The looting of Iraq continues.It started from day one of the occupation of Baghdad,when the national museum was looted of its priceless antiquities dating back to the beginning of human time.The occupation coalition forces squat over sites thousands of years old and a systematic looting has been carried out with the connivance of international antique smugglers,benefiting rich western collectors.
America,a nation barely 200+ years old has through its actions in Iraq is actively helping destroy the remains of the cradle of civilisatioon civilisation several thousand of years old,to days before the "great flood",as the clay tablets of Mespot have shown,with tales of events right back to the arrival of the Annunaki from the heavens ,tens of thousands of years ago and the story of the creation of man.We are rapdily losing/have lost the undiscovered history of the human race.
Iraqi expert accuses West over antiquities trade
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 18775.html
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Robert Fisk: It is the death of history
US military death toll in Iraq hits 7-month high
By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
Thursday, 1 May 2008
A senior Iraqi official has accused the West of not doing enough to stop the thriving trade in antiquities smuggled out of the country's depleted archeological sites and sold in auction houses across Britain, America and Europe.
Dr Bahaa Mayah, a special adviser to Iraq's Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, called for an immediate global ban on the sale of at least 100,000 artefacts that have been stolen since the invasion.
Speaking at the British Museum, he said it was the responsibility of the occupying forces to retrieve the valuable artefacts that had been plundered from southern Iraq's archaeologically rich sites since 2003.
Iraqi ministers are to discuss "imminently" the proposal of a global ban with members of the United nations Security Council, he added. "This is a problem of illegal trade that should be of concern to the international community. We want to strip the commercial value of Iraqi antiquities.
"Our antiquities are scattered everywhere from America to Europe. This problem is not new but it has intensified since 2003 and is now becoming a bigger problem.
"Some countries have co-operated with Iraq but most have not in terms of returning seized items. America is co-operating and not co-operating at the same time. We were grateful when they returned the Statue of Entemena (from 2,430BC) but at the same time, you see auctioneers all over the country trading in our antiquities. No action is being taken," he said.
The aim of the ban would be to leave the plunder – some 5,000 years old and often of inestimable worth – virtually unsellable.
The smugglers are often Iraqis, although soldiers from occupying forces are also under investigation, yet it was demand in the West – America, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain – that was leading to a thriving trade in auction houses, he said.
In December, a 4,000-year-old inscribed clay tablet, which authorities suspect was smuggled from Iraq, was pulled from eBay's Swiss website minutes before the close of bidding.
Professor Elizabeth Stone, a specialist in southern Iraqi heritage at Stony Brook University in New York, said Iraq had been depleted of 15 per cent of its ancient artefacts. Ever since Baghdad's National Museum was ransacked in 2003, "entrepreneurs" had set up organised teams to plunder ancient grounds. She said neolithic sites had been heavily looted as had those which contained items from the first Mesopotamian Empire, about 2300BC. "It looks as if the looters know exactly what they are looking for," she said.
Six months ago, The Independent revealed the full extent of the devastation on archaeological sites in the south of the country, committed by organised smugglers and troops.
The black market trade route takes the smugglers to the Gulf and into Britain, where a legal loophole enables them to acquire an export licence from the "free zones" in ports. This licence earns them ownership of the stolen objects. Dr Mayah said it then falls upon the Iraqi government to prove these treasures – which have often lain buried for thousands of years – were from their home soil.
Iraq will be demanding compensation for the damage caused to ancient sites, including Babylon, Umma, Zabalam and Ur, by allied troops who have used these grounds as military bases.
Robert Fisk: It is the death of history
17 September 2007
2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.
Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein's regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.
In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared "one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.
"They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.
"Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection."
Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.
"There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What's new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.
"Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There's been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake."
Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament – and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham – it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.
Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later – in what has become known as "the age of the deluge" – Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders – the world's first cheques – the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.
US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this "beggars belief". In an analysis of the city, she says: "The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region."
Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: "The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006."
The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.
Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately – but vainly – tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent "the disaster we are all witnessing and observing".
In 2006, he says: "We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.
"Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq."
Last year, Dr Hamdani's antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would "dig" the archaeological site, dissolve the "old mud brick" to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.
Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: "His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are 'frozen projects', but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects."
Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested – with the help of Western troops – several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.
The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. "It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world," Ms Farchakh says.
The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq's historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.
The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists' report says: "They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting."
After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.
Ms Farchakh adds: "The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from."
A land with fields of ancient pottery
By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist
Iraq's rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the "cradle of civilisation" is nothing more than desert land with "fields" of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is "their land". Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been "forgotten" by all the governments, their "revenge" for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that's half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their "looting" activities to be part of a normal working day.
IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Selling the president's general
You simply can't pile up enough adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a relatively young age, was already a runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2007. His record is stellar. His tactical sense extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it comes to mounting a campaign, beyond compare.
I'm speaking, of course, of General David Petraeus, the President's surge commander in Iraq and, as of last week, the newly nominated head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) for all of the Middle East and beyond -- "King David" to those of his peers who haven't exactly taken a shine to his reportedly "high self-regard." And the campaign I have in mind has been his years' long wooing and winning of the American media, in the process of which he sold himself as a true American hero, a Caesar of celebrity.
As far as can be told, there's never been a seat in his helicopter that couldn't be filled by a friendly (or adoring) reporter. This, after all, is the man who, in the summer of 2004, as a mere three-star general being sent back to Baghdad to train the Iraqi army, made Newsweek's cover under the caption, "Can This Man Save Iraq?" (The article's subtitle -- with the "yes" practically etched into it -- read: "Mission Impossible? David Petraeus Is Tasked with Rebuilding Iraq's Security Forces. An Up-close Look at the Only Real Exit Plan the United States Has -- the Man Himself").
And, oh yes, as for his actual generalship on the battlefield of Iraq… Well, the verdict may still officially be out, but the record, the tactics, and the strategic ability look like they will not stand the test of time. But by then, if all goes well, he'll once again be out of town and someone else will take the blame, while he continues to fall upwards. David Petraeus is the President's anointed general, Bush's commander of commanders, and (not surprisingly) he exhibits certain traits much admired by the Bush administration in its better days.
Launching brand Petraeus
Recently, in an almost 8,000 word report in the New York Times, David Barstow offered an unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon campaign, spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75 retired generals and other high military officers, almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors, were recruited as "surrogates."
They were to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and messages") about the President's War on Terror and war in Iraq into every part of the media -- cable news, the television and radio networks, the major newspapers -- as their own expert "opinions."
These "analysts" made "tens of thousands of media appearances" and also wrote copiously for op-ed pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert propaganda onslaught on the American people that lasted from 2002 until, essentially, late last night. Think of it, like a pod of whales or a gaggle of geese, as the Pentagon's equivalent of a surge of generals.
In that impressive Times report, however, one sentence has so far passed unnoticed; yet, it speaks the world of General Petraeus, and of how this administration and its chosen sons have played their cards from the moment George W. Bush mounted a pile of rubble on September 14, 2001, at Ground Zero in New York City and began to sell his incipient War on Terror (and himself as commander-in-chief). From that day on, the propaganda campaign, the selling war, on the American "home front" has never stopped.
Here, in that context, is Barstow's key sentence: "When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the [Pentagon's retired military] analysts." In other words, on becoming U.S. commander in Iraq, he automatically turned to the military propaganda machine the Pentagon had set up to launch his initial surge -- on the home front.
Think of the train of events this way: In January 2007, pummeled in the opinion polls, his Iraq policy in shambles and the Republican Party in electoral disarray, George W. Bush and his advisors decided to launch a last-minute home-front campaign to buy time on Iraq.
It was, the President declared in an address to the American people, his "new way forward in Iraq." In Vietnam-era terms, the plan itself involved a relatively modest "escalation" of 30,000 troops, largely into the Baghdad area -- that being all the troops the overstretched U.S. military then had available.
It gained, however, the resounding nickname, "the surge." (That word, strangely enough, had essentially been pilfered from the heart of "insurgent," a term previously used to designate the enemy.)
By then, of course, the President himself was a thoroughly tarnished brand, not exactly the sort of face with which to launch 1,000 ships or even 30,000 troops into a self-made hell against the urgent wishes of the American people.
Instead, he pushed forward his all-American general -- the smart, bemedaled, well-spoken, Princeton PhD and counterinsurgency guru, beloved by reporters whom he had romanced for years, and already treated like a demi-god by members of both parties in both houses of Congress.
He became the "face" of the administration (just as American military and civilian officials had long spoken of putting an "Iraqi face" on the American occupation of that country). In the ensuing months, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed out, the surging Brand Petraeus campaign only gained traction as the President publicly cited the general more than 150 times, 53 times in May 2007 alone. Never has a President put on the "face" of a general more regularly.
Now, let's return to that single sentence from Barstow. Having been put forward by Bush as his favorite general and the savior of his Iraq policies, Petraeus seems to have promptly turned to the Pentagon's favored military "analysts" for a hand.
The general's initial surge, that is, was right here at home via those figures the Pentagon had embedded in the media and liked to refer to as its "message force multipliers."
Let's keep in mind that one of those figures, retired Army general Jack Keane, a "patron" to Petraeus during his rise in the ranks, was, along with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, an "author" of, and key propagandist for, the surge strategy, as well as the head of his own consulting firm, on the board of General Dynamics, and a national security analyst for ABC News.
So, in case you were wondering why the hosannas to Petraeus nearly reached the heavens and why the "success" of the surge was established so quickly in this country (despite four years of promises followed by disaster that might have called for media caution), look first to those surging retired generals and to the general who had already established himself as a military brand name.
And let's keep in mind that the Times' Barstow has pulled back the curtain on but one administration program of deception. It is unlikely to have been the only one.
We don't yet fully know the full range of sources the Pentagon and this administration mustered in the service of its surge.
We don't know what sort of administration planning has gone into the drumbeat of well-orchestrated, ever more intense claims that Iran is the source of all our ills in Iraq, and directly responsible for a striking percentage of U.S. military deaths there.
Recently, according to the New York Times, "senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special groups'" (a euphemism for Iranian-trained groups of Shia militiamen).
(Watch video: Where does the Bush-Petraeus strategy lead? (Part 3))
We don't have a full accounting of the many carefully guided tours of Iraq given to inside-the-Beltway think-tank figures like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, former military figures, journalists, pundits, and congressional representatives, all involving special meet-and-greet contacts with Petraeus and his top commanders, all leading to upbeat assessments of the surge.
We don't have the logs of our surge commander's visitors these last months, but we know, anecdotally at least, that, during this period, no reporter, no matter how minor, seemed incapable of securing a little get-together time to experience the general's special charm.
Put everything we do know, and enough that we suspect, together and you get our last surge year-plus in the U.S. as a selling/propaganda campaign par excellence.
The result has been a mix of media good news about "surge success," especially in "lowering violence," and no news at all as the Iraq story grew boringly humdrum and simply fell off the front pages of our papers and out of the TV news (as well as out of the Democratic Congress).
This was, of course, a public relations bonanza for an administration that might otherwise have appeared fatally wounded. Think, in the president's terminology, of victory -- not over insurgents in Iraq, but, once again, over the media here at home.
None of this should surprise anyone. The greatest skill of the Bush administration has always been its ability to market itself on "the home front." From September 14, 2001 on, through all those early "mission accomplished" years, it was on the home front, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, that administration officials worked hardest, pacifying the media, rolling out their own "products," and establishing the rep of their leader and "wartime" Commander-in-Chief.
As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained candidly enough to the New York Times, when it came to the launching, in September 2002, of a campaign to convince Congress and the public that an invasion of Iraq should be approved: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Falling upwards
As a general and a personality, Petraeus fits the particular marketing mentality of this administration perfectly. Graduating from West Point too late for Vietnam -- he wrote his doctoral thesis on that war -- he had, before the President's invasion, taken part only in "peacekeeping" operations in places like Haiti.
In March 2003, a two-star general, he crossed the Kuwaiti border as commander of the 101st Airborne Division. After Baghdad fell, his troops occupied Mosul, a relative quiet city to the north, largely untouched by invasion or war. There, he gained a reputation (at least in the U.S.) for having a special affinity for Iraqis and for applying top-notch, outreach-oriented counterinsurgency tactics.
In those early months, he always seemed to have a writer in tow. In 2004-2005, for his next tour of duty -- already with the ear of the President and of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- he returned to Iraq as the Newsweek Can-He-Save-It guy. His giant task was to "stand up" Iraqi security forces.
Again, he had writers in tow. The Washington Post's columnist David Ignatius, for instance, twice paid extended visits to the general during that tour, returning from helicoptering around the Iraqi countryside all aglow and writing glowingly of the job Petraeus was doing (as he would again over the years, as so many other journalists and commentators would, too).
The general himself wasn't exactly shy on the subject of his accomplishments. He wrote, for instance, a strategically well-placed op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2004, just as the administration was rolling out another "product," the President's run for a second term. In it, with just enough caveats to cover himself professionally, he waxed positive about the glories of Iraqi soldiers standing up.
It was a piece filled with words like "progress" and "optimism," just the sort of thing a President trying to outrun a bunch of Iraqi insurgents to the November 4th finish line might like to see in print in his hometown paper. The general picked up his third star on this tour of duty.
Next came a stint at home where he oversaw the rewriting of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, while touting himself as the expert of experts on that subject, too. And then, of course, in February 2007, a fourth star in hand, he took charge of the U.S. command in Iraq for its surge moment.
Last week, of course, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed him head of the Pentagon's Central Command with responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for our proxy war in Somalia. His duties will soon stretch from North Africa into Central Asia.
The appointment, however, came after the fact. By then, as George W. Bush's personal general, he had already left the actual Centcom commander, Adm. William "Fox" Fallon in the dust. The President dealt with him directly, bypassing the Centcom commander; and, even before Fallon's ignominious resignation, Petraeus was already traveling the Middle East as, essentially, the President's personal representative, engaging in acts normally reserved for the head of Centcom.
(Watch video: More on Admiral Fallon's resignation)
President's appointment was seconded by Presidential candidate John McCain ("I think he is by far the best-qualified individual to take that job…"), signaling the degree to which the Bush administration is now preparing optimistically for McCain's war (or, alternatively, for Obama's hell).
But here's the strange thing when you look more carefully at Petraeus's record (as others have indeed done over these last years), the actual results -- in Iraq, not Washington -- for each of his previous assignments proved dismal. What the record shows is a man who, after each tour of duty, seemed to manage to make it out of town just ahead of the posse, so that someone else always took the fall.
On his time in Mosul, former ambassador Peter Galbraith offered this description:
"As the American commander in Mosul in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press coverage… for taming the Sunni-majority city. Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local government and police. A few months after he left the city, the Petraeus-appointed local police commander defected to the insurgency while the Sunni Arab police handed their weapons and uniforms over en masse to the insurgents."
Mosul has remained a hotspot of insurgency ever since. On his next tour, when it came to all the "progress" training the Iraqi army, let Rod Nordland, the author of that "fawning" -- his retrospective adjective, not mine -- Newsweek cover piece of 2004, suggest an obituary, as he did in 2007:
"[Petraeus] rose to fame not by his achievements but by his success in selling them as achievements. He's first of all a great communicator… Training the Iraqi military and shifting responsibility to them was the mantra Petraeus sold to hundreds of credulous reporters and hundreds of even more credulous visiting CODELs (congressional delegations)…
"By the time he left, the training program was clearly on its way to spectacular failure. By the end of last year that had become received wisdom; it became convenient for the brass to blame the fiasco on the politically less popular and media-friendless Gen. George Casey,
"Entire brigades of police had to be pulled off the street and retrained because they were evidently riddled with death squads and in some cases even with insurgents. The Iraqi Army was all but useless, a feeble patient kept on life support by the American military."
Just recently, in hearings before Congress, Petraeus himself introduced two new words to describe the post-surge security situation in Iraq: "fragile and reversible." Take that as a tip for the future. Fragile indeed.
The surge landscape the general helped create has, from the beginning, been flammable and unstable in the extreme. It has, in recent weeks, been threatening to break down in Shia civil strife, even as, under an American aegis, the Sunnis have been rearming and reorganizing for the day when they can take back a Baghdad that was largely cleansed of their ethnic compatriots during the surge months.
Americans are once again dying in increasing numbers (though little attention has yet been paid to this in the media), as are Iraqis. It will be a miracle if post-surge Iraq doesn't come apart before November 4, 2008, not to say the end of George Bush's term in January.
The problem is: Putting a face -- that is, a mask -- on something has nothing to do with changing it in any essential way, no matter how you brand it and no matter who's listening to you elsewhere.
This August or September, when the general takes over at Centcom, he will leave behind (as he has before) the equivalent of an IED-mined stretch of Iraqi roadside ready to explode, possibly under the coming U.S. presidential election. It remains to be seen whether he will once again have made it out of town in the nick of time and relatively unscathed.
The miracle, of course, was that, so late in the game, the American media swallowed the President's (and the general's) propaganda on the surge campaign which, on the face of it, was ludicrous.
Stranger still, they did so for almost a year before the situation started to fray visibly enough for our TV networks and major papers to take notice. For that year, most of them thought they saw a brass band playing fabulously when there was hardly a snare drum in sight.
That result may be a public-relations man's dream, but it was thanks to a con man's art. The question is: Can the President make it back to Texas before the bottom falls out in Iraq? And will the general continue to fall ominously upward?
The heat is on Muqtada
US is playing favourites among Shia factions .US wants to be sole decider in which faction becomes the gatekeeper of Southern Iraq ie Basra / crude oil export line .
Northern Iraq is & will be allowed by Anglo-American alliance to be a quasi independent state under Kurds to provide another route for oil flow i not in control of Shias both politically & demographically.
If i am not wrong , Northern Iraq seems to be the only gateway where gatekeeper isnt Shia .So its signifance goes much more beyond creating trouble in Iran & Syria ( all secondary issues ).
All this give Turks more reason to try and bring Northern Iraq under its sphere of influence fully if not de-facto control whereby Turks will enjoy a leverage over both Anglo-American & Franco-German alliances ( in addition to route for crude oil & natural gas flowing from Russia ).Where else can these two alliances find a route for oil export that is not in hands of Shias 'safely'.
Turks seems to be unique position to gain most in both short & medium term unlike any other power .
US is playing favourites among Shia factions .US wants to be sole decider in which faction becomes the gatekeeper of Southern Iraq ie Basra / crude oil export line .
Northern Iraq is & will be allowed by Anglo-American alliance to be a quasi independent state under Kurds to provide another route for oil flow i not in control of Shias both politically & demographically.
If i am not wrong , Northern Iraq seems to be the only gateway where gatekeeper isnt Shia .So its signifance goes much more beyond creating trouble in Iran & Syria ( all secondary issues ).
All this give Turks more reason to try and bring Northern Iraq under its sphere of influence fully if not de-facto control whereby Turks will enjoy a leverage over both Anglo-American & Franco-German alliances ( in addition to route for crude oil & natural gas flowing from Russia ).Where else can these two alliances find a route for oil export that is not in hands of Shias 'safely'.
Turks seems to be unique position to gain most in both short & medium term unlike any other power .
op US commando says strain of war limits forces elsewhere
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080505/ap_ ... e_warriors
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer 1 hour, 1 minute ago
WASHINGTON - The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are making such heavy use of the nation's Green Berets and other elite warriors that they cannot fulfill their roles in other parts of the world, the military's top commando told The Associated Press on Monday.
"We're going to fewer countries, staying for shorter periods of time, with smaller numbers of people than historically we have done," Adm. Eric T. Olson said in his first interview since becoming commander of U.S. Special Operations Command last July.
Olson, himself a combat veteran, saw little chance that the demand for his special operations forces in Iraq will decline anytime soon. Even as the overall American force there shrinks — from about 158,000 now to about 140,000 by the end of July — the number of special operations forces in the war zone is likely to increase, he said.
Use and abuse,the tragic story of Iraq and its disgusting occupiers continues.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 890121.ece
Iraqis allege sex abuse at the British Embassy
Deborah Haynes in Baghdad and Sonia Verma in Dubai
An Iraqi cleaner and two cooks claim that a culture of sexual harrassment, abuse and bullying exists at the British Embassy in Baghdad.
The middle-aged cleaner told The Times that a British contractor with KBR, the company hired to maintain the embassy’s premises, offered to double her daily pay if she would stay the night with him. When she refused, she said, her pay was cut and she was later dismissed.
The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.
The complainants – the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen – say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.
Legal loophole is leaving police powerless
Scandal in Baghdad
The British Embassy heard the complaints initially but left KBR to investigate; a KBR report found that there was no case to answer.
The three Iraqis lost their jobs at the embassy, in the Green Zone. They spoke to The Times in the hope that the Foreign Office would conduct an independent inquiry.
The allegations, outlined in testimonies taken by embassy officials last June and obtained by this newspaper, describe a culture of sexual harassment. The cleaner said that on one occasion her manager “threw many $100 notes on the desk and said, ‘take whatever you want and stay overnight and I will pay you double [your daily pay]’. â€
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 890121.ece
Iraqis allege sex abuse at the British Embassy
Deborah Haynes in Baghdad and Sonia Verma in Dubai
An Iraqi cleaner and two cooks claim that a culture of sexual harrassment, abuse and bullying exists at the British Embassy in Baghdad.
The middle-aged cleaner told The Times that a British contractor with KBR, the company hired to maintain the embassy’s premises, offered to double her daily pay if she would stay the night with him. When she refused, she said, her pay was cut and she was later dismissed.
The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.
The complainants – the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen – say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.
Legal loophole is leaving police powerless
Scandal in Baghdad
The British Embassy heard the complaints initially but left KBR to investigate; a KBR report found that there was no case to answer.
The three Iraqis lost their jobs at the embassy, in the Green Zone. They spoke to The Times in the hope that the Foreign Office would conduct an independent inquiry.
The allegations, outlined in testimonies taken by embassy officials last June and obtained by this newspaper, describe a culture of sexual harassment. The cleaner said that on one occasion her manager “threw many $100 notes on the desk and said, ‘take whatever you want and stay overnight and I will pay you double [your daily pay]’. â€
US chasing ghosts!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 26264.html
'Ghost city' Mosul braces for assault on last bastion of al-Qa'ida in Iraq
MUJAHID MOHAMMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Iraqi forces roll into the streets of Mosul on Saturday for their latest offensive against insurgents
Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al- Qa'ida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country's northern capital into a ghost town.
Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead yesterday by US troops, who issued a statement saying the men were armed and one made "threatening movements".
Mosul, on the Tigris river, is inhabited by 1.4 million people, but has been sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al-Qa'ida began at 4am on Saturday. The operation is a critical part of an attempt to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.
The besieged city is now difficult to reach; we began the journey from the Kurdish capital Arbil in a convoy of white pick-up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some wearing black face masks, that were escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the city.
Soon after crossing the long bridge over the Zaab river and leaving territory officially controlled by the Kurds, we saw lines of trucks and cars being stopped by police. Their drivers presumably had not heard of the curfew. At the Christian village of Bartilla we exchanged our pick-ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with windows a few inches across of bulletproof glass.
I had been to Mosul down this road half a dozen times since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and on each occasion the military escort necessary to reach the city safely has grown bigger. Squinting through the small glass portholes it was clear that local people were taking the curfew seriously. Even the miserable cafes used by the truck drivers, and which I had imagined never closed their doors, had pulled down their metal shutters.
In eastern Mosul the streets are usually bustling and stalls spill on to the road near the tomb of the prophet Jonah, who died here some time after his alarming experience with the whale. Most of the people living in this part of the city are Kurds, who support the central government against al-Qa'ida. Yet, here too every shop was shut and there were police and soldiers at checkpoints every 50 yards. An extra brigade had been sent from Baghdad for the offensive along with special security troops to reinforce the 2nd and 3rd divisions.
Outside the police headquarters, the black vehicles of the Interior Ministry, each with a heavy machine gun and a yellow head of a tiger as an insignia on the doors, were drawn up in rows. American helicopters flew high overhead as well as drones for reconnaissance. There was the occasional burst of firing and bomb blast in the distance. The governor of Mosul, Dunaid Kashmoula, says the city "has come to be dominated by the leaders of al-Qa'ida as a result of the delay in the military operation" originally scheduled for earlier this year.
Nevertheless, the insurgents in Mosul have never held whole quarters of the city and there was no street fighting.
The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki promised this offensive on Mosul as the last battle against al-Qa'ida. He promised revenge for the assassination of the previous police commander for the city who had been assassinated by an al-Qa'ida suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform.
These are critical days for Mr Maliki's government. Since 25 March he has launched military offensives in Basra and Baghdad. He is receiving support from the Americans and the Kurds. But it is not clear if the Iraqi army will fight without the backing of US firepower in the air or on the ground. On Saturday a ceasefire was agreed with the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City giving the government greater control. But, as in Mosul, it is not clear how far the government's opponents have simply retreated to fight another day.
There is no doubt that security in Mosul has been deteriorating over the last six months. Mr Goran, who in effect runs the city, said that 90 people were killed in Mosul last September compared to 213 dead this March, including 58 soldiers and policemen. The number of roadside bombs had risen from 175 to 269 over the same period.
The official theory for this is that al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has only a limited connection with Osama bin Laden and is largely home grown, has been driven out of its bastions in Anbar and Diyala provinces and Sunni districts of Baghdad. It has retreated to Mosul, the largest Sunni Arab city and the third largest in Iraq.
This is probably over-simple. Attacks on US troops in Anbar province have restarted and in Sunni districts of west Baghdad al-Qa'ida appears to be lying low rather than being eliminated. In many cases in Baghdad al-Sahwa, the supposedly anti-al-Qa'ida awakening councils paid by the Americans, in practice have cosy arrangements with al-Qa'ida.
I had decided to go to Mosul – arriving in the first hours of the government offensive – because of what proved to be a false report that the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had been captured in the city. Later Iraqi security officers said they captured many "Emirs", al-Qa'ida cell leaders, and targeted hundreds of suspected houses.
I was in Mosul on the day it was surrendered by Saddam Hussein's forces in 2003. Scenes of joy were succeeded within the space of a few hours by looting and gun battles between Arabs and Kurds. Five years later Mosul, one of the great cities of the world, looks ruinous and under siege. Every alley way is blocked by barricades and the only new building is in the form of concrete blast walls. The fact that the government has to empty the streets of Mosul of its people to establish peace for a few days shows how far the city is from genuine peace.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 26264.html
'Ghost city' Mosul braces for assault on last bastion of al-Qa'ida in Iraq
MUJAHID MOHAMMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Iraqi forces roll into the streets of Mosul on Saturday for their latest offensive against insurgents
Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al- Qa'ida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country's northern capital into a ghost town.
Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead yesterday by US troops, who issued a statement saying the men were armed and one made "threatening movements".
Mosul, on the Tigris river, is inhabited by 1.4 million people, but has been sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al-Qa'ida began at 4am on Saturday. The operation is a critical part of an attempt to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.
The besieged city is now difficult to reach; we began the journey from the Kurdish capital Arbil in a convoy of white pick-up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some wearing black face masks, that were escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the city.
Soon after crossing the long bridge over the Zaab river and leaving territory officially controlled by the Kurds, we saw lines of trucks and cars being stopped by police. Their drivers presumably had not heard of the curfew. At the Christian village of Bartilla we exchanged our pick-ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with windows a few inches across of bulletproof glass.
I had been to Mosul down this road half a dozen times since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and on each occasion the military escort necessary to reach the city safely has grown bigger. Squinting through the small glass portholes it was clear that local people were taking the curfew seriously. Even the miserable cafes used by the truck drivers, and which I had imagined never closed their doors, had pulled down their metal shutters.
In eastern Mosul the streets are usually bustling and stalls spill on to the road near the tomb of the prophet Jonah, who died here some time after his alarming experience with the whale. Most of the people living in this part of the city are Kurds, who support the central government against al-Qa'ida. Yet, here too every shop was shut and there were police and soldiers at checkpoints every 50 yards. An extra brigade had been sent from Baghdad for the offensive along with special security troops to reinforce the 2nd and 3rd divisions.
Outside the police headquarters, the black vehicles of the Interior Ministry, each with a heavy machine gun and a yellow head of a tiger as an insignia on the doors, were drawn up in rows. American helicopters flew high overhead as well as drones for reconnaissance. There was the occasional burst of firing and bomb blast in the distance. The governor of Mosul, Dunaid Kashmoula, says the city "has come to be dominated by the leaders of al-Qa'ida as a result of the delay in the military operation" originally scheduled for earlier this year.
Nevertheless, the insurgents in Mosul have never held whole quarters of the city and there was no street fighting.
The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki promised this offensive on Mosul as the last battle against al-Qa'ida. He promised revenge for the assassination of the previous police commander for the city who had been assassinated by an al-Qa'ida suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform.
These are critical days for Mr Maliki's government. Since 25 March he has launched military offensives in Basra and Baghdad. He is receiving support from the Americans and the Kurds. But it is not clear if the Iraqi army will fight without the backing of US firepower in the air or on the ground. On Saturday a ceasefire was agreed with the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City giving the government greater control. But, as in Mosul, it is not clear how far the government's opponents have simply retreated to fight another day.
There is no doubt that security in Mosul has been deteriorating over the last six months. Mr Goran, who in effect runs the city, said that 90 people were killed in Mosul last September compared to 213 dead this March, including 58 soldiers and policemen. The number of roadside bombs had risen from 175 to 269 over the same period.
The official theory for this is that al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has only a limited connection with Osama bin Laden and is largely home grown, has been driven out of its bastions in Anbar and Diyala provinces and Sunni districts of Baghdad. It has retreated to Mosul, the largest Sunni Arab city and the third largest in Iraq.
This is probably over-simple. Attacks on US troops in Anbar province have restarted and in Sunni districts of west Baghdad al-Qa'ida appears to be lying low rather than being eliminated. In many cases in Baghdad al-Sahwa, the supposedly anti-al-Qa'ida awakening councils paid by the Americans, in practice have cosy arrangements with al-Qa'ida.
I had decided to go to Mosul – arriving in the first hours of the government offensive – because of what proved to be a false report that the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had been captured in the city. Later Iraqi security officers said they captured many "Emirs", al-Qa'ida cell leaders, and targeted hundreds of suspected houses.
I was in Mosul on the day it was surrendered by Saddam Hussein's forces in 2003. Scenes of joy were succeeded within the space of a few hours by looting and gun battles between Arabs and Kurds. Five years later Mosul, one of the great cities of the world, looks ruinous and under siege. Every alley way is blocked by barricades and the only new building is in the form of concrete blast walls. The fact that the government has to empty the streets of Mosul of its people to establish peace for a few days shows how far the city is from genuine peace.
How low can an Islamic society go? This is not one crazy mentally sick criminal, this is a religious ideology guiding people to rape and murder. Religion of peace!
I killed her with a machine gun
I killed her with a machine gun
"How many girls did you kill and rape?" the soldier asks.
"I raped one, sir," the man responds.
"What was her name?"
"Ahlam," he says.
Ahlam was a university student in the predominantly Shiite city of Basra. The detainee said the gang he was in kidnapped her as she was leaving the university, heading home.
"They forced me, and I killed her with a machine gun, sir," he says.
CNN was shown what authorities say was his first confession. On it are the names of 15 girls whom he admitted kidnapping, raping and killing. The youngest girl on the list was just 9 years old.
For four years after the invasion, Basra was under the control of British forces, but they were unable to contain the violence and withdrew in September last year.
Women bore the brunt of the militias' extremist ideologies. The militants spray-painted threats on walls across Basra, warning women to wear headscarves and not to wear make-up. Women were sometimes executed for the vague charge of doing something "un-Islamic."
yeah, AllahoAkbar I guess.Inside her rundown home, Sabriya's watery eyes peer out from under her robe. She points to the first photo of one of her sons on the wall.
"This one was killed because he was drinking," she says.
She draws her finger across her neck and gestures at the next photo.
"This one was slaughtered for his car."
"This one the same," she adds, looking at the third.
Her three sons, her daughter and her sister were all killed by the hard-line militia. Her sister was slaughtered because she was a single woman living alone, Sabriya says.
"They came in at night and put a pillow on her face and shot her in the head," she says.
Iraq under Saddam's dictatorship was an infinitely better place than it is now,even with Saddam's regime's brutatlity.There was a modicum of order and discipline.If you didn't plot against the state/Saddam,you lived quite well.The US led invasion has taken the evil to another level that possibly is difficult to surpass.Nothing more describes the sadistic nature of the US forces and their inhumanity than the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Camp Gitmo.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... aib130.xml
Abu Ghraib: The dark side of democracy
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 30/05/2008
Two American documentary-makers have trained their sights on the abuses that took place in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. They tell Sheila Johnston what they found
They were the photographs that shocked the world: the inmates of Abu Ghraib, taunted and tormented by gloating US soldiers. The images have been endlessly analysed and you might think that there is nothing new to say about them.
A scene from Taxi to the Dark Side
But now two of the biggest guns in American documentary cinema have trained their sights on Abu Ghraib. And the affair is clearly far from over.
The first of these two films, Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, is a shaming exposé of the case of a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver wrongly arrested as a terrorist. He died in custody soon afterwards with terrible injuries: the official army coroner's report listed the cause of death as "homicide".
The film then fans out to explore, in the most wide-ranging terms, how a nation was persuaded to "work through the dark side", in the sinister phrase of Vice President Dick Cheney, and accept the necessity for torture.
It was inspired by Gibney's father, a Navy interrogator in Japan during the Second World War who never dreamed of such techniques. "He felt so angry that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld - whom he knew slightly - had betrayed the things he thought he was fighting for," says Gibney, who won this year's Oscar for best documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side, and was nominated for another study of corruption, The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the Enron scandal.
advertisementLike Taxi to the Dark Side, Standard Operating Procedure traces "our descent into evil, seen through the eyes of a group of men and women in the middle of a world gone mad", in the words of its director, Errol Morris.
His starting point and almost obsessional focus is the photographs themselves: how they were misleading, indeed mendacious, yet reassured the public that they knew the full facts.
"A photograph can be both an exposé and a cover-up," says Morris, who boasts an Oscar of his own, for The Fog of War, a revealing portrait of the former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara.
Rejecting the "bad apple" theory, that the culprits were a handful of degenerates, both directors argue that the abuses were condoned, encouraged, even ordered, at the highest levels.
So, was it difficult to obtain the co-operation of the low-ranking soldiers who ended up taking the rap while their superiors emerged untarnished?
"They found it difficult, but there was also a need to talk," says Morris, who has been attacked for paying some of his interviewees. "You can feel them wrestling with an incredible anger."
Perhaps his most unsettling witness is Lynndie England, who appeared in notorious photographs - holding an Iraqi man on a leash, for example - and received a three-year prison sentence.
"She has been made a demon, but I think of her as this character out of a novel by Theodore Dreiser. There's a kind of grimness and abject resignation in her. When she says she would do it all again because she has Carter [her son by fellow guard Charles Graner] - I find that so naked and raw and sad."
For all the films' accolades, the American public remains steadfastly resistant both to political documentaries, and to anything, fictional or otherwise, to do with Iraq.
"On a Friday night, who wants to take their date to see a film about torture?" Gibney asks ruefully. "But these films are having a powerful, slow-burning effect on people who do see them. DVDs of Taxi have been passed around to high-ranking army officers and it is now being taught at the JAG school [the Judge Advocate General's school for military lawyers]."
As Amnesty's annual report pointed out this week, torture is still used in at least 81 countries and, Gibney insists, "Taxi is about the corruption of the American character, but every nation has the capacity to go there. Terror is not going to go away. The question is: how are liberal democratic societies going to cope with it?"
Morris was equally struck by the wide-rippling ramifications of Abu Ghraib. "It was like lifting a rock and finding this whole world," he says. "They arrested and held children to extract information from their parents. There was constant bombardment, nearly every day. Close to 10,000 inmates lived in tent cities with contaminated food. The list goes on and on and on."
His voice rises in agitation. "They destroyed as much evidence as they could lay their hands on. The attempts to cover up this story is an amazing story in itself."
Morris has just published a book with more of his discoveries, and he adds, in a tone which certain members of the great and the good should find ominous, "I might be working on this for quite a while."
'Taxi to the Dark Side' opens on June 13. Errol Morris will present 'Standard Operating Procedure' at the Edinburgh Film Festival on June 21 and 22; it opens on July 18. 'Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story' by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris has just been published by Picador.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... aib130.xml
Abu Ghraib: The dark side of democracy
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 30/05/2008
Two American documentary-makers have trained their sights on the abuses that took place in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. They tell Sheila Johnston what they found
They were the photographs that shocked the world: the inmates of Abu Ghraib, taunted and tormented by gloating US soldiers. The images have been endlessly analysed and you might think that there is nothing new to say about them.
A scene from Taxi to the Dark Side
But now two of the biggest guns in American documentary cinema have trained their sights on Abu Ghraib. And the affair is clearly far from over.
The first of these two films, Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, is a shaming exposé of the case of a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver wrongly arrested as a terrorist. He died in custody soon afterwards with terrible injuries: the official army coroner's report listed the cause of death as "homicide".
The film then fans out to explore, in the most wide-ranging terms, how a nation was persuaded to "work through the dark side", in the sinister phrase of Vice President Dick Cheney, and accept the necessity for torture.
It was inspired by Gibney's father, a Navy interrogator in Japan during the Second World War who never dreamed of such techniques. "He felt so angry that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld - whom he knew slightly - had betrayed the things he thought he was fighting for," says Gibney, who won this year's Oscar for best documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side, and was nominated for another study of corruption, The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the Enron scandal.
advertisementLike Taxi to the Dark Side, Standard Operating Procedure traces "our descent into evil, seen through the eyes of a group of men and women in the middle of a world gone mad", in the words of its director, Errol Morris.
His starting point and almost obsessional focus is the photographs themselves: how they were misleading, indeed mendacious, yet reassured the public that they knew the full facts.
"A photograph can be both an exposé and a cover-up," says Morris, who boasts an Oscar of his own, for The Fog of War, a revealing portrait of the former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara.
Rejecting the "bad apple" theory, that the culprits were a handful of degenerates, both directors argue that the abuses were condoned, encouraged, even ordered, at the highest levels.
So, was it difficult to obtain the co-operation of the low-ranking soldiers who ended up taking the rap while their superiors emerged untarnished?
"They found it difficult, but there was also a need to talk," says Morris, who has been attacked for paying some of his interviewees. "You can feel them wrestling with an incredible anger."
Perhaps his most unsettling witness is Lynndie England, who appeared in notorious photographs - holding an Iraqi man on a leash, for example - and received a three-year prison sentence.
"She has been made a demon, but I think of her as this character out of a novel by Theodore Dreiser. There's a kind of grimness and abject resignation in her. When she says she would do it all again because she has Carter [her son by fellow guard Charles Graner] - I find that so naked and raw and sad."
For all the films' accolades, the American public remains steadfastly resistant both to political documentaries, and to anything, fictional or otherwise, to do with Iraq.
"On a Friday night, who wants to take their date to see a film about torture?" Gibney asks ruefully. "But these films are having a powerful, slow-burning effect on people who do see them. DVDs of Taxi have been passed around to high-ranking army officers and it is now being taught at the JAG school [the Judge Advocate General's school for military lawyers]."
As Amnesty's annual report pointed out this week, torture is still used in at least 81 countries and, Gibney insists, "Taxi is about the corruption of the American character, but every nation has the capacity to go there. Terror is not going to go away. The question is: how are liberal democratic societies going to cope with it?"
Morris was equally struck by the wide-rippling ramifications of Abu Ghraib. "It was like lifting a rock and finding this whole world," he says. "They arrested and held children to extract information from their parents. There was constant bombardment, nearly every day. Close to 10,000 inmates lived in tent cities with contaminated food. The list goes on and on and on."
His voice rises in agitation. "They destroyed as much evidence as they could lay their hands on. The attempts to cover up this story is an amazing story in itself."
Morris has just published a book with more of his discoveries, and he adds, in a tone which certain members of the great and the good should find ominous, "I might be working on this for quite a while."
'Taxi to the Dark Side' opens on June 13. Errol Morris will present 'Standard Operating Procedure' at the Edinburgh Film Festival on June 21 and 22; it opens on July 18. 'Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story' by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris has just been published by Picador.
U.S. Soldiers Launch Campaign to Convert Iraqis to Christianity
Some U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq appear to have launched a major initiative to convert thousands of Iraqi citizens to Christianity by distributing Bibles and other fundamentalist Christian literature translated into Arabic to Iraqi Muslims.
A recent article published on the website of Mission Network News reported that Bible Pathway Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian organization, has provided thousands of a special military edition of its Daily Devotional Bible study book to members of the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, currently stationed in Iraq, the project "came into being when a chaplain in Iraq (who has since finished his tour) requested some books from Bible Pathway Ministries (BPM)."
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the government watchdog agency The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), said the religious intolerance among U.S. military personnel calls for a federal investigation.
"The shocking actions revealed just last week of American soldiers in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan callously using the Koran for automatic weapons "target practice" is absolutely connected to the same issues of national security breach wrought by our United States armed forces proselytizing the local populations via the distribution to them of fundamentalist Christian coins, bibles, tracts, comics and related religious materials written in Arabic," Weistein said
However, reports on the Bible Pathway Ministries website up to 30,000 of the Christian books have been distributed to military personnel, some of which will presumably end up in the hands of Iraqis.
The new Saddam! Bush's seecret plan for the "annexation" of Iraq.The US's neo-imperialistic dreams have been revealed in full with this expose.It also reinforces the suspicion that the Iraq invasion was nothing about Saddam or his WMDs but a conquest of Iraq for its oil wealth.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 40512.html
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Ali Allawi: This raises huge questions over our independence
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.
America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.
The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.
Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.
The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.
Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.
The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.
The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.
The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 40512.html
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Ali Allawi: This raises huge questions over our independence
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.
America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.
The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.
Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.
The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.
Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.
The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.
The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.
The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.
US blackmail of Iraq.Plan by the US to "annex" Iraq.
US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal
By Patrick Cockburn
Friday, 6 June 2008
Under the planned pact, reported in The Independent yesterday, US soldiers in Iraq will enjoy legal immunity
The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.
US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.
Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.
The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.
Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government. American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.
The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge.
The US has security agreements with many countries, but none are occupied by 151,000 US soldiers as is Iraq. The US is not even willing to tell the government in Baghdad what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq, apparently because it fears the government will inform the Iranians, said an Iraqi source.
The fact that Iraq's financial reserves, increasing rapidly because of the high price of oil, continue to be held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is another legacy of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein. Under the UN mandate, oil revenues must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq which is in the bank.
The funds are under the control of the Iraqi government, though the US Treasury has strong influence on the form in which the reserves are held.
Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.
Iraqi officials say the consequence of the American action was to lose Iraq the equivalent of $5bn. Given intense American pressure on a weak Iraqi government very dependent on US support, it is still probable that the agreement will go through with only cosmetic changes. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the immensely influential Shia cleric, could prevent the pact by issuing a fatwa against it but has so far failed to do so.
The Grand Ayatollah met Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which is the main supporter of the Iraqi government, earlier this week and did not condemn the agreement or call for a referendum. He said, according to Mr Hakim, that it must guarantee Iraqi national sovereignty, be transparent, command a national consensus and be approved by the Iraqi parliament. Critics of the deal fear that the government will sign the agreement, and parliament approve it, in return for marginal concessions.
US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal
By Patrick Cockburn
Friday, 6 June 2008
Under the planned pact, reported in The Independent yesterday, US soldiers in Iraq will enjoy legal immunity
The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.
US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.
Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.
The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.
Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government. American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.
The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge.
The US has security agreements with many countries, but none are occupied by 151,000 US soldiers as is Iraq. The US is not even willing to tell the government in Baghdad what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq, apparently because it fears the government will inform the Iranians, said an Iraqi source.
The fact that Iraq's financial reserves, increasing rapidly because of the high price of oil, continue to be held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is another legacy of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein. Under the UN mandate, oil revenues must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq which is in the bank.
The funds are under the control of the Iraqi government, though the US Treasury has strong influence on the form in which the reserves are held.
Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.
Iraqi officials say the consequence of the American action was to lose Iraq the equivalent of $5bn. Given intense American pressure on a weak Iraqi government very dependent on US support, it is still probable that the agreement will go through with only cosmetic changes. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the immensely influential Shia cleric, could prevent the pact by issuing a fatwa against it but has so far failed to do so.
The Grand Ayatollah met Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which is the main supporter of the Iraqi government, earlier this week and did not condemn the agreement or call for a referendum. He said, according to Mr Hakim, that it must guarantee Iraqi national sovereignty, be transparent, command a national consensus and be approved by the Iraqi parliament. Critics of the deal fear that the government will sign the agreement, and parliament approve it, in return for marginal concessions.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
The idea that Iranian agents fed misleading information to American neocons on the eve of the war in Iraq appears to be gaining ground.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
More chaos for Iraq if the Iranian gambit begins.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 60509.html
Military action 'would destabilise Iraq'
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Iraq will be plunged into a new war if Israel or the US launches an attack on Iran, Iraqi leaders have warned. Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP.
The Iraqi government's main allies are the US and Iran, whose governments openly detest each other. The Iraqi government may be militarily dependent on the 140,000 US troops in the country, but its Shia and Kurdish leaders have long been allied to Iran. Iraqi leaders have to continually perform a balancing act in which they seek to avoid alienating either country.
The balancing act has become more difficult for Iraq since George Bush successfully requested $400m (£200m) from Congress last year to fund covert operations aimed at destabilising the Iranian leadership. Some of these operations are likely to be launched from Iraqi territory with the help of Iranian militants opposed to Tehran. The most effective of these opponent groups is the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which enraged the Iraqi government by staging a conference last month at Camp Ashraf, north-east of Baghdad. It demanded the closure of the Iranian embassy and the expulsion of all Iranian agents in Iraq. "It was a huge meeting" said Dr Othman. "All the tribes and political leaders who are against Iran, but are also against the Iraqi government, were there." He said the anti-Iranian meeting could not have taken place without US permission.
The Americans disarmed the 3,700 MEK militants, who had long been allied to Saddam Hussein, at Camp Ashraf in 2003, but they remain well-organised and well-financed. The extent of their support within Iran remains unknown, but they are extremely effective as an intelligence and propaganda organisation.
Though the MEK is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, the Pentagon and other US institutions have been periodically friendly to it. The US task force charged by Mr Bush with destabilising the Iranian government is likely to co-operate with it.
In reaction to the conference, the Iraqi government, the US and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have started secret talks on the future of the MEK with the Iraqi government pressing for their expulsion from Iraq. Dr Othman, who speaks to the MEK frequently by phone, said: "I pressed them to get out of Iraq voluntarily because they are a card in the hands of the Americans."
An embarrassing aspect of the American pin-prick war against Iran is that many of its instruments were previously on the payroll of Saddam Hussein. The MEK even played a role in 1991 in helping to crush the uprising against the Baathist regime at the end of the Gulf war. The dissidents from Arab districts in southern Iran around Ahwaz were funded by Saddam Hussein's intelligence organisations, which orchestrated the seizure of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 which was supposedly carried out by Arab nationalists from Iran.
The one community in Iran most likely to oppose the Tehran government is the Iranian Kurds. There have been an increasing number of attacks by PJAK, the Iranian wing of the Turkish PKK, which claims to be a separate party. Based in the Kandil mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, PJAK has carried out frequent raids into Iran and has reportedly been able to win local support. But it would be extremely dangerous for the US to be seen as a supporter of PJAK as this would offend the Turks who have a military co-operation agreement with Iran against terrorism.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 60509.html
Military action 'would destabilise Iraq'
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Iraq will be plunged into a new war if Israel or the US launches an attack on Iran, Iraqi leaders have warned. Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP.
The Iraqi government's main allies are the US and Iran, whose governments openly detest each other. The Iraqi government may be militarily dependent on the 140,000 US troops in the country, but its Shia and Kurdish leaders have long been allied to Iran. Iraqi leaders have to continually perform a balancing act in which they seek to avoid alienating either country.
The balancing act has become more difficult for Iraq since George Bush successfully requested $400m (£200m) from Congress last year to fund covert operations aimed at destabilising the Iranian leadership. Some of these operations are likely to be launched from Iraqi territory with the help of Iranian militants opposed to Tehran. The most effective of these opponent groups is the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which enraged the Iraqi government by staging a conference last month at Camp Ashraf, north-east of Baghdad. It demanded the closure of the Iranian embassy and the expulsion of all Iranian agents in Iraq. "It was a huge meeting" said Dr Othman. "All the tribes and political leaders who are against Iran, but are also against the Iraqi government, were there." He said the anti-Iranian meeting could not have taken place without US permission.
The Americans disarmed the 3,700 MEK militants, who had long been allied to Saddam Hussein, at Camp Ashraf in 2003, but they remain well-organised and well-financed. The extent of their support within Iran remains unknown, but they are extremely effective as an intelligence and propaganda organisation.
Though the MEK is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, the Pentagon and other US institutions have been periodically friendly to it. The US task force charged by Mr Bush with destabilising the Iranian government is likely to co-operate with it.
In reaction to the conference, the Iraqi government, the US and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have started secret talks on the future of the MEK with the Iraqi government pressing for their expulsion from Iraq. Dr Othman, who speaks to the MEK frequently by phone, said: "I pressed them to get out of Iraq voluntarily because they are a card in the hands of the Americans."
An embarrassing aspect of the American pin-prick war against Iran is that many of its instruments were previously on the payroll of Saddam Hussein. The MEK even played a role in 1991 in helping to crush the uprising against the Baathist regime at the end of the Gulf war. The dissidents from Arab districts in southern Iran around Ahwaz were funded by Saddam Hussein's intelligence organisations, which orchestrated the seizure of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 which was supposedly carried out by Arab nationalists from Iran.
The one community in Iran most likely to oppose the Tehran government is the Iranian Kurds. There have been an increasing number of attacks by PJAK, the Iranian wing of the Turkish PKK, which claims to be a separate party. Based in the Kandil mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, PJAK has carried out frequent raids into Iran and has reportedly been able to win local support. But it would be extremely dangerous for the US to be seen as a supporter of PJAK as this would offend the Turks who have a military co-operation agreement with Iran against terrorism.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Listene to this
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=92025860
Fresh Air from WHYY, June 30, 2008 · Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined. He writes about Congress' funding of covert military operations in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.
A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005.
During the Vietnam War, Hersh was the first to report on the My Lai massacre. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes. He is also the author of eight books, including Chain of Command about Abu Ghraib.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=92025860
Fresh Air from WHYY, June 30, 2008 · Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined. He writes about Congress' funding of covert military operations in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.
A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005.
During the Vietnam War, Hersh was the first to report on the My Lai massacre. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes. He is also the author of eight books, including Chain of Command about Abu Ghraib.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Yes,there is compelling information circulating about covert US operations that have already begun in Iran targeting the influence of Ayatollahs and Ahmed-is-a-joke.The ops are being launched from paki territory allegedly.The Us did the same dcades ago in Afghanistan using covert anti-Najibullah ops which forced him to call Brezhnev for help.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Al-Maliki,PM of the Baghdadi "Green Zone" dares to ask the US when it will leave! What gives?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2265376 ... rawal.html
Iraqi prime minister seeks timetable for American withdrawal
Last Updated: 12:53AM BST 08/07/2008
Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has broken with precedent and suggested that the United States should draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.
Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki speaks at a meeting of Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates
Speaking at a meeting of Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates, Mr Maliki was discussing what would happen after a United Nations mandate authorising the presence of foreign troops in Iraq expires at the end of this year.
"The direction we are taking is to have a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to have a timetable for their withdrawal," he said. "The negotiations are still continuing with the American side, but in any case the basis for the agreement will be respect for the sovereignty of Iraq."
Iraq and the United States have agreed in principle to sign a Status of Forces Agreement this summer, setting out the legal framework for American soldiers to remain in Iraq and a broader agreement defining political and security relations between the countries.
Negotiations began on the agreement in March, but have been complicated by a debate inside Iraq over how far a deal would damage its sovereignty.
However, the Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman has knocked back Mr Maliki's suggestion. "With respect to timetables I would say the same thing as I would say as respects to the security situation," he said. "It is dependent on conditions on the ground."
He acknowledged, however, that the United States had "no long term desires to have forces permanently stationed in Iraq".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2265376 ... rawal.html
Iraqi prime minister seeks timetable for American withdrawal
Last Updated: 12:53AM BST 08/07/2008
Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has broken with precedent and suggested that the United States should draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.
Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki speaks at a meeting of Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates
Speaking at a meeting of Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates, Mr Maliki was discussing what would happen after a United Nations mandate authorising the presence of foreign troops in Iraq expires at the end of this year.
"The direction we are taking is to have a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to have a timetable for their withdrawal," he said. "The negotiations are still continuing with the American side, but in any case the basis for the agreement will be respect for the sovereignty of Iraq."
Iraq and the United States have agreed in principle to sign a Status of Forces Agreement this summer, setting out the legal framework for American soldiers to remain in Iraq and a broader agreement defining political and security relations between the countries.
Negotiations began on the agreement in March, but have been complicated by a debate inside Iraq over how far a deal would damage its sovereignty.
However, the Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman has knocked back Mr Maliki's suggestion. "With respect to timetables I would say the same thing as I would say as respects to the security situation," he said. "It is dependent on conditions on the ground."
He acknowledged, however, that the United States had "no long term desires to have forces permanently stationed in Iraq".
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
THey might have been fed, but they didnt have to swallow it! Looks like they were like the old Yiddish saying "If you want to beat the dog you will find a stick". And now saying that Iranian agents fed them misleading stuff makes the error even more serious. How did you believe that stuff? Is this how you vet critical national security info?shyamd wrote:The idea that Iranian agents fed misleading information to American neocons on the eve of the war in Iraq appears to be gaining ground.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Elite mortar bombers are attacking US forces in Iraq:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080712/ap_ ... te_bombers
See, this is another reason why I wouldn't want to see India escalate into a military presence in Afghanistan. We'd be stuck suffering increased attrition, due to greater exposure from increased personnel levels. Then there'll be kidnappings, etc.
The answer is to create counter-proxies that will fight on Pak soil. We would have to consider arming Pak tribes on Afghan soil -- other than the Baloch, of course.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080712/ap_ ... te_bombers
See, this is another reason why I wouldn't want to see India escalate into a military presence in Afghanistan. We'd be stuck suffering increased attrition, due to greater exposure from increased personnel levels. Then there'll be kidnappings, etc.
The answer is to create counter-proxies that will fight on Pak soil. We would have to consider arming Pak tribes on Afghan soil -- other than the Baloch, of course.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
It actually came from a DoD report about DoD role and talks about meetings in Paris and Rome between 2001 and 2003 with an Iranian arms agent Manoucheir Ghorbanifer and Pentagon officials. Ghorbanifer presented several supposed Iranian defectors to the officials and put forward a covert plan to destabilize Iran, asking for USD 5 million to set it into motion.ramana wrote:THey might have been fed, but they didnt have to swallow it! Looks like they were like the old Yiddish saying "If you want to beat the dog you will find a stick". And now saying that Iranian agents fed them misleading stuff makes the error even more serious. How did you believe that stuff? Is this how you vet critical national security info?shyamd wrote:The idea that Iranian agents fed misleading information to American neocons on the eve of the war in Iraq appears to be gaining ground.
In the wake of the meetings, the Pentagon’s counter intel bureau, was told to draw up a report on Ghorbanifer and his Iranian associates. According to the report, the bureau clearly raised the possibility that Ghorbanifer was an Iranian agent attempting to mislead the Pentagon.
However, the Pentagons enquiry was called off the case one month later on the orders of Steve Cambone, the then under secretary of defence for intelligence. There have been other recent claims that the Bush administration’s sources in the Middle East may have been manipulated by Iran. In his book, The Man Who Pushed America to War, Aram Roston cited regular contacts before and during the Iraq invasion between Ahmed Chalabi, who was very close to American neocons and Ahmed Frousanda.
It turns out that Frousanda was in charge of southern Iraq for the Al Qods force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. In the wake of those contacts, Chalabi was closely investigated by the FBI but nothing conclusive against him was found. The DIA, which financed Chalabi, became convinced he was working in the end for Iran and broke off all contact with him.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
AP: probably paki ex-SSG types supplementing their retirement income.
AP: 'Lob bombs' biggest worry for US in Baghdad
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer 1 hour, 17 minutes ago
CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq - U.S. forces may be close to unlocking the mystery of who is behind a deadly innovation in Iraqi insurgents' weapons, a "lob bomb" now being used in Baghdad to target U.S. and Iraqi combat outposts, a senior American general said Friday in an Associated Press interview.
Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, called the weapon "the greatest threat right now that we face," and he likened the shadowy group behind it to the American military's elite Delta Force.
The weapon is particularly worrying because it is designed to cause catastrophic damage and cannot be stopped once it has been launched, Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said in an interview in his office at this U.S. military headquarters compound just west of the capital.
U.S. forces detained a man on Thursday who Hammond said could provide valuable insights into the group behind the bombmaking. "We think we have defined the network," he said. He would not elaborate, although other American officers said in interviews that the group is Shiite and may have links to Iran.
"We think we might have picked up a guy that could lead us — could be a big lead in this," Hammond said.
It's not clear whether this small group is related to efforts by anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to revitalize his Mahdi Army, which had held sway in the Sadr City section of Baghdad until U.S. and Iraqi forces wrested control after seven weeks of fighting that ended in May.
Arguing against a link to such an al-Sadr initiative is the fact that the group that Hammond described has been operating since at least late 2007, although it has become more active in recent months.
The 107 mm rockets that are used in the improvised bombs — which some call an airborne version of the roadside bombs that through the course of the war have been the leading killer of U.S. troops — are manufactured in Iran, officials said. But some officers cautioned against assuming Iran is directly involved.
The weapons are launched from small trucks and are fired in multiples of four to nine rockets at a time. The detonation is sometimes triggered by a signal from a cell phone, other times by a washing machine timer.
Brig. Gen. Will Grimsley, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in a separate AP interview on Thursday that for lack of a better term he refers to the group as "the evil militia." He said it is small and exhibits a high degree of technical skill in assembling the weapons and executing attacks.
The military calls the weapon an "improvised rocket-assisted mortar," or IRAM.
Grimsley on Thursday went to the Sadr City section of eastern Baghdad to visit a joint U.S.-Iraqi military outpost that suffered an IRAM attack on April 28. The building was heavily damaged, and 15 U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously enough to prevent their return to duty, said Lt. Col. Steven Stover, a military spokesman.
The weapon innovation has gained relatively little public attention because it has yet to kill in large numbers.
So far, in 11 attacks, three U.S. soldiers have been killed, Stover said. The three were killed April 28 — the same day as the Sadr City assault — in an attack on a larger U.S. base in eastern Baghdad.
At the Sadr City base, Grimsley consulted with Lt. Col. Brian Eifler, commander of 1st Battalion, 6th Armor, 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, inside a newly constructed combat outpost a stone's throw from the damaged one. Eifler said he is focused heavily on the IRAM threat and how to minimize it.
Eifler estimated that a U.S. soldier who might be in position to witness the approach of a potential IRAM-bearing vehicle would have less then two seconds to decide whether the person emerging from it has just set it for firing or is simply an innocent driver getting out to change a tire.
"That's a call our young soldiers have to make when potentially 200 lives are at stake," Eifler said.
Hammond said the perpetrators are so skilled that he has likened their organization to the U.S. military's secretive and elite Delta Force. He said they have demonstrated an unusual degree of military skill and cunning.
"They don't leave a forensic trail, and that just means we're going to have to work a little bit longer" to eliminate them, he said. "Of everything we've had to deal with here, this is a tough one. They're sort of the Delta Force of this enemy we face out there. They are very good" at covering their tracks, picking out targets and preserving secrecy about their membership and movements.
AP: 'Lob bombs' biggest worry for US in Baghdad
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer 1 hour, 17 minutes ago
CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq - U.S. forces may be close to unlocking the mystery of who is behind a deadly innovation in Iraqi insurgents' weapons, a "lob bomb" now being used in Baghdad to target U.S. and Iraqi combat outposts, a senior American general said Friday in an Associated Press interview.
Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, called the weapon "the greatest threat right now that we face," and he likened the shadowy group behind it to the American military's elite Delta Force.
The weapon is particularly worrying because it is designed to cause catastrophic damage and cannot be stopped once it has been launched, Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said in an interview in his office at this U.S. military headquarters compound just west of the capital.
U.S. forces detained a man on Thursday who Hammond said could provide valuable insights into the group behind the bombmaking. "We think we have defined the network," he said. He would not elaborate, although other American officers said in interviews that the group is Shiite and may have links to Iran.
"We think we might have picked up a guy that could lead us — could be a big lead in this," Hammond said.
It's not clear whether this small group is related to efforts by anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to revitalize his Mahdi Army, which had held sway in the Sadr City section of Baghdad until U.S. and Iraqi forces wrested control after seven weeks of fighting that ended in May.
Arguing against a link to such an al-Sadr initiative is the fact that the group that Hammond described has been operating since at least late 2007, although it has become more active in recent months.
The 107 mm rockets that are used in the improvised bombs — which some call an airborne version of the roadside bombs that through the course of the war have been the leading killer of U.S. troops — are manufactured in Iran, officials said. But some officers cautioned against assuming Iran is directly involved.
The weapons are launched from small trucks and are fired in multiples of four to nine rockets at a time. The detonation is sometimes triggered by a signal from a cell phone, other times by a washing machine timer.
Brig. Gen. Will Grimsley, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in a separate AP interview on Thursday that for lack of a better term he refers to the group as "the evil militia." He said it is small and exhibits a high degree of technical skill in assembling the weapons and executing attacks.
The military calls the weapon an "improvised rocket-assisted mortar," or IRAM.
Grimsley on Thursday went to the Sadr City section of eastern Baghdad to visit a joint U.S.-Iraqi military outpost that suffered an IRAM attack on April 28. The building was heavily damaged, and 15 U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously enough to prevent their return to duty, said Lt. Col. Steven Stover, a military spokesman.
The weapon innovation has gained relatively little public attention because it has yet to kill in large numbers.
So far, in 11 attacks, three U.S. soldiers have been killed, Stover said. The three were killed April 28 — the same day as the Sadr City assault — in an attack on a larger U.S. base in eastern Baghdad.
At the Sadr City base, Grimsley consulted with Lt. Col. Brian Eifler, commander of 1st Battalion, 6th Armor, 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, inside a newly constructed combat outpost a stone's throw from the damaged one. Eifler said he is focused heavily on the IRAM threat and how to minimize it.
Eifler estimated that a U.S. soldier who might be in position to witness the approach of a potential IRAM-bearing vehicle would have less then two seconds to decide whether the person emerging from it has just set it for firing or is simply an innocent driver getting out to change a tire.
"That's a call our young soldiers have to make when potentially 200 lives are at stake," Eifler said.
Hammond said the perpetrators are so skilled that he has likened their organization to the U.S. military's secretive and elite Delta Force. He said they have demonstrated an unusual degree of military skill and cunning.
"They don't leave a forensic trail, and that just means we're going to have to work a little bit longer" to eliminate them, he said. "Of everything we've had to deal with here, this is a tough one. They're sort of the Delta Force of this enemy we face out there. They are very good" at covering their tracks, picking out targets and preserving secrecy about their membership and movements.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Shyam D,
After the US put Iran on the Axis of Evil list in January 2002, Iran had *absolutely* no desire to see US troops and aircraft in Iraq on its border.
People like Ghorbanifer and Chalabi are ambitious opportunists who arent owned by anyone, but will take money from everyone. To call them Iranian agents makes no more sense than calling them American agents. They are essentially wheeler dealers in the grey market.
Neoconservative ideologues in particular thought Chalabi was some kind of Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa figure. He told them all the kinds of things they wanted to be told.
Its a stereotype I know but its exactly what happens when you go in to Persian bazaar to buy a carpet. If you want to believe that youre buying a handmade antique rug instead of a Chinese rag machine-loom produced yesterday, they're more than happy to make you happy, so long as you make them happy with a lot of cash. When the colours run, and the threads unravel, there's plenty of blame to go around.
Besides there's no way that they could operate that effectively outside the subcontinent. They dont have the language, the local contacts, the record of technical innovation, etc.
My bet is on Lebanese Shia Hezb'allah integrated with handpicked and trained Iraqi Shia.
After the US put Iran on the Axis of Evil list in January 2002, Iran had *absolutely* no desire to see US troops and aircraft in Iraq on its border.
People like Ghorbanifer and Chalabi are ambitious opportunists who arent owned by anyone, but will take money from everyone. To call them Iranian agents makes no more sense than calling them American agents. They are essentially wheeler dealers in the grey market.
Neoconservative ideologues in particular thought Chalabi was some kind of Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa figure. He told them all the kinds of things they wanted to be told.
Its a stereotype I know but its exactly what happens when you go in to Persian bazaar to buy a carpet. If you want to believe that youre buying a handmade antique rug instead of a Chinese rag machine-loom produced yesterday, they're more than happy to make you happy, so long as you make them happy with a lot of cash. When the colours run, and the threads unravel, there's plenty of blame to go around.
ex-SSG guys fighting for a Shia group all the way in Iraq? No chance.Singha wrote:AP: probably paki ex-SSG types supplementing their retirement income.
Besides there's no way that they could operate that effectively outside the subcontinent. They dont have the language, the local contacts, the record of technical innovation, etc.
My bet is on Lebanese Shia Hezb'allah integrated with handpicked and trained Iraqi Shia.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
US considering withdrawal of troops from Iraq: Report
13 Jul 2008
By the time Bush leaves office on Jan 20 next year, at least one or as many 3 to 15 combat brigades could be called back or be scheduled for withdrawal, the New York Times said citing American administration and military officials.
A factor behind the consideration, it said, is need for additional troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other fighters have intensified insurgency, inflicting an increasing number of casualties on Afghan and American-led forces.
More American and allied troops died in Afghanistan than in Iraq in May and June, a trend that has continued this month, the paper noted.
Though no decision has yet been taken, the desire to move quickly on this front reflects the growing view in Pentagon, which besides easing the strain on military also wants to release more troops for Afghanistan and other potential missions, it said.
The most optimistic course of events would still leave 120,000 to 130,000 American troops in Iraq, down from the peak of 170,000 reached late last year after Bush ordered what came to be known as "surge" of additional forces, the Times said.
Any troop reduction announced in the heat of the presidential election could blur the sharp differences between the likely candidates -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama -- with political benefit of the move estimated to go more in favour of the former, who is an avid supporter of the current strategy in Iraq.
Reduction would indicate that strategy has worked and could defuse anti-war sentiment among voters.
13 Jul 2008
NEW YORK: The Bush administration is considering withdrawal of additional combat forces from Iraq beginning in September, with pressing need for more troops in Afghanistan one of the main factors guiding the potential decision, a media report said.
By the time Bush leaves office on Jan 20 next year, at least one or as many 3 to 15 combat brigades could be called back or be scheduled for withdrawal, the New York Times said citing American administration and military officials.
A factor behind the consideration, it said, is need for additional troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other fighters have intensified insurgency, inflicting an increasing number of casualties on Afghan and American-led forces.
More American and allied troops died in Afghanistan than in Iraq in May and June, a trend that has continued this month, the paper noted.
Though no decision has yet been taken, the desire to move quickly on this front reflects the growing view in Pentagon, which besides easing the strain on military also wants to release more troops for Afghanistan and other potential missions, it said.
The most optimistic course of events would still leave 120,000 to 130,000 American troops in Iraq, down from the peak of 170,000 reached late last year after Bush ordered what came to be known as "surge" of additional forces, the Times said.
Any troop reduction announced in the heat of the presidential election could blur the sharp differences between the likely candidates -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama -- with political benefit of the move estimated to go more in favour of the former, who is an avid supporter of the current strategy in Iraq.
Reduction would indicate that strategy has worked and could defuse anti-war sentiment among voters.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Could you explain further about Iran not having a desire to see US troops in Iraq?Johann wrote:Shyam D,
After the US put Iran on the Axis of Evil list in January 2002, Iran had *absolutely* no desire to see US troops and aircraft in Iraq on its border.
100% spot on with what is going on. Hezbollah special forces are being integrated with Iran/Hezbollah trained Mahdi army soldiers.My bet is on Lebanese Shia Hezb'allah integrated with handpicked and trained Iraqi Shia.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Shyam,
The Islamic Republic is very, very sensitive to whatever comes out of Washington. Bush's state of the union address in January 2002 named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the 'Axis of Evil'.
With the build-up to war in Iraq, the message that the Islamic Republic took was that it was next on the list. As soon as Iraq fell it would serve as a staging ground for US operations against Iran.
Of course there were plenty of anti-regime Iranians inside and outside the country who hoped that this is exactly what would happen.
But from the Ayatollahs perspective, although the fall of Saddam and the establishment of Shia majority rule in Iraq was highly desirable, it wasnt worth having the Americans on the border making a big push against them.
The Islamic Republic is very, very sensitive to whatever comes out of Washington. Bush's state of the union address in January 2002 named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the 'Axis of Evil'.
With the build-up to war in Iraq, the message that the Islamic Republic took was that it was next on the list. As soon as Iraq fell it would serve as a staging ground for US operations against Iran.
Of course there were plenty of anti-regime Iranians inside and outside the country who hoped that this is exactly what would happen.
But from the Ayatollahs perspective, although the fall of Saddam and the establishment of Shia majority rule in Iraq was highly desirable, it wasnt worth having the Americans on the border making a big push against them.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Iran has achieved a major strategic victory over US. That is axiomatic.
Iran would never want US to leave Iraq.
If US leaves Iraq and strikes at Iran, there is now way Iraq can inflict directly any damage on US assets.
As long as US stays in Iraq, Iran can play N Korea cards and all highly paid think tanks will advocate no strike zone.
Bush and his advisors were stupid to have allowed undiplomatic, uttarances of "Axis of Evil", which is a sign of insecure super power. Lets not even talk of the stupidity of bring em on, wanted dead or alive.
No sane nation would not take notice of 'Evil remarks and Iran being all the more paranoid has behaved exactly as it would.
PRC and Russia have taken full advantage of pumping all the armaments that they could at profitable prices.
The republican neo cons etc forgot the fundamental way of making US secure and prosperous , that is stoke regional wars but not get involved, encourage hem to fight, sell arms to one particpant, and finance the other by buying its resources sheap.
The current republicans forgot the God of republicans Regan's way of doing the above, are now learning the fact that Wars cant be waged with good money, but only by being drug pushers like the British are, or like Spanish or Belgians looting and plunder.
The US economy is in doldrums, remember how the French lost to British by financing US war of independence and disproportianate luxaries indulged in?
The citizens of US have been mislead , cheated, lied and in addition a bonus of listening to the bed room conversations is on.
Just as the way Israel could not stop intentionally TSP become Nuke power cant do anything with decisve results about Iran nuclear ambitions. Iranians have the design and intent to go all the way and Russians will see to it as long as US keeps pushing NATO envolope and color revolutions.
US needs India in all this.
Iran would never want US to leave Iraq.
If US leaves Iraq and strikes at Iran, there is now way Iraq can inflict directly any damage on US assets.
As long as US stays in Iraq, Iran can play N Korea cards and all highly paid think tanks will advocate no strike zone.
Bush and his advisors were stupid to have allowed undiplomatic, uttarances of "Axis of Evil", which is a sign of insecure super power. Lets not even talk of the stupidity of bring em on, wanted dead or alive.
No sane nation would not take notice of 'Evil remarks and Iran being all the more paranoid has behaved exactly as it would.
PRC and Russia have taken full advantage of pumping all the armaments that they could at profitable prices.
The republican neo cons etc forgot the fundamental way of making US secure and prosperous , that is stoke regional wars but not get involved, encourage hem to fight, sell arms to one particpant, and finance the other by buying its resources sheap.
The current republicans forgot the God of republicans Regan's way of doing the above, are now learning the fact that Wars cant be waged with good money, but only by being drug pushers like the British are, or like Spanish or Belgians looting and plunder.
The US economy is in doldrums, remember how the French lost to British by financing US war of independence and disproportianate luxaries indulged in?
The citizens of US have been mislead , cheated, lied and in addition a bonus of listening to the bed room conversations is on.
Just as the way Israel could not stop intentionally TSP become Nuke power cant do anything with decisve results about Iran nuclear ambitions. Iranians have the design and intent to go all the way and Russians will see to it as long as US keeps pushing NATO envolope and color revolutions.
US needs India in all this.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Spinster,John Snow wrote:Iran would never want US to leave Iraq.
If US leaves Iraq and strikes at Iran, there is now way Iraq can inflict directly any damage on US assets.
a) The Ayatollahs greatest fear is regime change - they have vey serious problems with all kinds of dissidents. Air strikes on their nuclear and missile facilities, air defences, etc are much less daunting. US aid to internal regime opponents would be much harder if they werent on the Iranian border
b) There are plenty of Iranian hardliners who think that their influence in Iraq would be much more profound if it wasnt for the obstacle of the American presence.
The Iranians are confidant that what they can do economically to the US through the price of oil and gas, and what they can do in terms of naval guerilla attacks in the Straits of Hormuz is more than enough to deter the Americans. Not to mention the Hezb'allah option of international terrorist attacks almost anywhere in the world.
The people around Ahmadinejad are constantly talking with great confidance both in public and private that the moment when the last American helicopter takes off from the Baghdad embassy is just around the corner, that America is all washed up in the ME, etc.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Inverse logic works more often than not in diplomatic speak,
If Iran says it wants US to leave , then US will stay.
If US is for democracy it means it wants tin pot puupet regimes to bid its ways.
If US is for universal disarmament, it is speaking to say we will keep going with our bums!
If Iran says it wants US to leave , then US will stay.
If US is for democracy it means it wants tin pot puupet regimes to bid its ways.
If US is for universal disarmament, it is speaking to say we will keep going with our bums!
Spinster uvacha'Democracies are to be subverted to suit, dictatorship to be foisted to execute'
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
"Lob bombs" launched from trucks difficult to detect? There is some anomaly with the statements.From the US forces' viewpoint,these attackers are the supposed equiv. of Delta Force,therefore,small stealthy units.They must be using human 'mules" to move the bombs around in order not to avoid detection.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Multiple bombings kill 40 in northern Iraq
Tue, Jul 15 07:22 PM
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombers killed around 40 people and wounded scores in several attacks in northern Iraq on Tuesday, days after the government vowed to expand a crackdown against militants in a region where al Qaeda retains influence.
Tue, Jul 15 07:22 PM
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombers killed around 40 people and wounded scores in several attacks in northern Iraq on Tuesday, days after the government vowed to expand a crackdown against militants in a region where al Qaeda retains influence.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
This lob bombs was an IRA technique. At that time they used an improvised mortars on pick-up trucks to get stand-off and throw-weight. Looks like the idea was adapted by using available 107 mm rockets but with remote triggers, again use whats available - sort of MacGywer approach. Instead of shadowy groups it could be globalization of US tv shows.Philip wrote:"Lob bombs" launched from trucks difficult to detect? There is some anomaly with the statements.From the US forces' viewpoint,these attackers are the supposed equiv. of Delta Force,therefore,small stealthy units.They must be using human 'mules" to move the bombs around in order not to avoid detection.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Shocking scandalous revelations! "When thieves fall out"?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... =12&page=2
Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra
(Nabil al-Jurani)
Four thousand British troops, including elements of the SAS, are based outside Basra
Deborah Haynes in Baquba and Michael Evans, Defence Editor
A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt.
Four thousand British troops – including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade – watched from the sidelines for six days because of an “accommodation” with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault.
US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts.
Hundreds of militiamen were killed or arrested in the fighting. About 60 Iraqis were killed or injured. One US Marine died and sevenwere wounded.
Britain left facing wrath of its allies
US advisers who accompanied the Iraqi forces into the fight were shocked to learn of the accommodation made last summer by British Intelligence and elements of al-Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia Muslim cleric.
The deal, which aimed to encourage the Shia movement back into the political process and marginalise extremist factions, has dealt a huge blow to Britain’s reputation in Iraq.
Under its terms, no British soldier could enter Basra without the permission of Des Browne, the Defence Secretary. By the time he gave his approval, most of the fighting was over and the damage to Britain’s reputation had already been done.
Senior British defence sources told The Times that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who ordered the assault, and high-ranking US military officers had become disillusioned with the British as a result of their failure to act. Another confirmed that the deal, negotiated by British Intelligence, had been a costly mistake.
The Ministry of Defence has never confirmed that there was a deal with al-Mahdi Army, but one official denied that the delay in sending in troops was because of the arrangement agreed with the Shia militia.
A spokesman for the MoD said that the reason why troops were not sent immediately into Basra was because there was “no structure in place” in the city for units to go back in to start mentoring the Iraqi troops.
Colonel Imad, who heads the 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade, 1st Iraqi Army Division, the most experienced division, commanded one of the quick-reaction battalions summoned to assist British-trained local forces, who faltered from the outset because of inexperience and lack of support.
He said: “Without the support of the Americans we would not have accomplished the mission because the British Forces had done nothing there.
“I do not trust the British Forces. They did not want to lose any soldiers for the mission.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Western, a senior US Marine advising the Iraqi Army, told The Times: “I was not happy. Everybody just assumed that because this deal was cut nobody was going in. Cutting a deal with the bad guys is generally not a good idea.”
He emphasised, however, that he was not being critical of the British military, which he described as first-rate.
Captain Eric Whyne, another US Marine officer who took part in the battle, said that he was astounded that “a coalition force would make a pact with essentially their enemy and promise not to go into their area so as not to get attacked”. He alleged that “some horrific atrocities” were committed by the militia in Basra during the British watch.
A senior British defence source agreed that the battle for Basra had been damaging to Britain’s reputation in Iraq. “Maliki, and the Americans, felt the British were morally impugned by the deal they had reached with the militia. The British were accused of trying to find the line of least resistance in dealing with the Shia militia,” said the source.
“You can accuse the Americans of many things, such as hamfistedness, but you can’t accuse them of not addressing a situation when it arises. While we had a strategy of evasion, the Americans just went in and addressed the problem.”
Another British official said that the deal was intended as an IRA-style reconciliation. “That is what we were trying to do but it did not work.” The official added that “accommodation” had become a dirty word.
US officials knew of the discussions, which continued until March this year. They facilitated the peaceful exit of British troops from a palace compound in Basra last September in return for the release of a number of prisoners. The arrangement fell apart on March 25 when Mr al-Maliki ordered his surprise assault on Basra, catching both the Americans and British off-guard.
The Americans responded by flying in reinforcements, providing air cover and offering the logistical and other support needed for the Iraqis to win.
The British were partly handicapped because their commander, Major-General Barney White-Spunner, was away on a skiing holiday when the attack began. When Brigadier Julian Free, his deputy, arrived to discuss the situation with Mr al-Maliki at the presidential palace in Basra, he was made to wait outside.
The first British troops only entered the city on March 31.
The MoD spokesman said that the operation was launched at such short notice that the only support that could be given in the first few days was air power – in the form of Tornado ground attack aircraft – and logistics.
He said that after British troops were withdrawn from Basra last year it was realised that the Iraqi forces still needed help, which was why the current British force contained more instructors and trainers.
PS:Haven't the US also made similar "accomodations" with various ungodly outfits in their dirty wars too? What is the CIA doing in Pakistan right now?
Have your say
How typical of the duplicitous British. Instead of helping the brave US troops fighting this ENTIRELY NECESSARY AND MORAL fight against islamic terror, they sit back and do nothing. I am ashamed to be British.
jay, London,
There are two lessons that the US needs to learn.
Firstly the answer to a problem is not always to send in the troops - shoot first and ask questions later is a barbarian principle.
Secondly they should learn to keep their word and abide by deals made.
Neither comes naturally to the US.
Chris, Ashford, Middx, England
What a horrible betrayal of brave men!!
By the way, mates, if we were fighting for oil we would have done a better job of it and gasoline(petrol to you) would not be anywhere near $4. a gallon.
henry cowan, linthicum,MD, USA
Damned shame. I know that you British soldiers are far better than that. Your political masters have undermined you. Winston Churchill, where art thou?
Ross, Wyoming, USA
If we are supposed to be at war then surely people are going to die?
Why can we not accept that?
G Madden, London, United Kingdom
so - all the Americans are against the "accommodations" made north of Baghdad. These involved bribing those with millions of dollars, that last week had been shooting at you ?
rob, kingston, UK
Another political misjudgement by Gordon Brown? Does he really hate the Army so much?
sunniva, Edinburgh, UK
Yes he does. Why else would he commit them to 2 wars and yet underfund, underequip and underpay them? Not only that but the Defence Secretary moonlights as Secretary of State for Scotland
Warwick Pearmund, Tokyo, Japan
I am hopeful because most British don't seem to agree with the viewpoint of the wild-eyed leftist "world citizens" posting here, at least judging by your recent election. I hope the military is in no way to blame for this. I pray that we don't elect that ninny Obama just when y'all put Cameron in.
Dave, Raleigh, NC, US
it is interesting to read the comments and gauge the difference in response from Americans & British.
sorry William Ward USA, but this DOES represent the Civilian pops. opinion that we shouldn't have been there in the 1st place.
we are all a target. do u include the Iraqi civilians as well?
JW, Brisbane,
The point now is to get out of this illegal and immoral war. The U.S. will NEVER pull out in this election year. Which means will Brown have the guts to do the right thing?
Tom, Kansas City, US
And about time too. George W Bush ,along with Cheney and Rumsfeld , rushed headlong into Iraq without any real or true reason. Your Tony Blair and our John Howard disgracefully went along with the charade. The British did the correct thing in not subjecting their troops to this illegal battle.
Barry Everingham, Malvern, Australia
You couldn't make it up. Oh ! Actually, Joseph Heller DID ! In Catch-22 ! Brad- our politicians haven't got spines and let your troops go in without body armour and see how they feel .
Terry, Guildford, UK
a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
It wasn't the privates, sergeants, et al.that were the problem. It was a combination of the current government, the civilian population that voted them in, and the intelligence community. 7-7-05."we are all targets". you have gained no grace by hiding.
William Ward, Upland, USA
Reading this article made me physically ill. The commander was away on a skiing holiday??? Good lord, Great Britain is lost.
Victoria Pitt, Chicago, USA
Enjoy sharia law and the loss of all freedoms you now enjoy. I won't be sending my American son to defend Europe when she falls to the Islamo-facists. We've already done that once or twice before.
TaTa
Charles Dagostino, Bethesda, MD, United States
Troops on the Ground I'm Proud of you Fact is
British were handicapped coz their commander, M-G White-Spunner, was on skiing hols when attack began WHY? When Brigadier J Free - deputy arrived to discuss the situation with Mr al-Maliki at the presidential palace he had to wait for al-Maliki outside!
LT, Warminster, UK
Another political misjudgement by Gordon Brown? Does he really hate the Army so much?
sunniva, Edinburgh, UK
So long, pals.
David, Los Angeles, USA
We have an agreement to stop fighting and start a political process.
Worked in Ireland.
But no you're right let's just keep shooting ey cowboys?
Leonandrews, brisbane,
Brad,
When exactly did Iraq swear to destroy America, let alone Britain?
Why should we fight people defending their country against foreign troops who are there for no good reason?
Iraq is a huge distraction from the fight against our real enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.
Simon Allen, Melbourne, Australia
It's naive to think that No.10 cooks these schemes up.
I guarantee that the SIS are talking with the Taliban.
Christopher, Perth, Australia
If true, this is very sad as the Brits are our top allies in the world...hopefully, when McCain & Cameron are in power we can fix this!!!
God Bless America...
God Save the Queen...
Carlos Echevarria, Miami, USA
Sirs: I would not be surprised at all if the Times learns at a later date that this ignoble deal, along with others, was actually discussed and agreed to sometime ago--in Iran--as the lynch pin in securing the release of the British sailors and marines.
John H, Los Angeles, USA
All those billions of US dollars to prop up a proxy Iranian government...The Americans must be proud! At least the British know who to really make deals with. This is an American attempt to discredit the British because the British are intent on leaving Iraq!!
Tim, UK, UK
why are we making deals with terrorists? we are there to bring democracy to the south of iraq and yet we hand it over to an insurgent army? fair enough hand over to the iraqi army but why invade if we just swap 1 dictator for another?
ASHAMED, EMBARRASED, HUMILIATED
will, grimsby, uk
A very shoddy war in the first place, based on lies. The shame is that Britian and Australia and others went there in the first place. If our leaders had said no, maybe, just maybe the US would have had second thoughts. In fact our Prime minister, John Howard, was in constant touch, egging Bush on
margie , victoria , australia
Why would you do this to your soldiers? You have destroyed any trust our soldiers can ever put in yours. Why? Have you no sense of alegiance? Have you no brothers? You will never be trusted to watch our backs. We cannot afford it.
Kevin Vogel, Rapid City, United States
as always, the politicians screw up and the Soldier takes the brunt of the blame....... aside from this embaressing debacle and humiliation, I gurentee you this , everyone of those Soldiers in a British uniform would have rather died than be humiliated by politicians like this...
Wayne Smith , leeds, England
Third and final comment ............America just hides there deals under the guise of CIA black ops and then politicians deny any invovment
Wayne Smith , leeds, England
Whilst the "we know better than you" brigade continues to crowd Whitehall, ghastly mistakes like this one will continue to be made as they have been made in the past.
richard, bangkok,
If true, this is really horrifying. No one should make side deals with the enemy. The UK has done good work in Iraq and should not besmirch that by secretly agreeing to stand down. Either let the UK military do its job or pull them out. Don't humiliate the troops or fail to back up an ally.
Jill, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
The British military was betrayed by their political masters. Do the NuLabor Socialists hate the military that much?!
Starved of funds & equipment, treated worse than criminals at home and when they are still victorious on the battlefield, they are left humiliated by spineless pols.
Fernandez, San Jose, CA
We are in a desperate battle of civilization vs. 6th century barbarism. If you are not in it with us 100% then by all means, remove your troops. We can handle it on our own, provided our own political system does not succumb to the siren song of socialism that has overtaken GB. May god save us all
Andrew Repa, St Charles, Il, United States
I felt ashamed at the time when I read about what was happening. I wondered why we didn't attack when it seemed so obvious it should have been us supposrting the Iraqis. I still feel ashamed.
Martin, Durham, England
Now if we can just cut a secret deal to get all troops out of Iraq...
Mary Witherspoon, New York, NY, USA
I was hoping to read a good reason for the decision the British army made, but I didn't.
Ed, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
Of course New Labour humiliated the Army,that is what they intended from the outset.Every other British institution had been broken by the New Labour Project.The only way the Army could be broken was in the field..Under equipped under funded and betrayed.
Peter, Manchester, England
How many cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers have any military experience?
Rob Olivier, London, UK
This is a very disturbing report, but somehow not surprising. This whole business of the British trying to handle the shia as they did in Ireland was bound to fail.
Other readers are right, this is a major disgrace for Gordon Brown and the British army.
Paul, Alexandria, VA, USA
At least they were trying to keep to their word!
Steve, London, UK
It saddens me to see Great Britannia cower before these barbarians. Churchill wept. Britain is becoming more European. Grab hold of the rudder, and regain your course.
GOD save you.
Carlos A. Miller, Pasadena, California, US of A
This sounds like an old English attitude I had thought long dead; making and keeping a gentlemen's agreement in the name of "honor" while good men die. I've served with the British and was proud to do so, but present management needs to go.
Shaun Pearson, Halifax, Canada
So the Americans trick us into going to Iraq and once we discover this they are surprised we aren't too interested in fighting anymore. If the US want to fight for oil, let them die for it. Pull out now.
Ian, Tokyo, Japan
Hey, like it or not this is an American war, initiated for US for political and economic reasons, too many UK troops have died already through US lack of understanding of what happens outside the US homeland. I can speak of Rendition, Guantamo Bay and US troops using the Koran for target practice,
Charles J Fuller, Buckeye, USA
With friends like you we stopped wasting our time looking for enemies.
Frank Molnar, Carmel, Indiana, USA
Thanks guys, I've been to Iraq twice and spent time in a mixed American/UK unit in the Balkans. I used to have a lot of respect for ya'll. for your military, I still do.
You either face those sworn to destroy you or you surrender. There is no in between. guess your politiciansB lost their spines
Brad, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Britain has seemingly mastered the art of appeasment to a level never before seen in history. But they still dont seem to understand that it never works. Poland, France, Northern Ireland, Basra, how many more embarrassments does it take ?
Mike, Edinburgh,
What a disgrace!
WG Lynch, Vancouver , BC
Another reason why Gordon Brown's government is not fit to govern. He has shamed this country, humiliated its army, and betrayed his allies.
Eve Ventura, Nottingham, UK
More details here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 461067.ece
Six days on the sidelines left Britain facing wrath of allies in Basra
An 'accommodation' with al-Mahdi militia may have irrevocably soured relations with the US and Iraqi armies
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... =12&page=2
Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra
(Nabil al-Jurani)
Four thousand British troops, including elements of the SAS, are based outside Basra
Deborah Haynes in Baquba and Michael Evans, Defence Editor
A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt.
Four thousand British troops – including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade – watched from the sidelines for six days because of an “accommodation” with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault.
US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts.
Hundreds of militiamen were killed or arrested in the fighting. About 60 Iraqis were killed or injured. One US Marine died and sevenwere wounded.
Britain left facing wrath of its allies
US advisers who accompanied the Iraqi forces into the fight were shocked to learn of the accommodation made last summer by British Intelligence and elements of al-Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia Muslim cleric.
The deal, which aimed to encourage the Shia movement back into the political process and marginalise extremist factions, has dealt a huge blow to Britain’s reputation in Iraq.
Under its terms, no British soldier could enter Basra without the permission of Des Browne, the Defence Secretary. By the time he gave his approval, most of the fighting was over and the damage to Britain’s reputation had already been done.
Senior British defence sources told The Times that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who ordered the assault, and high-ranking US military officers had become disillusioned with the British as a result of their failure to act. Another confirmed that the deal, negotiated by British Intelligence, had been a costly mistake.
The Ministry of Defence has never confirmed that there was a deal with al-Mahdi Army, but one official denied that the delay in sending in troops was because of the arrangement agreed with the Shia militia.
A spokesman for the MoD said that the reason why troops were not sent immediately into Basra was because there was “no structure in place” in the city for units to go back in to start mentoring the Iraqi troops.
Colonel Imad, who heads the 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade, 1st Iraqi Army Division, the most experienced division, commanded one of the quick-reaction battalions summoned to assist British-trained local forces, who faltered from the outset because of inexperience and lack of support.
He said: “Without the support of the Americans we would not have accomplished the mission because the British Forces had done nothing there.
“I do not trust the British Forces. They did not want to lose any soldiers for the mission.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Western, a senior US Marine advising the Iraqi Army, told The Times: “I was not happy. Everybody just assumed that because this deal was cut nobody was going in. Cutting a deal with the bad guys is generally not a good idea.”
He emphasised, however, that he was not being critical of the British military, which he described as first-rate.
Captain Eric Whyne, another US Marine officer who took part in the battle, said that he was astounded that “a coalition force would make a pact with essentially their enemy and promise not to go into their area so as not to get attacked”. He alleged that “some horrific atrocities” were committed by the militia in Basra during the British watch.
A senior British defence source agreed that the battle for Basra had been damaging to Britain’s reputation in Iraq. “Maliki, and the Americans, felt the British were morally impugned by the deal they had reached with the militia. The British were accused of trying to find the line of least resistance in dealing with the Shia militia,” said the source.
“You can accuse the Americans of many things, such as hamfistedness, but you can’t accuse them of not addressing a situation when it arises. While we had a strategy of evasion, the Americans just went in and addressed the problem.”
Another British official said that the deal was intended as an IRA-style reconciliation. “That is what we were trying to do but it did not work.” The official added that “accommodation” had become a dirty word.
US officials knew of the discussions, which continued until March this year. They facilitated the peaceful exit of British troops from a palace compound in Basra last September in return for the release of a number of prisoners. The arrangement fell apart on March 25 when Mr al-Maliki ordered his surprise assault on Basra, catching both the Americans and British off-guard.
The Americans responded by flying in reinforcements, providing air cover and offering the logistical and other support needed for the Iraqis to win.
The British were partly handicapped because their commander, Major-General Barney White-Spunner, was away on a skiing holiday when the attack began. When Brigadier Julian Free, his deputy, arrived to discuss the situation with Mr al-Maliki at the presidential palace in Basra, he was made to wait outside.
The first British troops only entered the city on March 31.
The MoD spokesman said that the operation was launched at such short notice that the only support that could be given in the first few days was air power – in the form of Tornado ground attack aircraft – and logistics.
He said that after British troops were withdrawn from Basra last year it was realised that the Iraqi forces still needed help, which was why the current British force contained more instructors and trainers.
PS:Haven't the US also made similar "accomodations" with various ungodly outfits in their dirty wars too? What is the CIA doing in Pakistan right now?
Have your say
How typical of the duplicitous British. Instead of helping the brave US troops fighting this ENTIRELY NECESSARY AND MORAL fight against islamic terror, they sit back and do nothing. I am ashamed to be British.
jay, London,
There are two lessons that the US needs to learn.
Firstly the answer to a problem is not always to send in the troops - shoot first and ask questions later is a barbarian principle.
Secondly they should learn to keep their word and abide by deals made.
Neither comes naturally to the US.
Chris, Ashford, Middx, England
What a horrible betrayal of brave men!!
By the way, mates, if we were fighting for oil we would have done a better job of it and gasoline(petrol to you) would not be anywhere near $4. a gallon.
henry cowan, linthicum,MD, USA
Damned shame. I know that you British soldiers are far better than that. Your political masters have undermined you. Winston Churchill, where art thou?
Ross, Wyoming, USA
If we are supposed to be at war then surely people are going to die?
Why can we not accept that?
G Madden, London, United Kingdom
so - all the Americans are against the "accommodations" made north of Baghdad. These involved bribing those with millions of dollars, that last week had been shooting at you ?
rob, kingston, UK
Another political misjudgement by Gordon Brown? Does he really hate the Army so much?
sunniva, Edinburgh, UK
Yes he does. Why else would he commit them to 2 wars and yet underfund, underequip and underpay them? Not only that but the Defence Secretary moonlights as Secretary of State for Scotland
Warwick Pearmund, Tokyo, Japan
I am hopeful because most British don't seem to agree with the viewpoint of the wild-eyed leftist "world citizens" posting here, at least judging by your recent election. I hope the military is in no way to blame for this. I pray that we don't elect that ninny Obama just when y'all put Cameron in.
Dave, Raleigh, NC, US
it is interesting to read the comments and gauge the difference in response from Americans & British.
sorry William Ward USA, but this DOES represent the Civilian pops. opinion that we shouldn't have been there in the 1st place.
we are all a target. do u include the Iraqi civilians as well?
JW, Brisbane,
The point now is to get out of this illegal and immoral war. The U.S. will NEVER pull out in this election year. Which means will Brown have the guts to do the right thing?
Tom, Kansas City, US
And about time too. George W Bush ,along with Cheney and Rumsfeld , rushed headlong into Iraq without any real or true reason. Your Tony Blair and our John Howard disgracefully went along with the charade. The British did the correct thing in not subjecting their troops to this illegal battle.
Barry Everingham, Malvern, Australia
You couldn't make it up. Oh ! Actually, Joseph Heller DID ! In Catch-22 ! Brad- our politicians haven't got spines and let your troops go in without body armour and see how they feel .
Terry, Guildford, UK
a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
It wasn't the privates, sergeants, et al.that were the problem. It was a combination of the current government, the civilian population that voted them in, and the intelligence community. 7-7-05."we are all targets". you have gained no grace by hiding.
William Ward, Upland, USA
Reading this article made me physically ill. The commander was away on a skiing holiday??? Good lord, Great Britain is lost.
Victoria Pitt, Chicago, USA
Enjoy sharia law and the loss of all freedoms you now enjoy. I won't be sending my American son to defend Europe when she falls to the Islamo-facists. We've already done that once or twice before.
TaTa
Charles Dagostino, Bethesda, MD, United States
Troops on the Ground I'm Proud of you Fact is
British were handicapped coz their commander, M-G White-Spunner, was on skiing hols when attack began WHY? When Brigadier J Free - deputy arrived to discuss the situation with Mr al-Maliki at the presidential palace he had to wait for al-Maliki outside!
LT, Warminster, UK
Another political misjudgement by Gordon Brown? Does he really hate the Army so much?
sunniva, Edinburgh, UK
So long, pals.
David, Los Angeles, USA
We have an agreement to stop fighting and start a political process.
Worked in Ireland.
But no you're right let's just keep shooting ey cowboys?
Leonandrews, brisbane,
Brad,
When exactly did Iraq swear to destroy America, let alone Britain?
Why should we fight people defending their country against foreign troops who are there for no good reason?
Iraq is a huge distraction from the fight against our real enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.
Simon Allen, Melbourne, Australia
It's naive to think that No.10 cooks these schemes up.
I guarantee that the SIS are talking with the Taliban.
Christopher, Perth, Australia
If true, this is very sad as the Brits are our top allies in the world...hopefully, when McCain & Cameron are in power we can fix this!!!
God Bless America...
God Save the Queen...
Carlos Echevarria, Miami, USA
Sirs: I would not be surprised at all if the Times learns at a later date that this ignoble deal, along with others, was actually discussed and agreed to sometime ago--in Iran--as the lynch pin in securing the release of the British sailors and marines.
John H, Los Angeles, USA
All those billions of US dollars to prop up a proxy Iranian government...The Americans must be proud! At least the British know who to really make deals with. This is an American attempt to discredit the British because the British are intent on leaving Iraq!!
Tim, UK, UK
why are we making deals with terrorists? we are there to bring democracy to the south of iraq and yet we hand it over to an insurgent army? fair enough hand over to the iraqi army but why invade if we just swap 1 dictator for another?
ASHAMED, EMBARRASED, HUMILIATED
will, grimsby, uk
A very shoddy war in the first place, based on lies. The shame is that Britian and Australia and others went there in the first place. If our leaders had said no, maybe, just maybe the US would have had second thoughts. In fact our Prime minister, John Howard, was in constant touch, egging Bush on
margie , victoria , australia
Why would you do this to your soldiers? You have destroyed any trust our soldiers can ever put in yours. Why? Have you no sense of alegiance? Have you no brothers? You will never be trusted to watch our backs. We cannot afford it.
Kevin Vogel, Rapid City, United States
as always, the politicians screw up and the Soldier takes the brunt of the blame....... aside from this embaressing debacle and humiliation, I gurentee you this , everyone of those Soldiers in a British uniform would have rather died than be humiliated by politicians like this...
Wayne Smith , leeds, England
Third and final comment ............America just hides there deals under the guise of CIA black ops and then politicians deny any invovment
Wayne Smith , leeds, England
Whilst the "we know better than you" brigade continues to crowd Whitehall, ghastly mistakes like this one will continue to be made as they have been made in the past.
richard, bangkok,
If true, this is really horrifying. No one should make side deals with the enemy. The UK has done good work in Iraq and should not besmirch that by secretly agreeing to stand down. Either let the UK military do its job or pull them out. Don't humiliate the troops or fail to back up an ally.
Jill, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
The British military was betrayed by their political masters. Do the NuLabor Socialists hate the military that much?!
Starved of funds & equipment, treated worse than criminals at home and when they are still victorious on the battlefield, they are left humiliated by spineless pols.
Fernandez, San Jose, CA
We are in a desperate battle of civilization vs. 6th century barbarism. If you are not in it with us 100% then by all means, remove your troops. We can handle it on our own, provided our own political system does not succumb to the siren song of socialism that has overtaken GB. May god save us all
Andrew Repa, St Charles, Il, United States
I felt ashamed at the time when I read about what was happening. I wondered why we didn't attack when it seemed so obvious it should have been us supposrting the Iraqis. I still feel ashamed.
Martin, Durham, England
Now if we can just cut a secret deal to get all troops out of Iraq...
Mary Witherspoon, New York, NY, USA
I was hoping to read a good reason for the decision the British army made, but I didn't.
Ed, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
Of course New Labour humiliated the Army,that is what they intended from the outset.Every other British institution had been broken by the New Labour Project.The only way the Army could be broken was in the field..Under equipped under funded and betrayed.
Peter, Manchester, England
How many cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers have any military experience?
Rob Olivier, London, UK
This is a very disturbing report, but somehow not surprising. This whole business of the British trying to handle the shia as they did in Ireland was bound to fail.
Other readers are right, this is a major disgrace for Gordon Brown and the British army.
Paul, Alexandria, VA, USA
At least they were trying to keep to their word!
Steve, London, UK
It saddens me to see Great Britannia cower before these barbarians. Churchill wept. Britain is becoming more European. Grab hold of the rudder, and regain your course.
GOD save you.
Carlos A. Miller, Pasadena, California, US of A
This sounds like an old English attitude I had thought long dead; making and keeping a gentlemen's agreement in the name of "honor" while good men die. I've served with the British and was proud to do so, but present management needs to go.
Shaun Pearson, Halifax, Canada
So the Americans trick us into going to Iraq and once we discover this they are surprised we aren't too interested in fighting anymore. If the US want to fight for oil, let them die for it. Pull out now.
Ian, Tokyo, Japan
Hey, like it or not this is an American war, initiated for US for political and economic reasons, too many UK troops have died already through US lack of understanding of what happens outside the US homeland. I can speak of Rendition, Guantamo Bay and US troops using the Koran for target practice,
Charles J Fuller, Buckeye, USA
With friends like you we stopped wasting our time looking for enemies.
Frank Molnar, Carmel, Indiana, USA
Thanks guys, I've been to Iraq twice and spent time in a mixed American/UK unit in the Balkans. I used to have a lot of respect for ya'll. for your military, I still do.
You either face those sworn to destroy you or you surrender. There is no in between. guess your politiciansB lost their spines
Brad, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Britain has seemingly mastered the art of appeasment to a level never before seen in history. But they still dont seem to understand that it never works. Poland, France, Northern Ireland, Basra, how many more embarrassments does it take ?
Mike, Edinburgh,
What a disgrace!
WG Lynch, Vancouver , BC
Another reason why Gordon Brown's government is not fit to govern. He has shamed this country, humiliated its army, and betrayed his allies.
Eve Ventura, Nottingham, UK
More details here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 461067.ece
Six days on the sidelines left Britain facing wrath of allies in Basra
An 'accommodation' with al-Mahdi militia may have irrevocably soured relations with the US and Iraqi armies
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
White House "whitewash" of British Intel. that Saddam had no WMDs.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 466512.ece
White House 'buried British intelligence on Iraq WMDs'
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Tony Blair and George Bush both saw intelligence contradicting the rationale for invading Iraq, a new book claims
Tim Reid in Washington and Sam Coates in London
MI6 told Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq that a high-placed Iraqi source said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was passed to the US but was buried by the White House, according to a new book.
The book claimed that the former Prime Minister sent a top British spy to the Middle East in 2003 — three months before the invasion — to dig up enough intelligence to avoid war but that President Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, dismissed any claims or possible evidence that would stop military action.
In The Way of the World, the Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind also claimed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated, handwritten letter purportedly from the head of Iraqi Intelligence to Saddam. The letter, which came to light nine months after the invasion, was meant to demonstrate a link between the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda.
The forgery, adamantly denied by the White House, was passed to a British journalist in Baghdad and written about as if genuine by The Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003. The article received significant attention in the US and provided the White House with a new rationale for the invasion, Suskind claimed. The White House called the allegation absurd.
British commanders 'wanted to storm Basra'
Secret deal kept British Army out of Basra battle
Bush reduces duration of tours of duty in Iraq
Suskind said that at the beginning of 2003 MI6 sent one of its top agents, Michael Shipster, to the region. Mr Shipster held secret meetings in Jordan with Tahir Jalil Habbush, the head of Iraqi Intelligence. The meetings were confirmed by Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of MI6.
Mr Inkster also confirmed that Mr Shipster was told by Mr Habbush that there were no illicit weapons in Iraq. Mr Inkster refused to comment last night.
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British Intelligence, was also interviewed by Suskind. The author said that Sir Richard confirmed the Shipster meetings and report. He added that he asked why Mr Blair had not acted on the intelligence.
Sir Richard was quoted as saying that the mission was an eleventh-hour “attempt to try, as it were, I’d say, to diffuse \ the whole situation”. He added: “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”
Suskind wrote that Sir Richard flew to Washington in February 2003 to present the Habbush report to George Tenet, then the Director of the CIA. The report stated that according to Mr Habbush, Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in 1991 — the same year that he destroyed his chemical weapons programme — and ended his biological weapons programme in 1996. These assertions turned out to be true.
Mr Tenet briefed Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice, at the time his National Security Adviser.
Suskind wrote: “The White House then buried the Habbush report. They instructed the British that they were no longer interested in keeping the channel open.”
Rob Richer, a former CIA officer in the Near East division, told Suskind: “The Brits wanted to avoid war — which was what was driving them. Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office.”
Mr Habbush was put on the White House’s list of most-wanted Iraqis but according to Suskind he was paid by the CIA in October 2003 to write the forged letter to Saddam, dated July 1, 2001, saying that the putative September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq. This was the letter publicised in The Sunday Telegraph.
Of the forgery allegation, Mr Tenet said: “There was no such order from the White House to me or, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from the CIA ever involved in any such effort.” Of Mr Habbush, Mr Tenet said that the claims in the book were a complete fabrication. He said that Mr Habbush had “failed to persuade” the British that he had “anything new to offer by way of intelligence”.
Delving deep
— Ron Suskind was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000
— His serialised stories, following a religious student from a blighted inner-city school to the Ivy League Brown University, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995
— His 2004 book The Price of Loyalty penetrated the inner sanctum of the Bush Administration
— Excepts of his last book, The One Percent Doctrine, were published last month in Time magazine
Have your say
To say someone is innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept that has grown over the centuries from Magna Carta and safeguards our society in face of corruption and deceit. However one might guess that many people who are apparently iinocent are in fact guilty, and I see no harm in saying so.
Brian Lewis, Manila, Philippines
No surprise at all. Not only must the liars -in-high-office be held accountable now, but WE must resist the war hysteria based on lies when they "try it on" for a third time in order to get at the Iranian oil, and they won't care HOW they get their way this time round either. Don't believe them.
Julia Iskandar, London, England
why is it that no one is surprised about any kind of cover up by our gov.t...a very sad state of affairs but this is the game of politics, the US wanted war and they made it happen....do you think a corporate money orientated regime cares about the loss of life or destruction??
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 466512.ece
White House 'buried British intelligence on Iraq WMDs'
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Tony Blair and George Bush both saw intelligence contradicting the rationale for invading Iraq, a new book claims
Tim Reid in Washington and Sam Coates in London
MI6 told Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq that a high-placed Iraqi source said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was passed to the US but was buried by the White House, according to a new book.
The book claimed that the former Prime Minister sent a top British spy to the Middle East in 2003 — three months before the invasion — to dig up enough intelligence to avoid war but that President Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, dismissed any claims or possible evidence that would stop military action.
In The Way of the World, the Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind also claimed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated, handwritten letter purportedly from the head of Iraqi Intelligence to Saddam. The letter, which came to light nine months after the invasion, was meant to demonstrate a link between the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda.
The forgery, adamantly denied by the White House, was passed to a British journalist in Baghdad and written about as if genuine by The Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003. The article received significant attention in the US and provided the White House with a new rationale for the invasion, Suskind claimed. The White House called the allegation absurd.
British commanders 'wanted to storm Basra'
Secret deal kept British Army out of Basra battle
Bush reduces duration of tours of duty in Iraq
Suskind said that at the beginning of 2003 MI6 sent one of its top agents, Michael Shipster, to the region. Mr Shipster held secret meetings in Jordan with Tahir Jalil Habbush, the head of Iraqi Intelligence. The meetings were confirmed by Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of MI6.
Mr Inkster also confirmed that Mr Shipster was told by Mr Habbush that there were no illicit weapons in Iraq. Mr Inkster refused to comment last night.
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British Intelligence, was also interviewed by Suskind. The author said that Sir Richard confirmed the Shipster meetings and report. He added that he asked why Mr Blair had not acted on the intelligence.
Sir Richard was quoted as saying that the mission was an eleventh-hour “attempt to try, as it were, I’d say, to diffuse \ the whole situation”. He added: “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”
Suskind wrote that Sir Richard flew to Washington in February 2003 to present the Habbush report to George Tenet, then the Director of the CIA. The report stated that according to Mr Habbush, Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in 1991 — the same year that he destroyed his chemical weapons programme — and ended his biological weapons programme in 1996. These assertions turned out to be true.
Mr Tenet briefed Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice, at the time his National Security Adviser.
Suskind wrote: “The White House then buried the Habbush report. They instructed the British that they were no longer interested in keeping the channel open.”
Rob Richer, a former CIA officer in the Near East division, told Suskind: “The Brits wanted to avoid war — which was what was driving them. Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office.”
Mr Habbush was put on the White House’s list of most-wanted Iraqis but according to Suskind he was paid by the CIA in October 2003 to write the forged letter to Saddam, dated July 1, 2001, saying that the putative September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq. This was the letter publicised in The Sunday Telegraph.
Of the forgery allegation, Mr Tenet said: “There was no such order from the White House to me or, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from the CIA ever involved in any such effort.” Of Mr Habbush, Mr Tenet said that the claims in the book were a complete fabrication. He said that Mr Habbush had “failed to persuade” the British that he had “anything new to offer by way of intelligence”.
Delving deep
— Ron Suskind was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000
— His serialised stories, following a religious student from a blighted inner-city school to the Ivy League Brown University, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995
— His 2004 book The Price of Loyalty penetrated the inner sanctum of the Bush Administration
— Excepts of his last book, The One Percent Doctrine, were published last month in Time magazine
Have your say
To say someone is innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept that has grown over the centuries from Magna Carta and safeguards our society in face of corruption and deceit. However one might guess that many people who are apparently iinocent are in fact guilty, and I see no harm in saying so.
Brian Lewis, Manila, Philippines
No surprise at all. Not only must the liars -in-high-office be held accountable now, but WE must resist the war hysteria based on lies when they "try it on" for a third time in order to get at the Iranian oil, and they won't care HOW they get their way this time round either. Don't believe them.
Julia Iskandar, London, England
why is it that no one is surprised about any kind of cover up by our gov.t...a very sad state of affairs but this is the game of politics, the US wanted war and they made it happen....do you think a corporate money orientated regime cares about the loss of life or destruction??
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
The unending tragedy of Iraq.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 87135.html
The tragic last moments of Margaret Hassan
When a renowned British aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Herbody was never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al Jazeera,the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals why it has never been broadcast
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Margaret Hassan pleading for help from Tony Blair in a videotaped message
She stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded. I'm not sure if videos like this should ever be seen – or perhaps the word is endured – but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.
The "execution" – the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine – is among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel's archives.
Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. "I beg of you to help me," she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad airport. A man's voice prompts her to keep to a text. "I admit that we worked with the occupation forces ..." she says. It is untrue, of course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would never have spied on Iraqis.
Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle – a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn't move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face.
This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret's immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera's studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.
It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she – and she alone – who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein's bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died.
"We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.
On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a small butcher's knife and slowly carves his way through the victim's throat, the poor man's shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is eventually torn from his body.
Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare at the camera hopelessly.
Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and – along with other men off-camera – goes from one body to the next, firing again and again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag. He is singing.
For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. "I trained Ali Khatib – he was a great reporter," I am told. "The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he's approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say 'Stop – you have to go back'. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier."
For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret's husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. "I would come home and sit here and weep," he told me then. "I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don't think insurgents did this. I don't think Iraqi people did this ... I couldn't see the video that was released – not because she's my wife, but because I can't bear to see anyone assassinated."
So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution, there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility, just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret – who once worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam's government television station in Baghdad – even found support among the anti-American insurgents; they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qa'ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her husband's suspicions were correct, then whose "foreign" hand took her away?
The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera's archives, it is difficult to escape this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al Jazeera's Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden's tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station's Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al Jazeera's Doha head office. His staff had – for their own protection – earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair – on a post-prime-ministerial tour of the Doha offices – if Bush had really planned to bomb them. "Blair said something about 'the need to move on'" one of them told me. "So we knew it was true."
If Al Jazeera's staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.
Stories abound of the day that George Tenet – then America's CIA chief – turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera's reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked out.
In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr Cheney's list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would not discuss it. "Then that is the end of our meeting," Mr Cheney announced. "It is," the Emir apparently replied. And walked out. The "meeting" had lasted 30 seconds.
But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.
One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 – when Saddam still ruled Baghdad – an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British "want us to rebel against Saddam," the official said. "They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don't worry about democracy or who your leaders are."
That official was Margaret Hassan.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 87135.html
The tragic last moments of Margaret Hassan
When a renowned British aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Herbody was never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al Jazeera,the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals why it has never been broadcast
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Margaret Hassan pleading for help from Tony Blair in a videotaped message
She stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded. I'm not sure if videos like this should ever be seen – or perhaps the word is endured – but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.
The "execution" – the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine – is among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel's archives.
Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. "I beg of you to help me," she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad airport. A man's voice prompts her to keep to a text. "I admit that we worked with the occupation forces ..." she says. It is untrue, of course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would never have spied on Iraqis.
Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle – a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn't move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face.
This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret's immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera's studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.
It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she – and she alone – who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein's bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died.
"We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.
On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a small butcher's knife and slowly carves his way through the victim's throat, the poor man's shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is eventually torn from his body.
Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare at the camera hopelessly.
Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and – along with other men off-camera – goes from one body to the next, firing again and again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag. He is singing.
For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. "I trained Ali Khatib – he was a great reporter," I am told. "The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he's approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say 'Stop – you have to go back'. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier."
For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret's husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. "I would come home and sit here and weep," he told me then. "I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don't think insurgents did this. I don't think Iraqi people did this ... I couldn't see the video that was released – not because she's my wife, but because I can't bear to see anyone assassinated."
So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution, there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility, just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret – who once worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam's government television station in Baghdad – even found support among the anti-American insurgents; they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qa'ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her husband's suspicions were correct, then whose "foreign" hand took her away?
The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera's archives, it is difficult to escape this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al Jazeera's Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden's tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station's Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al Jazeera's Doha head office. His staff had – for their own protection – earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair – on a post-prime-ministerial tour of the Doha offices – if Bush had really planned to bomb them. "Blair said something about 'the need to move on'" one of them told me. "So we knew it was true."
If Al Jazeera's staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.
Stories abound of the day that George Tenet – then America's CIA chief – turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera's reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked out.
In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr Cheney's list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would not discuss it. "Then that is the end of our meeting," Mr Cheney announced. "It is," the Emir apparently replied. And walked out. The "meeting" had lasted 30 seconds.
But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.
One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 – when Saddam still ruled Baghdad – an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British "want us to rebel against Saddam," the official said. "They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don't worry about democracy or who your leaders are."
That official was Margaret Hassan.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Sitting on an oil bonanza revenue of billions upon billions ($80B?),the US aims to siphon much of that from Iraq with massive arms sales,rewarding their arms industry and filling Uncle Sam's depleted pockets with some loose change.In like manner decades ago in the '70s,did Kissinger and the Shah conspire to raise oil prices so that the Shah could pay for his US arms .The rest of the world,especially the :turd world" nations footed the bill,in similar manner as they are doing today.Who says that history does not repeat itself?
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy ... s_to_iraq/
U.S. Surges $11 Billion in Arms Sales to Iraq
by Travis Sharp [contact information]
Published on Iraq Slogger on August 6, 2008
During the last week of July, the Department of Defense notified Congress about the proposed sale of $10.9 billion in U.S. military equipment and support to Iraq through the Foreign Military Sales program. Besides the eye-catching price tag – which, at $10.9 billion, is greater than the value of all other U.S. arms sales to Iraq since 2005 combined – the equipment included in the proposed agreement represents a potential watershed in the development of Iraq’s military capabilities. The sale not only carries implications for the balance of power in the region, but also raises important questions about oversight, accountability, and transparency in a country riddled with internal violence.
THE DEVIL’S IN THE DETAILS
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) manages the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program. In its notification about the proposed sale to Iraq, the Agency reiterated that the ultimate goal was “to improve the security of a friendly country.” DSCA spokesman Charles Taylor told Bloomberg that Iraq will pay for the equipment with its own funds.
Congress must receive 30-day advance written notification of the intended sale of weapons, equipment, and services to another country if the total value is over $50 million. Congress may enact a joint resolution to stop an arms deal, but if no action is taken in 30 days, the deal is almost certain to go forward as planned. With Congress in recess throughout August, the sale will assuredly go through. Few members of Congress would oppose it anyway.
Under the proposal, Iraq would receive numerous defense articles and services, including:
• 140 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks upgraded to the M1A1M configuration
• 6 C-130J-30 Hercules transport aircraft
• 160 M1117 Guardian armored security vehicles
• 24 helicopters (either Bell Armed 407 or Boeing AH-6 Little Bird), with AGM-114M Hellfire missiles and launchers
• 392 light armored vehicles
• 26 M72 light anti-tank weapons
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers support for building facilities for Iraqi Security Forces
The DSCA claimed in its notification that the $10.9 billion weapons package “will not affect the basic military balance in the region.” However, a number of experts expressed skepticism about this claim, arguing that some equipment included in the package would start the process of transforming the Iraqi Army from a force focused on counterinsurgency and enforcing internal order to a force capable of counterbalancing other countries in the region.
Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, remarked that the DSCA’s claim that the sale will not affect the regional military balance is true only “if one factors in the American presence in Iraq. If the Americans are removed from the equation, however, this purchase crosses a Rubicon.”
The proposed sale foreshadows a time when U.S. forces will no longer be responsible for protecting Iraq from external threats. The 140 Abrams tanks and 392 light armored vehicles would equip between two and four mechanized brigades. In a defensive role, these tanks and vehicles “would present very formidable mobile opposition against even numerically superior foes,” noted Defense Industry Daily. “The Abrams’ battlefield performance against enemy T-72s and other Russian stock would have to give neighbors like Iran and Syria pause, if a North Vietnam-style armored invasion were ever contemplated.”
The six C-130J-30 Hercules transport aircraft and 24 helicopters are noteworthy upgrades for the Iraqi Air Force, which already is set to double in size by 2009. Adding six C-130s will triple Iraq’s inventory of the aircraft, which the DSCA said Iraq intends to use “for intra-theater support for its troops.” But, with a range of approximately 2,000 miles, C-130J-30s flying out of Iraq would be able to complete round-trip sorties to all the major cities in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Israel. This would expand the regional power projection capabilities of the Iraqi Air Force.
As for the helicopters, which will likely perform scout missions and close air support, the DSCA noted that they “will be used to develop new Iraqi Air Force (IAF) squadrons and/or wings.” While the Bell Armed 407 or Boeing AH-6 Little Bird are not out-and-out attack helicopters, the mounting of laser-guided Hellfire missiles with blast-fragmentation warheads would give the post-Saddam Iraqi Air Force airborne weaponry it “has not really had to this point,” noted Defense Industry Daily. DJ Elliott, an analyst at The Long War Journal, suggested that these helicopters may be destined for Iraqi Special Operations support.
PART OF A LARGER TREND
The United States has rapidly increased its arms sales to Iraq over the last several years. With the $10.9 billion deal announced in July, the United States has completed approximately $20 billion in arms sales agreements with Iraq since 2005. This total includes $132 million in 2005, $2.3 billion in 2006, $4.5 billion in 2007, and $12.7 billion (thus far) in 2008. Since the United States averaged only $15.4 billion per year in global arms agreements from 1999 to 2006, Iraq is receiving an increasingly significant proportion of total U.S. worldwide sales.
Separate from these Foreign Military Sales, the United States also provided $17.9 billion in military-related aid since 2005 through the Iraq Security Forces Fund, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s latest July 2008 report.
The United States is already the unparalleled leader in arms sales agreements to the Middle East. As a March 2008 analysis by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation detailed, the United States was responsible for 56% of all arms sales agreements with Middle Eastern countries from 1999 to 2006. This was nearly five times greater than Russia's share, the second highest supplier, and over eighteen times greater than China's. Blocking Russia and China’s influence in Middle Eastern arms markets is considered an important foreign policy goal by many U.S. defense officials.
The recent surge of sales to Iraq has supplanted other Middle Eastern countries’ long-standing status as the preferred destination for U.S. weapons. Since 2005, the United States averaged $4.9 billion per year in arms sales with Iraq. This places Iraq far ahead of other U.S. allies like Egypt and Israel, which averaged $1.2 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, in arms sales with the United States from 1999 to 2006.
ARMS SALES AND WITHDRAWAL?
The New York Times revealed in April 2008 that 22 high-ranking Iraqi officials secretly negotiated an $833 million arms agreement with Serbia. When the secret deal was exposed, Iraqis and Americans were quick to criticize both the process used and the quality of the equipment provided. However, Iraqi officials involved with the arrangement argued that the inadequacies of the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program justified seeking an alternative supplier. “The problem with FMS is that it didn’t deliver on time,” one senior Iraqi official said. “This [secret deal] was used by some in government to say, ‘Look, this is deliberate. The U.S. is trying to keep us unarmed so that we’ll always be in need of the Americans.’ ”
A chasm is growing between U.S. arms sales procedures – designed for accountability and standardization, not speed or flexibility – and Iraq’s purported need for better military equipment. As Ahmed Mahmoud, a lieutenant in the Iraqi Army, asked a New York Times reporter August 6, “In your opinion, do you think I could fight an army with those trucks?” One fifth of the vehicles in Mahmoud’s battalion were rotting and bomb-demolished, but they were still considered operational for bureaucratic reasons.
Of course, rapidly surging weapons into Iraq carries significant risks. A November 2007 audit by the Department of Defense Inspector General concluded that Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) “was not able to demonstrate proper accountability for and management of the Iraq Security Forces Fund and could not always demonstrate that the delivery of services, equipment, and construction was properly made to the Iraq Security Forces.” The audit also revealed that in 2005, MNSTC-I could not verify that Iraqi Security Forces received 12,712 of 13,508 light weapons. This expanded upon previous Government Accountability Office reporting that the United States couldn’t account for 30% of the weapons provided to Iraq since 2004.
Providing Iraqi Security Forces with the equipment they need to achieve their objectives will help increase Iraqi soldiers’ confidence and effectiveness as the United States begins commencing troop withdrawals. However, Iraqi oversight of military equipment coming into the country must be bolstered. If weapons are channeled toward dangerous insurgents, and away from the legitimate development of Iraqi Security Forces, the security environment in Iraq could take another perilous turn for the worse.
Travis Sharp 202-546-0795 ext. 2105 [email protected]
Travis Sharp is the Military Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation where he performs policy work on national security spending, military policy, and Iraq. He has published letters and articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy in Focus, United Press International, and Peace Review.
© 2007 Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation | Design by Plus Three | Powered by ARCOS
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy ... s_to_iraq/
U.S. Surges $11 Billion in Arms Sales to Iraq
by Travis Sharp [contact information]
Published on Iraq Slogger on August 6, 2008
During the last week of July, the Department of Defense notified Congress about the proposed sale of $10.9 billion in U.S. military equipment and support to Iraq through the Foreign Military Sales program. Besides the eye-catching price tag – which, at $10.9 billion, is greater than the value of all other U.S. arms sales to Iraq since 2005 combined – the equipment included in the proposed agreement represents a potential watershed in the development of Iraq’s military capabilities. The sale not only carries implications for the balance of power in the region, but also raises important questions about oversight, accountability, and transparency in a country riddled with internal violence.
THE DEVIL’S IN THE DETAILS
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) manages the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program. In its notification about the proposed sale to Iraq, the Agency reiterated that the ultimate goal was “to improve the security of a friendly country.” DSCA spokesman Charles Taylor told Bloomberg that Iraq will pay for the equipment with its own funds.
Congress must receive 30-day advance written notification of the intended sale of weapons, equipment, and services to another country if the total value is over $50 million. Congress may enact a joint resolution to stop an arms deal, but if no action is taken in 30 days, the deal is almost certain to go forward as planned. With Congress in recess throughout August, the sale will assuredly go through. Few members of Congress would oppose it anyway.
Under the proposal, Iraq would receive numerous defense articles and services, including:
• 140 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks upgraded to the M1A1M configuration
• 6 C-130J-30 Hercules transport aircraft
• 160 M1117 Guardian armored security vehicles
• 24 helicopters (either Bell Armed 407 or Boeing AH-6 Little Bird), with AGM-114M Hellfire missiles and launchers
• 392 light armored vehicles
• 26 M72 light anti-tank weapons
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers support for building facilities for Iraqi Security Forces
The DSCA claimed in its notification that the $10.9 billion weapons package “will not affect the basic military balance in the region.” However, a number of experts expressed skepticism about this claim, arguing that some equipment included in the package would start the process of transforming the Iraqi Army from a force focused on counterinsurgency and enforcing internal order to a force capable of counterbalancing other countries in the region.
Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, remarked that the DSCA’s claim that the sale will not affect the regional military balance is true only “if one factors in the American presence in Iraq. If the Americans are removed from the equation, however, this purchase crosses a Rubicon.”
The proposed sale foreshadows a time when U.S. forces will no longer be responsible for protecting Iraq from external threats. The 140 Abrams tanks and 392 light armored vehicles would equip between two and four mechanized brigades. In a defensive role, these tanks and vehicles “would present very formidable mobile opposition against even numerically superior foes,” noted Defense Industry Daily. “The Abrams’ battlefield performance against enemy T-72s and other Russian stock would have to give neighbors like Iran and Syria pause, if a North Vietnam-style armored invasion were ever contemplated.”
The six C-130J-30 Hercules transport aircraft and 24 helicopters are noteworthy upgrades for the Iraqi Air Force, which already is set to double in size by 2009. Adding six C-130s will triple Iraq’s inventory of the aircraft, which the DSCA said Iraq intends to use “for intra-theater support for its troops.” But, with a range of approximately 2,000 miles, C-130J-30s flying out of Iraq would be able to complete round-trip sorties to all the major cities in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Israel. This would expand the regional power projection capabilities of the Iraqi Air Force.
As for the helicopters, which will likely perform scout missions and close air support, the DSCA noted that they “will be used to develop new Iraqi Air Force (IAF) squadrons and/or wings.” While the Bell Armed 407 or Boeing AH-6 Little Bird are not out-and-out attack helicopters, the mounting of laser-guided Hellfire missiles with blast-fragmentation warheads would give the post-Saddam Iraqi Air Force airborne weaponry it “has not really had to this point,” noted Defense Industry Daily. DJ Elliott, an analyst at The Long War Journal, suggested that these helicopters may be destined for Iraqi Special Operations support.
PART OF A LARGER TREND
The United States has rapidly increased its arms sales to Iraq over the last several years. With the $10.9 billion deal announced in July, the United States has completed approximately $20 billion in arms sales agreements with Iraq since 2005. This total includes $132 million in 2005, $2.3 billion in 2006, $4.5 billion in 2007, and $12.7 billion (thus far) in 2008. Since the United States averaged only $15.4 billion per year in global arms agreements from 1999 to 2006, Iraq is receiving an increasingly significant proportion of total U.S. worldwide sales.
Separate from these Foreign Military Sales, the United States also provided $17.9 billion in military-related aid since 2005 through the Iraq Security Forces Fund, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s latest July 2008 report.
The United States is already the unparalleled leader in arms sales agreements to the Middle East. As a March 2008 analysis by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation detailed, the United States was responsible for 56% of all arms sales agreements with Middle Eastern countries from 1999 to 2006. This was nearly five times greater than Russia's share, the second highest supplier, and over eighteen times greater than China's. Blocking Russia and China’s influence in Middle Eastern arms markets is considered an important foreign policy goal by many U.S. defense officials.
The recent surge of sales to Iraq has supplanted other Middle Eastern countries’ long-standing status as the preferred destination for U.S. weapons. Since 2005, the United States averaged $4.9 billion per year in arms sales with Iraq. This places Iraq far ahead of other U.S. allies like Egypt and Israel, which averaged $1.2 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, in arms sales with the United States from 1999 to 2006.
ARMS SALES AND WITHDRAWAL?
The New York Times revealed in April 2008 that 22 high-ranking Iraqi officials secretly negotiated an $833 million arms agreement with Serbia. When the secret deal was exposed, Iraqis and Americans were quick to criticize both the process used and the quality of the equipment provided. However, Iraqi officials involved with the arrangement argued that the inadequacies of the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program justified seeking an alternative supplier. “The problem with FMS is that it didn’t deliver on time,” one senior Iraqi official said. “This [secret deal] was used by some in government to say, ‘Look, this is deliberate. The U.S. is trying to keep us unarmed so that we’ll always be in need of the Americans.’ ”
A chasm is growing between U.S. arms sales procedures – designed for accountability and standardization, not speed or flexibility – and Iraq’s purported need for better military equipment. As Ahmed Mahmoud, a lieutenant in the Iraqi Army, asked a New York Times reporter August 6, “In your opinion, do you think I could fight an army with those trucks?” One fifth of the vehicles in Mahmoud’s battalion were rotting and bomb-demolished, but they were still considered operational for bureaucratic reasons.
Of course, rapidly surging weapons into Iraq carries significant risks. A November 2007 audit by the Department of Defense Inspector General concluded that Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) “was not able to demonstrate proper accountability for and management of the Iraq Security Forces Fund and could not always demonstrate that the delivery of services, equipment, and construction was properly made to the Iraq Security Forces.” The audit also revealed that in 2005, MNSTC-I could not verify that Iraqi Security Forces received 12,712 of 13,508 light weapons. This expanded upon previous Government Accountability Office reporting that the United States couldn’t account for 30% of the weapons provided to Iraq since 2004.
Providing Iraqi Security Forces with the equipment they need to achieve their objectives will help increase Iraqi soldiers’ confidence and effectiveness as the United States begins commencing troop withdrawals. However, Iraqi oversight of military equipment coming into the country must be bolstered. If weapons are channeled toward dangerous insurgents, and away from the legitimate development of Iraqi Security Forces, the security environment in Iraq could take another perilous turn for the worse.
Travis Sharp 202-546-0795 ext. 2105 [email protected]
Travis Sharp is the Military Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation where he performs policy work on national security spending, military policy, and Iraq. He has published letters and articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy in Focus, United Press International, and Peace Review.
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Karan Dixit
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Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Georgia begins pulling forces out of Iraq: US military
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080810/wl ... 0810183442
(It seems like Georgians feel as if they were let down by US.)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080810/wl ... 0810183442
(It seems like Georgians feel as if they were let down by US.)
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
The US's new "weapon system" being used in Iraq!Go grab a gun BRites,head out for Iraq and make yourself rich thanks to Uncle Sam.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/00 ... 111102.htm
Report: US using 'money as a weapon' in Iraq
WASHINGTON (AP): A U.S. Army programme in which soldiers pay cash to Iraqis to help with expenses, large and small, has spent $2.8 billion in five years, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The Post reviewed records of the Commander's Emergency Response programme, which was intended for short-term humanitarian relief and reconstruction. The field manual laying out the guidelines for the programme is called ``Money as a Weapon System,'' pointing up the effectiveness of cold hard cash in winning over the hearts and minds of Iraqi civilians.
The largest sum of CERP money, $596.8 million, was spent on water and sanitation projects, the Post reported. Three other categories each received more than $300 million: electricityl; protective measures, such as fencing and guards; and transportation and roads.
But the Army also spent lesser sums on smaller acts of largesse, including $48,000 for children's shoes; $50,000 for 625 sheep; $100,000 for dolls; and $500,000 for action figures designed to look like Iraqi security forces, the Post reported.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/00 ... 111102.htm
Report: US using 'money as a weapon' in Iraq
WASHINGTON (AP): A U.S. Army programme in which soldiers pay cash to Iraqis to help with expenses, large and small, has spent $2.8 billion in five years, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The Post reviewed records of the Commander's Emergency Response programme, which was intended for short-term humanitarian relief and reconstruction. The field manual laying out the guidelines for the programme is called ``Money as a Weapon System,'' pointing up the effectiveness of cold hard cash in winning over the hearts and minds of Iraqi civilians.
The largest sum of CERP money, $596.8 million, was spent on water and sanitation projects, the Post reported. Three other categories each received more than $300 million: electricityl; protective measures, such as fencing and guards; and transportation and roads.
But the Army also spent lesser sums on smaller acts of largesse, including $48,000 for children's shoes; $50,000 for 625 sheep; $100,000 for dolls; and $500,000 for action figures designed to look like Iraqi security forces, the Post reported.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
Dan Rather Reports
Episode Number: 325
http://www.hd.net/transcript.html?air_master_id=A5352
Read the whole thing
Episode Title: The Real Iraq
Description: The war in Iraq as seen from the inside. Two young marines who worked closely with General Petraeus and a photojournalist who documented their exploits go beyond talking points and spin to provide a unique and in-depth perspective on the war.
Episode Number: 325
http://www.hd.net/transcript.html?air_master_id=A5352
Read the whole thing
Episode Title: The Real Iraq
Description: The war in Iraq as seen from the inside. Two young marines who worked closely with General Petraeus and a photojournalist who documented their exploits go beyond talking points and spin to provide a unique and in-depth perspective on the war.
TO THE SHEIKS. HOW BIG A FACTOR WAS THE DOLLAR IN GETTING THE SHEIKS TO GO OUR WAY? OH, IT'S-- IT'S ENORMOUS. I MEAN, LISTEN, THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE SAY, "HOW CAN YOU WORK WITH PEOPLE WHO, YOU KNOW, WERE PLANTING IEDS AND BLOWING, YOU KNOW, FELLOW AMERICANS UP TWO WEEKS BEFORE AND NOW THEY'RE ON YOUR SIDE?" I MEAN, I THINK ANY AMERICAN OUT THERE WHO'S HUMAN WILL REALIZE WHEN THEY LOOK AT THEIR TWO YEAR OLD, OR THEIR FIVE YEAR OLD THAT IF THEY'RE STARVING AND THEY'RE SICK THEY WILL DO WHAT THEY NEED TO DO TO GET FOOD INTO THAT CHILD'S MOUTH. THE SHEIKS ARE VERY WORRIED ABOUT LOSING ANY OF THEIR INFLUENCE OVER THEIR PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY'RE UNABLE TO PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT. SO I THINK ONE OF OUR BIGGEST FIGHTS WITH THE MILITIA, WHICH WE'RE WINNING RIGHT NOW WITH THE DOLLAR IS PROVIDING YOUNG MALES AN OPPORTUNITY TO DO SOMETHING BESIDES JOIN THE MILITIA.
I MEAN, IF YOU LOOK AT THE GROUP THAT THE INSURGENTS TARGET TO RECRUIT FROM, THEY ARE LARGELY UNEMPLOYED MALES. AND THAT MAY BE SAYING, "OH, HEY, DAN, DO YOU WANT TO PLANT AN IED FOR $100?" WELL, YOU KNOW, YOU LIVE WITH YOUR WHOLE FAMILY, AND THEY ARE LIVING ON RICE AND THEY HAVEN'T HAD ANYTHING. SO, IT-- IT MAY NOT BE THAT YOU HATE AMERICA. IT MAY BE THAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SURVIVE. SO, I-- I-- I ABSOLUTELY THINK THE DOLLAR IS HUGE AND IF WE DO NOT GET JOBS STARTED PRETTY QUICKLY AND WHAT I WAS DOING WAS A SHORT-TERM FIX. IT WAS LIKE A BRIDGE LOAN, IF YOU WILL, SAYING, "OKAY, I'M BUYING TIME HERE FOR THE UNITED STATES." AND SO THAT'S WHAT YOU WERE DOING WHEN YOU DEALT OUT THE DOLLARS? RIGHT. I'M- TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS I'M PROVIDING EMPLOYMENT THAT OTHERWISE WOULDN'T EXIST, GIVING A SHORT-TERM OPPORTUNITY HERE WAITING FOR US TO TRY TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO START AN-- AN ECONOMY, HOW TO CREATE SOME JOBS. I MEAN, IT'S AN ENORMOUS TASK. AND SO THAT'S WHY PEOPLE IN A MARINE UNIFORM ARE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WAYS TO FIGHT THE INSURGENTS AND SOMETIMES IT'S NOT JUST WITH BULLETS. DAN, I THINK SOMETIMES IT'S HARD FOR AMERICANS TO APPRECIATE JUST THE LEVEL OF POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN IRAQ.
I MEAN, WE WORRY WITH THE DECLINING ECONOMY, ABOUT EMPLOYMENT GOING FROM FIVE TO SEVEN PERCENT. THERE ARE PARTS OF IRAQ WHERE WE'RE NOT QUITE SURE IF THE UNEMPLOYMENT IS 50 PERCENT OR 70 PERCENT. IT-- IT'S JUST-- IT'S JUST DEVASTATING. AND SO IT'S NOT LIKE WE'RE HANDING OUT MONEY TO PAY PEOPLE OFF, AND THEY'RE GOING TO BUY A NEW TV SET OR A SATELLITE DISH. I MEAN, THESE TRIBAL SHEIKS ARE USING THIS MONEY TO EMPLOY PEOPLE IN THEIR TRIBE WHO IN MANY CASES HAVEN'T HAD JOBS FOR YEARS. SETH AND I WERE GOING HOUSE TO HOUSE AT ONE POINT. AND I MEAN IT WAS JUST LIKE HORRIBLE, BECAUSE EVERY HOUSE YOU WENT INTO, YOU START INTERVIEWING PEOPLE. AND YOU'RE TRYING TO GATHER WHAT WE CALL ATMOSPHERICS-- WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE THEY TO BEING RECRUITED BY THE MILITIAS. AND WHAT WE CONTINUALLY FOUND WAS, "DO YOU HAVE A JOB?" "NO." "HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE YOU'VE HAD A JOB?" "FOUR YEARS. FIVE YEARS.
Last edited by svinayak on 14 Aug 2008 00:17, edited 1 time in total.
Re: IRAQ-Current Continuing Conflict
There was an article in the TSP thread about the state of unemployment in the badlands and how the people found the Taliban an alterantive to grinding poverty.