perelli has decided that the United Nations will not attempt to observe -- much less supervise or run -- elections in Iraq, whenever they occur. Perelli and a staff of perhaps 25 experts will work in the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and train Iraqis to conduct registration and balloting. Like Brahimi, who rarely ventured out of the heavily fortified U.S. occupation headquarters, the members of the election team will have virtually no contact with ordinary Iraqis or a chance to determine for themselves what the security situation will or will not permit. The Green Zone has become a character in its own right in the Iraqi drama, and a nefarious one. The symbolism of American administrators moving into and converting Saddam Hussein's palaces into bunkers from which they and U.N. specialists urge Iraqis to take the lethal risks of democracy -- and then criticize the unprotected Iraqis for not getting it right -- has become noxious to many in Iraq. And so it should. The costs in delaying elections in such circumstances can be high, Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned Americans privately on his visit to Washington last week. Karzai believes that an election campaign and the act of voting would accelerate political stabilization in his country, despite the predictable imperfections and security problems of Election Day. Delay causes people to lose faith and gives corrupt and undemocratic forces more time to entrench themselves. Afghan elections are due in early October. A change in U.N.-mandated rules to allow same-day registration and voting would resolve many of the problems now being cited to argue for a six-month delay. NATO's European members could help by providing the military support they have already promised to Afghanistan. Elections educate citizens and give them a personal stake in the future of governments. They bring the promise of change, the driving force in improving the human condition. This is written not to bash the United Nations but to underscore some obvious points: Elections do not have to be perfect, or even peaceful, to bring positive change. The perfect can be made the enemy of the good. When in doubt, trust the people. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Michael Rubin, UN Plan for Iraqi Elections Gravely Flawed, Wash Post
Washington Post The Wrong Elections For Iraq By Michael Rubin June 19, 2004 On June 30 the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq will cease to exist. A caretaker Iraqi government will run the country until elections in January. While the transfer of sovereignty is a watershed, Iraqis say true legitimacy will come only with the elections. But now technocratic decisions having to do with these elections are threatening to undercut the durability of any democracy in the country. There are two ways to hold direct elections: by party slates, with each party gaining representation according to its portion of the vote, or by single-member constituencies, somewhat like our own congressional districts. On June 4 Carina Perelli, head of the U.N. electoral advisory team in Iraq, endorsed party slates. When I was a roving CPA political adviser, I lived outside the Green Zone and interacted not only with Iraqi politicians but also with ordinary people. Voting was the topic of conversations at teahouses and mosques. Islamist parties tended to favor a party-slate system. Advocates of an Iranian-style Islamic republic were blunt: The first article in a democracy is the rule of the majority over the minority, Sayyid Hadi Modarresi, one of Karbala's most influential clerics, told the Arabic daily Al-Hayah. Liberal Iraqis favor constituency-based elections. The Transitional Administrative Law calls for a 275-member National Assembly, which translates into each district's member representing approximately 87,000 people. Contests would occur not between parties but between individuals, who would be accountable to local residents rather than party bosses. Former Governing Council members condemned as irrelevant by CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer could win some districts. Raja Khuzai, an outspoken Shiite advocate for women's rights, is popular in her home town of Diwaniyah. Residents of Khadimiya favor Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi. A religious party leader, Abdul Aziz Hakim, is popular in Najaf. Less successful would be uncharismatic, corrupt or abusive party hacks who hope to win power on the coattails of party bosses. Older Iraqis also favor constituencies. Distrust of political parties is deeply rooted. One recent poll indicated that political parties have only a 3 percent favorability rating. Pensioners remember the 1960s as a time of pitched street battles between adherents of leftist and nationalist parties. Younger generations view parties through the lens of the Baath Party experience, in which employment depended on a party membership card. Distrust of parties extends to Iraqi Kurdistan, where I taught in the 2000-01 academic year. With few exceptions, my students associated local Kurdish parties with corruption, abuse of power and nepotism. Even Perelli, the U.N. official, acknowledged Iraqi ill feeling toward political parties. The anti-political party feeling of the population is extremely high, she told journalists in May. But at her news conference this month, Perelli explained her rationale for abandoning the accountability of single-member constituencies in favor of pursuing party-slate elections. There are a lot of communities that have been broken and dispersed around Iraq, she said, and these communities wanted to be able to accumulate their votes and to vote with like-minded people. With that one sentence, Perelli would set Iraq on the slippery slope to the failed Lebanese-style communal system. According to an Iraqi electoral commission member, Bremer agreed to a party-slate system to bypass the tricky question of who votes where, thereby trading Iraq's long-term health for short-term expediency. The U.N. endorsement of a party-slate system fails to correct the mistakes of the past year. While Bremer condemned the Governing Council as irrelevant, the truth was more nuanced. Many Iraqis adopt the same throw-the-bums-out mentality that Americans voice about Congress, even while supporting their own representatives. Distrust of the Governing Council was more pronounced in towns such as Kut, which had no representation, than in cities, such as Najaf, which were represented. Even in Iraq, politics is about patronage. The party-slate system will not bolster representation. Many Iraqis share ethnicity but not local interests. Tel Afar, a town of 160,000 east of Mosul, is 95 percent Shiite Turkmen. Its Turkish-speaking residents have little in common with Turkmen in Erbil or Kirkuk. The party-slate system might also undercut religious freedom. Christians, for example, represent less than 3 percent of Iraq's population. They remain concentrated in towns such as Alqosh, Ainkawa and Duhok. Many Christians do not support parties such as the Assyrian Democratic Movement. Without district-based elections, they may find themselves without representation. Smaller religious communities that do not have their own political parties but who live in clustered districts may find themselves without
Richard Perle: Iraq's Central Criminal Court the Campaign Against the INC
RICHARD PERLE'S COMMENTS AT AEI "IRAQ HAND-OFF" PANEL June 14, 2004 http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.841/transcript.asp MR. PERLE: ...How many of you are familiar with the name Zuhair al-Maliky? Anybody? He's a man of no consequence, except he sits in Baghdad issuing arrest warrants for people who have for many years been fighting to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein. So I think you ought to know something about him. He has the title of chief investigative judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, which is an impressive-sounding title. The Central Criminal Court of Iraq, CCCI for short, was created by none other than our very own Jerry Bremer. And Mr. al-Maliky was appointed by Jerry Bremer and made a judge, despite the fact that he has no judicial experience, and perhaps in recognition of the fact that he was a translator for the Coalition Provisional Authority until he was elevated into the position of chief investigative judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. In that capacity, as I indicated, he has been issuing arrest warrants for a great many people without anything that could be called probable cause, as far as I can tell. Or if there is probable cause, it hasn't been stated in a way that could be properly examined or investigated. According to reliable reports, his notion of due process includes threats to the counsel representing some of the accused, that if they continue to press the concerns of their clients, they themselves can find themselves under investigation by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. It was a little bit awkward propelling into that position a man with no judicial experience, since the order establishing the court required that judges on that court--let alone the chief judge--should have five years of judicial experience. An order to that effect was promulgated on the 18th of June 2003. And when it became clear that Mr. al-Maliky didn't meet the requirement, that order was amended. A revised and amended order was issued on April 22, 2004, by Ambassador Bremer, which dropped the requirement for prior judicial experience. I mention all of this because it would be a tragedy indeed if we had fought to liberate Iraq only to bring Saddam's style of justice back to that country. Now happily, Mr. Bremer will be leaving shortly and the Iraqis will have to make decisions about whether they wish to continue an institution like the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. And I hope that they will have gained enough of a sense of proper judicial practice so that they will disband that court before it can do any more damage. The damage it has done is to wage a campaign against the Iraqi National Congress and against Ahmed Chalabi, who many of you who have been at prior AEI events have had an opportunity to hear from. It is clearly an abusive campaign of intimidation. It is clearly politically motivated. It follows decisions taken, sadly, in this government to marginalize Dr. Chalabi. But a decision to marginalize unleashed the most vicious opponents of the Iraqi National Congress--the Central Intelligence Agency, which has never liked the INC and has its own preferred methods and candidates, and parts of the Department of State. I say all of this remorsefully because we are in the process of depriving, or seeking to deprive, the people of Iraq of a man of great effectiveness and vision, who deserves nothing more than a chance to appeal to his fellow Iraqis to play a role in the construction of a secular and democratic Iraq, which has been his goal and ambition all his life. I rather suspect that he will emerge despite this campaign if intimidation. But it's a shameful campaign. And I've been struck by how little people have inquired into the basis for it. So let me say a word about the other half of this campaign of intimidation, which is the suggestion promulgated in a whispering campaign out of the CIA, the message carried often by former intelligence officials, at the CIA in some cases, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and in the FBI, and that is a campaign that has at its core the suggestion that Dr. Chalabi was found out to have been advising the government of Iran in a manner hostile to American interests. I've seen the suggestion, for example, that he informed the Iranians that codes that they had been using had been compromised by us and therefore they ought not to use those codes. As far as I can tell, there has been hardly any scrutiny by a willing press corps of these charges. Hardly any questioning, for example, along the following lines--and I just throw out a few questions that it would be worth asking: Is it possible that, if messages were intercepted to this effect, is it possible that those messages were deliberately transmitted so that we would receive them, with a view to alienating the United States from the Iraqi National Congress? Are the goals and objectives of the Iraqi
Jim Hoagland, The Toll of 'No More Iraqs'
Washington Post The Toll of 'No More Iraqs' By Jim Hoagland June 24, 2004 Military victory in Iraq was supposed to change the psychology of nations as well as the regime in Baghdad. For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America, President Bush said in his State of the Union message in January. It is not working that way as the occupation of Iraq stumbles toward a nominal end on June 30. The purposes and durability of the use of American military power abroad are being more loudly questioned and more persistently stigmatized in the media, on domestic political hustings and at international conclaves than they have been since Vietnam. This is a growing problem for Bush as he heads toward Election Day. But the consequences of failure to create a psychology of victory by following Afghanistan with Iraq are far broader than Bush's fate at the polls. The souring of America on intervention abroad has major strategic implications for the United States and for the world. The threshold for preventive war, for example, will be raised significantly for the immediate future. Intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the intentions of dictators or terrorist gangs that seem to possess them are unlikely to be sufficiently clear to meet the standards for action demanded by the post-facto doubts and recriminations on Iraq. Intelligence analysis will become even more cautious and ambiguously stated to policymakers. Vulnerability to surprise attack could grow again. Widespread disillusionment will also seriously undercut idealistic rationales for deploying U.S. forces overseas. The growing acceptance of humanitarian intervention that gave rise to the slogan No more Rwandas is marginalized today by the drumbeat of No more Iraqs. The mishandling and abuses of the Iraq occupation have negated much of the idealism of the liberation in one long, bloody year. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking of Kosovo in 1999, called for a new internationalism in which countries fight not for territorial imperatives but for values . . . for a world where those responsible for crimes will have nowhere to hide. The sentiments were echoed by Kofi Annan at the United Nations and drew many to the cause of regime change in Iraq. Blair's words are quoted in The Breaking of Nations, an outstanding new book of essays by Robert Cooper, who once served as an adviser to Blair and is now a senior official at the European Union in Brussels. Cooper treats Blair's high-mindedness with respectful but cool skepticism: Humanitarian interventions are particularly dangerous for those who intervene. It is difficult to set clear objectives; it is difficult to know where to stop, he writes, adding that those who become involved in places such as Iraq or Sudan run the risk that ultimately they will be there because they are there. The United States has typically stationed troops abroad to defend its allies, not to seek territory or empire -- or to create new world orders, Cooper notes. The traditional Cold War defensive role is at an end, as decisions this month on troop redeployments from Germany and South Korea signify. But a consensus on what American troops can hope to accomplish in the Middle East or elsewhere is ever more elusive as the problems of intervention rather than its uses dominate U.S. national attention. Unfortunately, Bush has compounded the confusion by prolonging Iraq's occupation and its aftermath, and blessing naked expediency in Baghdad, where the new prime minister is a longtime CIA asset who is accused in the New Yorker this week of having once been part of Saddam Hussein's execution squads. Americans have lost sight of the mass graves of Iraqi Shiites, the genocide campaigns against the Kurds and the war crimes committed by the criminal Baathist regime that was overthrown a year ago. The benefits of fighting terrorist networks in the Middle East and thereby galvanizing the Saudi, Moroccan and other Arab regimes to take forceful action against their extremists are not described or seen clearly enough to counterbalance the abuses of Abu Ghraib or the problems of Fallujah. Instead, Washington is in the grips of an overlapping series of blame games geared toward influencing the November elections, ruining the reputations of rivals, and obtaining or protecting jobs for the professionally ambitious and the ambitiously professional. Perspective on the future of America's role in Iraq, the Middle East and the world is quickly jettisoned in this psychological sourness. So are the once bright hopes of humanitarian intervention. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mylroie, Odd al Qaeda Family-- Iraq, NY Sun
The New York Sun June 24, 2004 All in the Family? Laurie Mylroie outlines a theory of Iraqi involvement in the two attacks on New York The claim of the 9/11 commission that no credible evidence exists linking Iraq to Al Qaeda's assaults on America, including the attack of September 11, 2001, is itself not credible. Iraq was almost certainly directly involved in those attacks. After 1996, when Osama bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan, Iraqi intelligence became an integral part of Al Qaeda, or so it would seem. This is, of course, a shocking statement, with enormous significance. Moreover, it involves the question: Who is our enemy? Who was responsible for the terrible events of September 11? And what threat do we still face? There is scarcely a subject about which it is more necessary to pay careful attention to key facts. Since September 11, 2001, American authorities have learned a great deal more about Al Qaeda. As they now understand, a clan lies at the heart of the major acts of Islamic terrorism directed against America from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center though the September 11 strikes. That family consists of the person known as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and a number of his nephews. So far, five such individuals have been publicly named, and there are probably more. Mohammed is the recognized mastermind of the September 11 attacks. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali--who is also known as Ammar al-Baluchi and whom American officials consider a nephew of Mohammed--sent the primary funding for the conspiracy to the hijackers in America, as the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, told the Congressional Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry. The most well-known of Mohammed's supposed nephews is Ramzi Yousef, who is the recognized mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef fled New York the night of that assault. Two years later, he conspired with Mohammed and two others to bomb a dozen American airplanes in the Philippines. None of those involved in that plot, including Yousef and Mohammed, lived as Islamic militants then. They had girlfriends and frequented Manila's karaoke bars, strongly suggesting that Islamic militancy was not their motive for attacking America. The 1995 plane-bombing plot went awry when Yousef accidentally started a fire while mixing explosives. Yousef was soon captured and brought to New York to stand trial, where he was convicted in 1996 for his role in that plot and convicted in 1997 for his role in the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Yousef is now in federal prison in Colorado. Mohammed escaped from the Philippines and fled to Qatar. As the FBI tried to seize him there, he was tipped off and fled again, joining up with Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan, as American authorities would learn much later. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. Ali was captured there a few months later. Two more of Mohammed's nephews--Yousef's older brothers, Abdul Karim and Abdul Monem--are considered Al Qaeda masterminds, capable of replacing Mohammed, as the Washington Post reported last year, shortly after Mohammed's capture. They remain at large. Last week, Pakistani authorities announced the arrest of yet another nephew. The State Department confirmed the man's significance, but expressed doubts the Pakistanis had the right person. Yet there is substantial reason to doubt these individuals really do constitute a family. No other major terrorist organization has a family at its core. It is without precedent. Indeed, there is no other such family within Al Qaeda. At most, such familial relationships are extremely limited associations, like Mr. bin Laden and his son, or the two pairs of brothers among the September 11 hijackers. Indeed, this family represents such an odd phenomenon that it requires far more serious attention than it has yet publicly received. The individuals in this family are all Baluch, a Sunni Muslim people who live in Eastern Iran and Western Pakistan. The Baluch are a distinct ethnic group, possessing their own language and inhabiting a specific territory, although they have no state. America has virtually nothing to do with the Baluch. The Baluch have no evident motive for these stupendously murderous assaults against America--save one. Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus had deep and well-established ties with the Baluch on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. So Wafiq Samarrai, who headed Iraqi military intelligence until 1991 before defecting in 1994, explained to this author. Iraq long used the Baluch against the Shi'a regime in Tehran, including during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988.The most evident motive for Baluch to attack America is their relationship with Iraq. In fact, there are substantial uncertainties about the true identities of these people. Yousef represents the clearest case. Yousef entered America on an Iraqi passport in that name, with stamps showing a journey starting in Baghdad. However, Yousef fled New York
Amar Baluchi Financed Indonesia Bombing, Wash Post
Gunawan, who had been living as a student in Pakistan, was asked by his brother to transfer the money from another activist, Amar Baluchi, through a series of intermediaries, according to Indonesian prosecutor Payaman. Some of the funds ultimately reached key planners of the Marriott attack, Payaman told the Jakarta court. Presumably, Amar Baluchi is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew--Ammar al-Baluchi, who sent most of the money to the 9/11 hijackers in the US--and not just another terrorist-financier of essentially the same name. Washington Post Indonesia Prepares to Try Cleric in Bomb Attacks By Alan Sipress Washington Post Foreign Service June 26, 2004 JAKARTA, Indonesia, June 25 -- Law enforcement officials said Friday they had finished assembling evidence against radical cleric Abubakar Baasyir and were preparing to schedule his trial on charges of involvement in a string of bombings in Indonesia, including an attack two years ago on nightclubs in Bali. Though a Jakarta court acquitted Baasyir last year of allegations that he headed a militant underground group, Indonesian officials said they were now confident of proving that he was the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, linked by intelligence officials to al Qaeda. We have enough new evidence of Abubakar Baasyir's involvement in a series of bombings in Indonesia since 1999 and we're working closely with the attorney general's office, said National Police Chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar. He added that the case file would be turned over to prosecutors shortly. The latest developments came as Indonesian prosecutors opened another high-profile terrorism case this week against the younger brother of Hambali, a longtime Baasyir associate and the suspected operations chief for Jemaah Islamiah, whose real name is Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin. Prosecutors accused Rusman Gunawan, 27, of helping to provide as much as $50,000 to militants behind the suicide car bombing last August of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12 people. Gunawan, who had been living as a student in Pakistan, was asked by his brother to transfer the money from another activist, Amar Baluchi, through a series of intermediaries, according to Indonesian prosecutor Payaman. Some of the funds ultimately reached key planners of the Marriott attack, Payaman told the Jakarta court. Gunawan has denied being involved in the Marriott plot. Prosecutors also alleged that Gunawan, commonly known as Gun Gun, had led a group of militant Indonesian and Malaysian students living in Karachi, Pakistan. This group, dubbed al Ghuraba, was established by Hambali to groom a new generation of Southeast Asian militants, and several had received weapons training, investigators said. Gunawan was arrested late last year, weeks after his brother was captured while hiding in Thailand. Gunawan was then turned over by Pakistani authorities to Indonesia along with five other students. Three of them also face terrorism charges in Indonesia, while two were released for lack of evidence. Other students from the al Ghuraba groups are now held in Malaysia. Indonesian authorities have arrested and convicted dozens of militants in connection with the bombing of the Marriott and the earlier attack on the Bali nightspots, which killed 202 people. In the latest conviction, a Jakarta court Wednesday sentenced Muslim activist Malikul Zurkoni to three years in prison for storing explosives used in the Marriott bombing. The judge said Zurkoni had provided TNT and detonators to Jemaah Islamiah's chief bomb maker, known as Dr. Azahari. But Azahari himself has eluded investigators in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, who have named him as one of the region's most wanted men. Bachtiar, the police chief, said investigators had information that Azahari is still in Indonesia. Police previously tracked Azahari to Bandung, a city on Indonesia's main Java island, only to see him slip through their dragnet. Bandung police said they suspected that Azahari might still be there and have raised the city's state of alert. We failed to arrest him in our last operation. We don't want this to happen again, said Bandung Police Chief Hendra Sukmana. The U.S. State Department warned last week that Jemaah Islamiah or other terrorist groups might carry out attacks in advance of Indonesia's July 5 election for president. U.S. officials said they continued to recommend that Americans defer travel to Indonesia unless unavoidable. But despite the heightened warnings and continuing campaign by police and prosecutors against suspected militants, Indonesian voters do not consider terrorism to be a significant concern as they prepare to head to the polls. A survey by the International Foundation for Election Systems released Thursday found that less than 1 percent of respondents named terrorism as an issue they wanted candidates to address. Indonesians' top concerns were combating corruption, reducing inflation and creating jobs,
Evidence of Niger Uranium Trade Years Before War, FT
Financial Times What Wilson couldn't learn sipping tea Evidence of Niger uranium trade 'years before war' By Mark Huband Published: June 27 2004 21:56 When thieves stole a steel watch and two bottles of perfume from Niger's embassy on Via Antonio Baiamonti in Rome at the end of December 2000, they left behind many questions about their intentions. The identity of the thieves has not been established. But one theory is that they planned to steal headed notepaper and official stamps that would allow the forging of documents for the illicit sale of uranium from Niger's vast mines. The break-in is one of the murkier elements surrounding the claim - made by the US and UK governments in the lead-up to the Iraq war - that Iraq sought to buy uranium illicitly from Niger. The British government has said repeatedly it stands by intelligence it gathered and used in its controversial September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes. It still claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. But the US intelligence community, officials and politicians, are publicly sceptical, and the public differences between the two allies on the issue have obscured the evidence that lies behind the UK claim. Until now, the only evidence of Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger had turned out to be a forgery. In October 2002, documents were handed to the US embassy in Rome that appeared to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials. When the US State Department later passed the documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, they were found to be fake. US officials have subsequently distanced themselves from the entire notion that Iraq was seeking buy uranium from Niger. However, European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq. These intelligence officials now say the forged documents appear to have been part of a scam, and the actual intelligence showing discussion of uranium supply has been ignored. The fake documents were handed to an Italian journalist working for the Italian magazine Panorama by a businessman in October 2002. According to a senior official with detailed knowledge of the case, this businessman had been dismissed from the Italian armed forces for dishonourable conduct 25 years earlier. The journalist - Elisabetta Burba - reported in a Panorama article that she suspected the documents were forgeries and handed them to officials at the US embassy in Rome. The businessman, referred to by a pseudonym in the Panorama article, had previously tried to sell the documents to several intelligence services, according to a western intelligence officer. It was later established that he had a record of extortion and deception and had been convicted by a Rome court in 1985 and later arrested at least twice. The suspected forger's real name is known to the FT, but cannot be used because of legal constraints. He did not return telephone calls yesterday, and is understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel. The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq. This intelligence provided clues about plans by Libya and Iran to develop their undeclared nuclear programmes. Niger officials were also discussing sales to North Korea and China of uranium ore or the yellow cake refined from it: the raw materials that can be progressively enriched to make nuclear bombs. The raw intelligence on the negotiations included indications that Libya was investing in Niger's uranium industry to prop it up at a time when demand had fallen, and that sales to Iraq were just a part of the clandestine export plan. These secret exports would allow countries with undeclared nuclear programmes to build up uranium stockpiles. One nuclear counter-proliferation expert told the FT: If I am going to make a bomb, I am not going to use the uranium that I have declared. I am going to use what I acquire clandestinely, if I am going to keep the programme hidden. This may have been the method being used by Libya before it agreed last December to abandon its secret nuclear programme. According to the IAEA, there are 2,600 tonnes of refined uranium ore - yellow cake - in Libya. However, less than 1,500 tonnes of it is accounted for in Niger records, even though Niger was Libya's main supplier. Information gathered in 1999-2001 suggested that the uranium sold illicitly would be
Allawi May Amnesty Insurgents, AP Iraq News Note
NB: An informed source tells Iraq News that this is part of a CIA-backed plan to give nationalist credentials to the new Iraqi government. The source even suggests that some anti-Israeli position will be articulated for the same purpose. Associated Press July 3, 2004 Iraq May Give Amnesty to Insurgents By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's prime minister, less than a week after taking power, may offer amnesty to insurgents and could extend it to those who killed American troops in an apparent bid to lure Saddam Hussein loyalists from their campaign of violence. A spokesman for Iyad Allawi went as far as to suggest attacks on U.S. troops over the past year were legitimate acts of resistance - a sign of the new government's desire to distance itself from the 14-month U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. If he (a guerrilla) was in opposition against the Americans, that will be justified because it was an occupation force, the spokesman, Georges Sada, said Saturday. We will give them freedom. Choking the brutal 14-month insurgency is the No. 1 priority of Allawi's government, and the prime minister is expected to make a number of security-related policy announcements in coming days. Besides the amnesty plan, those include the resurrection of Iraq's death penalty and an emergency law that sets curfews in Iraq's trouble spots, Sada said. The amnesty plan is still in the works. A full pardon for insurgents who killed Americans is not a certainty, Sada told The Associated Press. Allawi's main goal is to start everything from new by giving a second chance to rebel fighters who hand in their weapons and throw their weight behind the new government. There is still heavy discussion about this, said Sada, interviewed in the prime minister's office. He said the U.S. Embassy has encouraged Allawi to try creative solutions to end the insurgency as long as they don't infringe on human rights. Analysts say Allawi's plan is critical to ending a grinding rebellion in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland that has shown no sign of bowing to the U.S. military. Especially worrying for Allawi's government is recent evidence that shows secular fighters - ex-members of Saddam's Baath Party - forming an alliance with radical Islamists. Some type of amnesty is needed to coax Iraqi nationalist guerrillas to the government's side, while separating them from fighters using terrorist-style bombings, experts say. It's hard to imagine any way forward other than co-opting people who had previously fought against the United States, either as part of Saddam's army, part of the insurgency, or both, said Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Allawi needs to split the opposition into two groups: those he can co-opt and those he must confront. Amnesties can be tricky. If the offer is too strict and few rebels accept, it will have little effect. But too lenient a deal could destabilize the government by bringing criminals and radicals into the government, said James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who served as the Bush administration's special envoy for Afghanistan. Amnesties have succeeded in many countries. Militants once considered outlaws landed top jobs in government. In Kenya, South Africa and Cyprus they even became president. Some landed the Nobel Peace Prize. Not to push the point too far, but George Washington led the American insurgency and went on to become our first president, Dobbins said. If Allawi and his government can't assume the nationalist mantle in the eyes of the Iraqi population, they can't prevail against the insurgency. Dobbins said he believed Washington would not block Allawi's pardoning of Iraqi insurgents, noting that there is plenty of precedent for such reconciliation. The United States never sought to prosecute surrendering Germans, Koreans or Vietnamese who had killed U.S. soldiers. He said he doubted the United States intends to prosecute the many Afghan and Iraqi prisoners it holds as enemy combatants. Besides, there is wide acknowledgment that U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of Iraq's army and security services was a mistake, and forced people into fighting the occupation for money and revenge, Sada said. Some people were cheated, some were misled. Some did this because they had no salaries, no food, no bread, Sada said. There appears to be little controversy about pardoning rebels who were not actual killers of U.S. or Iraqi security forces. Sada said it was no problem to amnesty rebel financiers and those storing heavy weapons in their homes. It remains to be seen whether many hard-core Iraqi insurgents, numbering around 5,000 according to a recent U.S. estimate, will take Allawi's expected offer. One former army officer who described himself as a helper to the resistance in Fallujah said Allawi's plan would find little traction because his government is seen as illegitimate. I do not want to return to
Saddam Family Aids Insurgency, NYT
New York Times U.S. Aides Say Kin of Hussein Aid Insurgency By DOUGLAS JEHL July 5, 2004 WASHINGTON, July 4 - A network of Saddam Hussein's cousins, operating in part from Syria and Jordan, is actively involved in the smuggling of guns, people and money into Iraq to support the anti-American insurgency, say American government officials and a prominent Iraqi. The operations involve at least three cousins from the Majid family who now live in Syria and in Europe, the American officials said. A leading figure among them is Fatiq Suleiman al-Majid, a cousin of Mr. Hussein's and a former officer in Iraq's Special Security Organization who fled from Iraq to Syria last spring and may still be living there. The view that the cousins are helping finance the insurgency developed fairly recently and is described in intelligence reports, the American officials say. They said the conclusion was based in part on suspicious recent movements of money and goods, including the transfer of cash into Syria, that were detected by American intelligence. Still, the military and intelligence officials have acknowledged that a significant component of the resistance, including some of its foot soldiers, comes from Iraqis without ties to Mr. Hussein's government. Mr. Hussein's family has a history of intermarriage with the Majid clan; his own full name is Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti. Under his government, the Majid family was a particularly feared branch of the ruling Tikriti tribe. Its members played prominent roles in the day-to-day operations of the country's state security apparatus, as bodyguards, enforcers and secret-police chiefs, and the cousins who now live outside Iraq have access to tens of millions of dollars, much of it derived from smuggling oil, military equipment and other goods in and out of Iraq under Mr. Hussein, the American officials said. Fatiq al-Majid, said to be in his 30's and described as a main money man in the operation, has been living in Syria with the knowledge of the Syrian authorities, American officials said. In addition to being Mr. Hussein's cousin, he was a brother-in-law of Mr. Hussein's son Qusay and is a nephew of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the general who became known as Chemical Ali for gassing thousands of Kurds in the 1980's. The prominent Iraqi who provided information about the network aiding the insurgency, Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi, was a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. He served briefly this spring as interior minister and was responsible for security. He recently described another Majid, Izzadin, as now financing a lot of the activities of the insurgents. The statement by Mr. Sumeidi, at an appearance in Washington last month, was the first public reference to the concerns about the role played by the Majid family. In response to inquiries about Mr. Sumeidi's statement and about other information provided by former intelligence officials, American officials confirmed that intelligence reports had provided information linking Izzadin al-Majid, Fatiq al-Majid and at least one other member of the family, along with some associates, to operations in support of the Iraqi insurgency. The American officials declined to speak publicly about the information because the intelligence reports in which it is spelled out are classified. In 1995, Izzadin al-Majid, then a major in the Republican Guard, fled Iraq with a group that included his cousin Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law of Mr. Hussein's. Hussein Kamel and a brother who had also fled returned to Iraq in 1996, and were killed there, leaving Izzadin al-Majid in control of a large portion of the family's assets, the American officials said. He was granted asylum in Britain in 2000, and has since maintained a home in Leeds. His involvement after leaving Iraq in smuggling operations that involved members of Mr. Hussein's government suggest that he maintained close ties there, a former intelligence official said. American officials say Izzadin al-Majid now travels frequently between Europe, Jordan and Iraq. In a brief telephone conversation from Europe, he dismissed the accusations of involvement in the insurgency as groundless and said he had last seen his cousin Fatiq in 1994, though he had spoken to him last year by phone. The American officials identified the third family member as Ezz al-Dain al-Majidi al-Tikriti, another cousin of Hussein Kamel, who they said owned a printing plant and had access to black-market wealth. The indication that exiles linked to the former Iraqi government are helping to finance, recruit and organize the insurgency adds a new dimension to a picture that has been sketched in recent months by a broad range of military and intelligence officers. In recent days, several senior military and diplomatic officials have said there is limited intelligence on the command and control - the central nervous system, as some called it - of the Iraqi resistance. According to the general
Senate Disputes Wilson's Claim on Niger Trip, Wash Post
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role By Susan Schmidt Washington Post Staff Writer July 10, 2004 Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly. Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House. Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched yellowcake uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said. The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him. Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer. Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name. The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional. The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame offered up Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity. The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said. Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger. Valerie had nothing to do with the matter, Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip. Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: I don't see it as a recommendation to send me. The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, there's this crazy report about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion. The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because the dates were wrong and the names were wrong. Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports, the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have misspoken to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger. Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical,
NY Sun, Does the US Need a CIA?
The New York Sun; July 12, 2004 Editorial Bush's Intelligence The 511-page Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq is a useful document indeed, even with the redactions it was released with Friday by the Senate intelligence committee. The anti-war left is making much of the report's statements taking issue with the information about weapons of mass destruction cited by President Bush in the run-up to the war in Iraq.He misled America about the types of weapons that were there, Senator Kerry said in an interview with the New York Times over the weekend. Indeed, the Senate report indicates that at several junctures, Mr.Bush,Secretary of State Powell, and the Central Intelligence Agency used language about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs that went beyond what the evidence available to them conclusively proved. These details are significant. In making the case for war, accuracy is important. Even so, on the key point -- that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction and wanted more -- enough facts are in to suggest that Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell, and the CIA were correct to be concerned. After all,the postwar finds in Iraq have included what American officials have described as 10 or 12 sarin and mustard rounds, a 7-pound block of cyanide salt, a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be producedhidden in the home of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist, and 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources. That's not even considering materials that may still be buried, or that may have been smuggled out of Iraq to Syria in the closing days of Saddam's regime. The findings on weapons of mass destruction are hardly the only part of the Senate committee report that are worth taking seriously. Just as significant is the way that the report debunks the claim that the intelligence was politicized or cooked by Vice President Cheney. This claim is common on the left. For instance, David Remnick, in the New Yorker on July 28, 2003, wrote of the the prospect that intelligence has been manipulated, forged, or bullied into shape and the pressure that the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office had been exerting on the C.I.A. to square the evidentiary circle. Yet the Senate committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of political pressure. Got that? No evidence. As for pressure, the committee noted several of the allegations of pressure on Intelligence Community analysts involved repeated questioning.The report says analysts should expect difficult and repeated questions. The Senate committee found that in some cases,the questions forced analysts to go back and review things, and come across information they had overlooked earlier.The policymakers probing questions actually improved the CIA's products, the report says. Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, though, is the devastating assessment of America's human intelligence -- old-fashioned spying -- ability. The Intelligence Community did not have a single HUMINT source collecting against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq after 1998, the report says, calling for dramatic changes in a risk-averse corporate culture. Rather than an indictment of the so-called neo-cons for phonying up the pre-war intelligence, the Senate report is in some sense a validation of a critique of the CIA that the neo-cons have been making for years. It was Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute who in a 1998 speech called for a congressional investigation into the Near East division of the CIA and said its head should be removed on grounds of incompetence. It was AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht, who, writing as Edward Shirley in his 1997 book Know Thine Enemy, described the CIA as a bastion of bureaucratic mediocrity and incompetence. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has resigned, but there are other personnel worth pursuing in the wake of the Senate report. Where, during these errors, was the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, General Scowcroft? The board provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, according to the White House. Was Mr. Scowcroft asleep at the switch, or too busy with his private consulting to firms in the energy industry? What about Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, whose 2001 book takes the defeatist attitude,If there is a 'war' against terrorism, it is a war that cannot be won. The book advises, Give peace a chance. Before moving to replace Mr. Tenet and rebuild America's spying capacity, Mr. Bush would profit by re-reading the warnings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Dean Acheson about whether America really
INC Denies Ties to Curveball, Other Allegations
INC DENIES CIA ALLEGATIONS part of a campaign to divert attention away from the real intelligence failures in Iraq BAGHDAD (13 July, 2004): The Iraqi National Congress today issued the following statement denying recent false allegations made by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has recently alleged that one of their main sources of information on mobile bio-weapons facilities was an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball who they claim is the brother of a senior INC official and thus was coached by the INC. The CIA claims that the INC introduced Curveball to the German intelligence service. These allegations are false. The INC knows of no such person and challenges the CIA to produce evidence or stop making unsubstantiated and false allegations. These charges are part of a campaign to divert attention away from the real intelligence failures in Iraq and shift blame on to the INC. The INC did not provide false or fabricated information to the US Government or the media on Saddam's WMD programs. The INC did not coach defectors or tell them what to say and there is no evidence to support this. The INC introduced to the US Government people who claimed to have important information on WMD. The INC never claimed to vouch for such information. Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
NYT, US Officials Retract Claim on Curveball, INC
(with thanks to Clarice Feldman) http://www.nytimes.com/corrections.html New York Times July 17, 2004 Corrections An article on Monday about the Senate intelligence committee report on prewar intelligence about Iraq misstated the relationship between a defector known as Curveball and the Iraqi National Congress. There is no information that Curveball, who worked with German intelligence, was introduced to that service by the I.N.C., which is led by Ahmad Chalabi. (Articles on June 2 and June 4 also described such a connection, attributing that account to American intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those officials now say there was no such established relationship.) The Iraqi National Congress has denied any connection whatsoever to Curveball, and the Senate intelligence committee report issued on July 9 did not describe such a relationship.
WSJ: Time to End Plame Leak Investigation
If Mr. Bush ends up losing the election over Iraq, it won't be because he oversold the case for war but because he's sometimes appeared to have lost confidence in the cause. Wall Street Journal REVIEW OUTLOOK Mr. Wilson's Defense Why the Plame special prosecutor should close up shop. Tuesday, July 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT After U.S. and British intelligence reports exposed his falsehoods in the last 10 days, Joe Wilson is finally defending himself. We're therefore glad to return to this story one more time, because there are some larger lessons here about the law, and for the Beltway media and Bush White House. Mr. Wilson's defense, in essence, is that the Republican-written Senate Intelligence Committee report is a partisan hatchet job. We could forgive people for being taken in by this, considering the way the Committee's ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, has been spinning it over the past week. But the fact is that the three most damning conclusions are contained not in Chairman Pat Roberts's Additional Views, but in the main body of the report approved by Mr. Rockefeller and seven other Democrats. Number one: The winner of last year's Award for Truth Telling from the Nation magazine foundation, didn't tell the truth when he wrote that his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his selection for the Niger mission. Mr. Wilson is now pretending there is some kind of important distinction between whether she recommended or proposed him for the trip. Mr. Wilson had been denying any involvement at all on Ms. Plame's part, in order to suggest that her identity was disclosed by a still-unknown Administration official out of pure malice. If instead an Administration official cited nepotism truthfully in order to explain the oddity of Mr. Wilson's selection for the Niger mission, then there was no underlying crime. Motive is crucial under the controlling statute. The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act was written in the wake of the Philip Agee scandal to protect the CIA from deliberate subversion, not to protect the identities of agents and their spouses who choose to enter into a national political debate. In short, the entire leak probe now looks like a familiar Beltway case of criminalizing political differences. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald should fold up his tent. Number two: Joe Wilson didn't tell the truth about how he supposedly came to realize that it was highly doubtful there was anything to the story he'd been sent to Niger to investigate. He told everyone that he'd recognized as obvious forgeries the documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. But the forged documents to which he referred didn't reach U.S. intelligence until eight months after his trip. Mr. Wilson has said that he misspoke--multiple times, apparently--on this issue. Number three: Joe Wilson was also not telling the truth when he said that his final report to the CIA had debunked the Niger story. The Senate Intelligence report--again, the bipartisan portion of it--says Mr. Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing some confirmation of foreign government service reporting that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. That's because Niger's former Prime Minister had told Mr. Wilson he interpreted a 1999 visit from an Iraqi trade delegation as showing an interest in uranium. This is a remarkable record of falsehood. We'll let our readers judge if they think Mr. Wilson was deliberately wrong, and therefore can be said to have lied. We certainly know what critics would say if President Bush had been caught saying such things. But in any event, we'd think that the news outlets that broadcast Mr. Wilson's story over the past year would want to retrace their own missteps. Mr. Wilson made three separate appearances on NBC's Meet the Press, according to the Weekly Standard. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof first brought the still anonymous Niger envoy to public attention in May 2003, so he too must feel burned by his source. Alone among major sellers of the Wilson story, the Washington Post has done an admirable job so far of correcting the record. Also remarkable is that the views of former CIA employee Larry Johnson continue to be cited anywhere on this and related issues. Mr. Johnson was certain last October that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity was a purely political attack, now disproven. He is also a friend of Ms. Plame and the author of a summer 2001 op-ed titled The Declining Terrorist Threat. You'd think reporters would at least quote him with a political warning label. The final canard advanced by Mr. Wilson's defenders is that our own recent editorials and other criticism was somehow orchestrated. Well, by whom? Certainly not by the same White House that has been all too silent about this entire episode, in large part because it prematurely apologized last year for the 16 words in a State of the Union address that have now been declared well-founded by Lord
Martin Peretz: Wilson, Berger, TNR
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=expresss=peretz072104 The New Republic DAILY EXPRESS Turning Tale by Martin Peretz TNR Online Post date: 07.21.04 The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done. The flying apart began with two stories in the Financial Times (London), one on June 28, the other on July 4. Relying on information ultimately sourced to three European intelligence services--none of them British and one of them that had monitored clandestine uranium smuggling to Iraq over three years--Mark Huband reported that the network also serviced or was to service Libya, Iran, China, and North Korea. A tell-tale element of the story is that the mines in Niger from which several thousand tons of uranium had been extracted and sold were owned by French companies. Apparently, after a time, they had abandoned the mines as economically unviable. But, as a counter-proliferation expert told Huband, this does not mean that extraction stopped. In any case, Lord Butler's altogether independent panel in the United Kingdom concluded that Tony Blair's claim about Hussein being in the market for uranium was well-founded. These are the same claims made by George W. Moreover, the U.S. Senate report undercuts Wilson's very believability. I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a real spook had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office outed Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do. I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it. No matter. Still, here's his story about the filched classified materials dealing with the foiled Al Qaeda millennium terrorist bombing plot from the National Archives: He inadvertently took home documents and notes about documents that he was not permitted to take from the archives; secondly, he inadvertently didn't notice the papers in his possession when he got home and actually looked at them; and, thirdly, he inadvertently discarded some of these same files so that they are now missing. Gone, in fact. One of his lawyers attributes this behavior to sloppiness, which may better explain his career as Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser and certainly describes his presentation of self in everyday life. But it is not an explanation of his conduct in the archives or, for that matter, at home. Personnel at the archives actually noticed him stuffing his pockets with papers as he left, which is how the FBI found out about this bizarre tale in the first place. Inadvertence, then, doesn't do it either. Maybe Sandy wanted souvenirs from his career in the White House that was punctuated by so many catastrophes for the United States. Nonetheless, he has had ambitions tied to John Kerry's, ambitions that clash with those of Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden, who decisively do not have McGovernite politics. But Berger did run the Kerry foreign policy team at the writing of the Democratic Party platform a few weeks ago (when the only opposition, easily pacified, came from a handful of Dennis Kucinich loyalists) and has been deeply involved in crafting how the candidate presents himself on these issues. So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much,
US Military: Big Misunderstanding of Iraq War
IRAQ NEWS, SUNDAY, JULY 25, 2004 I. UNWILLING VICTIMS, ABC NEWS, JUL 23 II. THE FIGHTING IN RAMADI, LAT, JUL 25 As ABC News, Jul 23, reported, regarding the violence in Iraq, the director of intelligence for Central Command, Brig. Gen. John Custer, explained, The big myth is that the foreign fighters are everywhere, that there are thousands, Custer said. My feeling is that that's largely that Arab street [spreading the myth]. That's the story everybody wants to hear, and Iraqis don't want to admit that some of [the bombers] might be Iraqis. Custer also said that there was evidence some bombers were physically chained inside the vehicles used in the attacks. 'What we've found in a number of places are hands chained to a steering wheel,' he said. 'Up in Irbil, we found a foot roped into the car, unable to escape. Their children were kidnapped and held - they were forced.' The LA Times today carries a similar story about fighting in the Sunni city of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province. As the LAT explains, The ferocity of the fighting in Ramadi and the tenacity of the mujahedin - as the insurgents are widely known, though one commander favors the snappier 'Johnny Jihad - have produced a very specific view of who the enemy is here: A mostly home-grown mix of anti-U.S. nationalists, loyalists of Saddam Hussein's former regime and a seemingly endless supply of part-time fighters - many former members of the Iraqi army - willing to pick up a rifle or grenade launcher to fire at U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies. Most insurgents here, the Marines say, are natives of the Ramadi area, where the insular tribal culture and tradition of cross-border smuggling have fostered an undercurrent of violence and suspicion of outsiders. . . . Neither foreign fighters nor religious militants drive the insurgency here, commanders say, though both strains are present. 'It's one big overlapping mishmash,' said Maj. Michael P. Wylie, battalion executive officer. It is, indeed, one big overlapping mishmash (Iraq News would suggest that Syrian intelligence is also involved.) Yet one would never know this from most of what America's chattering class has to say. On both the left and the right, there is a fixation on and fascination with Islamic Militants, as if the many problems of that vast, dysfunctional region could be accurately summarized in a five second soundbite. Yet where life is clearly and directly on the line, people are far more accurate and precise in their observations and analysis. Much more attention should be paid to what America's military commanders in Iraq are saying. It is relevant not only to Iraq, but the Middle East more broadly. I. UNWILLING VICTIMS Unwilling Victims? U.S. Official: Some Iraqi Suicide Bombers May Have Been Forced BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 23, 2004 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/iraq_suicide_bombers_040723.html - It is one of the most frightening forms of violence in Iraq today - dozens of human bombers willing to die for their cause. But Brig. Gen. John Custer, the director of intelligence for Central Command, told ABC News he believes many of the bombers are forced to carry out the attacks. Custer said there was evidence some bombers were physically chained inside the vehicles used in the attacks. What we've found in a number of places are hands chained to a steering wheel, he said. Up in Irbil, we found a foot roped into the car, unable to escape. Their children were kidnapped and held - they were forced. We've seen faces blown off and been able to identify the perpetrator. Officials are not certain who is forcing people to do this, but he says the idea that Iraq is being badly infiltrated by outsiders is wrong. The big myth is that the foreign fighters are everywhere, that there are thousands, Custer said. My feeling is that that's largely that Arab street [spreading the myth]. That's the story everybody wants to hear, and Iraqis don't want to admit that some of [the bombers] might be Iraqis. There are serious concerns that violence will increase in the next few months with the approach of the Iraq elections. They primary concern: Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi has been blamed for much of the violence in Iraq. Today U.S. warplanes attacked what the military said was a gathering site for his followers in Fallujah. Zarqawi has certainly become the rock star terrorist in the past two months, Custer said. Not to the degree most people can claim and not to the degree they want to be seen. Custer said he sees possible links between Zarqawi and al Qaeda, but beyond that, he said, I don't see a lot of evidence in Iraq of al Qaeda. Custer insisted progress has been made in going after the insurgents in Iraq, but he acknowledged the extremist networks are proving very difficult to crack. ABC News' Martha Raddatz filed this report for World News Tonight. II. THE FIGHTING IN RAMADI July 25, 2004 THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ No Shortage of Fighters in Iraq's Wild
