3 Sufis 3

1) Next time you invade a country, kindly bring your own money. Now we know why the so-called “UN oil for food scandal” has attracted so much attention in Republican circles – it’s a smoke screen to cover for all those palaces being built outside DC. This is a long, but important, article (Posting #2 is more detailed version of the same article):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1522983,00.html

So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared. Ed Harriman on the extraordinary scandal of Iraq’s missing billions

Thursday July 7, 2005
The Guardian

When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) “in a transparent manner … for the benefit of the Iraqi people”….

2) This is the more extended version of the previous Guardian article. I recommend this longer version:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/harr04_.html

Where has all the money gone?

Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq
US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office
| Link: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/

US General Accountability Office
| Link: http://www.gao.gov/

Defense Contract Audit Agency
| Link: http://www.dcaa.mil/

International Advisory and Monitoring Board
| Link: http://www.iamb.info/

Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General
| Link: http://www.cpa-ig.com/

Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
| Link: http://www.sigir.mil/

On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.

The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.

That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq from Kuwait, at a profit of more than $150 million. Waxman and his assistants found that Halliburton was charging $2.64 a gallon for petrol for Iraqi civilians, while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon.

Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee instructed Congress’s General Accountability Office to look into Halliburton’s biggest contract in Iraq: providing virtually all back-up facilities – from meals to laundry soap – to American forces. LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme) contracts like this one are a product of the new ‘slimmed down’ American military, the quartermaster’s equivalent of Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion lite’. Rather than have uniformed troops peel potatoes and scrub floors, base support services have been privatised and contracted out so that, the idea goes, soldiers can get on with the fighting. The contracts are paid on a cost-plus basis, which allows the contractor to charge for what it has spent, then add on a profit. LOGCAP contracts have not been put out to tender, but rather awarded to a few US firms, the largest being Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root.

The GAO report of July 2004 found that in the first nine months of the occupation, KBR was allowed a free hand in Iraq: a free hand, for example, to bill the Pentagon without worrying about spending limits or management oversight or paperwork. Millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment disappeared. KBR charged $73 million for motor caravans to house the 101st Airborne Division, twice as much as the army said it would cost to build barracks itself; KBR charged $88 million for three million meals for US troops that were never served. The GAO calculated that the army could have saved $31 million a year simply by doing business directly w
ith the catering firms that KBR hired. In June 2004, the GAO continued, ‘by eliminating the use of LOGCAP and making the LOGCAP subcontractor the prime contractor, the command reduced meal costs by 43 per cent without a loss of service or quality.’

The GAO report makes clear that the Americans had given little thought as to how they might prevent looting and rebuild Iraqi society. They hadn’t even planned how they were going to provision the US forces staying on in Iraq: ‘the Army Central Command did not develop plans to use the [KBR] contract to support its military forces in Iraq until May 2003’ – a month after Saddam fell. Even then, this contract – with an estimated value of $3.894 billion – did not adequately provide for dining facilities, pest control, laundry services, morale, welfare and recreation, troop transportation or combat support services at the American bases hastily being built across Iraq. Stung by Waxman’s revelations about Halliburton’s petrol profiteering, and realising that KBR’s costs were spiralling out of control (LOGCAP costs in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan rose from a projected yearly total of $5.8 billion in September 2003 to $8.6 billion in January 2004), the army vice chief of staff ‘asked units to control costs and look for alternatives to the LOGCAP contract’. This was the first admission that the Pentagon could not afford the occupation on top of the war.

At the same time, the Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, went to Houston to have a look at KBR’s books. They were not happy with what they found:

Our examination disclosed several deficiencies in KBR’s billing system resulting in billings to the government that are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms. We have also found system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/or corrected in a timely manner.

They also found that ‘KBR also does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the related costs and billings.’ When the auditors asked to see the files of payments to subcontractors to back up the invoices KBR submitted to the government, there weren’t any: ‘We found no such documents included in KBR’s subcontract files, nor did we find any log of subcontractor payments.’ So how did KBR work out its monthly invoices to the government for its whopping $3.9 billion contract? ‘The explanation begins with the costs on a spreadsheet with no indication of where or how these costs are accumulated.’ The auditors also wanted to know what happened to the money the government had paid for those three million non-existent meals:

Despite repeated requests over two months, KBR has not been able to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ‘overage’ factor.

KBR’s response has been to tough it out. The company wrote to the auditors saying that its position regarding the meals ‘had been misquoted as well as misinterpreted’. The auditors, the corporation said, knew full well that KBR had ‘established a Tiger Team that is actively researching and analysing the facts and circumstances surrounding each of its DFAC subcontracts’. ‘Tiger Teams’ are in-house investigative units. KBR’s Tiger Team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel, where its members ran up a bill of more than $1 million. This outraged the army, whose troops were sleeping in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The army asked the Tiger Team to move into tents. It refused. As to how the Tiger Team ‘actively researched and analysed the facts’, we have the sworn testimony that a KBR employee gave to Congressman Waxman’s committee: ‘The Tiger Team looked at subcontracts with no invoice and no confirmation that the products contracted for were being used. Instead of investigating further, they would recommend extending the subcontract.’

The Pentagon auditors asked to see ‘evidence that KBR’s internal audit department is functionally and organisationally independent and sufficiently removed from management to ensure that it can conduct audits objectively and can report its findings, opinions and conclusions without fear of reprisal.’ KBR locked them out of its audit department. The auditors then asked who did KBR’s audits. Halliburton, KBR wrote back. The Pentagon auditors said that from then on KBR would have to submit all bills to them ‘for provisional approval prior to submission for payment’. Tough talk. But, despite all the threats to withhold payment, and with several lawsuits pending, KBR and Halliburton have now been paid more than $10 billion for quartermastering US forces in Iraq.

One of KBR’s contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq’s central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn’t carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn’t even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside. For fear of ambush, KBR drivers were told not to slow down. ‘The truck in front of the one I was riding ran a car with an Iraqi family of four off the road,’ a KBR employee told Waxman’s committee. ‘My driver said that was normal.’

American profligacy with Iraqi money has been, if anything, even worse. According to the CPA’s own rules, the authority ‘was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner that fully met the CPA’s obligations under international law including Security Council Resolution 1483’. Despite repeated efforts, however, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), with representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of the CPA’s spending.

The IAMB then spent months trying to find auditors acceptable to the US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled. ‘KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures,’ they wrote in an interim report. ‘Staff have indicated . . . that co-operation with KPMG’s undertakings is given a low priority.’ KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes for the Green Zone.

There was a good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. The Bush administration wasn’t going to allow independent auditors to be in a position to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while Bremer was still answerable to the press. The report was published in July. The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.

An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled
it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone, or held prominent posts in the new government ministries, were also in a position to benefit enormously. Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be allowed to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers’ relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.

Hard evidence comes from a further series of audits and reports carried out by the office of the CPA’s own inspector general (CPA-IG). Set up in January 2004, it reported to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafeteria tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and the Iraqi ministries ‘did not ensure that . . . contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements’.

Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.

The IAMB, meanwhile, discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. ‘The only reason you wouldn’t monitor them is if you don’t want anyone else to know how much is going through,’ one petroleum executive told me. Officially, Iraq exported oil worth $10 billion in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that oil worth up to an additional $4 billion may also have been exported and is unaccounted for. If this is correct, it would have created an off the books slush fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret – among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the Bush administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.

America’s situation in Iraq took a turn for the worse in April 2004, with the uprisings in Najaf and Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and mass defections from the new Iraqi security forces. ‘At the beginning of April,’ one of the audits says, ‘the Iraqi National Guard force held steady at around 32,000 personnel. Between 9 and 16 April this number dropped to a low of 17,500.’ As for the police, ‘the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has decided to reduce the number of police officers to 89,000’ – from 120,000 – ‘by trimming from its rolls those who have proved to be unsuitable.’ At the same time, ‘recent attacks on the pipelines reduced exports in April to an average of 1.7 million barrels per day and 1.4 million barrels per day in May. The total could possibly be lower in June.’ That’s a million barrels per day fewer than under Saddam. Across Iraq, hospitals and schools were derelict, electricity was intermittent, and water supplies were polluted.

The American response to the militant insurgency and to the loss of their moral credentials at Abu Ghraib was a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Law-abiding Iraqis were to be shown respect and given buckets of money, while Bremer and the CPA prepared to hand over the management of Iraq to an interim government picked by the Americans. KBR’s lorry drivers were told not to run Iraqis off the road. And millions of dollars in cash – most of it Iraqi money – were handed out by American commanders in local communities across Iraq in an attempt to buy friends. ‘The Commanders’ Emergency Reconstruction Programme continues to be a very effective programme . . . which has built trust and support for the United States at grass roots level,’ the CPA-IG report said. ‘As of 19 June 2004, the local commanders have spent $364.6 million . . . on over 27,600 small projects . . . repairing and refurbishing water and sewer lines, cleaning up highways by removing waste and debris, transporting water to remote villages, purchasing equipment for local police stations, upgrading schools and clinics, purchasing school supplies, removing ordnance from public spaces . . .’ It was too little too late. With the concentration on big infrastructure projects and contracts for American corporate cronies and Iraqi businessmen ‘friends’, there had been little for ordinary Iraqis to benefit from or to take part in. Rumsfeld knew by the beginning of 2004 that his and Bremer’s management was in deep trouble. ‘Iraqis are puzzled; they truly don’t know what the US really intends for them. We haven’t communicated well. The “story” has not been believed,’ a Personnel Assessment Team reported to Rumsfeld on 11 February 2004. ‘We have in essence a pick-up organisation in place to design and execute the most demanding transformation in recent history.’

Last September was the crucial month. By then the US government had spent $60 billion on the US forces in Iraq, and $1 billion on the Iraqi security forces. The Americans knew that they were widely hated. ‘In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds . . . American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended’ was the principal finding of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The answer was a big rethink – a strategic spending review. The $18.4 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund that Congress had voted to rebuild Iraq, and which Bremer had left largely untouched and possibly never intended to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad.

First, $3 billion was diverted from the budgets to restore Iraq’s destroyed electricity supply, water supply and sewers to security and law enforcement. The reduced electricity budget (down from $5.6 billion to $4.4 billion) was to be spent patching up neighbourhoods flattened by American fire power, and electricity pylons and stations sabotaged by the insurgents. The electricity supply had become one of the war’s main battlegrounds.

This meant fewer large contracts for American and international energy firms, which were further discouraged from staying in Iraq as their personnel were attacked and the price of private security soared. It also meant flickering lights and hours of power cuts for ordinary Iraqis. Yet development and reconstruction were officially deferred. Or, as the auditors put it, ‘this redistribution of funds . . . appears to be generally consistent with the stated m
anagement objective of de-emphasising longer-term development projects as funds are shifted toward more immediately realisable goals.’

‘The country’s widely failing sewage management infrastructure and the sporadic availability of potable water,’ the auditors wrote, ‘continue to pose health threats and tarnish overall impressions of reconstruction achievements.’ Yet the water and sanitation budget was cut almost in half, as long-term development was again handed over to the Iraqi government so US funds could be doled out to Iraqis in neighbourhoods where the insurgents held sway and it was now unsafe for foreigners to go. ‘Initial plans to rehabilitate large portions of the country’s water and wastewater system through the IRRF have been curtailed,’ the auditors wrote. ‘Water resources and sanitation sector funds have been reallocated to security, governance, debt relief and efforts to boost Iraqi employment opportunities . . . creating local water and wastewater projects to stimulate Iraqi employment and deliver needed services to high-risk areas.’

The budget for employing Iraqis rose by more than 350 per cent, to be spent largely on ‘local projects that will visibly impact Iraqi communities before the 30 January 2005 national election’. At the same time, ‘the construction sector saw the withdrawal of the prime design-and-build road contractor from Iraq, reportedly because of concern for personnel and site security.’ The insurgents had forced a fundamental reshaping of US spending priorities, further widened the no man’s land between themselves and US troops, polarising Iraq, and assuming the initiative in the war.

None of this has changed. In December 2004, the US Mission in Iraq allotted an extra $457 million to keep the electricity working and ‘to boost short-term employment through health, electricity and water initiatives in Najaf, Samarra, Sadr City and Fallujah. Together,’ the auditors reported, ‘the two adjustments reflect a significant change in US spending priorities.’

In March this year, a further $832 million ‘was reprogrammed for management initiatives’, largely ‘for operations and maintenance at various power and water plants, urgent work in the electrical and oil sectors’ to repair sabotage damage, and to pay for building contracts on which it had become extremely dangerous and expensive to work. The most recent audit, issued in April, reports that projects are running between 50 and 85 per cent above the original estimated costs. The free-spending days are over. Americans are having to divert increasing amounts of US development money just to keep what remains of Iraq’s damaged public utilities working, and to finance the Iraqi police and army.

Six months into the occupation, in autumn 2003, the Americans planned to transfer security to the Iraqi police and army so they could ‘draw down US forces from Iraq’. The goal was to have 250,000 Iraqis in the security forces by the following summer. However, as a GAO report submitted to Congress in March this year explains, most of the recruits were neither vetted nor properly trained. The result has been that the ‘Ministry of Interior’s security forces committed numerous serious human rights abuses’; the Iraqi police and army have been easily infiltrated by former Ba’athists and other insurgents; and morale is low.

As the GAO put it,

police and military units performed poorly during an escalation of insurgent attacks against the Coalition in April 2004 . . . Many Iraqi security forces around the country collapsed during this uprising . . . units abandoned their posts and responsibilities and in some cases assisted the insurgency . . . Police manning a checkpoint in one area were reporting convoy movements by mobile telephone to local terrorists. Police in another area were infiltrated by former regime elements.

‘In response to the unwillingness of a regular army battalion to fight Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah’, the Americans created a special Iraqi Intervention Force. Then last autumn they decided to beef up the Iraqi police service from 90,000 to 135,000, to add 20 battalions to the Iraqi National Guard and double the border guard. This February, the State Department glowingly reported that almost 82,000 Iraqi police and 60,000 troops had been trained.

These figures are grossly misleading. According to the GAO’s March report to Congress ‘the reported number of Iraqi police is unreliable because the Minister of the Interior does not receive consistent and accurate reporting from the police forces around the country. The data does not exclude police absent from duty.’ As for the army, ‘Ministry of Defense reports exclude the absent military personnel from its totals. According to DOD officials, the number of absentees is probably in the tens of thousands.’ Furthermore the State Department no longer reports on whether Iraqi security forces have the required weapons, vehicles, communication equipment and body armour. Bluntly, ‘US government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped.’ The GAO further found that the Iraqi police are being trained for ‘community policing in a permissive security environment’ rather than getting ‘paramilitary training for a high-threat hostile environment’. It’s hardly surprising that close to 2000 Iraqi police have been killed.

This is all horribly reminiscent of American policy in Vietnam. American troops are staying in Iraq to stiffen Iraqi forces who are dying in droves in an escalating counter-insurgency war that neither the Americans nor the Iraqi forces are prepared for. The Americans originally allocated $5.8 billion to build the Iraqi security forces. In February this year, George Bush asked Congress for another $5.7 billion to go towards this task.

What’s happened to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, and real governance based on transparency and accountability? In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3 billion in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327 million to see if the embassy ‘could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations’. It couldn’t. ‘Our review showed that financial records . . . understated payments made by $108,255,875’ and ‘overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286’. The auditors also reviewed the paperwork for a further 300 contracts worth $332.9 million. ‘For 198 of 300 contracts, documentation was not available . . . to indicate that contract execution was monitored for performance and payment . . . Files did not contain evidence that goods and services had been received for 154 contracts, that invoices had been submitted for 169 contracts, or that payments had been made for 144 contracts.’

Clearly the Americans see no need to account for spending the Iraqis’ national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors’ invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that ‘the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts.’ This is a remarkable understatement. It’s also an admission that Americans can’t be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people’s money to finance a war.

Not only the Americans are guilty of a lack of accountability. In January this year, the SIGIR issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8 billion – the entire Iraqi Int
erim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and few of the ministries had budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American ‘advisers’ looked on. ‘CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,’ the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8206 guards, but only 602 could be accounted for. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8 billion went to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

‘It’s remarkable that the inspector general’s office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies,’ Bremer said in his reply to the SIGIR report. ‘At Liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA’s top priority was to get the economy going.’ The SIGIR responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer’s CPA managed cash payments from the Development Fund for Iraq in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: ‘During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash . . . of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives.’ They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad ‘did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9 million’, and that agents in the field ‘cannot properly account for or support over $96.6 million in cash and receipts’. These agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent’s account balance was ‘overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected’. Another agent was given $25 million cash for which Bremer’s office ‘acknowledged not having any supporting documentation’. Of more than $23 million given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors. Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each; the money has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents’ balances of between $250,000 and $12 million without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that ‘this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash,’ pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8 million more than he had been given in the first place, which ‘suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable’.

Staff at the CPA head office in Baghdad usually worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often on three-month postings. They didn’t trust the computer network so many of them put their records on USB sticks and in private computer files that couldn’t be opened by their replacements. At one point there was only one officer at the CPA account manager’s office clearing all the paying agents throughout Iraq. Paying agents in the field often couldn’t get – let alone be bothered with – the paperwork, which was frustrating for the honest ones and a boon to their crooked colleagues. So where did the money go? You can’t see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from this money, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.

And so it continues. The IAMB’s most recent audit of Iraqi government spending, which is yet to be published, talks of ‘incomplete accounting’, ‘lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries’, ‘possible misappropriation of oil revenues’, ‘significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures’, and ‘non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483’.

Bremer re-established the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit a month before he left Baghdad. It is now said to have more than a thousand auditors and support personnel spread throughout Iraqi government ministries. A new Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, the equivalent of the FBI, is said to have 200 staff and 15 US advisers. Yet according to the latest American figures, of more than 3400 complaints, only about one in 50 has been passed to the Commission on Public Integrity for possible prosecution.

There is an explanation for this lack of activity. On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investigating corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.

In the absence of any meaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation’s wealth is being handed out to ministers’ and civil servants’ friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba’athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.

Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq’s wealth while most of Iraq’s oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam’s favour, grew rich. Today the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the country’s money with impunity.

3) Obviously, I’m watching this story extremely closely. When Americans kidnap Americans abroad, it’s a dangerous day for travelling:

“Following are links to articles on the Iranian
American film-makers who “..traveled to Iraq with an
Iranian cameraman to film archaeological sites around
Babylon. After a taxi they were in was stopped in
Baghdad, the two men were arrested by Iraqi security
forces, who found what they suspected might be bomb
parts in the vehicle. Since then, Mr. Kar has been
held in what his relatives and their lawyers describe
as a frightening netherworld of American military
detention in Iraq – charged with no crime but
nonetheless unable to gain his freedom or even tell
his family where he is being held…”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20050628-041605-2260r.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/international/middleeast/06
detain.html?
hp&ex;=1120708800&en;=7a4cca591b3c6756&ei;=5094&partner;=homepage

4) Same story, different source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5123899,00.html

U.S. Filmmaker Among 5 Arrested in Iraq
Thursday July 7, 2005 10:01 AM

By JEREMIAH MARQUEZ
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Cyrus Kar’s family says his passion for the documentary film he was working on about an ancient Persian ruler led to his being locked up in a military jail outside Baghdad in May.

Kar was arrested after Iraqi security forces allegedly seized several dozen washing machine timers – components frequ
ently used in terrorist bombs – in the taxi in which he was traveling. Kar says the timers were owned by the driver.

Now, relatives of the 44-year-old Iranian-American and U.S. Navy veteran have sued the government to gain his freedom. They contend Kar’s detention tramples on his constitutional rights and claim FBI officials have already cleared him of suspicion.

“I’m here to beg President Bush… to release an innocent boy,” Kar’s aunt, Parvin Modarress, said at a news conference Wednesday to announce the lawsuit in Washington, D.C. “He went to Iraq to do his dream work, to make a documentary.”

Kar is one of five U.S. citizens suspected of insurgent activities in Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman said. They were captured separately and do not appear to be related, spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He declined to identify them, citing a Pentagon policy that prohibits the identification of detainees.

Besides Kar, three of those being detained are Iraqi-Americans and a fifth is a Jordanian-American, Whitman said. The three Iraqi-Americans were captured in April, May and June, officials said.

Born in Iran, Kar became immersed in American culture after immigrating as a child, according to his family.

The Los Angeles resident served in the Navy for several years and studied marketing at San Jose State University and business at Pepperdine University. He worked in the computer industry during Silicon Valley’s tech boom.

Several years ago, Kar decided to try his hand at filmmaking.

Kar began working on a documentary about Cyrus the Great, a Persian king during the 500s B.C. and the author of the first human rights charter. He interviewed experts and scholars and shot up to 60 hours of footage at archaeological sites in Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan, according to his family.

On May 17, officials and family say, he was traveling with an Iranian filmmaker after leaving a Baghdad hotel when their taxi was stopped at a checkpoint and the washing-machine timers were found.

“I think most people would agree that’s somewhat suspicious,” said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner. “All of the facts need to be thoroughly questioned.”

Kar’s relatives say FBI agents searched his home and Agent John D. Wilson in Los Angeles told them weeks ago that Kar’s story had checked out.

They say Wilson told them that Kar passed a polygraph test, had been cleared of any charges, and that the washing machine timers belonged to the taxi driver, who was transporting them to a friend.

FBI spokeswoman Cathy Viray declined to comment.

Incarcerated at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, Kar spoke several times with his family during monitored 10-minute conversations.

They say he sounded tired in the first call in May, irate in the second, saying he was frustrated that the military could hold him.

“I’m hurt by our government,” said Kar’s cousin Shahrzad Folger. “I’m hurt that they would do this to one of their own citizens, to one of their veterans.”

5) Another Iraqi liberated from life itself. Sounds like one of the Semper Fi boys seems to believe in “kill them all, and let God sort it out.” Note yesterday’s posting entitled “real JAG.” Note also the source. If you can’t trust Fox, who can you trust?:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,161397,00.html

Iraqi Pol: Marines Killed My Cousin
Saturday, July 02, 2005

UNITED NATIONS — Iraq’s U.N. ambassador accused U.S. Marines of killing his unarmed young cousin in what appeared to be “cold blood” and demanded an investigation and punishment for the perpetrators.

In an e-mail to friends obtained Friday by The Associated Press, Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie (search) said the killing took place in his ancestral village in western Anbar province, where U.S.-led forces have been conducting a counterinsurgency sweep aimed at disrupting the flow of foreign militants into Iraq (search).

His cousin Mohammed Al-Sumaidaie (search), 21, a university student, was killed June 25 when he took Marines doing house-to-house searches to a bedroom to show them where a rifle which had no live ammuntion was kept, the ambassador said. When the Marines left, he was found in the bedroom with a bullet in his neck…

Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. Mission, said acting U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson received a call from the Iraqi ambassador “and expressed her heartfelt condolences on this terrible situation, and contacted senior State Department and Pentagon officials to look into the matter immediately.”

The U.S. military issued a statement in response late Friday.

“The events described in the allegations roughly correspond to an incident involving Coalition Forces on that day in that general location; therefore a military inquiry has been initiated,” the statement said.

“We take these allegations seriously and will thoroughly investigate this incident to determine what happened,” the statement quoted Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson as saying. The investigation could take several weeks, the statement said.

Sumaidaie said the killing represents “a betrayal” of the values and aspirations of Iraqis and Americans to defeat the terrorists and build a country based on freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights and the rule of law.

“It is a betrayal of the American people who are making huge sacrifices to bring this about, and a betrayal of Iraq and all Iraqi patriots who have put their trust in the United States,” he said.

In the letter, Sumaidaie gave a detailed account of the tragedy.

Mohammed, an engineering student at the University of Techology in Baghdad, was visiting his family in the village of Al-Shaikh Hadid when the Marines knocked on the door, the ambassador said.

The young man rushed to open the door and greeted the group of about 10 Marines and an interpreter who appeared to be Egyptian pleasantly, “happy to exercise some of his English,” he said.

The Marines asked if there were any weapons, and Mohammed said there was a rifle, which only had blanks, the letter said. He then led some of the Marines into his father’s bedroom where it was kept, Sumaidaie wrote. His father, the local headmaster, was at school.

A short time later, his mother, brothers and sisters who were kept in the living room heard a thud but they were generally relaxed because they had nothing to hide, and “they thought, nothing to fear,” he said.

But later a younger brother, Ali, was dragged by the hair into the corridor by a Marine and was beaten. The mother started sobbing. A Marine then went out and returned with a camera and went into the bedroom. After a while, the family went outside and waited on the porch as they were ordered, the ambassador said.

More than an hour later, as the soldiers were leaving, the interpreter asked the mother in Arabic if that was her son inside. When she replied “yes,” the interpreter said, “they killed him!,” Sumaidaie said.

“The mother let off a deafening cry of anguish, but the Marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving,” he said. “In the bedroom, Mohammed was found dead and laying in a clotted pool of his blood. A single bullet had penetrated his neck,” the ambassador said.

The ambassador wrote that he believed “a serious crime has been commited — a crime that may be repeated up and down Al-Anbar” and demanded an investigation into what he said appeared to be the “killing of an unarmed innocent civilian — a cold blood murder.”

6) Saddam Hussein Sourcebook. This research tool features the video of Rumsfeld meeting Saddam to sell weapons in 1983, as well as a number of declassified documents detailing US government links to the Iraqi government throughout the 70’s and 80’s:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/sp
ecial/iraq/index.htm

7) Here is an interview discussing reproductive policies in the Islamic World, with Linda Herrera, one of this list’s readers:

http://www.righttodecide.org//Personal_Stori/interview.html?entry=760d462c0db11513&return;=606717496665bcba

It is impossible to disentangle religion from culture or tradition.

Linda Herrera is an educational anthropologist who specializes in education systems and Islam in the Middle East. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the ISIM Review. “The Islamic Republic of Iran which represents a fairly conservative theocracy has one of the most efficient and perhaps even progressive approaches to sexual and reproductive health in the region.”…

1) Real JAG:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG06Ak02.html

Subject: The perils of colonial justice in Iraq

The perils of colonial justice in Iraq
By Ashraf Fahim

Among its more vociferous opponents, the American project in Iraq is characterized as a classic colonial adventure, indistinguishable in nature or intent from the deepest, darkest chapters in Northern oppression of the South: America is to Iraq as Britain was to India or Belgium to the Congo. Proponents, on the other hand, argue the inherent benevolence of American empire – the export of democracy and egalitarianism in contrast to the transparent racist imperialism of yore.

One possible way to arbitrate this dispute is by observing the dispensation of justice with regard to American servicemen accused of the “unlawful killing” (in military parlance) of Iraqi civilians. In this area, as with the infamous cases of torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, impunity is the rule of thumb for both the rank and file and their superiors. In the overwhelming majority of cases over the course of the war, prosecutions have either not taken place, or if court martials have occurred, there have been acquittals or token sentences dispensed.

No matter how profound the inequities of US military justice, the transitional Iraqi government of Ibrahim Jaafari has no means to challenge them. The trend towards impunity, therefore, would seem to validate the grievances of the opponents by demonstrating the uneven distribution of power that defines relations between the US and the transitional Iraqi government.

It is difficult to determine the precise number of US servicemen accused or convicted of unlawful killings during the war. A June 6 Associated Press article concluded that “since the Iraq war began, at least 10 US military personnel have been convicted of a wide array of charges stemming from the deaths of Iraqi civilians. But only one sentence has exceeded three years.” Those 10 convictions do not reflect the dozens of investigations that have not produced court martials nor the large number of prosecutions that have led to acquittals.

The case of Ilario Pantano is typical of the way the scales of justice tip in occupied Iraq. Pantano was a Marine lieutenant accused of killing two Iraqi captives, Hamadaay Kareem and Taha Ahmed Hanjil, in April 2004, after the platoon he commanded captured them as they drove away from a house the Marines had just raided as a suspected insurgent hideout. The two officers with Pantano at the time allege that he ordered the captives’ handcuffs removed, had them assume defensive positions, instructed his soldiers to look away, then shot Kareem and Hanjil in the back. Pantano emptied two magazines into them.

One of the officers present, Sergeant Daniel Coburn, stated that Pantano had become agitated when weapons were discovered in the suspected hideout and apparently wanted to “teach [the insurgents] a lesson”. Pantano’s defense, which has been successful in similar cases (such as the execution of a wounded insurgent in a Fallujah mosque famously captured by an NBC television reporter) was that the unarmed Iraqis moved suddenly, leading him to fear they were about to carry out an attack. Pantano faced the death penalty on charges of premeditated murder, but was cleared in a pretrial hearing in late May, and resigned from the military.

Terrorizing the natives, poisoning the well
M Cherif Bassiouni, a renowned professor of international law at Depaul University, is as familiar as any jurist with the legal dimension of US-Iraqi relations. Bassiouni is currently the director of a project to reform Iraq’s legal system, as well as a project to aid the transitional government’s drafting of a permanent constitution. Also, as the United Nations’ Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan in 2004, Bassiouni was apparently a little too effective, as his mandate was not renewed after heavy US pressure.

There is nothing unusual in American soldiers being judged under US jurisdiction (and by their peers, as they are in the military justice system) rather than the Iraqi courts, Bassiouni says. Such matters are usually covered by a so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that defines relations between US forces and their host country – like the one between the US and Japan. “In the SOFA the US has the primary jurisdiction to prosecute,” Bassiouni told Asia Times Online, “but it has the obligation to prosecute.” If it fails to do so, the host country gets the opportunity. “But the Bush administration has refused to have a SOFA not only with Iraq but with Afghanistan,” Bassiouni notes. This affords American soldiers total impunity from Iraqi or Afghani courts.

Bassiouni points out that the issue surfaced on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s June 15 pilgrimage to the White House. “[When] Karzai was here he raised the question once again. He said we need a SOFA, you have no right to detain Afghani citizens in Afghanistan,” says Bassiouni. “And Bush says absolutely not. I mean, that arrogance of power.” Instead, a “memorandum of understanding” for a long-term security “partnership” was signed, offering only joint “consultation” on military operations.

Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, has tackled the issue of impunity head on. CCR is currently trying to prosecute US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the former top military officer in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, for their roles in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Ratner says the policy of giving US servicemen and high officials impunity to order or carry out torture or killings is no accident.

“I think it’s intentional,” Ratner told Asia Times Online. “The military is saying, in Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘if you mess with us you’re going to die and no one is going to be held accountable’.” The motivation is twofold, he believes. “Part of it is terrorizing the population and part of it is they want our army to be killers. They’re frightened that if they discipline or prosecute them, they’ll hold back.”

If the intention is to terrorize the population, ordinary Iraqis are apparently getting the message. Reports from Iraq indicate that Iraqis stay as far away as possible from trigger-happy convoys of US troops, which are a prime target of insurgent attacks. But the use of excessive force and concomitant impunity is also poisoning what little remains in the well of Iraqi goodwill towards America.

“What we are doing politically through the Abu Ghraib situation, through the non-punishment of people, through the policy of basically giving plausible deniability to all of the officers,” says Bassiouni, “is reinforcing the popular perception of anti-Americanism and that’s the strongest support we’re giving to the resistance.”

The lonesome death of Zaidun Hassun
The demise of Zaidun Hassun in the depths of the river Tigris at 11pm two days after New Year, 2004, is surely one of the war’s most arbitrary killings. Hassun and his cousin Marwan Fadil were stopped at a checkpoint by US troops near a bridge in Samarra for breaking curfew. Once detained, Sergeant Tracy Perkins ordered his men to throw them into the river, apparently to teach them a lesson. Hassun drowned, but Fadil survived to tell their harrowing tale. There was a subsequent investigation and then a court martial that cleared Perkins and his men of involuntary manslaughter. Perkins was found guilty of assault and obstruction of justice, however, charges that held a maximum penalty of 11 years in prison. He got 45 days.

One reason for Perkins’ exoneration on the manslaughter charge was because the defense argued that Hassun might not really be dead, since no US doctor had examined his body. Oddly, no one bothered to exhume Hassun’s grave, and photographic evidence of his corpse provided by his family, as well as the testimony of Fadil, held lit
tle weight among the soldiers sitting in judgment of their colleague. When soldiers judge soldiers, says Ratner, a slanted outcome is always a risk. “The theory of military tribunals is that military officers understand the combat situation best and therefore you want those people to judge,” he says. “So first, they’re sympathetic already, and second they probably see themselves in that situation.”

The Hassun case illustrates the hierarchies of race that corrupt the dispensation of US military justice and indeed the wider Iraqi-US relationship. As such, the US is reproducing the kind of colonial justice practiced by the British in India, the French in Algeria or the Israelis in Occupied Palestine. Overt racism is rife in the military’s internal investigations, says Ratner.

“One of the things that comes out from the CID [Criminal Investigations Division] of the army investigations is that they’re shoddy and they never believe the victim or the witnesses who were Iraqi,” he says. “It’s almost like what we had in the American south during the post-civil war period, where they never believed the black witness in a trial against a white.” US soldiers, says Ratner, “have been taught that Muslims are terrorists, so it doesn’t take a big leap to say ‘I’m not going to believe their testimony’.”

It is not only Iraqis who feel hard done by Bush-era US military justice. When Italian special forces agent Nicola Calipari was shot dead by US soldiers on March 4 while driving towards a checkpoint as he attempted to deliver Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena to Baghdad airport (after apparently freeing her from her insurgent kidnappers) , many assumed America’s relations with its key coalition ally would ensure due diligence. But despite evidence that little warning was given before US soldiers fired on the Italian convoy, a joint US-Italian investigation – the conclusions of which the Italians refused to cosign – found no US soldier at fault.

The Calipari case shows that the US is willing to go to great lengths to hold its soldiers above the law, says Ratner. “Right now the Bush administration is not about to prosecute anybody for any crime in a serious way,” he says. “Even with someone who politically they had to get along with like the Italians, it didn’t make any difference to their bigger aim, which is to protect their soldiers and basically have them be looked at as a killing force that’s just not accountable.”

The high cost of impunity
That American soldiers are perceived by Iraqis as being above the law has serious implications for the US-Iraqi relationship. It feeds Iraqi cynicism about the legitimacy of the transitional government and reinforces assumptions that Americans are the ultimate arbiters of Iraq’s purported sovereignty.

“[Iraqis] have absolutely no illusions that the present government has very little ability to exercise sovereignty,” says Professor Bassiouni. “Thirty years under Saddam’s regime brought people a certain type of realism. Power, control – corrupt absolutely. Saddam controlled absolutely, now the Americans are controlling absolutely.”

While the Jaafari government is amenable to the US presence for now, that writ is not eternal. Jaafari’s administration “obviously receives its policy directives from [Grand Ayatollah Ali] al-Sistani,” Bassiouni notes. “And Sistani’s basic position has been made very clear. He wants a government to be in place, an orderly transition made, and the Americans out. The US has to leave, period.”

Once the constitution is in place, elections are held and the word “transitional” erased from government stationary, the colonial relationship demonstrated by the impunity US soldiers on Iraqi soil could begin to chafe unbearably. And sovereign Iraq’s rulers may not be as patient in demanding jurisdiction over foreign forces as the ever-genial Hamid Karzai. Sooner rather than later, Iraqis will tire of US soldiers hurling their young men into the Tigris and getting off scott free.

Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London. His writing can be found at www.storminateacup.org.uk.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

2) If you like geo-politics, and the connection between “democratization” and realpolitik oil concerns, read the next two articles in their entirety (yes, they’re long) — and draw your own conclusions about the connections between them:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GF30Dj01.html

Revolution, geopolitics and pipelines
By F William Engdahl

After a short-term fall in price below the $50 a
barrel level, oil has broken through the $60 level and
is likely to go far higher. In this situation one
might think the announcement of the opening of a major
new oil pipeline to pump Caspian oil to world markets
might dampen the relentless rise in prices.

However, even when the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries agreed on June 15 to raise its
formal production quota by another 500,000 barrels
per day (bpd), the reaction of NYMEX oil futures
prices was to rise, not fall. Estimates are that world
demand in the second half of 2005 will average at
least 3 million barrels a day more than the first half
of the
year.

Oil has become the central theme of world political
and military operations planning, even when not always
openly said.

Caspian pipeline opens a Pandora’s box In this
situation, it is worth looking at the overall
significance of the May opening of the Baku to Ceyhan,
Turkey, oil pipeline. This 1,762 kilometer long oil
pipeline was completed some months ahead of plan.
The BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline was begun in
2002 after four years of intense international
dispute. It cost about US$3.6 billion, making it
one of the most expensive oil projects ever. The main
backer was British Petroleum (BP), whose chairman,
Lord Browne, is a close adviser to Britain’s Prime
Minister Tony Blair. BP built the pipeline through a
consortium including Unocal of the US, Turkish
Petroleum Inc, and other partners.

It will take until at least late September before 10.4
million barrels can provide the needed volume to start
oil delivery to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the
Mediterranean Sea. Ceyhan is conveniently near to the
US airbase Incirlik. The BTC has been a US strategic
priority ever since president Bill Clinton first
backed it in 1998. Indeed, for the openingceremonies
in May, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman attended and
delivered a personal note of congratulations from US
President George W Bush.

As the political makeup of the Central Asia Caspian
region is complex, especially since the decomposition
of the Soviet Union opened up a scramble in the
oil-rich region of the Caspian from the outside, above
all from the US, it is important to bear in mind the
major power blocs that have emerged.

They are two. On the one side is an alliance of
US-Turkey-Azerbaijan and, since the “Rose” revolution,
Georgia, that small but critical country directly on
the pipeline route. Opposed to it, in terms of where
the pipeline route carrying Caspian oil should go, is
Russia, which until 1990 held control over the entire
Caspian outside the Iran littoral. Today, Russia has
cultivated an uneasy but definite alliance with Iran
and Armenia, in opposition to the US group. This
two-camp grouping is essential to understanding
developments in the region since 1991.

Now that the BTC oil pipeline has finally been
completed, and the route through Georgia has been put
firmly in pro-Washington hands, an essential
precondition to completing
the pipeline, the question
becomes one of how Moscow will react. Does President
Vladimir Putin have any serious options left short of
the ultimate nuclear one?

A clear strategy
A geopolitical pattern has become clear over the past
months. One-by-one, with documented overt and covert
Washington backing and financing, new US-friendly
regimes have been put in place in former Soviet states
which are in a strategic relation to possible pipeline
routes from the Caspian Sea.

Ukraine is now more or less in the hands of a
Washington-backed “democratic” regime under Viktor
Yushchenko and his billionaire Prime Minister Yulia
Timoshenko, known in Ukraine as the “gas princess” for
the fortune she made as a government official,
allegedly through her dubious dealings earlier with
Ukraine Energy Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and Gazprom.
The Yushchenko government’s domestic credibility is
reportedly beginning to fade as Ukrainian “Orange”
revolution euphoria gives way to economic realities.
In any event, on June 16 in Kiev, Yushchenko hosted a
special meeting of the Davos World Economic Forum to
discuss possible investments into the “new” Ukraine.

At the Kiev meeting, Timoshenko’s government announced
that it planned to build a new oil and gas pipeline
from the Caspian across Ukraine into Poland, which
would lessen Ukraine’s reliance on Moscow oil and gas
supplies. Timoshenko also revealed that the Ukrainian
government was in positive talks with Chevron, the
former company of US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, for the project.

It goes without saying that such a project would run
counter to the Russian regional interest. One reason
for Washington’s strong backing for Yushchenko last
year was to counter a decision by the Kuchma
government and parliament to reverse the flow of the
Brody-Odessa pipeline from a planned route from the
Black Sea port into Poland. The initial
Odessa-to-Poland route would have tied Ukraine to the
West. Now Ukraine is discussing with Chevron to build
a new pipeline doing the same. The country presently
gets 80% of its energy from Russia.

A second project Ukraine’s government and the state
NAK (Naftogaz Ukrainy) are discussing is with France’s
Gaz de France to build a pipeline from Iran for
natural gas to displace Russian gas. Were that to
happen it would simultaneously weaken ties of mutual self-interest between Russia and Iran, as well as Russia and France.

On the same day as the Kiev conference, Kazakhstan’s
government told an international investors’ conference
in Almaty that it was in negotiations with Ukraine to
route Kazakh oil as well through the proposed new
Ukrainian pipeline to the Baltic. Chevron is also the
major consortium leader developing Kazakh oil in
Tengiz. Given the political nature of US “big oil”, it
is more than probable that Rice, Vice President Dick
Cheney and the administration in Washington are
playing a strong role in such Ukraine pipeline talks.
The “Orange” revolution, at least from the side of its
US sponsors, had little to do with real democracy and
far more with military and oil geopolitics.

Pipelines and US-Azeri ties
The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline was originally proclaimed by
BP and others as the project of the century. Former US
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was a
consultant to BP during the Bill Clinton era, urging
Washington to back the project. In fact, it was
Brzezinski who went to Baku in 1995, unofficially, on
behalf of Clinton, to meet with then-Azeri president
Haidar Aliyev, to negotiate new independent Baku
pipeline routes, including what became the BTC
pipeline.

Brzezinski also sits on the board of an impressive, if
little-known, US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
(USACC). The chairman of USACC in Washington is Tim
Cejka, president of ExxonMobil Exploration. Other
USACC board members include Henry Kissinger and James Baker III, the man who in 2003 personally went to Tbilisi to tell Eduard Shevardnadze that Washington wanted him to step aside in favor of the US-trained Georgian president Mikhail Shaakashvili. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George H W Bush, also sits on the board of USACC. And Cheney was a former board member before he became vice president. A more high- powered Washington team of geopolitical fixers would be hard to imagine. This group of prominent individuals certainly would not give a minute of their time unless an area was of utmost geopolitical strategic importance to the US or to certain powerful interests there.

Now that the BTC pipeline to Ceyhan is complete, a
phase 2 pipeline is in consideration undersea,
potentially to link the Caspian to Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan with its rich gas reserves, directing
that energy away from China to the West in a
S-UK-controlled route.

In this context, it’s worth noting that Bush himself
made a trip to Tbilisi on May 10 to address a crowd in
Freedom Square, promoting his latest war on tyranny
campaign for the region. He praised the US-backed
“color revolutions” from Ukraine to Georgia. Bush went
on to attack Franklin D Roosevelt’s Yalta division of
Europe in 1945. He made the curious declaration, “We
will not repeat the mistakes of other generations,
appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom
in the vain pursuit of stability,” the president said.
“We have learned our lesson; no one’s liberty is
expendable. In the long run, our security and true
stability depend on the freedom of others.” Bush
continued, “Now, across the Caucasus, in Central Asia
and the broader Middle East, we see the same desire
for liberty burning in the hearts of young people.
They are demanding their freedom – and they will have it.”

What color will the Azeri revolution take?
Not surprisingly, that speech was read as a “go”
signal for opposition groups across the Caucasus. In
Azerbaijan four youth groups – Yokh! (No!),
Yeni Fikir (New Thinking), Magam (It’s Time) and the
Orange Movement of Azerbaijan – comprise the emerging
opposition, an echo of Georgia, Ukraine and Serbia,
where the US Embassy and specially trained non-
governmental organizations operatives orchestrated the
US-friendly regime changes with help of the US
National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and
the Soros Foundations.

According to Baku journalists, Ukraine’s Pora (It’s
Time), Georgia’s Kmara (Enough) and Serbia’s Otpor
(Resistance) are cited by all four Azeri opposition
organizations as role models. The opposition groups
also consider Bush’s February meeting in Bratislava
with Pora leader Vladislav Kaskiv as a sign that
Washington supports their cause.

It seems the same team of Washington regime-change
experts are preparing for a “color revolution” for the
upcoming November elections in Azerbaijan as were
behind other recent color revolutions.

In 2003, on the death of former Azeri president Haider
Aliyev, his playboy son, Ilham Aliyev, became
president in grossly rigged elections which Washington
legitimized because Aliyev was “our tyrant”, and also
just happened to hold his hand on the spigot of Baku
oil.

Ilham, former president of the state oil company
SOCAR, is tied to his father’s power base and is
apparently now seen as not suitable for the new
pipeline politics. Perhaps he wants too big a share of
the spoils. In any case, both Blair’s UK government and the US State Department’s AID are pouring money into Azeri opposition groups, similar to Otpor in Ukraine. US Ambassador Reno Harnish h
as stated that Washington is ready to finance “exit polling” in the elections. Exit polling in Ukraine was a key factor used to drive the opposition success there.

Moscow is following Azeri events closely. On May 26,
the Moscow daily Kommersant wrote, “While the pipeline
will carry oil from the East to West, the spirit of
‘color revolutions’ will flow in the reverse
direction.” The commentary went on to suggest that
Western governments wanted to promote democratization
in Azerbaijan out of a desire to protect the
considerable investment made in the pipeline. That is
only a part of the strategic game, however. The other
part is what Pentagon strategists term “strategic
denial”.

Until recently the US had supported the corrupt
ruthless dictatorship of the Aliyev’s as the family
had played ball with US geopolitical designs in the
area, even though Haider Aliyev had been a career top
KGB officer in the Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev era. Then
on April 12, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to
Baku, his second visit in four months, to discuss
demands to create a US military base in Azerbaijan, as
part of the US global force redeployment involving
Europe, the Mideast and Asia.

The Pentagon already de facto runs the Georgia
military, with its US Special Forces officers, and
Georgia has asked to join the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). Now Washington wants to
have direct bases in Azerbaijan proximate to Russia as
well as to Iran.

The Pentagon has also allocated $100 million to build
a Caspian Guard of special forces military, ostensibly
to guard the new BTC pipeline, though the latter was
deliberately built underground to make it less
vulnerable, one reason for its high cost. Part of the
Pentagon money would go to build a radar-equipped
command center in Baku, capable of monitoring all sea
traffic in the Caspian. The US wants airbases in
Azerbaijan, which naturally would be seen in Tehran
and Moscow as a strategic provocation.

In all this maneuvering from the side of Washington
and 10 Downing Street, the strategic issue of
geopolitical control over Eurasia looms large. And
increasingly it is clear that not only Putin’s Russia
is an object of the new Washington “war on tyranny”.
It is becoming clear to most now that the grand design
in Eurasia on the part of Washington is not to
pre-empt Osama bin Laden and his “cave dwellers”.

The current Washington strategy targets many Eurasian
former Soviet republics which per se have no known oil
or gas reserves. What they do have, however, is
strategic military or geopolitical significance for
the Washington policy of dominating the future of Eurasia.

That policy has China as its geopolitical, economic
and military fulcrum. A look at the Eurasian map and
at the target countries for various US-sponsored color
revolutions makes this unmistakably clear. To the east
of the Caspian Sea, Washington in one degree or
another today controls Pakistan, Afghanistan,
potentially Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
These serve as a potential US-controlled barrier or
buffer zone between China and Russian, Caspian and Iranian energy sources. Washington is out to deny China easy land access to either Russia, the Middle East or to the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea.

Whither Kyrgystan?
Since early 2005, when a series of opposition protests
erupted over the fairness of parliamentary elections in February and March, Kyrgystan has joined the growing list of Eurasian republics facing major threat of regime change or color revolution. The success of former Kyrgystan premier Kurmanbek Bakiev in replacing ousted president Askar Akayev in that country’s so-called “Tulip” revolution, becoming interim president until July presidential elections, invited inevitable comparisons with the “Orange” revolution in Ukraine and the Georgian “Rose” revolution.

Washington’s Radio Liberty has gone to great lengths
to explain that the Kyrgystan opposition is not a US
operation, but a genuine spontaneous grass-roots
phenomenon. The facts speak a different story however.
According to reports from mainstream US journalists,
including Craig Smith in the New York Times and Philip
Shishkin in the Wall Street Journal, the opposition in
Kyrgystan has had “more than a little help from US
friends” to paraphrase the Beatles song. Under the
Freedom Support Act of the US Congress, in 2004 the
dirt-poor country of Kyrgystan received a total of
$12 million in US government funds to support the
building of democracy. This will buy a lot of
democracy in an economically desolate, forsaken land
such as Kyrgystan.

Acknowledging the Washington largesse, Edil Baisolov,
in a comment on the February-March anti-government
protests, boasted, “It would have been absolutely
impossible for this to have happened without that
help.” According to the New York Times’ Smith,
Baisolov’s organization, the Coalition for Democracy
and Civil Rights, is financed by the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a
Washington-based non-profit organization in turn
funded by Rice’s State Department. Baisolov told Radio
Liberty he had been to Ukraine to witness the tactics
of their “Orange” Revolution, and got inspired.

But that isn’t all. The whole cast of democracy
characters has been busy in Bishkek and environs
supporting American-style democracy and opposing
“anti-American tyranny”. Washington’s Freedom House
has generously financed Bishkek’s independent printing
press, which prints the opposition paper, MSN,
according to its man on the scene, Mike Stone.

Freedom House is an organization with a fine-sounding
name and a long history since it was created in the
late 1940s to back the creation of NATO. The chairman
of Freedom House is James Woolsey, former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) director who calls the
present series of regime changes from Baghdad to Kabul
“World War IV”. Other trustees include the ubiquitous
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Clinton commerce secretary
Stuart Eizenstat, and national security adviser
Anthony Lake. Freedom House lists USAID, US
Information Agency, the Soros Foundations and the
National Endowment for Democracy among its financial
backers.

One more of the many non-governmental organizations
active in promoting the new democracy in Kyrgystan is
the Civil Society Against Corruption, financed by the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED which,
with Freedom House, has been at the center of all the
major color revolutions in recent years, was created
during the Ronald Reagan administration to function as
a de facto privatized CIA, privatized so as to allow
more freedom of action, or what the CIA likes to call
“plausible deniability”. NED chairman Vin Weber, a
former Republican congressman, is close to neo-
conservative Bill Bennett. NED president since 1984 is
Carl Gershman, who had previously been a Freedom House
scholar. NATO General Wesley Clark, the man who led
the US bombing of Serbia in 1999, also sits on the NED
board. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the
legislation establishing NED, said in 1991, “A lot of
what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by
the CIA.”

Not to be forgotten, and definitely not least in
Kyrgystan’s ongoing “Tulip” revolution is Soros’ Open
Society Institute – which also poured money into the
Serbian, Georgian and Ukraine color revolutions. The
head of the Civil Society Against Corruption in
Kyrgystan is Tolekan Ismailova, who organized the
translation and distribution of the revolutionary
manual used in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia written by
Gene Sharp, of a curiously named Albert Einstein
Institution in Boston. Sharp’s book, a how-to manual
for the color revolutions, is titled From Dictatorship
to Democracy. It includes tips on non-violent
resistance – such as “display of flags and symbolic
colors” – and civil disobedience.

Sharp’s book is literally the bible of the color
revolutions, a kind of “regime change for dummies”.
Sharp created his Albert Einstein Institution in 1983,
with backing from Harvard University. It is funded by
the US Congress’ NED and the Soros Foundations, to
train people in and to study the theories of “non-
violence as a form of warfare”. Sharp has worked with
NATO and the CIA over the years training operators in
Myanmar, Lithuania, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and
Taiwan, even Venezuela and Iraq.

In short, virtually every regime which has been the
target of a US-backed soft coup in the past 20 years
has involved Gene Sharp and usually, his associate, Colonel Robert Helvey, a retired US Army intelligence specialist. Notably, Sharp was in Beijing two weeks before student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Pentagon and US intelligence have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it “swarming”, referring to the swarms of youth, typically linked by short message services and weblogs, who can be mobilized on command to destabilize a target regime.

Then Uzbekistan …?
Uzbekistan’s tyrannical President Islam Karimov had
early profiled himself as a staunch friend of the
Washington “war on terror”, offering a former Soviet
airbase for US military actions, including the attack
on the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001. Many
considered Karimov too close to Washington to be in
danger. He had made himself a “good” tyrant in
Washington’s eyes.

That’s also no longer a sure thing. In May, Rice
demanded that Karimov institute “political reforms”
following violent prison uprisings and subsequent
protests over conditions in the Ferghana Valley region
in Andijan. Karimov has fiercely resisted independent
inquiry into allegations his troops shot and killed
hundreds of unarmed protesters. He insists the
uprisings were caused by “external” radical Muslim
fundamentalists allied with the Taliban and intent on
establishing an Islamic caliphate in Uzbekistan’s
Ferghana Valley bordering Kyrgystan.

While the ouster of Karimov is unclear for the moment,
leading Washington backers of Karimov’s “democratic
reform” have turned into hostile opponents. As one US
commentator expressed it, “The character of the
Karimov regime can no longer be ignored in deference
to the strategic usefulness of Uzbekistan.” Karimov
has been targeted for a color revolution in the
relentless Washington “war on tyranny”.

In mid-June, Karimov’s government announced changes in
terms for the US to use Uzbekistan’s Karshi-Khanabad
military airbase, including a ban on night flights.
Karimov is moving demonstrably closer to Moscow, and
perhaps also to Beijing, in the latest chapter of the
new “Great Game” for geopolitical control over
Eurasia.

Following the Andijan events, Karimov revived the
former “strategic partnership” with Moscow and also
received a red-carpet welcome at the end of May in
Beijing, including a 21-gun salute. At a June Brussels
NATO meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ivanov
backed Karimov, declaring there was no need for an
international investigation of what happened in
Andijan.

Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan and China, is so far
the only remaining Central Asian republic not yet to
undergo a successful US-led color revolution. It’s not
for lack of trying. For several years Washington has
attempted to woo Dushanbe away from its close ties to
Moscow, including the economic carrot of US backing
for Tajik membership in the World Trade Organization.
Beijing has also been active. China has recently
upgraded military assistance to Tajikistan, and is
keen to strengthen ties to all Central Asian republics
standing between it and the energy resources to the
Eurasian west, from Russia to Iran. The stakes are the
highest for the oil-dependent China.

Washington playing the China card
The one power in Eurasia that has the potential to
create a strategic combination which could checkmate
US global dominance is China. However, China has an
Achilles’ heel, which Washington understands all too
well–oil. Ten years ago China was a net oil exporter.
Today China is the second-largest importer behind the
US.

China’s energy demand is growing annually at a rate of
more than 30%. China has feverishly been trying to
secure long-term oil and gas supplies, especially
since the Iraq war made clear to Beijing that
Washington was out to control and militarize most of
the world’s major oil and gas sources. A new wrinkle
to the search for black gold, oil, is the clear data
confirming that many of the world’s largest oilfields
are in decline, while new discoveries fail to replace
lost volumes of oil. It is a pre-programmed scenario
for war. The only question is, with what weapons?

In recent months Beijing has signed major oil and
economic deals with Venezuela and Iran. It has bid for
a major Canadian resources company, and most recently
made the audacious bid to buy California’s Unocal, a
partner in the Caspian BTC pipeline. Chevron
immediately stepped in with a counter bid to block
China’s.

Beijing has recently also upgraded the importance of
the four-year-old organization, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, or SCO. SCO consists
of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan
and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, these are many of
the states which are in the midst of US-backed
attempts at soft coups or color revolutions. SCO’s
July meeting list included an invitation to India, Pakistan and Iran to attend with observer status.

This June, the foreign ministers of Russia, China and
India held a meeting in Vladivostock where they
stressed the role of the United Nations, a move
aimed clearly at Washington. India also discussed its
project to invest and develop Russia’s Far East
Sakhalin I, where it has already invested about
$1 billion in oil and gas development. Significantly,
at the meeting, Russia and China resolved a decades-
long border dispute, and two weeks later in Beijing
discussed potentials for development of Russia’s
Siberian resources.

A close look at the map of Eurasia begins to suggest
what is so vital here for China, and therefore for
Washington’s future domination of Eurasia. The
goal is not only strategic encirclement of Russia
through a series of NATO bases ranging from Camp Bond
Steel in Kosovo to Poland, to Georgia, possibly
Ukraine and White Russia, which would enable NATO to
control energy ties between Russia and the EU.

Washington policy now encompasses a series of
“democratic” or soft coup projects which would
strategically cut China off from access to the vital
oil and gas reserves of the Caspian, including
Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade
routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty
in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a
region surrounded by major mountain ranges.

Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and
Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential
pipeline routes between China and Central Asia,
just a
s the encirclement of Russia allows for the
control of pipeline and other ties between it and
Western Europe, China, India and the Mideast.

In this context, the revealing Foreign Affairs article
from Zbigniew Brzezinski from September/October 1997
is worth again quoting:

Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically
assertive and dynamic states. All the historical
pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The
world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony,
China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the
potential political or economic challengers to
American primacy. After the United States, the next
six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75% of the world’s population, 60% of its GNP [gross national product], and 75% of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.

Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A
power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive
influence over two of the world’s three most
economically productive regions, Western Europe and
East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a
country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically
control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now
serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no
longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and
another for Asia. What happens with the distribution
of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive
importance to America’s global primacy …

This statement, written well before the US-led bombing
of former Yugoslavia and the US occupations in
Afghanistan and Iraq, or the BTC pipeline, helps put
recent Washington pronouncements about “ridding the
world of tyranny” and about spreading democracy into a
somewhat different context from the one usually
mentioned by Bush.

“Elementary, my dear Watson. It’s about global
hegemony, not democracy, you fool.”

F William Engdahl, author of A Century of War:
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,
from Pluto Press Ltd.

3) See also Juan Cole’s analysis of the significance of the below appeal in www.juancole.com :

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0705/dailyUpdate.html

Will US be asked to leave key military bases?

Chinese-led regional security group urges US to set timetable for withdrawal of troops.

By Matthew Clark | csmonitor.com

A six-nation security bloc comprised of China, Russia, and four former Soviet states has urged the US-led coalition in Afghanistan to set a deadline for withdrawing troops from member states, reports BBC.
Meeting in the Kazakh capital of Astana, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – which includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Russia – issued a joint statement saying the active military phase of the Afghan operation was coming to an end and calling on the US-led coalition to agree to a deadline for ending the temporary use of bases and air space in member countries.

There are about 18,000 coalition forces in Afghanistan, and the US has hosted bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan since the anti-Taliban operations began in 2001.

“Considering that the active phase of the military anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan has finished, member states… consider it essential that the relevant participants in the anti-terrorist coalition set deadlines for the temporary use” of bases in Central Asia, the declaration read.

AFX News, a global news agency, points out that this is the SCO’s first meeting since the ouster of Kyrgyz leader Askar Akayev in March and a military crackdown in Uzbekistan in May. AFX also reports that “the leaders also included a clause on the inadmissibility of ‘monopolizing or dominating international affairs’ – apparently a reference to growing US influence in Central Asia.”

Today’s declaration echoes a similar one on the ’21st century international order’ signed by Putin and Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in Moscow last week.
It follows a string of complaints by leaders such as Uzbek President Islam Karimov suggesting that the West was behind uprisings in three former Soviet republics in the last two years – Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

“There should be no place for interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states,” Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said.

Mr. Karimov said outside forces were threatening to “hijack stability and impose their model of development” on the region.

UzReport.com, Uzbekistan’s largest business Internet portal, reports that Secretary-General of the SCO Zhang Deguang said three evils – terrorism, extremism, and separatism – are the main threat to peace and security in the region.

Sergei Prikhodko, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Central Asian states will ask US-led forces when they plan to leave Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases, reports MosNews.

The active phase is now being completed and it’s important to know when they will go home. … No one is telling them it should be tomorrow, in a month, in five months or in a year and a half, but it’s just straightforward that SCO members know by when the anti-terrorist coalition will leave.
“Speeches at the summit by the leaders of China and Uzbekistan included veiled criticism of Western influence in the region and they follow hawkish comments by Russian officials criticizing attempts by unspecified foreign forces to destabilize Central Asia,” according to MosNews.
“Correspondents say the statement appears to reflect increasing concerns that the US is encouraging the overthrow of Central Asia’s authoritarian governments,” reports BBC.

Radio Free Europe writes “the summit highlights China’s continuing efforts to build influence in Central Asia – and gain greater access to its energy resources – by making common cause with Russia and the Central Asian states against militant groups.”

Beijing, the major force behind the SCO, has poured more resources into maintaining it than have any of the other member states. And often, Beijing has found itself trying to push the others along in its efforts to develop the SCO into a major regional alliance.
RFE points out that a Kazakh oil pipeline to China with up to 20 million tons capacity is due to be completed by December.

4) This is a long analysis about peak oil, concentrating on Saudi Arabia’s reserves:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF29Ak01.html

The Saudi oil bombshell
By Michael T Klare

For those oil enthusiasts who believe that petroleum will remain abundant for decades to come – among them President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and their many friends in the oil industry – any talk of an imminent “peak” in global oil production and an ensuing decline can be easily countered with a simple mantra: “Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia.”

Not only will the Saudis pump extra oil now to alleviate global shortages, it is claimed, but they will keep pumping more in the years ahead to quench our insatiable thirst for energy. And when the kingdom’s existing fields run dry, lo, they will begin pumping from other fields that are just waiting to be exploited. We ordinary folk need have no worries about oil scarcity, because Saudi Arabia can satisfy our current and future needs. This is, in fact, the basis for the Bush administration’s contention that we can continue to increase our yearly consumption of oil, rather than conserve what’s left and begin the transition to a post-petroleum economy. Hallelujah for Saudi Arabia!

But now, from an unexpected source, comes a devastating challenge to t
his powerful dogma: in a newly released book, investment banker Matthew R Simmons convincingly demonstrates that, far from being capable of increasing its output,
Saudi Arabia is about to face the exhaustion of its giant fields and, in the relatively near future, will probably experience a sharp decline in output. “There is only a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and consumption,” Simmons writes in Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. “Saudi Arabian production,” he adds, italicizing his claims to drive home his point, “is at or very near its peak sustainable volume … and it is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future.”

If only ……

www.truthtalkziraq.blogspot.com
www.truthtalkz.blogspot.com

1) Although a month old now, this article analyzes what the US Embassy in Iraq (Negroponte’s embassy) has done to try and cope with the insurgency. Check it out through the link — which contains several more links in turn:

For Iraq, “The Salvador Option” Becomes Reality
by Max Fuller

www.globalresearch.ca
2 june 2005

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html

——————————————————
Abstract

The following article examines evidence that the ‘Salvador Option’ for Iraq has been ongoing for some time and attempts to say what such an option will mean. It pays particular attention to the role of the Special Police Commandos, considering both the background of their US liaisons and their deployment in Iraq. The article also looks at the evidence for death-squad style massacres in Iraq and draws attention to the almost complete absence of investigation. As such, the article represents an initial effort to compile and examine some of these mass killings and is intended to spur others into further looking at the evidence. Finally, the article turns away from the notion that sectarianism is a sufficient explanation for the violence in Iraq, locating it structurally at the hands of the state as part of the ongoing economic subjugation of Iraq…

2) The below event is extremely suspicious, whereby a journalist is killed by a single shot to the head from a distance while at a checkpoint set up outside his house, after investigating stories related to the above posting:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/iraq-j01.shtml

Journalist killed after investigating US-backed death squads in Iraq

By James Cogan
1 July 2005

On June 24, Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi special correspondent for the news agency Knight Ridder, was killed by a single bullet to the head as he approached a checkpoint that had been thrown up near his home in western Baghdad by US and Iraqi troops. It is believed that the shot was fired by an American sniper. According to eyewitnesses, no warning shots were fired.

The US military has announced it is conducting an investigation into Salihee’s killing. Knight Ridder has already declared, however, that “there’s no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work”. In fact, his last assignment gives reason to suspect that it was.

Over the past month, Salihee had been gathering evidence that US-backed Iraqi forces have been carrying out extra-judicial killings of alleged members and supporters of the anti-occupation resistance. His investigation followed a feature in the New York Times magazine in May, detailing how the US military had modeled the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, known as the Wolf Brigade, on the death squads unleashed in the 1980s to crush the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was recruited by US operatives and the US-installed interim government headed by Iyad Allawi during 2004. A majority of its officers and personnel served in Saddam Hussein’s special forces and Republican Guard—veterans of killings, torture and repression. The unit has been used against the resistance in rebellious cities such as Mosul and Samarra, and, over the past six weeks, has played a prominent role in the massive crackdown ordered by the Iraqi government in Baghdad codenamed “Operation Lightning”.

On June 27, Knight Ridder published the results of its inquiry in an article jointly written by Salihee and correspondent Tom Lasseter. The journalists “found more than 30 examples in less than a week” of corpses turning up in Baghdad morgues of people who were last seen being detained by the police commandos.

The men, according to the central Baghdad morgue director Faik Baqr, had “been killed in a methodical fashion”. The article reported: “Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, their eyes were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases, the dead men looked as if they’d been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads.”

A grocer in west Baghdad told Salihee that he had been detained by police with a man named Anwar Jassim on May 13. “When we were in detention, they put blindfolds and handcuffs on us. On the second day the soldiers were saying ‘He’s dead’. Later we found out it was Anwar.” According to the medical reports at the Yarmuk morgue where police dumped his body, Jassim had a “bullet wound in the back of his head and cuts and bruises on his abdomen, back and neck.”

Police commandos reportedly told the morgue director to leave the corpse “so that dogs could eat it, because he’s terrorist and he deserves it”.

In a second case, a brigadier-general in the Iraqi interior ministry related that his brother had been detained during a raid on May 14, in a working class Sunni suburb in Baghdad’s west. His body was found the next day bearing signs of torture. Witnesses told the general that the abductors “came in white police Toyota Land Cruisers, wore police commando uniforms, flak vests and helmets” and were armed with 9mm Glock pistols.

Glock sidearms are used by many US law enforcement agencies and have been supplied to Iraqi security forces by the US military.

The article also cited a third case. The body of Saadi Khalif was brought to Yarmuk morgue by police commandos several days after he was taken from his home by police on June 10. Saadi’s brother told Knight Ridder: “The doctor told us he was choked and tortured before they shot him. He looked like he had been dragged by a car.”

An article in the British Financial Times on June 29 provided further evidence of police commando atrocities. Mustafa Mohammed Ali, from the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, told the newspaper he was detained by the Wolf Brigade on May 22, during the build-up to Operation Lightning. He alleged that he was held for 26 days.

The article reported: “He spent the first day in a barbed wire enclosure with hundreds of other detainees, without food, water or toilet facilities… On the fourth day, the interrogations began. Mr Ali says Wolf Brigade commandos attached electrical wires to his ear and his genitals, and generated a current with a hand-cranked military telephone.”

According to the figures given to the Financial Times, only 22 of the 474 people seized from their homes during the Wolf Brigade sweep in the Abu Ghraib area are still being held. Those released allege they suffered systematic abuse. “Mass detentions and indiscriminate torture seem to be the main tools deployed to crush an insurgency that could last ‘five, six, eight, 10, 12 years’ according to Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary,” the newspaper commented.

In light of the evidence gathered by Salihee, significant discrepancies in the official figures for Operation Lightning in Baghdad raise further concerns about the fate of detainees. In early June, the Iraqi government reported that 1,200 had been detained. Just days later on June 6, this was revised downward to just 887, with no explanation. Some of the deaths referred to in the Knight Ridder article coincide with this period.

Suspicions of wholesale killings

The revelations about the conduct of the Wolf Brigade lend credibility to the claims made by Max Fuller, in a feature headlined “For Iraq, ‘The Salvador Option’ Becomes Reality” and published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation.

Over the past nine months, a terrifying new development in Iraq has been the discovery of dozens of bodies dumped in rubbish heaps, rivers or abandoned buildings. In most cases, the people had suffered t
orture and mutilation before being killed by a single shot to the head. The US military has consistently reported that the victims were members of the Iraqi army or police. The media has universally reported the mass killings as the work of anti-occupation terrorists.

Fuller noted, however: “What is particularly striking is that many of those killings have taken place since the police commandos became operationally active and often correspond with areas where they have been deployed.”

In Mosul, for example, dozens of men were detained by the commandos last November, as part of a US-led operation to bring the city back under occupation control. Over the following weeks, more than 150 tortured and executed bodies were found. In Samarra, dozens of bodies appeared in nearby Lake Thartar in the wake of operations by the commandos in that city.

From February through to late April, more than 100 bodies were recovered from the Tigris River south of Baghdad—one of the most rebellious areas of the country. The Iraqi government initially claimed they were villagers who had been kidnapped by insurgents in the village of Maidan. This has since been discredited. The victims are from a range of towns and villages, including Kut in the north and Basra in the south. Police in the area told the San Francisco Chronicle that many of the dead had been “motorists passing through the area when stopped by masked men bearing Kalashnikov rifles at impromptu checkpoints”.

Other killings have been discovered in Baquaba and the Syrian border town of Qaim in the aftermath of counter-insurgency operations by US forces and their Iraqi allies. Fuller also noted the suspicions surrounding the assassination of well over 200 university academics, most of whom were opponents of the US occupation of Iraq.

Dozens of bodies have been found over the past two months in Baghdad. In May, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS)—the main public Sunni organisation opposed to the occupation—directly accused the Wolf Brigade of having “arrested imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump in Shaab district” of Baghdad. AMS secretary general Hareth al-Dhari declared at the time: “This is state terrorism by the Minister of the Interior.”

The very existence of the Wolf Brigade underscores the criminality of the US occupation and the utter fraud of the Bush administration claims to be bringing “liberation” and “democracy” to Iraq. Many of the commandos would have been involved in murder and torture on behalf of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The American military deliberately recruited them in order to make use of their experience in mass repression and has directly modeled their operations on those of right-wing death squads in Central America.

The main US advisor to the Wolf Brigade from the time of its formation until April 2005 was James Steele. Steele’s own biography, promoting him for the US lecture circuit, states that “he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerilla war” and “was credited with training and equipping what was acknowledged to be the best counter-terrorist force in the region”. In a 12-year campaign of murder and repression, the Salvadoran units, trained and advised by people like Steele, killed over 70,000 people.

In his speech on June 28, George Bush declared his administration was working with the Iraqi interior and defence ministries to “improve their capabilities to coordinate anti-terrorist operations” and “develop their command and control structures”. The evidence is beginning to emerge that this means paying and equipping former Baathist killers to terrorise, torture and murder Iraqis who are believed to have links to the popular resistance, which an unnamed US analyst estimated for the June 27 edition of Newsweek had “as many as 400,000 auxiliaries and support personnel”.

The killing of journalists seeking to document or expose allegations of state-organised murder has accompanied every dirty war against a civilian population. Since the US occupation of Iraq began, dozens of reporters, cameramen and other media workers have been killed by American-led forces in suspicious circumstances that were never independently investigated.

Two more Iraqi journalists have been killed in the days since Yasser Salihee’s death. On June 26, Maha Ibrahim, a news editor with a television station operated by the anti-occupation Iraqi Islamic Party, was shot dead when US troops opened fire on her car as she and her husband drove to work. Two days later, Ahmad Wail Bakri, a program director for Iraqi al-Sharqiya television was killed by American troops as he reportedly tried to drive around a traffic accident in Baghdad

3) While I’m not sure that the US is about to follow the path of the USSR due to invading Afghanistan and Iraq (Louisiana secession, anyone?), this analysis demonstrates some thought-provoking parallels, especially in terms of military reality. Remember, these interventions are only 2-3 years old yet. The US has just entered the tunnel of its own creation — there is no end of the tunnel to give off light yet:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/070105X.shtml

The December Decision
By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 30 June 2005

On October 9th 2001, in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks and as part of the preparations for going to war in Afghanistan, a series of essays were prepared on previous involvements in that country. One of documents prepared, edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, was on the lessons of the Soviet invasion and occupation from 1979 until 1988. Afghanistan has a long history of foreign intervention, having been one of the key squares in the “Great Game” between Russia and England.

In dry national security prose, the report noted that “the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of the country itself.” This is, perhaps, too strong a phrasing, but it certainly didn’t help. Moreover, the ease of the invasion and the failure of the occupation created certain sharp lessons for other powers that seek to impose their will by direct force.

The first lesson was the invasion itself: in the run-up to the invasion, the USSR General Staff objected to the small size of the force and the rather broad objectives. The USSR wanted to root out those who had crossed it and impose a Soviet-style government on Afghanistan, not merely fulfill some simple regime change or removal of particular leadership.

The second lesson followed from the first: the USSR had limited intelligence about the political make-up of the factions in Afghanistan, and they expected it to be like other poor peripheral countries, for example, Mongolia. This lack of clear information and willingness to “form a picture” were mistakes that compounded the lack of force commitment. The Soviet Union expected to be seen as liberators, or at least as an improvement, bringing with them technology, teaching and training. Instead they found that the populace rejected them as “infidels,” and instead of being able to secure the cooperation of the local power centers, they found little immediate resistance, but also no reconciliation. Even their own friends on the ground were divided along ethnic and religious lines.

This much became clear rather early, and the military leadership pressed for either withdrawal of the “Limited Contingent” or some clearly defined goal or exit strategy. Neither was accomplished, because of the political centralization and rot within the Soviet Politburo itself. In 1985, the Politburo decided to decide, but it would wait until 13 November 1986, when there would be a full discussion of how to exit from Afghanistan. By this point, Gorbachev accuses their alli
es of “walking like a pretzel” – meaning weaving around every issue and being disingenuous – and warns that unless some important change of policy is undertaken, that Afghanistan will continue for another 20 or 30 years of fighting. It is now 20 years from the time of that meeting, and the fighting has continued, even if the USSR is now a motif for t-shirts, and not a government.

But it is Gromyko who argues for realpolitik in the meeting: that there are still political options, even though military ones have failed. He argues that an attempt to modernize Afghanistan is not realistic, that the USSR will have to accept Afghanistan as a neutral country, and he notes there is no internal support: the USSR has lost as many men from Afghanistan as it drafted. The politburo called for a hard exit date, a withdrawal of troops within two years. But it would not save the USSR or its political allies in Afghanistan.

By 1988, the Soviet military and political establishment were busy doing a post-mortem on Afghanistan. The political leadership agreed that going in had been a mistake, but argued that there had been repeated requests from a fellow Soviet bloc government – and thus a legitimate use of military power. The military assessment was far harsher and far more direct, as expressed in a CPSU letter of 10 May 1988.

The lessons the Soviet military drew were concise:

Insufficient intelligence;
The ability of small units to use terrain against large formations;
“Complete disregard” for the local populace and its reactions;
Failure to win the populace over to the regime;
Placing all reliance on a “military solution”;
Long term combat operations degrading the military.
From the US side, the lessons to be drawn from the Soviet invasion were a complementary image: political failure combined with loss of control of the road network, which led to an increasing reliance on helicopters, which were vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles.

And now we have reached that most dangerous of mileposts: the transportation network that the military relies on in Afghanistan and Iraq. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. Strategy is what you can do with what you can get there. The gem of the Cold War military system was not the fighter bombers, the aircraft carriers, or even the ICBM deterrent, instead it was the logistical network that allowed the US to project force farther and faster than any other nation, such that no nation felt itself too far out of American reach for too long.

The indications in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan were that American logistical capability was stretched, that there had been failures of new software and shortages of needed equipment. This failure becomes more visible with time: the lack of armored HumVees and flack jackets were the flesh wounds, caught by IED shrapnel. The loss of the ability to truck material and the reliance on rotary wing aircraft is a more dangerous failure, and a more militarily grievous loss, because it costs that which is very expensive to replace: pilots, specialists and commanding officers. The kind of people of which there is a limited supply, and which take years to fully replace.

It is this same attrition of valuable personnel which ended up being the death knell for Soviet occupation. It could no longer staff its chain of command, coordinate or control defense missions, nor could it reliably move people from one place to another. This undercut the political objectives of “national reconciliation,” because reconciliation is dependent on a clear and imposing presence which cannot be delayed, denied or defeated.

The harsh conclusion is that the very documents being read in the Pentagon in the days after 9/11 provided clear warnings not to go into a nation without intelligence, not to go in with a “limited contingent,” not to set large and sweeping goals of political transformation, and not to rely on an increasingly fragile military instrument to effect change. The Downing Street Memos show how, systematically, these points were ignored by key US envoys to Great Britain, and the final invasion of Iraq ended up looking like the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. That is, politically compelled for ideological reasons, but constrained by economic and military shortages.

With the crash of a Chinook troop transport helicopter, lost, in all probability, to hostile fire, the parallels between the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq should be held to closer parallel. Consider that, from the point of invasion to the 10 May letter, the Soviets had suffered, on average, 5 killed per day of involvement, and 13 wounded. The United States has suffered only 2.3 killed, but 16 wounded. In other words, the intensity of American combat in Iraq differs from the Soviet presence in Afghanistan only in that better American evacuation and medical technology, plus better armor, saves 3 people every day who otherwise would have died.

In short, the United States is fighting its own version of the war that, according to the the foreign policy intellectual establishment, either brought down or hastened the fall of the USSR. We have engaged in the same mistakes: the Downing Street Memos of March 2002 show a determination to invade but an admission that there is poor intelligence on troops, deployment of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the state of Saddam’s air force. There is no mention made of non-conventional or guerrilla warfare, just as the planning documents of the Soviet invasion do not once mention the possibility of a resistence developing. There is a reliance on an outside trained elite that, it is admitted, has no credibility on the ground.

It was a Soviet politician who reminded his fellow politburo members that with each person’s death and closing of the eyes, a unique world comes to an end. It might also be added that when a nation closes its eyes to the lessons of the past, it too sets itself on a course toward its own death, a journey to that country “from which no traveler returns.”

——————————————————
Stirling Newberry is an internet business and strategy consultant, with experience in international telecom, consumer marketing, e-commerce and forensic database analysis. He has acted as an advisor to Democratic political campaigns and organizations and is the the co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, Jay Rosen and Matt Stoller, of BopNews, as well as being the military affairs editor of The Agonist.

4) Why withdrawal is the right way to go:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1521437,00.html

Comment:
A fiction as powerful as WMD

It is not withdrawal that threatens Iraq with civil war, but occupation

Sami Ramadani
Tuesday July 5, 2005
The Guardian

Most people in Britain want troops withdrawn from Iraq – and so do most Iraqis, according to opinion polls. Trade unions are calling for early withdrawal, as are some Labour MPs and the Liberal Democrats. But many well-intentioned people argue that the US-led occupation must end only when the country is stable. A swift withdrawal, they fear, would plunge the country into civil war.
In one sense this position is the same as that of Bush and Blair, who consistently say troops will not stay in Iraq “a moment longer than necessary” and will withdraw when asked to do so by a democratically chosen government. In reality, with over 200,000 foreign troops and auxiliaries in control of Iraq, even an elected government will owe its survival to the occupation.

It was a reflection of Iraqi popular hatred of the occupation that 82 of the national assembly’s 275 members signed a petition calling for a speedy withdrawal, after the prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, appeared to be breaking his election promise to insist o
n a scheduled pullout. Jaafari went on to renege in the most humiliating fashion, standing next to George Bush at the White House as the US president declared: “I told the prime minister that there will be no scheduled withdrawal.”

It would be wrong to dismiss the fears of those who argue for “withdrawal but not now” just because it is also the position of Bush and Blair. But those who are genuinely concerned about withdrawal should examine the facts on the ground before giving support to continued occupation.

Some pro-war commentators warned early on that the country would be blighted by sectarian violence: oppressed Shias would take revenge on Sunnis; Kurds would avenge Saddam’s rule by killing Arabs; and the Christian community would be liquidated.

What actually happened confounded such expectations. Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, millions converged on Karbala chanting “La Amreeka, la Saddam” (No to America, no to Saddam). For months, Baghdad, Basra and Najaf were awash with united anti-occupation marches whose main slogan was “La Sunna, la Shia; hatha al-watan menbi’a” (no Sunni, no Shia, this homeland we shall not sell).

Such responses were predictable given Iraq’s history of anti-sectarianism. But the war leaders reacted by destroying the foundations of the state and following the old colonial policy of divide and rule, imposing a sectarian model on every institution they set up, including arrangements for the January election.

When it became clear that the poorest areas of Baghdad and the south were even more hostile to the occupation than the so-called Sunni towns – answering the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s call to arms – Bush and Blair tried to defeat the resistance piecemeal, under the guise of fighting foreign terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was promoted to replace Saddam as the bogeyman in chief, to encourage sectarian tension and isolate the resistance.

This propaganda has been more successful abroad than in Iraq. Indeed, Iraqis habitually blame the occupation for all acts of terrorism, not what is fondly referred to as al-muqawama al-sharifa (the honourable resistance). But in Britain and the US many people feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards the mainstream popular resistance.

The occupation’s sectarian discourse has acquired a hold as powerful as the WMD fiction that prepared the public for war. Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can’t wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically. Only a few days ago the national assembly members who had signed the anti-occupation statement met representatives of the Foundation Congress (a group of 60 religious and secular organisations) and the al-Sadr movement and issued a joint call for the rapid withdrawal of the occupation forces according to an internationally guaranteed timetable.

There is now broad agreement in Iraq to build a non-sectarian, democratic Iraq that guarantees Kurdish national rights. The occupation is making the achievement of these goals more difficult.

Every day the occupation increases tension and makes people’s lives worse, fuelling the violence. Creating a client regime in Baghdad, backed by permanent bases, is the route that US strategists followed in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, popular resistance in Iraq and the wider Middle East will not go away but will grow stronger, until it eventually unites to force a US-British withdrawal.

How many more Iraqis, Americans and Britons have to die before Bush and Blair admit the occupation is the problem and not part of any democratic solution in Iraq?

· Sami Ramadani, a political refugee from Saddam Hussein’s regime, is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

5) Monbiot op-ed, always worth a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1521387,00.html

Africa’s new best friends

The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 5, 2005
The Guardian

I began to realise how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting, I wondered? “Down with me and all I stand for”?

Benn is the man in charge of using British aid to persuade African countries to privatise public services; wasn’t the march supposed to be a protest against policies like his? But its aims were either expressed or interpreted so loosely that anyone could join. This was its strength and its weakness. The Daily Mail ran pictures of Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof on its front page, with the headline “Let’s Roll”, showing that nothing either Live 8 or Make Poverty History has done so far represents a threat to power….

1) Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps

Secret torture chambers, the brutal interrogation of
prisoners, murders by paramilitaries with links to
powerful ministries… Foreign affairs editor Peter
Beaumont in Baghdad uncovers a grim trail of abuse
carried out by forces loyal to the new Iraqi
government

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1520136,00.html

Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer

The video camera pans across Hassan an-Ni’ami’s body
as it is washed in the mosque for burial. In life he
was a slender, good-looking man, usually dressed in a
dark robe and white turban, Imam at a mosque in
Baghdad’s Adhimiya district and a senior official of
the Muslim Clerics Association.

When I first interviewed him a year ago he was
suspected of contacts with the insurgency. Certainly
he supported resistance to US forces.

More recently, an-Ni’ami had dropped out of sight.
Then, a little over a month ago, relatives say,
paramilitary police commandos from ‘Rapid Intrusion’
found him at a family home in the Sha’ab neighbourhood
of northern Baghdad. His capture was reported on
television as that of a senior ‘terrorist commander’.
Twelve hours later his body turned up in the morgue.

What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was
written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded
by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs
still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged
long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell.
There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has
placed something very hot near his right nipple and
moved it around.

A little lower are a series of horizontal welts,
wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they
turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten
with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are
other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that
look like cigarette burns.

An arm appears to have been broken and one of the
higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster
of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of
his left knee. At some stage an-Ni’ami seems to have
been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a
gun – the exit wounds are identical in size to the
entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet.
Instead it appears to have been done with something
like a drill.

What actually killed him however were the bullets
fired into his chest at close range, probably by
someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The
last two hit him in the head.

The gruesome detail is important. Hanging by the arms
in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an
iron and knee-capping are claimed to be increasingly
prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging
that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only
Iraqis make the allegations. International officials
describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones,
laying them at the doorof the increasingly
unaccountable forces attached to Iraq’s Ministry of
the
Interior.

The only question that remains is the level of the
co-ordination of the abuse: whether Iraq is stumbling
towards a policy of institutionalised torture or
whether these are incidents carried out by rogue
elements.

Six months ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) laid out a
catalogue of alleged abuses being applied to those
suspected of terrorism in Iraq and called for an
independent complaints body in Iraq.

But as the insurgency has grown hotter, so too, it
appears, have been the methods employed in the dirty
counter-insurgency war.

To add to HRW’s allegations of beatings, electric
shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and
detention without trial, The Observer can add its
own charges These include the most brutal kinds of
torture, with methods resurrected from the time of
Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial
executions; and of the existence of a ‘ghost’ network
of detention facilities – in parallel with those
officially acknowledged – that exist beyond all
accountability to international human rights monitors,
NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi
government.

What is most shocking is that it is done under the
noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that
they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by
units who are diverting international funding to their
dirty war.

Hassan an-Ni’ami may well have been a terrorist. Or he
may have had knowledge of that terrorism. Or he may
have been someone who objected too loudly to
foreign troops being in Iraq. We will never know. He
had no opportunity to defend himself, no lawyer, no
trial. His interrogation and killing were a breach
of international law.

And it is not only the case of an-Ni’ami but others
too, all arrested by units of the Ministry of the
Interior, many of whom were tortured and subsequently
killed. Post-mortem images show a dozen or so farmers
from the insurgent hotbed of Medayeen who were
apparently seized by police as they slept in one of
Baghdad’s markets and whose bodies were discovered on
a rubbish dump in shallow graves to the north of the
city. Like an-Ni’ami, their bodies also bore the
marks of extensive torture before execution, most with
a bullet to the head.

The face of the first body is blackened by
strangulation or asphyxiation. Another has bruises to
his forehead where he was been hit repeatedly with
something heavy. Yet another, his hands still tied
with cord, has been punched in the eye and had his
ankle fractured. Yet another shows signs of burning
similar to an-Ni’ami’s. The last two have identical
puncture wounds, fist-width apart, suggesting the use
of a spiked knuckle-duster.

Then there is Tahar Mohammed Suleiman al-Mashhadani,
seized from the Abu Ghraib neighbourhood from early
prayers outside a mosque with a number of other men,
again by paramilitary police from Rapid Intrusion.
When his body was found by family members in the
morgue – 20 days after his arrest – he had been
tortured almost beyond recognition.

These are not isolated cases. For what is
extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the
torture, intimidation and murder is taking place. It
is not
just in Baghdad. In the majority Shia south, far from
the worst ravages of the insurgency, there are also
emerging reports consistent with the abuses in
the capital.

If there is a centre to this horror, it is Baghdad’s
Ministry of the Interior, and the police commando
units that operate from there.

The ministry is a strange, top-heavy building, set
apart in an area of open ground off the highway. Its
entrance is guarded by concrete blast-walls and
endless checkpoints on the dusty road that leads to
its crowded reception.

I came here almost exactly a year ago, two days after
sovereignty had been handed back to Iraq’s interim
government. The floors were occupied by civil
servants and blue-uniformed officers of the Iraqi
Police Service. It was easy to wander in.

These days the ministry is a very different place. The
dusty hinterland that leads to it is busy with the new
paramilitary forces that most often have been accused
of human rights abuses – the Rapid Intrusion brigades,
most notoriously the Wolf Brigade of ‘Abu Walid’.
There has been no investigation or official findings
over the allegations.

It was
here – 12 months ago – that there was the first
intimation that somethingwas going seriously wrong. On
the second day of Iraq’s new government, US military
police were forced to raid the Guest House to ‘rescue’
dozens of alleged criminals, scooped up in a sweep of
the city, who were being subjected to beatings and
forced confessions of their crimes.

Back then officials were happy to justify the violence
– and angry at the US intervention. Criminals and
terrorists expected a good beating, one official said,
proud of his 100 per cent confession rate.

Now it is impossible to reach those officials as they
shelter on heavily guarded floors. There are no
American MPs to come to the aid of those locked in the
cells.

A year ago, the worst violence was meted out in the
Guest House. Now officials say the abuse happens on
the seventh floor, where those suspected of terrorist
connections are brought.

One of those held at the ministry for ‘terrorist
interrogation’ is ‘Zaid’. It is not his real name.
Since his release, the 25-year-old Sunni from the
western suburbs of Baghdad lives in fear of being
brought back.

A taxi driver, the college graduate stopped his car in
March to buy food in a market. When a bomb exploded
nearby, he went to look at the damage. Arrested at the
scene by soldiers from the Iraqi National Guard, he
says he was handed over to the Ministry of the
Interior.

At first, said Zaid, he was put in a room, on the
seventh floor, measuring 10ft by 12ft, with 60 others.
He was crammed in so tightly he could not sit. In
some respects Zaid was lucky. Early in his detention,
a Ministry of Justice official appeared and, furious
at the conditions, demanded the men be moved. ‘He
said, “You can’t have this many people in a room this
size,” so they moved us to somewhere with more air and
fed us. He asked too whether there had been any
beatings and some said yes.’

For his part, Zaid says he was hung by his arms, but
not for so long that it caused any permanent damage.
His ordeal was largely to be subjected to threats of
violence as up to eight guards circled him during his
interrogation. But Zaid claims he witnessed what
happened to men brought from another detention
facility, a barracks run by the Wolf Brigade, who were
kept in the same area as Zaid until his parents paid a
hefty bribe for his release.

‘I saw men from Samarra [another insurgent stronghold]
and from Medayeen. Some appeared to have wounds to
their legs,’ he recalled. ‘There were others who could
not use their spoon properly. They had to hold it
between their palms and move their heads to the
spoon.’

His month in the ministry terrified Zaid. If the
police came again for him, he said, he would rather
throw himself off a balcony than go back. Zaid is not
the first detainee to accuse the police of taking
bribes for the release of prisoners. It is a common
charge, as are descriptions of prisoners being brought
from other, less accountable, interrogation facilities
where the worst of the violence is taking place.

What is most important about Zaid’s testimony is that
it makes clear a link exists between the Ministry of
Interior and the torture being conducted out of sight
at other centres. Iraqi and international officials
named several of these centres, including al-Hadoud
prison in the Kharkh district of Baghdad.

A second torture centre is said to be located in the
basement of a clinic in the Shoula district, while the
Wolf Brigade is accused of running its own
interrogation centre – said to be one of the worst –
at its Nissor Square headquarters. Other places where
abusive interrogations have been alleged include
al-Muthana airbase and the old National Security
headquarters.

‘Abu Ali’, a 30-year-old Sunni scooped up in a mosque
raid in central Baghdad, was taken to the latter for a
week in mid-May where he says he was beaten on his
feet, subjected to hanging by his arms and, when he
angered his guards by refusing to confess, threatened
with being sat on ‘the bottle’ – being anally
penetrated.

It is not just in Baghdad. Credible reports exist of
Arab prisoners in Kirkuk being moved to secret
detention facilities in Kurdistan, while other centres
are alleged in Samarra, in the Holy Cities and in
Basra in the south.

‘There are places we can get to and know about,’ said
one Iraqi official. ‘But there are dozens of other
places we know about where there is no access at all.’

‘It is impossible to keep track of detentions, and
what is happening to people when they are taken away,’
complained one foreign official involved in trying to
building Iraq’s respect for human rights.

‘On top of that we have a whole culture that is
permitting torture. The impression is the judiciary
are simply not interested in responding to the issue
of human rights. It is depressing.’

But it is not simply the issue of keeping track of
where detainees are being taken that is a problem.
Accountability has also become more opaque since
the formation of the Shia-dominated government of
Ibrahim Jaffari with ministers and senior officials at
the Ministry of the Interior refusing to meet
concerned
international organisations including Human Rights
Watch.

‘We have been trying to break through to someone
responsible to express our concerns,’ said another
international official.

‘But it is impossible to meet the people we really
need to see. What is so worrying is that allegations
concerning the use of drills and irons during torture
just keep coming back. And we have seen precisely the
same evidence of torture on bodies that have turned up
after they have been arrested. There is a dirty
counter-insurgency war, led on the anti-insurgency
side by groups responsible to different leaders.
People are not appearing in court. Instead, what is
happening to them is totally arbitrary.’

There is a significance to all this that goes beyond
the everyday horror of today’s Iraq. In the absence of
weapons of mass destruction, the human rights abuses
of Saddam Hussein’s regime became more important as a
subsidiary case for war.

It has been a theme that has been constantly
reiterated: it was horrific then, and it is better
now. The second may still just be true. In many
aspects
there may be some improvement, but the trajectory of
Iraq now on human rights is in danger of undermining
that last plank of justification.

True, there is a question of scale of the abuses. What
is also different from Saddam’s era is that Iraq is
now host to multinational troops, to huge UK and US
missions, and is a substantial recipient of foreign
aid, including British and EU funds.

British and US police and military officials act as
advisers to Iraq’s security forces. Foreign troops
support Iraqi policing missions. What is extraordinary
is that despite the increasingly widespread evidence
of torture, governments have remained silent. It is
all the more extraordinary on the British side, as
embassy officials have been briefed by senior Iraqi
officials over the allegations on a number of
occasions and individual cases of abuse have been
raised with British diplomats.

In Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights, close to the
Communications Tower and the location of one of the
secret interrogation centres, they were marking the
international day for the victims of torture. As
officials ga
thered for chocolate cake and cola under
posters that read ‘Non to torture’, some senior
officials are in no doubt that torture in their
country is again getting worse.

The deputy minister, Aida Ussayran, is a life-long
human rights activist who returned from exile in
Britain to take up this post. She concedes that
abuses by Iraq’s security forces have been getting
worse even as her ministry has been trying to
re-educate the Iraqi police and army to respect
detainee rights.

‘As you know, for a long time Iraq was a mass grave
for human rights,’ she says.’The challenge is that
many people who committed these abuses are still there
and there is a culture of abuse in the security forces
and police – even the army – that needs to be
addressed. I do not have a magic solution, but what I
can do is to remind people that this kind of behaviour
is what creates terrorists.’

There is a sense of frustration too in the Ministry of
Human Rights, for even as the security forces rapidly
increase in size, the ministry tasked with checking
abuses has only 24 monitors to pursue cases, at a time
when officials believe it needs hundreds to keep
Iraq’s police and army effectively in check.

If Ussayran is robust about her country’s problems
with human rights abuses, others are convinced that,
far from being the acts of rogue units, the abuse is
being committed at the behest of the ministry itself –
or at least senior officials within it.

‘There are people in the ministry who want to use
these means,’ said one. ‘It is in their ideology. It
is their strategy. They do not understand anything
else. They believe that human rights and the
Convention against Torture are stupid.’

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

2) Mark LeVine, write on again:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/12726.html

Mark A. LeVine
The Fallacy of the Impossibility of Withdrawal

Mr. LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming books: Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil; and Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. He is also a contributor, with Viggo Mortensen and Pilar Perez, to Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation. Click here to access his homepage.

As calls to set a timetable for withdrawing American troops grow with each new casualty, President Bush and other critics of such a move argue vigorously that announcing such a deadline would grant the insurgents a major political and strategic victory: the former by vindicating the violent, even terroristic methodology of the insurgency itself, the latter by allowing rebels to bide their time and overwhelm government troops once American forces have departed.

However convincing at face value, these arguments beg the question: Are the only options in Iraq maintaining an unpopular and costly occupation or handing the country over to “former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, criminal elements and foreign terrorists” (as President Bush describes them)?

The answer is manifestly no, and the fact so few people within the corridors of power can imagine an alternative policy reveals a powerful yet fallacious line of reasoning at the heart of arguments to “stay the course” in Iraq: that a US troop withdrawal would automatically leave a security vacuum in its place.

But such an outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion; the problem is that few Americans, especially politicians, are willing to consider the alternative: apologize to the Iraqi people for an invasion and occupation that (whatever our intentions) has gone terribly wrong; ask the UN to take over the management of the country’s security, lead negotiations to end the insurgency, and oversee redevelopment aid; and leave as soon as a sufficient number of replacement forces are in place.

There are four reasons why such a development, however distasteful to the Bush Administration and many Americans, is the best hope for achieving the peace and democracy most everyone wants to bring to Iraq.

First, it is increasingly clear that the insurgency is unwinnable as long as the US remains in Iraq. Even Defense Secretary Rumsfeld now admits that it could take a dozen years to defeat it. Given such a forecast, he explains that “Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We’re going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency.”

Is this our gift to the Iraqi people, what 1,700 American soldiers have died for–a cancerous insurgency that will devour the energy, revenue and personnel of the Iraqi government for the foreseeable future? In most any other country, such an admission by one of the war’s chief architects would lead to his resignation, or even indictment for what former senior CPA official Larry Diamond describes (in his new book Squandered Victory) as the “criminal negligence” of the US-led occupation.

The fact that US diplomats have had secret talks with insurgents confirms that the Bush Administration is worried that it cannot defeat the insurgency and is exploring the option of a “peace with honor” to extricate America from what even the President (jokingly, no doubt) calls the Iraqi “quagmire.” Must we repeat rather than learn from the disastrous history of our withdrawal from Vietnam a generation ago?

Indeed, if the US is talking to insurgents others can too–particularly others who haven’t been involved in the occupation of Iraq and all the disastrous consequences it has led to in so many areas of life in the country. While some elements of the insurgency (particularly the criminals, Baathists and foreign jihadis cited by the President) want to transform Iraq into some sort of neo-Taliban state, the clear majority of insurgent are ordinary Iraqis who see themselves as patriots defending their country and will lay down their arms once Coalition forces have left the country, as long as their leaders are involved in negotiating the temporary presence of peacekeeping forces necessary to maintain order.

Second, while Republicans have rightly criticized systematic corruption at the United Nations, the Oil for Food scandal pales in comparison with the level of corruption in post-invasion Iraq. Whether it’s $9 billion in cash literally gone missing from CPA offices, repeated no-bid contracts to Halliburton and even the managers of the Abu Ghraib prison, or the smaller scale but ubiquitous corruption infecting every sector of the Iraqi economy under our tutelage, the US has proven itself incapable of managing the reconstruction and development of the country or supporting an environment in which Iraqis can do it themselves.

A new international regime, which separates the management of the country’s security from its reconstruction and the immense profits (and potential for malfeasance) tied to both is the sine qua non for establishing a democratic future for the country. The UN system can’t do it alone, but with a sufficient level of supervision and expertise by donor countries and Iraqi professionals, it can help Iraqis rebuild the country with their own skill, labor and resources. In such a scenario it will be much easier to persuade countries such as France, Germany, and others who largely stayed clear of involvement in the invasion and occupation, to contribute the necessary funds and personnel to enable Iraq’s stability and reconstruction. More important, it will give Iraqis a working stake in the peaceful development of their country.

Third, most Iraqis and other critics of the occupation believe the US has no intention of withdrawing its troops from Iraq or relinquishing its de facto control of the country’s al
l-important petroleum resources. President Bush declared in his speech tonight that “as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” but such blithe delcarations are belied by the massive construction going on at US bases across the country and remarks by senior US officials, who have admitted that we intend (with Iraq’s “permission,” of course) to station tens of thousands of troops in more or less permanent bases across the country for the foreseeable future.

All that’s needed is a Status of Forces Agreement signed by an Iraqi government that could not survive without a continued US presence–or in lieu of that, a security situation which makes asking us to leave practically impossible in the foreseeable future–to realize the grandest aspirations of neocons and security hawks alike: a large and long-term US presence in the heart of world’s major oil producing region as we enter the Age of Peak Oil.

Such a situation might seem ideal in the context of a new cold war with an energy-hungry China, but it would likely fuel a much hotter war against a mushrooming pan-Islamic insurgency across the Muslim world. The United States would be much more secure if it took the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in Iraq and devoted them to developing sustainable alternative energy technologies and transforming the global economic system so that our standard of living no longer depends on billions of people living on $2 a day or less, and entire world regions such as Africa and the Middle East structurally marginalized from the formal flows of money and goods in the globalized economy.

Finally, an insurmountable collection of evidence is emerging that American forces have systematically committed war crimes in Iraq and continue to violate international law in their actions across the country. The longer the United States remains, the greater the chances that senior officials will face criminal charges, or at least international censure, for the conduct of the invasion and occupation of the country.

While it is perhaps unlikely that senior officials will ever stand trial for their actions in an international venue, the loss of American prestige and respect across the world that our actions have brought on is incalculable. Moreover, when tied–quite naturally–by people across the global south to our support for the policies associated with the dominant neoliberal model of globalization, the Iraqi occupation and the increasingly open imperial endeavor it represents has contributed to the victories of populist anti-American candidates across Latin America, and now Iran.

Even those who support a timetable for withdrawing American troops might respond negatively to the suggestion that America apologize for its invasion and occupation of Iraq. Certainly the President’s speech before the troops offered no hint of remorse for the pain and suffering the invasion brought to Iraq.

Such knee-jerk patriotism disappears, however, when you actually visit Iraq as I did (that is, without a massive security detail and living with Iraqis) and see the disaster that the occupation has produced first hand. Observed close up, without the filter of an obsequious news media, the overwhelmingly negative consequences of the occupation become impossible to ignore: the 100,000 dead (the majority of them civilians); wide scale violations of human, political and civil rights; the destruction of the country’s health, education and other crucial social systems; the massive unemployment; a violent and destabilizing insurgency that is likely to last a generation or more; the rending of a delicate social fabric that managed to survive a bloody British occupation, several wars, and the even bloodier rule of Saddam Hussein (which we should never forget was made possible in good measure by decades of support from administrations as far back as President Kennedy).

In Alcoholics Anonymous apologizing and making amends for the hurt one has done to others are among the most important steps in the long path towards sobriety. Clearly President Bush, who believes Iraqis should “put the past behind them,” isn’t about to engage in soul searching about the mission and consequences of our Iraq adventure. But if Americans can admit to–and in doing so, comprehend–the damage our government has wrought in Iraq in our name and with our consent, we will take an important first step in ending our addiction to an unsustainable corporate-led, consumer-driven culture, and the wars and systematic violence, oppression and exploitation it requires world-wide. In doing so we will begin the long but necessary task of building a sustainable and peaceful future, for Iraq, for ourselves, and for the world at large.

3) Military History Analysis of Iraq:

http://hnn.us/articles/12790.html

So We Can’t Find Middle Echelon Officers to Staff the Iraqi Army? That’s Bad

By William Marina

Mr. Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA.

No sooner had President George W. Bush finished his prime time speech last week, than the television talking heads and the press, that Big Media , which the government relies upon to help define their Imperial Reality for us, were hard at it, interpreting every possible nuance or inflection of his address.

Did he say anything new? Hardly. But what he omitted spoke volumes!

The real test of the effectiveness, of his speech, however, will come, not from the Media, or those millions of passive Americans and most of the Congress that have supported his war, but among the youth ranging from some of the “red” states of the South and the Mid-west, to the inner cities ghettoes and barrios. Will these young people, inspired by the President’s rhetoric, buy into the notion that Iraq has been worth the cost? Bottom line: will they enlist in Mr. Bush’s War?

I rather think not!

They are more likely to heed the warnings of some of our more cautious and realistic military men that the insurgency will last years, a position even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged with the statement that it might take a dozen years.

Bush is hoping that the Iraqi army will begin to shoulder the overwhelming burden of the war, and mentioned the figure of 160,000, as if it was the sheer number that mattered, rather than morale.

The most perceptive observation made on the “Charlie Rose” show discussing the speech, was that the U.S. was having trouble finding middle echelon officers to staff the Iraqi army, and that we intended to put in a number of American officers into those positions.

Now, it is certainly true about the importance of the middle echelon officers in any war, especially an insurgency, where the nature of the warfare demands instant decisions, without the time for debate or consult with those of a higher rank, up the chain of command.

It has been clear for months now, that this crucial sector of Saddam’s old army did not, nor has not yet, come over to the side of the new government sponsored by the Americans.

I would not want to be in the shoes of, say, an American captain, thrust into the midst of an Iraqi unit. We know the insurgents have infiltrated men into these units. How difficult would it be for one of these men to frag the American officer, or simply shoot him in the back?

Fragging was, of course, a problem in Vietnam, and there has already been at least one case in Iraq. A newspaperman friend of mine from the Vietnam era told me there were rumors that Max Cleland, the triple amputee war hero, and later Senator from Georgia, attacked by Republicans for his lack of enthusiasm for Iraq, had actually been fragged. If this is true, it makes the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire look almost tame in comparison.

Certainly, the morale and training of the middle echelon officers is critica
l. Some military historians have suggested that in WWII, the creative, and gung-ho 11,000 or so young recruits in that position were a great weapon in achieving victory.

There are already indications that some of our best young officers, often West Point graduates, in which the country has a considerable investment, are opting out of the Army for commensurate managerial jobs. Perhaps the task of integrating with the Iraqi army will fall to the mercenaries hired by companies such as Halliburton

In Vietnam, quite apart from the fragging, the increasing disillusionment of the middle echelon officers was an early sign the war was not going well. Anyone who has read many of the letters of these middle echelon British officers in the American Revolution, often young Scots, who wrote back to their families about going out into the wilderness, perhaps never to return, will recognize this pattern. The British referred to the area around Charlotte, North Carolina, as the “hornet’s nest,” and it was the defeats around that area which led to the retreat toward Yorktown.

Clearly, a segment of the American military shares the administration’s hope that it will be possible build a U.S. supported regime, perhaps on the model of what was done in the Philippines over a century ago; not that that nation has been a great example economic development of late.

Americans seem amazed by the degree of solidarity among the insurgents, that some are willing to not only die for the cause, but to do so as a suicide bomber. Part of the Media approach has been to glorify the whole idea of “Empire.” A new television show of that title aired June 29th, in which we are suppose to identify with Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavian, soon to be Caesar Augustus.

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, despising Empire as they did, would not have admired that whole theme. Their heroes were Brutus, Cassius, Cicero and Cato. It is well to remember that a wounded Cato ripped off his bandages so that he might die, so much did he hate the notions of Despotism and Empire. Suicide was preferable to life in the Empire.

As in the Philippines, we have found no shortage of bureaucrat Compradors, willing to be our “willing executioners” of their own people, in running “our” Iraqi government. Whether we can find American recruits as well as Iraqi officers to continue the war in the face of a growing public disenchantment, is the major question facing the Bush administration in the months ahead.

4) Here’s a great subversive idea — “newsbreakers,” who crash local broadcasts in order to demonstrate the utter inanity of local news in the US. It’s subversive, if a bit abstract for most folks:

www.newsbreakers.org

www.truthtalkziraq.blogspot.com
www.truthtalkz.blogspot.com

1) Iraq in pictures. Check out “The Unseen Gulf War
by Peter Turnley,” especially useful pedagogically for
those who get off on invading countries:

http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/photography/iraq/LINKS_home.htm

2) Another Iraqi website:

http://www.iraqirabita.org/english/index.php

3) Nice op-ed cartoon, by Mike Luckovitch, who used to
provide content to the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file;=article&sid;=3603&mode;=threadℴ=0&thold;=0

3) Good thing they got rid of Saddam. Now things are
really going to get dirty:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1520186,00.html

UK aid funds Iraqi torture units

Peter Beaumont in Baghdad and Martin Bright
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer

British and American aid intended for Iraq’s
hard-pressed police service is being diverted to
paramilitary commando units accused of widespread
human rights abuses, including torture and
extra-judicial killings, The Observer can reveal.
Iraqi Police Service officers said that ammunition,
weapons and vehicles earmarked for the IPS are being
taken by shock troops at the forefront of Iraq’s new
dirty counter-insurgency war.

The allegations follow a wide-ranging investigation by
this paper into serious human rights abuses being
conducted by anti-insurgency forces in Iraq. The
Observer has seen photographic evidence of post-mortem
and hospital examinations of alleged terror suspects
from Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle which demonstrate
serious abuse of suspects including burnings,
strangulation, the breaking of limbs and – in one case
– the apparent use of an electric drill to perform a
knee-capping.

The investigation revealed:

· A ‘ghost’ network of secret detention centres across
the country, inaccessible to human rights
organisations, where torture is taking place.

· Compelling evidence of widespread use of violent
interrogation methods including hanging by the arms,
burnings, beatings, the use of electric shocks and
sexual abuse.

· Claims that serious abuse has taken place within the
walls of the Iraqi government’s own Ministry of the
Interior.

· Apparent co-operation between unofficial and
official detention facilities, and evidence of
extra-judicial executions by the police.

The issue of increasing human rights abuses has been
raised with the new Iraqi government by the Foreign
Office, the US State Department and the United
Nations. British Embassy officials in Baghdad have
been briefed on the crisis by concerned senior Iraqi
officials on several occasions.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed that it has spent
£27 million in gift aid on the Iraqi security
services, which provided guns, ammunition, and public
order equipment such as protective vests and armoured
Land Rovers. An MoD source said the majority of this
material went to the police. A further £20m went to
the police from the government’s Global Conflict
Prevention Pool, jointly funded by the MoD, the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for
International Development.

Despite that, the British government has, until now,
remained silent in public on the issue of the
country’s widening human rights crisis.

Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Michael Moore
called on ministers to make an immediate statement in
the House of Commons: ‘These are serious reports that
go to the heart of the question of the coalition’s
oversight of the security situation in Iraq. The
Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence must
urgently inform Parliament about the scope of their
investigation into these allegations,’ he said.

The Foreign Office said last night that it was taking
the reports of abuse ‘very seriously’. It issued
detailed responses to the claims: ‘We are aware and
deeply concerned by reports of detainee abuse by Iraqi
police officers and of men in police uniforms
committing serious crimes, whether these men are
genuine policemen or not. Any abuse of detainees is
unacceptable.’

An MoD spokesman told The Observer: ‘We are aware of
the allegations. We have raised this with the Iraqi
government at the highest levels in Baghdad and
Basra.’

Privately, there is a growing belief that complaints
are being stonewalled.

The investigation raises questions about the British
government’s commitment to denying aid to governments
that tolerate or encourage human rights abuses.

International and Iraqi officials claim the use of
torture has become more extensive since the country’s
first democratically-elected government was sworn in.

Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch,said: ‘There has
been the attempt to suggest that because Saddam’s
regime is over now everything is rosy in Iraq. What is
happening in official places in Iraq is simply
horrific and must be stopped.’

The Foreign Office stressed: ‘Any abuse of detainees
is unacceptable. As soon as we become aware of any
allegations of abuse we raise them at the highest
levels in Basra and Baghdad.

‘We would expect them to publish the findings of any
investigations, prosecute those found to have carried
out any abuse, punish those found guilty regardless of
rank or background, and take all steps to prevent any
recurrence.’

5) G-8 Petition:

Dear friends and colleagues,

Please forward this letter widely and return all
sign-ons (organizational
sign-ons with names of directors or senior staff
preferred, though
individuals are welcome to sign on as well) to
as soon as
possible. We will be delivering this with your names
at a press conference
at the G8 Summit next week in Scotland.

Thanks for your prompt response to this message and
for your support!

Daphne Wysham
Director, Sustainable Energy & Economy Network
Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Civil Society Statement on Debt and Climate Change

We the undersigned call on the Group of 8 (G8) leaders
to recognize and
act upon the twin, interlinked crises of debt and
global warming. Current
G8 energy investments are fundamentally at odds with
sound development
practice. Ongoing public financing of the fossil fuel
industry is
increasing debt, poverty, and climate change. Urgent
action is now
required to substantially reduce emissions, reduce
fossil fuel dependence,
and protect people around the world, especially the
vulnerable, the poor
and disappearing nations.

Such urgent action requires that G8 nations make
rapid, specific,
substantial and sustained cuts in their domestic
emissions of greenhouse
gases. It also requires that G8 leaders cut the
significant emissions
that are resulting from their taxpayer-financed
multilateral and bilateral
lending agencies.

Export credit agencies and international financial
institutions are
leading financiers of oil, gas and coal projects
around the world. The
World Bank Group alone has financed over $25 billion
in oil, gas and coal
contracts (including fossil fuel-fired power plants)
since the UN Climate
Convention was signed by a majority of the world’s
countries in 1992. The

current and future emissions from all World Bank
fossil fuel projects
financed since 1992 is equivalent to almost two years’
worth of global
greenhouse gas emissions.

While the World Bank is supposed to serve the world’s
poor, it is the poor
who are likely to suffer first and foremost from
climate change, as they
will not be able to take preventive measures to
protect themselves. In
addition, over 80% of all oil projects financed by the
World Bank are
designed to produce petroleum for export to the
wealthy countries of the
north. Along with most of the gas and coal projects
financed by the World
Bank, they do little or nothing to meet the growing
energy needs of the
poorest. Public financing, intended for poverty
alleviation and
sustainable development, instead ends up being simply
another public
subsidy to wealthy governments, consumers and
corporations.

Other multilateral development banks and publicly
financed export credit
agencies (ECAs) follow a similar pattern of
investment. U.S. export
credit and investment insurance agencies alone have
invested over $32
billion in financing and insurance for oil and gas
fields, pipelines and
coal-fired power plants since 1992 without assessing
their contribution to
global warming nor their impact on the U.S. or global
environment.
Estimates suggest these U.S. taxpayer-backed ECA
investments alone are
releasing and will release over one year’s worth of
global greenhouse gas
emissions. Other ECAs have supported fossil fuel-based
energy projects
which produce or will produce as much as 20 times the
amount of greenhouse
gases as their own governments have committed to
reduce under the Kyoto
Protocol.

Meanwhile, the World Bank and the Global Environmental
Facility, created
at the 1992 Earth Summit to act on climate change,
combined have invested over 17 times more in fossil
fuels and fossil
fuel-driven power plants as they have in renewable
forms of energy and
energy efficiency projects. Carbon trading engineered
by the World Bank
Group in advance of the Clean Development Mechanism is
resulting in few,
if any, truly renewable energy projects. Instead,
monoculture tree
plantations, gas flare reduction and methane capture
from waste dumps are
gaining the lions’ share of financing—-while carbon
credits as currently
enacted enable dirty industry to continue with
business as usual in the
North.

Gas flaring and venting by petroleum corporations in
Nigeria remains
sub-Saharan Africa’s largest source of greenhouse
gases, yet, the World
Bank is preparing to sell carbon credits for
Chevron/Shell’s West- African
Gas pipeline, despite the fact that overall greenhouse
gas emissions due
to flaring will not be reduced by this project. Such
initiatives are
misleading and provide no net progress toward climate
stability and a net
loss for local as well as global communities.

Thus, the public institutions entrusted with averting
a climate
catastrophe are dangerously exacerbating the problem.
Such institutional
corruption results in paltry funding for renewable
energy, a growing
energy deficit among the poorest in developing
countries, and increased
developing country debt.

The World Bank’s own Extractive Industries Review, a
three-year study
commissioned by the World Bank’s president with
involvement of government,
industry and civil society, came to the conclusion
that, if the World Bank
is serious about poverty alleviation and climate
change, it should get out
of coal immediately, get out of oil by 2008, and
rapidly scale up its
investments in renewable energy at the rate of 20% a
year. Yet senior
World Bank officials openly reject the report’s
recommendations.

Thus, we call on the G8 nations to:
1) Halt the Northern financing of Southern coal-fired
power
projects immediately;
2) End aid financing for oil. OECD countries should
end Northern
governmental subsidies for new oil projects in the
South. Such projects
have not historically provided energy for the poor,
and are proven to be
associated with a rise in poverty, public health
problems, local
environmental destruction, conflict, corruption and
debt, and to increase
the risk to the poorest from climate change. Thus,
they cannot be
considered as “aid” for the poor;
3) Set up an international sustainable renewable
energy fund,
independent of the development banks and export credit
agencies, with
funding provided by the G8, that would set as a target
the delivery of
small-scale, community-based, sustainable, equitable
and appropriate
energy services and technologies, excluding large dams
and nuclear power,
to the more than 2 billion poorest living in
developing countries,
low-income areas of developed countries, and countries
with economies in
transition within the next 20 years;
4) Work with developing countries, especially small
island states and
Arctic regional local authorities, to build
technological and
infrastructure capacity to assist them in developing
solutions to mitigate
and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change;
5) Immediately cancel 100% of the remaining
multilateral and
bilateral debt without requiring that debtor countries
join the HIPC
(Heavily Indebted Poor Country) initiative as a
precondition for debt
cancellation, nor accept any additional harmful
economic conditions.
6) Concentrate development aid to oil-exporting
countries on
helping them diversify their economies in order to
minimize debt burdens
from excessive oil-export dependence and maximize
income generation for
the population;
7) Commit by the next G8 Summit in 2006 to a global
harmonization of energy and development strategies in
light of global warming, debt, poverty, and the finite
quantity of fossil fuels remaining in the ground and
the limited ability of our atmosphere to safely absorb
additional greenhouse gas emissions. These issues
should henceforth be viewed as inextricably woven
together.

Signed,

www.truthtalkziraq.blogspot.com
www.truthtalkz.blogspot.com

1) Riverbend / Baghdad Burning dissects Bush’s speech from an Iraqi perspective:

http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

“Not only can they not find WMD in Iraq,” I commented
to E. as we listened to the Bush speech, “But they
have disappeared from his speeches too!” I was
listening to the voiceover on Arabiya, translating his
speech to Arabic. He was recycling bits and pieces of
various speeches he used over two years.

E., a younger cousin, and I were sitting around in the
living room, sprawled on the relatively cool tiled
floor. The electricity had been out for 3 hours and we
couldn’t turn on the air conditioner with the
generator electricity we were getting. E. and I had
made a bet earlier about what the theme of tonight’s
speech would be. E. guessed Bush would dig up the
tired, old WMD theme from somewhere under the debris
of idiocy and lies coming out of the White House. I
told him he’d dredge up 9/11 yet again… tens of
thousands of lives later, we would have to bear the
burden of 9/11… again.

I won the bet. The theme was, naturally, terrorism-
the only mention of ‘weapon’ or ‘weapons’ was in
reference to Libya. He actually used the word
‘terrorist’ in the speech 23 times.

He was trying, throughout the speech, to paint a rosy
picture of the situation. According to him, Iraq was
flourishing under the occupation. In Bush’s Iraq,
there is reconstruction, there is freedom (in spite of
an occupation) and there is democracy.

“He’s describing a different country…” I commented to
E. and the cousin.

“Yes,” E. replied. “He’s talking about the *other*
Iraq… the one with the WMD.”

“So what’s the occasion? Why’s the idiot giving a
speech anyway?” The cousin asked, staring at the
ceiling fan clicking away above. I reminded him it was
the year anniversary marking the mythical handover of
power to Allawi’s Vichy government.

“Oh- Allawi… Is he still alive?” Came the indolent
reply from the cousin. “I’ve lost track… was he before
Al Yawir or after Al Yawir? Was he Prime Minister or
did they make him president at some point?”

9/11 and the dubious connection with Iraq came up
within less than a minute of the beginning of the
speech. The cousin wondered whether anyone in America
still believed Iraq had anything to do with September
11.

Bush said:
“The troops here and across the world are fighting a
global war on terror. The war reached our shores on
September 11, 2001.”

Do people really still believe this? In spite of that
fact that no WMD were found in Iraq, in spite of the
fact that prior to the war, no American was ever
killed in Iraq and now almost 2000 are dead on Iraqi
soil? It’s difficult to comprehend that rational
people, after all of this, still actually accept the
claims of a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Or that they
could actually believe Iraq is less of a threat today
than it was in 2003.

We did not have Al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the war. We
didn’t know that sort of extremism. We didn’t have
beheadings or the abduction of foreigners or religious
intolerance. We actually pitied America and Americans
when the Twin Towers went down and when news began
leaking out about it being Muslim fundamentalists-
possibly Arabs- we were outraged.

Now 9/11 is getting old. Now, 100,000+ Iraqi lives and
1700+ American lives later, it’s becoming difficult to
summon up the same sort of sympathy as before. How
does the death of 3,000 Americans and the fall of two
towers somehow justify the horrors in Iraq when not
one of the people involved with the attack was Iraqi?

Bush said:
“Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. … The
commander in charge of coalition operations in Iraq,
who is also senior commander at this base, General
John Vines, put it well the other day. He said, “We
either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad,
or we deal with it when it comes to us.”

He speaks of ‘abroad’ as if it is a vague desert-land
filled with heavily-bearded men and possibly camels.
‘Abroad’ in his speech seems to indicate a land of
inferior people- less deserving of peace, prosperity
and even life.

Don’t Americans know that this vast wasteland of
terror and terrorists otherwise known as ‘Abroad’ was
home to the first civilizations and is home now to
some of the most sophisticated, educated people in the
region?

Don’t Americans realize that ‘abroad’ is a country
full of people- men, women and children who are dying
hourly? ‘Abroad’ is home for millions of us. It’s the
place we were raised and the place we hope to raise
our children- your field of war and terror.

The war was brought to us here, and now we have to
watch the country disintegrate before our very eyes.
We watch as towns are bombed and gunned down and
evacuated of their people. We watch as friends and
loved ones are detained, or killed or pressured out of
the country with fear and intimidation.

Bush said:
“We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who
exploded car bombs along a busy shopping street in
Baghdad, including one outside a mosque. We see the
nature of the enemy in terrorists who sent a suicide
bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul…”

Yes. And Bush is extremely concerned with the mosques.
He might ask the occupation forces in Iraq to quit
attacking mosques and detaining the worshipers inside-
to stop raiding them and bombing them and using them
as shelters for American snipers in places like
Falluja and Samarra. And the terrorists who sent a
suicide bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul? Maybe
they got their cue from the American troops who
attacked the only functioning hospital in Falluja.

“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their
country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of
tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at
war is even harder.”

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned
buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of
tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such
things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics.
Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we
didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we
do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time.
We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity
daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that
much.

“They are doing that by building the institutions of a
free society, a society based on freedom of speech,
freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and equal
justice under law.”

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of
our homes, with roads cut off indefinitely and
complete areas made inaccessible. We are so free to
assemble that people now fear having gatherings
because a large number of friends or family members
may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by
American or Iraqi forces.

As to Iraqi forces…There was too much to quote on the
new Iraqi forces. He failed to mention that many of
their members were formerly part of militias, and that
many of them contributed to the looting and burning
that swept over Iraq after the war and continued for
weeks.

“The new Iraqi security forces are proving thei
r
courage every day.”

Indeed they are. The forte of the new Iraqi National
Guard? Raids and mass detentions. They have been
learning well from the coalition. They sweep into
areas, kick down doors, steal money, valuables, harass
the females in the household and detain the men. The
Iraqi security forces are so effective that a few
weeks ago, they managed to kill a high-ranking police
major in Falluja when he ran a red light, shooting him
in the head as his car drove away.

He kept babbling about a “free Iraq” but he mentioned
nothing about when the American forces might actually
depart and the occupation would end, leaving a “free
Iraq”.

Why aren’t the Americans setting a timetable for
withdrawal? Iraqis are constantly wondering why
nothing is being done to accelerate the end of the
occupation.

Do the Americans continue to believe such speeches? I
couldn’t help but wonder.

“They’ll believe anything.” E. sighed. “No matter what
sort of absurdity they are fed, they’ll believe it.
Think up the most outrageous lie… They have people
who’ll believe it.”

The cousin sat up at this, his interest piqued. “The
most outrageous lie? How about that Iraq was amassing
aliens from Mareekh [Mars] and training them in the
battle art of kung-fu to attack America in 2010!”

“They’d believe it.” E. nodded in the affirmative. “Or
that Iraq was developing a mutant breed of rabid,
man-eating bunnies to unleash upon the Western world.
They’d believe that too.”

2) This is a nicely written rant responding to Bush’s speech the other day, by a DC resident:

http://www.mykeru.com/weekly/2005_0626_0702.html#062805

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Respectable Murder and Pure Wind

Hoo boy, tonight George W. Bush delivered a major
policy speech on the “War on Terror” at Fort Bragg.

And, really, I don’t give a shit.

Because now every time I hear Bush or one of his
apologists blathering away, I mentally superimpose a
caption in the Fox News graphical style under their
image containing one of George Orwell’s more famous
observations:

Political language… is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Sure, this could be the one time Bush says something
interesting, insightful, important and even, well,
let’s go for the big one here, truthful. In fact, by
not really caring anymore what he says I might be
missing out on the moment when George W. Bush blinks
into the Teleprompter, hesitates and is suddenly awash
in a blinding moment of self-revelation:

“Um…err”, he would say at this frat boy Siddartha
moment, “Uh, I just realized that I’m kind of an
asshole…and I haven’t really make anything of myself
that wasn’t handed to me…and I guess I got carried
away trying to actually be somebody and…well, fuck,
I sure did kill a whole lot of people who didn’t
really need killing”….

3) Tom Engelhardt: The Immoral Relativism of the Bush Administration:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/12823.html

Tom Engelhardt: The Immoral Relativism of the Bush Administration

Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (6-28-05):

[ Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.]

“At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn’t read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn’t want to be ‘distracted’ by ‘history’ from his new job as head of the world’s leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four African nations.

“‘There’s a lot I could say about what you’re asking about, if I were willing to get distracted from the main subject,’ Wolfowitz said. ‘But I really think there’s a price paid with the people I’ve just spent time with, people who are struggling with very real problems, to keep going back in history.'” (Jon Sawyer, Wolfowitz won’t talk about war planning, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

For at least 30 years now, the right has fought against, the Republican Party has run against, and more recently, the Bush administration has claimed victory over the “moral relativism” of liberals, the permissive parenting of the let-them-do-anything-they-please era, and the self-indulgent, self-absorbed, make-your-own-world attitude of the Sixties. Since September 11th, we have been told again and again, we are in a different world… finally. In this new world, things are black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You are for or you are against. The murky relativism of the recent past, of an America in a mood of defeat, is long gone. In the White House, we have a stand-up guy so unlike the last president, that draft dodger who was ready to parse the meaning of “is” and twist the world to his unnatural desires…

4) There’s a great movie script in here somewhere, in addition to the gross violation of Italian sovereignty. Also, nice to know they were using regular cell phones and apparently real identities. That means they can be prosecuted for kidnapping like normal people:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1519576,00.html

CIA methods exposed by kidnap inquiry

Agents’ use of commercial mobiles gives Italian police detailed picture of how Muslim cleric was abducted

John Hooper in Rome
Saturday July 2, 2005
The Guardian

“I was walking down Via Guerzoni with my little girl and I saw a man with a long beard and a djellaba being stopped by two westerners with a mobile telephone. They were asking him, in Italian, for his documents, the way the police do,” the witness said.
“At the junction with Via Croce Viola there was a pale-coloured van on the pavement,” she continued. “Then, all I heard was a loud noise like a thud. The van suddenly shot backwards and then set off again, away from the mosque, passing me at high speed. And the three people I’d seen, they weren’t there any longer.”

One of them was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, otherwise known as Abu Omar, a radical Muslim cleric living in Milan and under investigation by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism.

His disappearance, in February 2003, caused an inquiry that attracted worldwide attention last month when a Milan judge ordered the arrest of 13 American secret service agents accused of the cleric’s abduction.

Details from the inquiry have provided a unique glimpse of the way in which the CIA seizes its foes abroad. The prosecutors in charge of the inquiry claim that Abu Omar was the target of what the US terms an “extraordinary rendition”, the seizure of a suspect by agents for dispatch to a third country, often one in which torture is common.

Washington says it obtains guarantees that suspects grabbed in this way will not be tortured. But, in a call to his wife last year after he was released and before he disappeared again, Abu Omar said he had almost died under torture in an Egyptian jail. His current whereabouts is unknown, though associates say he was rearrested last year.

By ploughing through hundreds of thousands of mobile phone records, tracing hotel registrations and bugging phone conversations, the Italian police have built up a picture of the CIA’s operation that offers several surprises.

According to the police version of events, the CIA’s special removal unit (SRU) can whistle up private jets to fly its captives unseen across international frontiers.

A Learjet allegedly took Abu Omar from the joint US base at Aviano in Italy to another US base at Rams
tein, Germany, then a chartered Gulfstream V whisked him to Cairo. Yet barely a dollar was spent on making the team’s communications secure.

The secret agents used ordinary mobile phones. Italian investigators put names to the abductors by matching their calls to the phone contracts they had signed. And they could be sure of the team’s movements because they could see when the calls had been made and from which mobile phone.

In at least one case, calls were traced to a phone that was apparently returned to a US diplomatic pool. After a silence it was reactivated by an American citizen using the antenna 100 metres from the US embassy in Rome.

Investigators suspected Abu Omar was taken to Aviano, on discovering three calls made after the abduction by the apparent leader of the SRU to the mobile of the base’s then security chief.

A second surprise is the numbers involved. The Italian investigators say they have identified 23 members of the operation, and have been able to put names to 20 of them. At least six were women and – a third surprise – there seem to have been intimate links between male and female colleagues.

SRU members made several, apparently recreational, trips within Italy as they waited to seize Abu Omar and, on at least two occasions, couples booked into double rooms.

Most of the names on their passports were false. But two are not, and one belongs to the man the Italian prosecutors claim was the coordinator of the operation.

The suspected operational leader of the SRU remains unidentified.

The inquiry showed that the biggest number of calls converged on the phone of someone identified in court papers merely as X.

On the day of the abduction, as the coordinator monitored events from his office at the consulate, X deployed his team.

Italian investigators concluded that the lookout was one of the women, a 33-year-old; and that a six-strong team actually carried out the abduction and delivered Abu Omar to the entrance to the A4 motorway where a second team of six was waiting to speed him to Aviano.

The last trace of X is a call the same day to Virginia, the state in which the CIA has its headquarters.

But the coordinator’s Italian mobile sprang to life again on March 3 2003. And the company’s records show that by then he, like Abu Omar, was in Egypt.

Yesterday, Mel Sembler, the US ambassador to Rome, who had been out of Italy, returned after being summoned to explain to the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, an operation about which the Italian government insists it was never informed.

Mr Berlusconi demanded that the US “fully respect Italian sovereignty”.

The US embassy declined to comment on the kidnapping allegations, though it did say yesterday that relations would continue to be underpinned by “mutual respect”.

5) Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s more to this story than we know?:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1519539,00.html

Bush administration to keep control of internet’s central computers

Gary Younge in New York and agencies
Saturday July 2, 2005
The Guardian

The Bush administration has decided to retain control over the principal computers which control internet traffic in a move likely to prompt global opposition, it was claimed yesterday.
The US had pledged to turn control of the 13 computers known as root servers – which inform web browsers and email programs how to direct internet traffic – over to a private, international body.

But on Thursday the US reversed its position, announcing that it will maintain control of the computers because of growing security threats and the increased reliance on the internet for global communications. A Japanese government official yesterday criticised the move, claiming it will lend momentum to the debate about who controls the information flow online.

“When the internet is being increasingly utilised for private use, by business and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it’s befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that … It’s likely to fuel that debate,” said Masahiko Fujimoto, of the ministry of internal affairs and communications’ data communications division.
The computers serve as master directories that contain government-approved lists of the roughly 260 suffices used, such as .com or .co.uk. Anyone who uses the web interacts with them every day. But a policy decision by the US could, at a stroke, make all sites ending in a certain suffix unreachable.

Despite many doomsday scenarios, the most recent US decision will have little if any immediate effect on internet users, and given the internet’s anarchic nature it may simply represent a desire to assert state control even when it is not possible to do so.

Claudia Bernett, 32, a digital design analyst in New York, said: “Scary as it seems, because of the nature of the internet, I think they’ll be hardpressed to create a coherent system that is capable of the kind of monitoring they hope for … Eventually, the people participating in the system will find the technological means to evade the watchful eye.”

Experts say that in the worst-case scenario, countries that refused to accept US control of the main computers could establish their own separate domain name system, with addresses in some places that others would not be able to reach, making the world wide web give way to discrete, regional web domains.

Mr Fujimoto said that is also unlikely because of its complexity, but the US decision will raise serious concerns that will not be assuaged easily. The announcement comes just weeks before a UN panel is set to release a report on internet governance. Some nations want international oversight of the issue but historically the US has maintained the role because it was such a key player in the early years of the internet’s development.