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

Skipping the argument that the slight AQ in Iraq was a growing threat, a growing threat is not an imminent threat.

I agree that "a growing threat is not an imminent threat."

However, one cannot prove in advance that a threat is imminent; one can only provide evidence that a threat is growing. We had a growing pile of evidence that what eventually happened on 9/11/2001 was a growing threat. We had zero evidence that it was an imminent threat until after it happened. Even the case of an armed man yelling threats to kill you is but a growing threat. Only after he whips out his pistol and shoots you can you in retrospect prove his yelling was an imminent threat. Of course, by the time you are shot, it's too late to do anything about his imminent threat, because it has already been executed.

Clearly, the time to stop a growing threat from becoming an imminent threat is before the threat grows into an imminent threat.

I disagree that a couple of hundred AQ terrorist in Iraq who are training to kill Americans whereever they can be found is "slight AQ in Iraq." I recall that each airliner high jacked on 9/11/2001 was highjacked by 4 or 5 AQ terrorists whose principal weapons were box cutters. Also, there exists persuasive evidence that one suicidal AQ terrorist who sets off a bomb strapped to him or her in a crowd has killed more than a dozen civilians and/or military. Also one roadside bomb planted by two AQ terrorists and triggered via a remote cell phone by one AQ terrorists has kill more than a dozen civilians and/or military.


There was nothing that was imminent that a delay would have hurt. With a delay all the concerns could have been talked about among parties much like issues that we still face today are talked about among the parties involved, like the North Korea issue and now the China issue and any number of security issues that have come up.

Neither you or I know that a delay in our invasion of Iraq would or would not hurt. We do know that some of the AQ that had successfully escaped our Afghanistan invasion (October 2001) subsequently fled to the AQ bases in northern Iraq before we invaded Iraq (March 2003). It was not unreasonable to expect the population of those AQ Iraq bases to continue to increase. How much of an increase would "hurt"?

Since the inspections stopped in Iraq the world’s attention was not centered on Iraq despite the no fly zones occurrences and the occasional bombings by Clinton. I will agree that with the lead up to the war it got the world centered on the issues of Iraq. Powell going to UN got the world centered on Iraq even though he used evidence that was in dispute at the time. But since the world was centered on Iraq and the inspections were on going and reports were being made, there was an avenue in which any concerns such as even the oil for food aspect and the slight AQ presence in Iraq could have been brought up and discussed among nations and leaders.

I disagree that more discussion of AQ based in Iraq would have solved the problem of AQ based in Iraq, anymore than more discussion of AQ based in Afghanistan would have solved the problem of AQ based in Afghanistan. We now know that the two countries, France and Russia, that possessed UN Security Council veto power, had a major vested interest in keeping Saddam's regime in power. In fact both contributed to the build up of the over a thousand weapons and munitions (i.e., military ordnance) sites found in Iraq after our invasion. Surely it's reasonable to expect that a significant part of this ordnance would have eventually found its way into AQ hands and used against Americans and many others. AQ has been using this ordnance in Iraq since our invasion, but fortunately the AQ have been too busy in Iraq to have yet become an imminent threat with that ordnance in the US. In fact, worldwide AQ terrorist attacks have decreased since our invasion of Iraq.

There are others here who have brought up other reasons why the war in Iraq could not have waited another minute. The only one for me that has the slightest merit is the humane situation that was going on in Iraq. However, that situation was in no way so unique that it outstripped all other concerns in the world.

IMO two good things have come out of the Iraq war despite all Bush’s and the leaders of military starting from Rumsfeld on down bungles and outright IMO criminal behavior with regard to abuse of detainees was the removal of Saddam Hussein and people getting a chance to decide on their own future through the elections.

But the way that they set up the elections in my opinion was corrupt because it denied a full democracy for those who risked their lives to vote.

I am hopeful though that soon through the efforts of Iraqis themselves who are fight the insurgents since they now have a something to fight for and through the renewed efforts of the coalition to fight the insurgents that maybe in the end it will turn out to have been worth it all.

I don’t hate George Bush and administration so much that I wish for a million people to live in bloodshed and misery for all time in order to prove what a disaster the Iraq was. Personally I have long held a direct and personal insult for those implications and presumptuous assumptions.

My concerns about you (as well as many others in the US) do not relate to my perceptions of your (or their) feelings about Bush and his administration. My concerns relate to what appears to me to be your and (their) excessive focus on Bush and his administration's errors and bungles and blunders, and too little focus on the real nature of the growing threat of AQ to Americans and others, since AQ's inception in August 1988 from its original Afghan jihad against the Russians, and its subsequent rapid growth ever since (not just after our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq).

Sure Bush senior and Clinton and Bush junior screwed up. American presidents always have and probably always will. But that doesn't change one iota the fact that we damn well better face the reality of what can happen to us if we focus only on the AQ, and not on the governments that provide them sanctuary, .... and what we should do about both to make AQ a reducing threat and not a re-continuing increasing threat.

size=18]Journalist Freed From Iraq Leaves Hospital [/size]

ROME - A journalist who was held hostage in Iraq for a month and later shot by U.S. troops as she was being driven to freedom was released Thursday from the hospital, where she was treated for a wound to her shoulder.


Giuliana Sgrena left Celio Military Hospital, where she has stayed since her return to Italy on March 5.


The Italian journalist from the newspaper Il Manifesto has undergone two operations after suffering a wound in her shoulder from shots fired by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad's airport on March 4. Nicola Calipari, an Italian security agent traveling with Sgrena, was killed by the gunfire, and another one driving the car was injured.


Meanwhile, Italian newspapers reported Thursday that the justice minister has asked U.S. authorities to release the car so it can be examined by Italian ballistics experts.


Justice Minister Roberto Castelli sent an official request to the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday to have the vehicle released, the Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica dailies reported.


The Justice Ministry in Rome said nobody was immediately available to confirm the reports.


The papers said the request came after the U.S. command in Iraq reportedly blocked two Italian policemen from examining the car, citing security concerns. On Wednesday, the U.S. military in Baghdad said it did not have information on that report by Corriere della Sera.


The Toyota Corolla remains in U.S. hands at Baghdad airport, where it had been rented, according to the reports.


Italian authorities say inspecting the car is crucial in assessing what happened during the shooting.


Italian prosecutors investigating the shooting have received photographs of the car but want to analyze bullet entry holes and the vehicle's engine, La Repubblica said.


Calipari's killing outraged Italians and prompted Premier Silvio Berlusconi to demand that Washington provide an explanation.


Italy agrees that the shooting was an accident but disputes some key elements of the U.S. account.


The U.S. military said the driver was speeding and refused to stop, and that a U.S. patrol tried to warn the driver with hand and arm signals, and by flashing white lights and firing shots in front of the car and into the car's engine block.


Berlusconi said the car was traveling slowly, noting that it was nighttime, and stopped immediately when a light was flashed at it, shortly before U.S. troops fired on the car. Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said the gunfire appeared to have hit the right side of the car.


Washington has ordered an investigation into the shooting to be led by a U.S. brigadier general, with the participation of Italian officials. The joint commission is expected to release its findings by mid-April.

Insurgents cling to training camp after Iraq-US assault


SAMARRA, Iraq, March 24 (AFP) - Insurgents were still manning a training camp in northern Iraq in defiance of a blistering raid by the authorities, as British lawmakers accused the US-led coalition of "mistakes and misjudgments" by failing to prepare for the insurgency.

About 30 to 40 fighters were seen Wednesday at the lakeside training camp attacked by US and Iraqi forces on Tuesday and denied they had ever left, an AFP correspondent who visited the site said.

There were numerous discrepancies in the accounts given by the rebel and Iraqi security forces. The US military said Thursday it was investigating the new accounts of a rebel presence after what had been reported as a crushing raid.

The AFP correspondent, who traveled Wednesday with other journalists to the camp in the village of Ain al-Hilwa on Lake Tharthar, 200 kilometres (120 miles) north of Baghdad, said he saw the remains of three burnt-out vehicles on a dusty road leading to the site.

A fighter named Amer, who claimed membership in the Secret Islamic Army of Iraq, said the men had never abandoned the camp and only 11 of his comrades were killed in airstrikes on the site.

Iraqi commanders have said 85 suspected insurgents were killed in an assault by Iraqi troops and US aircraft on the camp Tuesday, adding that no one was captured and others had fled by boat.

Asked about the presence of rebels at the camp late Wednesday, a member of the Iraqi police commandos that took part in the operation said Iraqi and US troops withdrew from the area at about 6:30 pm (1530 GMT) Tuesday.

Local hospitals told AFP they had received no casualties from the battle.

"The commandos killed 35 and US air raids killed 50. But no one was captured and many escaped by boat," General Adnan Thabet, a senior advisor to the interior ministry, earlier told AFP by phone from Samarra.

"During the fight, 30 boats left."

A statement from the outgoing government, which confirmed the insurgent toll, said one Algerian was captured.

The camp, frequented by members of Saddam's Baath party and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's branch of Al-Qaeda, was built after the US offensive to retake the rebel enclave of Fallujah in November, Thabet said.

Besides Fallujah, where rebels had turned the entire town into one giant command centre before November, the only other known strike on a suspected rebel camp was by US forces near Qaim on the Syrian border in June 2003.

"This was a serious military camp with a living section and guard posts," said a commando officer, named Jalil, who took part in the operation.

Jalil said machine guns, rockets, arms and training manuals including ones on how to make roadside bombs were found at the camp along with fake identification cards, passports and documents that proved the presence of foreigners, long blamed for the bulk of the insurgency.

He estimated that some 100 fighters might have been at the camp at the time of the attack.

Thabet said six commandos were killed and four wounded.

A US military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Goldenberger, confirmed the operation and said Apache attack and Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopters backed the commandos.

He said what started as an Iraqi mission quickly turned into a joint one after fighters opened fire on the some 240 members of the interior ministry's 1st Commando Battalion approaching the camp.

Meanwhile, an influential British parliamentary panel released findings that the US-led coalition failed to prepare sufficiently for the deadly insurgency that flared up in the aftermath of the spring 2003 Iraq invasion.

"A series of mistakes and misjudgements" occurred during the initial stages of the campaign which began in March 2003 and not enough importance was attached to boosting Iraq's own police force, the House of Commons defence committee said in a report.

The report criticised the Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to secure small arms depots across Iraq. They have now become a key source for insurgents to get explosive materials and heavy weapons.

In the latest violence, a US soldier died in Baghdad late Wednesday, a US military spokesperson said, but gave no further details.

An interior ministry official said a US soldier had been seriously wounded in a mortar strike on a police station in the capital.

A man seeking asylum in Germany and claiming to be a journalist has been taken hostage by the previously unknown "The Protectors of Islam Brigade" demanding the release of all Muslims in German jails, Der Spiegel reported on Thursday.

The news weekly said the man, identified as an Iraqi national named Hassan al-Sajdi, had claimed in a hostage-style video tape sent to the offices of the US magazine "Time" that he was working for an unnamed German media company.

On the political front, Iraq's election-winning Shiite list said it was pushing for Iraq's parliament to meet Saturday.

Members of the Shiite coalition said they were waiting to meet with Kurdish leaders to decide.

Last Update: 24/03/2005 20:16


Iraqi electrical workers protest attacks

By The Associated Press



BAGHDAD - Hundreds of power employees shouting "No, no to terror!" marched through Baghdad's streets Thursday to protest attacks that have killed dozens of their colleagues, while demonstrators in the petroleum-rich south demanded the new government's oil minister be from their region.
The protests came as negotiators hammered out details of a new government that U.S. officials hope will pave the way for an eventual withdrawal of coalition forces. Jawad al-Maliki, a negotiator from the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance, said Shiite Muslim and ethnic Kurdish officials agreed to hold parliament's second-ever session early next week, although no date has been set. The 275-seat National Assembly has held only one session - on March 16 - to swear in its members.

"The negotiations were positive and very good," al-Maliki said of Thursday's discussions. "In the coming days, the meetings will be continuous and decisive."

Lined up behind a black banner with the names of slain power workers, protesters Thursday demanded an end to attacks against power stations and pipelines - part of the insurgents' two-year campaign to undermine the U.S.-led coalition and interim government.

At the same time, in southern Basra, more than 200 workers gathered outside a local government building to insist that the new government's ministers of oil and transportation be from their region.

"Everyone must know that the oppressed and persecuted people of the south refuse to have their interests be ignored," protesters said in a statement given to the provincial governor, Mohammed al-Waeli.

Al-Waeli agreed, saying: "We are eager that the people of Basra and the south have clout in the new government."

Some workers threatened to walk out.

"We will stop pumping the oil and go on strike for those working in the oil field and the ports if our demands aren't met," said Mohammed Abdul Hafez, an oil workers' union official and one of the protest's organizers.

Tensions and possible outages in Iraq, one of the world's key oil producers, have contributed to rising crude prices in the past year.

Kurdish and Shiite negotiators debated Cabinet posts Thursday, with Abdul-Karim al-Anzi, a Shiite negotiator, saying lawmakers are expected to name the country's new president, two vice presidents, and parliament's speaker in their upcoming session.

One of the vice presidents will likely be a Sunni Arab, al-Maliki and al-Anzi both said.

The move is an effort to reach out to the Sunnis, largely believed to be behind the country's insurgency. Dominant under former dictator Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Arabs mostly stayed away from Iraq's historic Jan. 30 elections, some to boycott the vote and others because they feared attacks.

Kurds are thought to number between 15 to 20 percent of Iraq's 26 million people, with Sunni Arabs roughly equivalent. Shiite Arabs make up 60 percent of the population.

Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani is expected to be named president, with Shiite politician Ibrahim al-Jaafari likely to become prime minister.

The top United Nations envoy in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, reached out to Iraq's Sunni minority Thursday by meeting with influential Sunni religious leaders at a Baghdad mosque.

Qazi "stressed the importance of ensuring that all components of Iraqi society are adequately represented in the constitutional making process," a UN statement said.

A seven-member U.S. congressional delegation also visited Iraq and expressed optimism at the progress being made in forming a new government.

"We take hope home that our troops will be able to rejoin their families sooner rather than later," said Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California.

Also Thursday in Rabia, police mistook a group of Iraqi soldiers wearing civilian clothing and carrying guns to be insurgents, and opened fire on them, killing three, police chief Ahmed Mohammed Khalaf said. The soldiers shot back, killing two police officers. Another eight police were wounded in the battle, which lasted about 10 minutes.

In the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, police imposed a sudden, late-afternoon curfew in part of the city, shouting through loudspeakers: "Close your stores and go home!" They also set up checkpoints and searched cars in the city.

The curfew may have been related to a battle that broke out earlier in the northern Jolan neighborhood between unidentified gunmen and Iraqi security forces.

"We were surprised to see a large number of Iraqi security forces raiding homes and dragging out young men, maybe for investigations," resident Jamal Mohammed said.

Also Thursday, the U.S. military announced that a prisoner died a day earlier at the Camp Charlie internment facility. The man, in his early 30s, was found lying in his cell Wednesday, four days after his arrival at Camp Charlie, the military said in a statement. Attempts to revive him failed, and the cause of death was under investigation.

Army Documents Shed Light on CIA 'Ghosting'
Systematic Concealment Of Detainees Is Found

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page A15

Senior defense officials have described the CIA practice of hiding unregistered detainees at Abu Ghraib prison as ad hoc and unauthorized, but a review of Army documents shows that the agency's "ghosting" program was systematic and known to three senior intelligence officials in Iraq.

Army and Pentagon investigations have acknowledged a limited amount of ghosting, but more than a dozen documents and investigative statements obtained by The Washington Post show that unregistered CIA detainees were brought to Abu Ghraib several times a week in late 2003, and that they were hidden in a special row of cells. Military police soldiers came up with a rough system to keep track of such detainees with single-digit identification numbers, while others were dropped off unnamed, unannounced and unaccounted for.

The documents show that the highest-ranking general in Iraq at the time acknowledged that his top intelligence officer was aware the CIA was using Abu Ghraib's cells, a policy the general abruptly stopped when questions arose.

According to investigative statements by some soldiers, such detainees were left in isolation cells for weeks without being interrogated, they were sometimes registered under fake names and essentially lost, and the rules that applied to thousands of other detainees did not always apply to them.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top Army officer in Iraq at the time, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last spring that there was no system of keeping such detainees at Abu Ghraib, but he later acknowledged two cases in which it had happened, including that of one detainee who died in custody and another who was kept without registration at the behest of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The jerks of the current administration gives our country a bad name; and it's gonna take years before our allies trust us - if ever.

Try to figure out who our allies were before this admininstration, and you'll find the answer.

My comments are in blue. I infer from your comments below that you have changed your mind and have decided to participate in one more round of discussion with me. If so, I'm happy to oblige.

revel wrote:

Skipping the argument that the slight AQ in Iraq was a growing threat, a growing threat is not an imminent threat.

I agree that "a growing threat is not an imminent threat."

However, one cannot prove in advance that a threat is imminent; one can only provide evidence that a threat is growing. We had a growing pile of evidence that what eventually happened on 9/11/2001 was a growing threat. We had zero evidence that it was an imminent threat until after it happened. Even the case of an armed man yelling threats to kill you is but a growing threat. Only after he whips out his pistol and shoots you can you in retrospect prove his yelling was an imminent threat. Of course, by the time you are shot, it's too late to do anything about his imminent threat, because it has already been executed.

We didn't have zero evidence that what happened on 9/11 was a growing threat. If you go back and read more parts of the 9/11 report it is evident that we had warning that something was gearing up to happen. The mention of people using planes was even mentioned. However none of was what they termed actionable intelligence; however we should have been more on the alert and if the administration was more tuned in with something other than Iraq maybe we could have at least been more prepared.

Clearly, the time to stop a growing threat from becoming an imminent threat is before the threat grows into an imminent threat.

I take it from your above statement that you believe in preemptive wars. I disagree. There were steps already being taken which should have been allowed to have been played out before we lost so many lives and untold amount of lives on Iraqs side.

I disagree that a couple of hundred AQ terrorist in Iraq who are training to kill Americans whereever they can be found is "slight AQ in Iraq." I recall that each airliner high jacked on 9/11/2001 was highjacked by 4 or 5 AQ terrorists whose principal weapons were box cutters. Also, there exists persuasive evidence that one suicidal AQ terrorist who sets off a bomb strapped to him or her in a crowd has killed more than a dozen civilians and/or military. Also one roadside bomb planted by two AQ terrorists and triggered via a remote cell phone by one AQ terrorists has kill more than a dozen civilians and/or military.

I don't believe it was the case that a hundred AQ were in Iraq training to kill Americans. I don't think it has been proved. Before the war the one AQ camp was very small and mostly was concerned with Saddam Hussien and the secular way of doing things in Iraq.

I agree that one AQ or another terrorist group or person could do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people. However there are terrorist all over the world and the one camp that was in Iraq was out of the control of Saddam Hussien.


There was nothing that was imminent that a delay would have hurt. With a delay all the concerns could have been talked about among parties much like issues that we still face today are talked about among the parties involved, like the North Korea issue and now the China issue and any number of security issues that have come up.

Neither you or I know that a delay in our invasion of Iraq would or would not hurt. We do know that some of the AQ that had successfully escaped our Afghanistan invasion (October 2001) subsequently fled to the AQ bases in northern Iraq before we invaded Iraq (March 2003). It was not unreasonable to expect the population of those AQ Iraq bases to continue to increase. How much of an increase would "hurt"?

I don't know if it was true or not if some AQ fled into Iraq. I am sure they fled all over the place into the middle east region and even some staying right there in those hills in Afghanistan.

Since the inspections stopped in Iraq the world's attention was not centered on Iraq despite the no fly zones occurrences and the occasional bombings by Clinton. I will agree that with the lead up to the war it got the world centered on the issues of Iraq. Powell going to UN got the world centered on Iraq even though he used evidence that was in dispute at the time. But since the world was centered on Iraq and the inspections were on going and reports were being made, there was an avenue in which any concerns such as even the oil for food aspect and the slight AQ presence in Iraq could have been brought up and discussed among nations and leaders.

I disagree that more discussion of AQ based in Iraq would have solved the problem of AQ based in Iraq, anymore than more discussion of AQ based in Afghanistan would have solved the problem of AQ based in Afghanistan. We now know that the two countries, France and Russia, that possessed UN Security Council veto power, had a major vested interest in keeping Saddam's regime in power. In fact both contributed to the build up of the over a thousand weapons and munitions (i.e., military ordnance) sites found in Iraq after our invasion. Surely it's reasonable to expect that a significant part of this ordnance would have eventually found its way into AQ hands and used against Americans and many others. AQ has been using this ordnance in Iraq since our invasion, but fortunately the AQ have been too busy in Iraq to have yet become an imminent threat with that ordnance in the US. In fact, worldwide AQ terrorist attacks have decreased since our invasion of Iraq.

I don't believe that France and Russia were only going to veto because of some oil for food thing. In any case there were other countries who were against the war who didn't have any alleged interest in the oil for food scandal.

We should have allowed the inspections to continue and we should have made our case without stretches of the truth.

There are others here who have brought up other reasons why the war in Iraq could not have waited another minute. The only one for me that has the slightest merit is the humane situation that was going on in Iraq. However, that situation was in no way so unique that it outstripped all other concerns in the world.

IMO two good things have come out of the Iraq war despite all Bush's and the leaders of military starting from Rumsfeld on down bungles and outright IMO criminal behavior with regard to abuse of detainees was the removal of Saddam Hussein and people getting a chance to decide on their own future through the elections.

But the way that they set up the elections in my opinion was corrupt because it denied a full democracy for those who risked their lives to vote.

I am hopeful though that soon through the efforts of Iraqis themselves who are fight the insurgents since they now have a something to fight for and through the renewed efforts of the coalition to fight the insurgents that maybe in the end it will turn out to have been worth it all.

I don't hate George Bush and administration so much that I wish for a million people to live in bloodshed and misery for all time in order to prove what a disaster the Iraq was. Personally I have long held a direct and personal insult for those implications and presumptuous assumptions.

My concerns about you (as well as many others in the US) do not relate to my perceptions of your (or their) feelings about Bush and his administration. My concerns relate to what appears to me to be your and (their) excessive focus on Bush and his administration's errors and bungles and blunders, and too little focus on the real nature of the growing threat of AQ to Americans and others, since AQ's inception in August 1988 from its original Afghan jihad against the Russians, and its subsequent rapid growth ever since (not just after our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq).

Sure Bush senior and Clinton and Bush junior screwed up. American presidents always have and probably always will. But that doesn't change one iota the fact that we damn well better face the reality of what can happen to us if we focus only on the AQ, and not on the governments that provide them sanctuary, .... and what we should do about both to make AQ a reducing threat and not a re-continuing increasing threat.

First two sentences on front page of today's Independent:

"A brutal prospect now faces the British Government. It is that unless and until it publishes the full documentation behind the legal advice to go to war in Iraq, the impression will grow that it took the country into an illegal war, throwing its troops into battle at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians on the basis of a false prospectus and fluctuating advice from its senior law officer."

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

First two sentences on front page of today's Independent:

"A brutal prospect now faces the British Government. It is that unless and until it publishes the full documentation behind the legal advice to go to war in Iraq, the impression will grow that it took the country into an illegal war, throwing its troops into battle at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians on the basis of a false prospectus and fluctuating advice from its senior law officer."

I found this quote from a British newspaper quite remarkable. It evokes a state of mind I associate with the angry and vengeful sissies who could not cope in the real world of boyhood struggles that perhaps many of us recall from school days.

Have ANY of the many wars Britain has fought met the test of "legality" implied here? In the long history of the Western World have the "chief legal officers" of any country ever been the deciding factor in a decision to go to war? (Certainly if President Roosevelt had applied this rule Britain's history may have turned out quite differently)

When has the advice of key specialist advisors to decision makers on issues of great import ever not been "fluctuating"??

" ... the impression will grow..." Is this a "brutal prospect"? All that is required to understand the reasons and merits of our intervention in Iraq is a bit of common sense. Moreover the benefits of it are becoming more evident with every passing day.

The United States and Britain, along with the other members of the UN Security Council, designed and oversaw the oil-for-food program. The United States alone had 60 professionals review each of the 36,000 contracts awarded - more than twice the size of the UN oil-for-food office's professional staff. America and Britain held up 5,000 contracts, sometimes for months, to ensure that no technology was getting through that Saddam could use for weapons purposes. But they held up none - not a single solitary one - on the grounds of pricing irregularities, even when alerted by UN staff.

What does this suggest about American and British motives? Were they toothless and unwilling to crack down on Saddam, as some now argue that Annan was? Or were these decisions the product of competing priorities - trying to sustain French, Russian and others' support for sanctions that prevented Saddam (successfully, it turned out) from acquiring weapons of mass destruction?

Similarly, three successive U.S. administrations looked the other way while Saddam illegally sold oil to Jordan and Turkey - about $5.1 billion worth, according to the Duelfer report. American fighter planes patrolled the skies, U.S. satellites took photos of the parade of trucks making daily trips and the nightly news covered the story. This was entirely unrelated to the oil-for-food program. It represented U.S. efforts to shore up two allies that played a central role in containing Saddam but were adversely affected by the sanctions. Indeed, doing so required the secretary of state to certify annually to Congress that these illegal sales were in the national security interest of the United States.

Another line of inquiry for Congress concerns American firms that used overseas subsidiaries, including in France, to do oil-for-food business to the tune of at least half a billion dollars. They included Halliburton, Ingersoll-Rand and General Electric. The U.S. government reportedly never objected.

Critics have trained their sights on UN shortcomings, which Volcker is examining in detail. Congress would serve the public interest by asking equally tough questions about the U.S. government and U.S. companies, and by telling us what future administrations should do in similar circumstances.

I accept your self-description. However, in that case there is no point - you will not understand.