THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Do we, ican?

... Clarke had many and detailed recommendations on how to deal with terrorism, everything from infiltrating known terrorist training camps in Afghanistan to providing more and better intel and agents. He never suggested that we declare war and attempt to invade, so he answered the question honestly. One does not have to invade a country to win a war.

And do you think the Iraqis think it's comparable?

It wasn't suppressed until after the election. It was released after the election.

Had it been released prior to the election what effect do you think it would have had on the election? I think zero.

What do you think Vice-president "Negotiate", or Senator "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time," would have done if instead he were elected back in 2000?

True! We won the cold-war with the USSR without invading the USSR. But the USSR while threatening to "bury" us never shot at us, nor did they harbor mass murderers who threatened and did murder us.

Kara, try what Pdiddle suggested ..... put some peanut butter on his nose ...

Iraq's election commission expected to announce final results


Baghdad, Feb 13, SPA -- Iraqi election commission officials
are expected to announce final results from the landmark
Jan. 30 balloting at a news conference Sunday.
The news conference is scheduled for 1300 GMT.
Election commission spokesman, Farid Ayar, said on
Al-Arabiya television Saturday night that the commission
would meet Sunday morning to finalize some unspecified
issues and then announce the final figures in the
afternoon. The results will be considered official after a
three-day period.
--SPA

1116 Local Time
0816 GMT

"The 1981 Israeli aerial Strike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the 'success' at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track reacrod of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation."

If you think the UN's oil-for-food program was leaky, take a look at the Coalition Provisional Authority's oil-for-reconstruction scheme.


Where Has Iraq's Money Gone?
By George Monbiot, AlterNet
Posted on February 10, 2005, Printed on February 13, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21227/
The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the UN are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet last Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman's mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the United Nations is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organization. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN's oil-for-food program, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.

"The major source of external financial resources to the Iraqi regime," he reported, "resulted from sanctions violations outside the [oil-for-food] Program's framework." These violations consisted of "illicit sales" of oil by the Iraqi regime to Turkey and Jordan. The members of the UN Security Council, including the United States, knew about them but did nothing. "United States law requires that assistance programs to countries in violation of United Nations sanctions be ended unless continuation is determined to be in the national interest. Such determinations were provided by successive United States administrations."

The government of the United States, in other words, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6 billion, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq.The biggest source of illegal funds to Saddam Hussein was approved not by officials of the United Nations but by officials in the United States. Strange to relate, neither Mr. Hyde nor Mr. Coleman have yet been bellyaching about it. But this isn't the half of it.

It is true that the UN's auditing should have been better. Some of the oil-for-food money found its way into Saddam Hussein's hands. One of its officials, with the help of a British diplomat, helped to ensure that a contract went to a British firm, rather than a French one. The most serious case involves an official called Benon Sevan, who is alleged to have channelled Iraqi oil into a company he favored, and who might have received $160,000 in return. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, has taken disciplinary action against both men, and promised to strip them of diplomatic immunity if they are charged. There could scarcely be a starker contrast to the way the United States has handled the far graver allegations against its own officials.

Four days before Paul Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the U.S. Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The Inspector General's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8 billion went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr. Sevan is alleged to have been paid.

The Authority, the Inspector General found, was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management." This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.

Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC's File on Four program that officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by U.S. forces simply disappeared. Some $800 million was handed out to U.S. commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4 billion was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has never been seen since.

The CPA awarded contracts to U.S. companies without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible. As a result, the authority appears to have obtained appalling value for money. Auditors at the Pentagon, for example, allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61 million. This appears to have been officially sanctioned.

In November, The New York Times obtained a letter from an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers insisting that she would not "succumb to the political pressures from the ... U.S. Embassy to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary." She was overruled by her superiors, who issued a memo insisting that the prices the company was charging were "fair and reasonable," and that it wouldn't be asked to provide the figures required to justify them.

Other companies appear to have charged the authority for work they never did, or to have paid sub-contractors to do it for them for a fraction of what they were paid by the CPA. Yet, even when confronted by cast-iron evidence of malfeasance, the authority kept employing them. When the Inspector-General recommended that the US army withhold payments from companies which appear to have overcharged it, it ignored him. No one has been charged or punished. The U.S. Department of Justice refuses to assist the whistleblowers who are taking these companies to court.

What makes all this so serious is that more than half of the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the U.S. government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil. If you think the UN's oil-for-food program was leaky, take a look at the CPA's oil-for-reconstruction scheme. Throughout the entire period of CPA rule, there was no metering of the oil passing through Iraq's pipelines, which means that there was no way of telling how much of the country's wealth the authority was extracting, or whether it was paying a fair price for it. The CPA, according to the international monitoring body charged with auditing it, was also "unable to estimate the amount of petroleum ... that was smuggled."

The authority was plainly breaching UN resolutions. As Christian Aid points out, the CPA's distribution of Iraq's money was supposed to have been subject to international oversight from the beginning. But no auditors were appointed until April 2004: just two months before the CPA's mandate ran out. Even then, they had no power to hold it to account or even to ask it to cooperate. But enough information leaked out to suggest that $500 million of Iraqi oil money might have been "diverted" (a polite word for nicked) to help pay for the military occupation.

I hope that Messrs Hyde and Coleman won't stop asking whether Iraqi oil money has been properly spent. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if their agreeable silence persists.

Quote:

Kara, try what Pdiddle suggested ..... put some peanut butter on his nose ...

virtual or actual peebee? Sheesh, my magic will only lift so much weight.

Denial or Despair

Is it really possible that I know more than most Iraqis about what's really going on in Iraq?

By David Enders

February 11, 2005


About six months after the US invasion of Iraq, I was working with a Christian translator, an Iraqi woman of 24. We were in a slummy neighborhood somewhere in northern Baghdad, trying to track down a street kid who had been picked up by a local home for orphans and was presumably being held against her will.

We didn't manage to find the girl, but Ator, the translator, sat and chatted with some of the other kids. Near the orphanage we stopped and talked to some squatters (which most of the people in the neighborhood around the orphanage were), and as we got back in the car, Ator said something that surprised me.

"Thank you for bringing me here. I would have never come here," she said. A few days later, we returned to the squatter camp to drop off children's clothes Ator's nieces and nephews had outgrown.

That's when I began to realize how divided Iraqi society is. Many people rarely -- if ever -- seem to leave their neighborhoods, social circles, and, these days, their houses. For all intents and purposes, the journalists who do get out meet a broader cross- section of Iraqi society than do most Iraqis. Every time I talk to a liberal politician or citizen who assures me that elements of sharia (Islamic law) couldn't possibly be written into the new constitution, I want to ask them: "when was the last time you went to prayers in Sadr City? Have you been down to Najaf or Basra lately?"

On Mutanaby Street in central Baghdad, where booksellers lay out their wares every Friday and the cafes fill with all sorts -- wizened old poets, college professors, artists, religious scholars -- one is infected with the sense of what Baghdad was before -- secular, eclectic -- and what it might, possibly, make of its "liberation." A large painting of two martyred clerics, Moqtada Al-Sadr's father and uncle, hangs near the entrance to the market, but no one seems to mind. The street has a tolerant air. In the stalls and shops, the collected works of Saddam Hussein, in both French and English, as well as a bootleg Arabic translation of Bob Woodward's Bush at War, translated slightly more literally in the Arabic as harb Bush (Bush's War) -- mingle with copies of Louis L'Amour novels, modern Iraqi poetry, and piles of back copies of Popular Mechanics.

Many of the old men sitting in the cafes remember the days when Baathism was a doctrine of brotherhood and socialism; others reminisce about the years, between 1958 and 1963, when the communist party held power. Hiba and I have come to Mutanaby Street to look for reactions from secular Iraqis to the notion that sharia might soon govern their lives. Strangely, no one seems terribly worried. "Sistani doesn't represent all of us," a biology teacher tells me as he sits sipping tea in one of the cafes.

Usually Hiba, my translator, lets me ask the questions, but today she is going after people on her own. A secular, determinedly nonconformist Iraqi woman in her early thirties, she's still fuming from earlier this week, when we interviewed people from the new government intent on pushing sharia. "But the Governing Council did it before, and the only thing that stopped them was Bremer vetoing it." For Hiba it is particularly maddening -- she's convinced it's coming. "Why can't anyone see it?"

The answer, perhaps, is to be found in Iraq as it was before the invasion, when most of the citizens mastered the art of shutting themselves off, resigning themselves to something they couldn't alter, rebelling in small ways -- satellite television, a forbidden photocopied book passed around a circle of friends. How hard is it for many to go back to the way they've lived most of their lives? Under Saddam they either held their breath and waited, left the country, or went underground. The oppression now is different, but it seems to be producing much the same effect. Before it was a police state; now the lack of social order has become the new order.

I can't stand when people -- and they come from all sectors of Iraqi society -- tell me things are going to be better now that the elections have taken place. How many Iraqis have bothered to interview the doctor at the central morgue, to hear him talk about the 40 to 60 murder victims he receives each day? (That's not including Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed by bombings, who, through an agreement with the Ministry of Health, are taken elsewhere?) How come the ministry of health gives me such ridiculously low numbers when I ask its spokesman what the death toll is? (About 5,000, from natural and violent causes, he says, in eight months. Impossible.) As we are leaving the morgue, a police car drives in, one of the officer's legs hanging out of the trunk at what would normally be a very uncomfortable angle.

On the way into Najaf, the police stop my car and confiscate my camera, though I haven't taken any pictures yet. I argue, but it's no use. I reluctantly hand it over, more interested in getting to Najaf than in taking pics once I'm there; but, because I've argued, the police lieutenant who has taken the camera launches into a rant. I begin writing down what he's saying.

"… we think showing pictures of what's going on just makes people mad and encourages them against the government… we have to do this, because we have to stop the terrorists… hey, stop writing."

"Why?"

"Because you're writing bad things about us."

"I just want to show people in the States how Iraqi people are defying the terrorists. It is because of the situation with the terrorists that you must do this to journalists. I understand."

He hands my camera back, insisting he had only taken it in the interests of the state. He tells me of his two brothers and father, killed for their participation in the 1991 intifada, of the horrors under Saddam ... how much he doesn't want it to be like it was under Saddam again ... everyone afraid ... no freedom ...

If normalcy and negotiations are on their way, I'm not seeing them. Earlier this week, Adel Abdul Madhi, one of the leading candidates for prime minister, told me that he and members of his (Shiite) party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had held "a very good meeting with the Muslim Scholars [a group of Sunni clerics that have been at the forefront of opposition to the occupation and the new government]. We had a very positive message coming from them encouraging the whole process, and even differences could be discussed in meetings rather than having opposite attitudes and views."

The response from a Muslim Scholars spokesman this morning: "Under the occupation, we will never participate in [discussions about] writing the constitution," the spokesman said. "We have had no meetings or phone calls from [Mahdi] or other members of his party."

I ended my day interviewing a 20-year-old physics student who got out of prison a month ago. He was arrested in November when US troops raided his house. Standard story ?- the garden door knocked in with a humvee, troops bust in, bag over the head (a practice US army spokesman Mark Kimmet said was stopped more than a year ago), loaded on to a truck, gone. First he was held at a base at the south end of Baghdad. He says he was there for about a month, interrogated and beaten daily. He points to his nose, which he says wasn't crooked before he was arrested. He said the prisoners were shocked repeatedly with tasers, forced to spend 24 hours at a time in cells too low to stand and too narrow sit, forced to sit for two days. After that he was moved to the airport where he was held for another month, unceremoniously dropped from a humvee in Amariya, a fairly rough neighborhood -- fearing, though now free, that he'd be killed as a spy.

(The US military, though it has never controlled an inch of this city outside of the Green Zone, contributes heavily to the lack of social order -- a hard reality that shows no sign of changing any time soon, whatever the vague talk of "timetables" and "withdrawal".)

Across the room, the young man's cousin pipes up. "He's been staying at his cousin's house since he was released, he's too afraid that if he returns to his own house he'll be arrested again. We just want to leave the country. Go to Syria. Lebanon. Anywhere but Iraq."

The violence touches too many lives, the breakdown of social order has become a way of life -- which only increases the likelihood that sharia, with its unbending dictates, its promise of strict order, will deeply inform the new Iraqi state.

"Why can't some people see what's happening around them?" Hiba asks me, more and more frequently these days.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis on Mutanaby Street know what it's like to keep to themselves and hope for better days ahead.
. What do you think?

David Enders is a 24-year-old freelance journalist who has spent more than a year reporting from Iraq since the end of the invasion. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation, will be released by the University of Michigan Press in April.

Or if you don't mind the mess you could just spread the pb on his icon

Well, I could be showing my ignorance but how in the world do the numbers add up correctly and be balanced by the turnout?