THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

The UIA is expected to announce a leader by Saturday afternoon when the parliament is due to hold a session, which was postponed from Thursday.

Saturday's session, at which MPs are due to choose a speaker, likely to be drawn from the Sunni Arab parliamentary contingent, will be only its second since the general election in December.

Wrangling between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish parties over who should be prime minister has prevented the formation of a government.


As recently as Wednesday, Mr Jaafari was refusing to step aside, insisting his nomination was the democratic choice of the Iraqi people.

A meeting with United Nations envoy Ashraf Qazi and Shia Muslim religious leaders were key factors in Mr Jaafari's change of heart, correspondents quote MPs as saying.

Despite the impasse, hopes are rising for a breakthrough as violence continues across the country, the BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's ruling Shi'ite Alliance nominated Jawad al-Maliki for prime minister on Friday, winning support from the main Sunni Arab bloc and raising a possible end to a four-month deadlock over forming a coalition government.

No reaction was available from the Kurdish alliance, whose support would be key to a national unity government that Washington hopes can avert any slide toward a sectarian civil war and draw Sunni Arab insurgents into the political process.

Maliki, a leader in the Dawa party who spent years living in Shi'ite-dominated Iran during Saddam Hussein's rule, had previously been seen as an unlikely candidate for prime minister because he was widely viewed as a sectarian politician.

UN CHARTER Article 51
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations ...

... until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Central Intelligence Agency warned US President George W. Bush before the Iraq war that it had reliable information the government of Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, a retired CIA operative disclosed.

But the operative, Tyler Drumheller, said top White House officials simply brushed off the warning, saying they were "no longer interested" in intelligence and that the policy toward Iraq had been already set.

The disclosure, made in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" program due to be broadcast late Sunday, adds to earlier accusations that the Bush administration used intelligence selectively as it built its case for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam's regime.

The administration claimed in the run-up to the war that Baghdad had extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was working clandestinely to build a nuclear arsenal, therefore, presenting a threat to the world.

An extensive CIA-led probe undertaken after the US military took control of Iraq failed to turn up any such weapons. But Bush and other members of his administration have blamed the fiasco on a massive intelligence failure and vehemently denied manipulating information they had been provided.

However, Drumheller, who was a top CIA liaison officer in Europe before the war, insisted Bush had been explicitly warned well before an invasion order was given that the United States may not find the suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The information about the absence of the suspected weapons in Iraq, according to excerpts of Drumheller's remarks, was clandestinely provided to the United States by former Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri, who doubled as a covert intelligence agent for Western services.

Then-CIA director George Tenet immediately delivered this report to Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials, but the information was dismissed, Drumheller said.

"The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested," the former CIA official recalled. "And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"

Drumheller said the White House did not want any additional data from Sabri because, as he pointed out, "the policy was set."

"The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy," he argued.

The CIA declined to comment on the disclosure.

Drumheller admitted that Sabri was just one source, but pointed out that the administration would not shy away from other single-source information if it suited its policy goals.

"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," he complained.

The White House had embraced a British report that Iraq had purchased 500 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger, allegedly to restart its nuclear weapons program.

A special CIA envoy Joseph Wilson, who made a secret trip to Niger in late 2002 to verify the report, dismissed it as unfounded -- much to the displeasure of the White House.

Drumheller, who retired from the agency last year, is the second high-ranking ex-CIA official to criticize the administration's use of intelligence in months leading up to the war.

Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, wrote in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs magazine that the White House was "cherry-picking" information and that "intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made."

There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the latest charges.

revel, That'd be the nomination impasse, but not the insurgency or sectarian violence that's getting worse for the Iraqi people.

The name of Mr Maliki, a close ally of Mr Jaafari and a member of his Dawa party, has circulated for several weeks as a possible replacement. Yesterday Sunni and Kurdish leaders welcomed him as a potential end to the stalemate.

"We have no objection to Jawad al-Maliki," said Iyad al-Samarrai, of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic party. "Although there is not much difference [from Mr Jaafari] from the ideological point of view, we have a feeling he is more practical, more willing to solve problems. We don't want to complicate the process [further]. It's better to move on.''

UN CHARTER Article 51
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Just hours after Iraq's prime minister-designate promised to unite Iraqis on Saturday, three Shi'ite brothers and two Sunni brothers went out to dinner together.

It was an uplifting gathering in a country where sectarian mistrust deepens after every bombing, shooting and kidnapping.

But the harsh reality of Iraq caught up with the group of friends just after they paid the check and left the restaurant.

Gunmen in cars pulled up and shot them dead in plain view of the public, police said. Relatives who washed the bodies for burial said their eyes had been gouged out and hands bound.

Friendships were forgotten the next day as vows of revenge whipped up an already emotional crowd at the funeral for the Shi'ite brothers -- Iyad, Ali and Mohammad Yazan.

There appeared to be no compassion for the Sunni Arab brothers -- Omar and Hakam Khudeir -- even though they were victims of the same hail of bullets.

BAGHDAD, Iraq // The man selected to lead Iraq continued to send mixed signals on the critical issue of dismantling militias, even as the U.S. ambassador said yesterday that disbanding the groups is the single most significant step in preventing civil war.
Jawad al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim political figure endorsed Saturday as prime minister by Iraq's new parliament, has 30 days to form a Cabinet that meets the elected body's approval. But as Iraqi politicians haggle over influence and jostle for government posts, the problem of militias has emerged as the biggest challenge.

In one of his first speeches after his endorsement, al-Maliki promised to rein in the militias, but said he would do so by adhering to a controversial law that requires making them part of the government's security forces.

"It's a message in two directions," said Hassan Bazzaz, a political analyst in Baghdad. "One to those who are scared of the militias and the other message is to the militia people: 'We will take care of you.'"

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said yesterday that militias and "death squads" are "a serious challenge to stability in Iraq to building a successful country based on rule of law."

But taking guns out of politics remains a challenge in a country where political groups have assembled armed forces to back their agendas.

Al-Maliki's coalition is backed by two Shiite militias, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigades and radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Even the country's Kurdish president appears unwilling to lay down arms. Jalal Talabani, speaking yesterday to reporters in Erbil, defended the 70,000-strong Kurdish peshmerga militia as a "regulated force."

"It seems like the Kurds always want an exception," said Ezzat Shabander, a secular legislator from former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's electoral slate.

BAGHDAD -- Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found 173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further abuse, the U.S. military reported.

Since then, there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.

But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.