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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: January 14, 2007 9:50:54 PM PST
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Subject: Why Is George Bush Building His Own "Babylon" in Iraq?
MSNBC.com
New embassy in Iraq a mystery
Baghdad locale, slated to be completed in 2007, to be largest of
its kind
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:45 p.m. PT April 14, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris
River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size
of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own
defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious
perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future.
The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the
ministate in Rome.
Construction cranes loom above the site of the new U.S. Embassy
being built in Baghdad. The embassy will sit on 104 acres, six
times larger than the United Nations compound in New York and two-
thirds the acreage of Washington’s National Mall.
“We can’t talk about it. Security reasons,” Roberta Rossi, a
spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information
about the project.
A British tabloid even told readers the location was being kept
secret — news that would surprise Baghdadis who for months have
watched the forest of construction cranes at work across the
winding Tigris, at the very center of their city and within easy
mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital, though fewer
explode there these days.
The embassy complex — 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a
U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report — is taking shape on
riverside parkland in the fortified “Green Zone,” just east of al-
Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein’s, and across the road
from the building where the ex-dictator is now on trial.
The Republican Palace, where U.S. Embassy functions are temporarily
housed in cubicles among the chandelier-hung rooms, is less than a
mile away in the 4-square-mile zone, an enclave of American and
Iraqi government offices and lodgings ringed by miles of concrete
barriers.
5,500 employees at the embassy
The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half
listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S.
mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the “Red Zone,”
that is, violence-torn Iraq.
This huge American contingent at the center of power has drawn
criticism.
“The presence of a massive U.S. embassy — by far the largest in the
world — co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is
seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in
their country,” the International Crisis Group, a European-based
research group, said in one of its periodic reports on Iraq.
State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the
embassy, old and new, saying it’s indicative of the work facing the
United States here.
“It’s somewhat self-evident that there’s going to be a fairly
sizable commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for
several years,” he said in Washington.
Higgins noted that large numbers of non-diplomats work at the
mission — hundreds of military personnel and dozens of FBI agents,
for example, along with representatives of the Agriculture,
Commerce and other U.S. federal agencies.
They sleep in hundreds of trailers or “containerized” quarters
scattered around the Green Zone. But next year embassy staff will
move into six apartment buildings in the new complex, which has
been under construction since mid-2005 with a target completion
date of June 2007.
Iraq’s interim government transferred the land to U.S. ownership in
October 2004, under an agreement whose terms were not disclosed.
“Embassy Baghdad” will dwarf U.S. embassies elsewhere, projects
that typically cover 10 acres. The embassy’s 104 acres is six times
larger than the United Nations compound in New York, and two-thirds
the acreage of Washington’s National Mall.
Estimated cost of over $1 billion
Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress
appropriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted
last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading
& Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on
the project’s “classified” portion — the actual embassy offices.
Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security
reasons, but said five were American companies.
The designs aren’t publicly available, but the Senate report makes
clear it will be a self-sufficient and “hardened” domain, to
function in the midst of Baghdad power outages, water shortages and
continuing turmoil.
It will have its own water wells, electricity plant and wastewater-
treatment facility, “systems to allow 100 percent independence from
city utilities,” says the report, the most authoritative open
source on the embassy plans.
Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the
ambassador and his deputy, and the apartment buildings for staff,
the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food
court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.
Security, overseen by U.S. Marines, will be extraordinary: setbacks
and perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures
reinforced to 2.5-times the standard, and five high-security
entrances, plus an emergency entrance-exit, the Senate report says.
Higgins said the work, under way on all parts of the project, is
more than one-third complete.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12319798/
© 2007 MSNBC.com