Iraq's election result: a divided nation
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 21 December 2005
Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.
Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.
The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said: "In two and a half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq."
The success of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shia religious parties, has been far greater than expected according to preliminary results. It won 58 per cent of the vote in Baghdad, while Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister strongly supported by Tony Blair, got only 14 per cent of the vote. In Basra, Iraq's second city, 77 per cent of voters supported the Alliance and only 11 per cent Mr Allawi.
The election was portrayed by President George Bush as a sign of success for US policies in Iraq but, in fact, means the triumph of America's enemies inside and outside the country.
Iran will be pleased that the Shia religious parties which it has supported, have become the strongest political force.
Ironically, Mr Bush is increasingly dependent within Iraq on the co-operation and restraint of the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for the eradication of Israel. It is the allies of the Iranian theocracy who are growing in influence by the day and have triumphed in the election. The US will fear that development greatly as it constantly reminds the world of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Iran may be happier with a weakened Iraq in which it is a predominant influence rather than see the country entirely break up.
Another victor in the election is the fiery nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia fought fierce battles with US troops last year. The US military said at the time it intended "to kill or capture him".
Mr Bush cited the recapture of the holy city of Najaf from the Mehdi Army in August 2004 as an important success for the US Army. Mr Sadr will now be one of the most influential leaders within the coalition.
All the parties which did well in the election have strength only within their own community. The Shia coalition succeeded because the Shia make up 60 per cent of Iraqis but won almost no votes among the Kurds or Sunni, each of whom is about 20 per cent of the population. The Sunni and the Kurdish parties won no support outside their own communities.
The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad, sounded almost despairing yesterday as he reviewed the results of the election. "It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities," he said. "But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operation."
The election also means a decisive switch from a secular Iraq to a country in which, outside Kurdistan, religious law will be paramount. Mr Allawi, who ran a well-financed campaign, was the main secular hope but that did not translate into votes. The other main non-religious candidate, Ahmed Chalabi, won less than 1 per cent of the vote in Baghdad and will be lucky to win a single seat in the new 275-member Council of Representatives.
"People underestimate how religious Iraq has become," said one Iraqi observer. "Iran is really a secular society with a religious leadership, but Iraq will be a religious society with a religious leadership." Already most girls leaving schools in Baghdad wear headscarves. Women's rights in cases of divorce and inheritance are being eroded.
Sunni Arab leaders were aghast at the electoral triumph of the Shia, claiming fraud. Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Arab alliance, the Iraqi Accordance Front, said that if the electoral commission did not respond to their complaints they would "demand the elections be held again in Baghdad".
Mr Allawi's Iraqi National List also protested. Ibrahim al-Janabi, a party official, said: "The elections commission is not independent. It is influenced by political parties and by the government." But while there was probably some fraud and intimidation, the results of the election mirror the way in which the Shia majority in Iraq is systematically taking over the levers of power. Shia already control the ministry of the interior with 110,000 police and paramilitary units and most of the troops in the 80,000-strong army being trained by the US are Shia.
Mr Khalilzad said yesterday: "You can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian, for example, as Minister of the Interior." This is a not so-veiled criticism of the present minister, Bayan Jabr, a leading member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shia party. He is accused of running death squads and torture centres whose victims are Sunni Arabs.
It is unlikely that the Shia religious parties and militias will tolerate any rollback in their power. "They feel their day has come," said Mr Attiyah.
For six months the Shia have ruled Iraq in alliance with the Kurds. Kurdish leaders are not happy with the way this government has worked. The Kurds, supported by the US, will now try to dilute Shia control of government by bringing in Sunni ministers and Mr Allawi. But one Kurdish leader said: "We have a strategic alliance with the Shia religious parties we would be unwise to break."
The elections are also unlikely to see a diminution in armed resistance to the US by the Sunni community. Insurgent groups have made clear that they see winning seats in parliament as the opening of another front.
The break-up of Iraq has been brought closer by the election. The great majority of people who went to the polls voted as Shia, Sunni or Kurds - and not as Iraqis. The forces pulling Iraq apart are stronger than those holding it together. The election, billed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair as the birth of a new Iraqi state may in fact prove to be its funeral.
Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest
Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Panel
By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A01
A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.
Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday.
Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.
Sunni, Secular Groups Demand New Vote
Claims That Iraqi Ballot Was Rigged Threaten to Derail Government, Boost Insurgency
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A23
BAGHDAD, Dec. 20 -- Sunni and secular political groups angrily claimed Tuesday that last week's Iraqi national election was rigged, demanded a new vote and threatened to leave a shambles the delicate plan to bring the country's wary factions together in a new government.
Faced with preliminary vote counts that suggest a strong victory by the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shiite Muslim religious parties that dominates the outgoing government, political leaders of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority hinted that insurgent violence would be accelerated by the suspicions of fraud.
Alluding to Sunnis who chose to abandon their earlier rejection of Iraqi politics and participate in Thursday's election, Adnan Dulaimi, a chief of the main Sunni coalition, the Tawafaq front, demanded: "What would we tell those whom we indirectly convinced to stop the attacks during the election period? What would we tell those people who wanted to boycott and we convinced them to participate?"
The preliminary results, he said, were "not in the interest of stability of the country."
Figures released by Iraq's electoral commission indicated that, with ballots from more than 95 percent of boxes counted across the country, the Shiite religious coalition appeared poised to dominate the four-year parliament -- and, with it, selection of the next prime minister.
Though the Shiites' slim majority in the outgoing parliament was expected to dwindle because of high Sunni Arab turnout Thursday, initial calculations showed the Shiite list winning overwhelmingly in 10 of Iraq's 18 provinces, including the most populous, Baghdad. A coalition of ethnic Kurdish parties swept the three northernmost provinces, where Kurds predominate.
The final distribution of seats in the 275-member National Assembly will be decided by a complicated formula that is based on turnout and is skewed to reward small parties by giving them some representation. Electoral commission members cautioned that the election results must be checked and cross-checked and that the allegations of ballot violations would be settled before the results were declared final. That process might last into January, said Farid Ayar, an elections official.
Ayar said Tuesday that among the 1,000 complaints received so far, about 20, if valid, were serious enough to have affected the vote. The complaints included "some forgeries, fraud, and use of force and efforts to intimidate," he told reporters. "We will study all of these very carefully."
Former prime minister Ayad Allawi, whose secular slate appeared likely to finish fourth in the race and play a small role in the government, also questioned the results and called a meeting for Wednesday of groups angry with the outcome.
And Saleh Mutlak, who headed an independent Sunni slate, said: "I don't think there is any practical point for us for being in this National Assembly if things stay like this.
"This election is completely false. It insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on fraud, cheating, frightening people and using religion to frighten the people," he said. "It is terrorism more than democracy."
Mutlak said he had expected his slate to capture 70 parliamentary seats, but he said it seemed likely to win fewer than 20, according to the preliminary results.
U.S. officials continued to praise the conduct of the election, and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a leader of the Shiite ruling coalition, played down the complaints in an appearance on Iraqi television Tuesday night. The election, he said, "should be seen as a victory for all Iraqis, regardless of any doubts or skepticism."
The campaign leading to Thursday's vote was marked by heightened violence, including the assassinations of candidates and election workers and attacks on party offices. But the balloting itself was hailed in diverse quarters as an overall success.
As results emerged this week, however, cries of fraud and ballot-rigging surged.
Mutlak said, for example, that in Shiite-populated southern Iraq, militiamen fired guns in the air to intimidate voters, ballots disappeared under the control of militias and polling places claimed to run out of ballots on election day. Other critics have complained of ghost voters, duplicate voters and people being bused from other districts to vote.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad insisted Tuesday that "overall, from what we know so far, the election went very well."
"It's too soon to speak definitively about the results, but everyone, all the communities, participated," he said. "That was very important. That was a significant step."
Though estimated to account for 20 percent of Iraq's population, Sunni Arabs dominated the government of Saddam Hussein, as well as previous administrations. When Hussein was toppled in 2003 by the U.S.-led invasion, Sunnis largely rejected the new political process that was brokered by American occupation officials and gradually dominated by the country's Shiite majority.
After Sunni Arabs boycotted elections for a transitional parliament in January, the United States worked strenuously behind the scenes to bring them into the political process, arguing that Sunni participation in government might dampen the insurgency.
The Sunni Arab vote in provinces of central Iraq was splintered among Dulaimi's main Sunni coalition, Mutlak's party and, in Salahuddin province, a small party headed by Mishan Jabouri.
In addition to the Sunni slates, secular groups appeared to attract little support, including those of Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, who as an exile had pushed the Bush administration to invade Iraq. There was much speculation that Allawi, a secular Shiite, would capitalize on dissatisfaction with Iraq's current leaders, but his party received only 14 percent of the vote in Baghdad and a lower percentage in other provinces.
"It looks like people preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identity," Khalilzad told reporters. "But for Iraq to succeed, there has to be cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic cooperation. At this point, it seems sectarian and ethnic identity has played a dominant role in the vote."
Even before the voting began, Sunni leaders had said the country's electoral system was stacked against them.
The number of parliamentary seats allocated to each province was based on the number of registered voters rather than population, since no reliable census exists for much of the country. That shortchanged Sunni regions that boycotted the January elections, said B.B. Abdul Qadir, an official with the Iraqi Islamic Party.
According to an analysis that Qadir presented to Iraqi election officials, the four provinces with the largest Sunni populations have eight fewer seats than they should.
A U.S. official in Fallujah, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said there was some validity to the claim but that the total shortfall was probably closer to a few seats.
Fact Check: Clinton/Carter Executive Orders Did Not Authorize Warrantless Searches of Americans
The top of the Drudge Report claims "CLINTON EXECUTIVE ORDER: SECRET SEARCH ON AMERICANS WITHOUT COURT ORDERÂ…" It's not true. Here's the breakdown -
What Drudge says:
Clinton, February 9, 1995: "The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order"
What Clinton actually signed:
Section 1. Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) [50 U.S.C. 1822(a)] of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act, the Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section.
That section requires the Attorney General to certify is the search will not involve "the premises, information, material, or property of a United States person." That means U.S. citizens or anyone inside of the United States.
The entire controversy about Bush's program is that, for the first time ever, allows warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and other people inside of the United States. Clinton's 1995 executive order did not authorize that.
Drudge pulls the same trick with Carter.
What Drudge says:
Jimmy Carter Signed Executive Order on May 23, 1979: "Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order."
What Carter's executive order actually says:
1-101. Pursuant to Section 102(a)(1) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1802(a)), the Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order, but only if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that Section.
What the Attorney General has to certify under that section is that the surveillance will not contain "the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." So again, no U.S. persons are involved.
how do they choose which citizen to monitor?
Gelisgesti wrote:how do they choose which citizen to monitor?
It appears they cross-reference the al Qaeda membership roster.
No, he is taking away the rights of people with known al qaeda links to converse with who knows who in foreign countries in secret.
And then there is this from Clinton's associate attorney general:
President had legal authority to OK taps
By John Schmidt
Published December 21, 2005
President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents.
The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation.
In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.
Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.
In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."
The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation. That law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that can authorize surveillance directed at an "agent of a foreign power," which includes a foreign terrorist group. Thus, Congress put its weight behind the constitutionality of such surveillance in compliance with the law's procedures.
But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."
Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/drudge-fact-check/ (bears repeating)
FISA contains a provision making it illegal to "engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." The term "electronic surveillance" is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication "sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person" (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by "intentionally targeting that United States person." The cryptic descriptions of the NSA program leave unclear whether it involves targeting of identified U.S. citizens. If the surveillance is based upon other kinds of evidence, it would fall outside what a FISA court could authorize and also outside the act's prohibition on electronic surveillance.
The administration has offered the further defense that FISA's reference to surveillance "authorized by statute" is satisfied by congressional passage of the post-Sept. 11 resolution giving the president authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force" to prevent those responsible for Sept. 11 from carrying out further attacks. The administration argues that obtaining intelligence is a necessary and expected component of any military or other use of force to prevent enemy action.
But even if the NSA activity is "electronic surveillance" and the Sept. 11 resolution is not "statutory authorization" within the meaning of FISA, the act still cannot, in the words of the 2002 Court of Review decision, "encroach upon the president's constitutional power."
Not all of them apparently agreed as one of them quit over it.
Quote:link againA federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources
FISA does not anticipate a post-Sept. 11 situation. What was needed after Sept. 11, according to the president, was surveillance beyond what could be authorized under that kind of individualized case-by-case judgment. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court second-guessing that presidential judgment.
Should we be afraid of this inherent presidential power? Of course. If surveillance is used only for the purpose of preventing another Sept. 11 type of attack or a similar threat, the harm of interfering with the privacy of people in this country is minimal and the benefit is immense. The danger is that surveillance will not be used solely for that narrow and extraordinary purpose.
But we cannot eliminate the need for extraordinary action in the kind of unforeseen circumstances presented by Sept.11. I do not believe the Constitution allows Congress to take away from the president the inherent authority to act in response to a foreign attack. That inherent power is reason to be careful about who we elect as president, but it is authority we have needed in the past and, in the light of history, could well need again.
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John Schmidt served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997 as the associate attorney general of the United States. He is now a partner in the Chicago-based law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw.
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