:: Has the whole world gone mad or is it just me. ::

:: Thursday, July 17, 2003 ::

July 17, 2003

In Ohio, Iraq Questions Shake Even Some of Bush's Faithful
By JAMES DAO


INCINNATI, July 16 — Jim Stock voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and says that if the election were held tomorrow, he'd vote for President Bush again. But he says he is troubled by indications that the White House used questionable intelligence about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa to push for war in Iraq. And he wants a fuller accounting.

"I'd like to know whether there was any deliberate attempt to deceive," said Mr. Stock, 70, a retired public school administrator. "My feeling is there was not. But there was an eagerness in the administration to pursue the battle and to believe information that wasn't quite good."

"It's painful to say," he added, "but I don't like where this is coming down."

If there are dark political clouds for Mr. Bush in this largely socially conservative region, they are forming around voters like Mr. Stock. Though they supported the war in Iraq, they now say they are growing uncomfortable with reports that the White House might have used inaccurate intelligence to justify it.

Many people interviewed here in the past two days said they did not question Mr. Bush's personal credibility. Still, they said, they wanted to know more about what happened and support Democratic calls for a Congressional inquiry into how suspect intelligence information got into the State of the Union address on Jan. 28.

"When you are taking lives, it should be nothing but the truth," Matt Zurkuhlen, 25, a business consultant, said outside a coffee shop in the Mount Lookout neighborhood here. "We rushed in there."

Americans are voicing increasing concerns about Iraq, national polls show. A CBS News survey conducted early last week before the political storm over unreliable intelligence intensified, showed that 56 percent of those polled believe the administration overestimated Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Less than a majority said the war would be worth its costs if such weapons were not found, down from 56 percent in May.

In conversations here with nearly three dozen voters, the vast majority said they generally like President Bush and believe he is doing a good job. Many people said they remained convinced that Iraq posed a threat, even though no chemical or biological weapons have been found. And there was a broad consensus that the result of the war — the ousting of a brutal dictator — was good for Iraq as well as the United States.

"Whether or not they find weapons of mass destruction is besides the point," Joyce Allen, 71, a retired bank teller, said as she ate lunch with a friend at Cincinnati's Museum Center. "The people there needed to be freed, and somebody had to do it."

What Cincinnati and its suburbs think of Mr. Bush is of vital importance to the White House because this is a swing region in a potential battleground state. The city of Cincinnati voted for Vice President Al Gore in 2000, but Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, gave 54 percent of its votes to Mr. Bush. Ohio went somewhat narrowly for Mr. Bush, 50 percent to 46 percent.

The region's political significance was underscored in October when Mr. Bush came to Cincinnati to deliver a major speech pressing his case for attacking Iraq. In it, the president asserted that Saddam Hussein was building "an arsenal of terror," that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons, was "seeking" nuclear weapons and had "given shelter" to terrorists.

But at the urging of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, a reference to the contentions that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium in Africa was removed from the speech. Three months later, Mr. Bush made the same declaration in his State of the Union address.

Most people interviewed here said they did not pay much attention to either Mr. Bush's October appearance or State of the Union address. But for Bruce Kleeberger, a bank official, the two speeches wove together many loose threads and helped convince him of the need to attack Iraq.

Mr. Kleeberger, 44, said he remains convinced that the invasion was a good thing, whether or not the president was wrong about Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Eventually, he said, he believes prohibited weapons will be found in Iraq.

"It would take many more mistakes for me to question the credibility and decision-making of the government," he said. "We'd like to think intelligence is 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. But it's a human system and there's human error."

Others said some exaggeration by the Bush administration to justify the war seemed acceptable.

"What is the advertising term for pumping something up?" asked Gary Botkins, 55, who works for the Internal Revenue Service. "Hype. The intelligence community does it all the time. But I believe Saddam did have weapons. I just wish they had found some."

Still, not everyone was so sanguine. "Bush was leaning on the C.I.A. to come up with some dirt," said Charles Flanagan, 70, a Democrat and semi-retired truck driver. "They should have given inspectors more time."

"I think his popularity is falling," he said of Mr. Bush, "and once people find out the truth about this it's really going to drop."

Despite Democratic efforts to use the intelligence issue to undermine Mr. Bush's credibility, most people interviewed here, including Democratic voters, said they did not think Mr. Bush had knowingly used bad intelligence. Most said they believed the president had been motivated by a sincere desire to counter what he considered a real threat.

"There are always a lot of people involved in these things," said Jill Switzer, 27, a church music director who said she would almost certainly not vote for Mr. Bush in 2004. "I don't blame him."

She said she would like to see a "truth commission" investigate the dubious Iraq intelligence. "If we are a country that upholds freedom and freedom of speech, we should investigate so we can have confidence our system works."

Despite the growing casualties in Iraq, most people interviewed, including those who had doubts about the war, said Mr. Bush should keep American troops in Iraq to help stabilize the country.

"After all the death that occurred, what's the use in pulling out now?" asked Ms. Allen, the retired bank teller. "Pulling out now would mean those boys died in vain."

To the chagrin of staunch Democrats here, the Washington debate about intelligence has received scant coverage in Cincinnati. But they might feel heartened that most people questioned said they consider the economy, not foreign policy, to be the most important issue on their 2004 campaign list. And most said they consider it less than healthy.


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Their return home delayed, U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq say their heart isn't in it anymore. (ABCNEWS.com)  
A Big Letdown
Soldiers Learn They’ll Be in Baghdad Longer Than Expected

By Jeffrey Kofman

F A L L U J A H, Iraq, July 16

— The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list," he told me.
He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.

"The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz," he said.

He was referring to the four men who are running U.S. policy here in Iraq — the four men who are ultimately responsible for the fate of U.S. troops here.

Those four are not popular at 2nd BCT these days. It is home to 4,000 troops from the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. The soldiers were deployed to Kuwait last September. They were among the first troops in Baghdad during the war. And now they've been in the region longer than other troops: 10 months and counting.

They were told they'd be going home in May. Then in early July. Then late July. Then last week they heard that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had mentioned them on Capitol Hill.

"The 2nd Brigade is — the plan is that they would return in August, having been there something like 10 months," said Rumsfeld.

He added: "The services and the Joint Staff have been working with Central Command to develop a rotation plan so that we can, in fact, see that we treat these terrific young men and young women in a way that's respectful of their lives and their circumstances."

Solid words from a solid source. Soldiers called their families. Commanding officers began preparations.

‘I Don’t Care Anymore’

Now comes word from the Pentagon: Not so fast.

The U.S. military command in Iraq said Tuesday it plans to complete the withdrawal of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division by September, but officials said they could make no hard promises because of the unsettled state of security in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

"If Donald Rumsfeld were sitting here in front of us, what would you say to him?" I asked a group of soldiers who gathered around a table, eager to talk to a visiting reporter.

"If he was here," said Pfc. Jason Punyahotra, "I would ask him why we're still here, why we've been told so many times and it's changed."

In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. "If Donald Rumsfeld was here," he said, "I'd ask him for his resignation."

Those are strong words from troops used to following orders. They say they will continue to do their job, but they no longer seem to have their hearts in the mission.

"I used to want to help these people," said Pfc. Eric Rattler, "but now I don't really care about them anymore. I've seen so much, you know, little kids throwing rocks at you. Once you pacify an area, it seems like the area you just came from turns bad again. I'd like this country to be all right, but I don't care anymore."


Wondering Why

What they care about is their families. Sgt. Terry Gilmore had to call his wife, Stacey, this week to her that he wouldn't be home in a few weeks to see her and their two little children.

"When I told her, she started crying," Gilmore said, his eyes moistening. "I mean, I almost started crying. I felt like my heart was broken. We couldn't figure out why they do it. Why they can keep us over here right after they told us we were coming home."

Sgt. Felipe Vega, who oversees the platoon, sat alone in the platoon quarters, writing a letter. A photo of his wife, Rhonda, was taped to the wall above him.

It is Vega's job to maintain morale. That's not easy, he told me, when the Army keeps changing the orders.

"They turn around and slap you in the face," he said.

When asked if that's the way it feels, he said, "Yeah, kicked in the guts, slapped in the face."

Losing Faith

The 2nd Brigade originally came to Kuwait for six months of exercises. Then they stayed to fight the war. Like the others, Vega thought that would be the end of it.

"What was told to us in Kuwait," he said, "was the fastest way to go home was through Baghdad. And that's what we did."

But more than three months later they are still here.

"Well it pretty much makes me lose faith in the Army," said Pfc. Jayson Punyhotra, one of the soldiers grouped around the table. "I mean, I don't really believe anything they tell me. If they told me we were leaving next week, I wouldn't believe them."

Fighting words from men who are eager to put down their weapons.  
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July 16, 2003

Rape (and Silence About It) Haunts Baghdad
By NEELA BANERJEE


AGHDAD, Iraq, July 15 — In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.

But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, "Let me go!"

"I am afraid of the gangsters," Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. "I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares."

Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital's streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported.

The breakdown of the Iraqi government after the war makes any crime hard to quantify.

But the incidence of rape and abduction in particular seems to have increased, according to discussions with physicians, law-enforcement officials and families involved.

A new report by Human Rights Watch based on more than 70 interviews with law-enforcement officials, victims and their families, medical personnel and members of the coalition authority found 25 credible reports of abduction and sexual violence since the war. Baghdadis believe there are far more, and fear is limiting women's role in the capital's economic, social and political life just as Iraq tries to rise from the ashes, the report notes.

For most Iraqi victims of abduction and rape, getting medical and police assistance is a humiliating process. Deeply traditional notions of honor foster a sense of shame so strong that many families offer no consolation or support for victims, only blame.

Sanariya's four brothers and parents beat her daily, Fatin said, picking up a bamboo slat her father uses. The city morgue gets corpses of women who were murdered by their relatives in so-called honor killings after they returned from an abduction — even, in some cases, when they had not been raped, said Nidal Hussein, a morgue nurse.

"For a woman's family, all this is worse than death," said Dr. Khulud Younis, a gynecologist at the Alwiyah Women's Hospital. "They will face shame. If a woman has a sister, her future will be gone. These women don't deserve to be treated like this."

It is not uncommon in Baghdad to see lines of cars outside girls' schools. So fearful are parents that their daughters will be taken away that they refuse to simply drop them off; they or a relative will stay outside all day to make sure nothing happens.

"Women and girls today in Baghdad are scared, and many are not going to schools or jobs or looking for work," said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "If Iraqi women are to participate in postwar society, their physical security needs to be an urgent priority."

Beyda Jafar Sadiq, 17, made the simple decision to go to school on the morning of May 22 and never returned. Her family has been looking for her ever since. They have appealed to every international nongovernmental organization, the Iraqi police and the American authorities. Her eldest brother, Feras, 29, has crisscrossed the country, visiting the morgue in Basra in the south, traveling to Amara and Nasiriya on reports from acquaintances that they saw a girl who looked like Beyda.

"I just want to find her," said Beyda's mother, Zakiya Abd, her eyes swollen with grief. "Whether she's alive or dead, I just want to find her."

Some police in Baghdad concede that at this point, there is little they can do to help. Their precinct houses were thoroughly looted after the war. Despite promises from the American authorities, Baghdad police still lack uniforms, weapons, communications and computer equipment and patrol cars.

"We used to patrol all the time before the war," said a senior officer at the Aadimiya precinct house. "Now, nothing, and the criminals realize there is no security on the streets."

The Human Rights Watch report alleges that sometimes when women try to report a rape or families ask for help in finding abducted women, they are turned away by Iraqi police officers indifferent to the crimes. Some law-enforcement officials insist abduction and rape have not increased, while other officials and many medical personnel disagree.

Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and now an adviser to the Interior Ministry, told of recently firing a precinct chief when he learned that the official had failed to pursue a family's report of their missing 16-year-old daughter. "The biggest part of the issue is a culture that precludes people from reporting," Mr. Kerik said. "It encourages people not to report."

If an Iraqi woman wants to report a rape, she has to travel a bureaucratic odyssey. She first has to go to the police for documents that permit her to get a forensic test. That test is performed only at the city morgue. The police take a picture of the victim and stamp it, and then stamp her arm. "That is so no one else goes in her place and says that she was raped, that she lost her virginity," said Ms. Hussein, the nurse.

At the morgue, a committee of three male doctors performs a gynecological examination on the victim to determine if there was sexual abuse. The doctors are available only from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. If a victim arrives at any other time, she has to return the next day, without washing away any physical evidence. Hospitals can check victims only for broader trauma, like contusions and broken bones.

Dr. Younis said she had seen more rape cases in the months after the war than before. Yet even when women come to the hospital with injuries that are consistent with rape, they often insist something else happened. A 60-year-old woman asserted that she had been hit by a car. The mother of a 6-year-old girl begged the doctor to write a report saying that her daughter's hymen had been ruptured because she fell on a sharp object, a common lie families tell in the case of rape, Dr. Younis said.

Shame and fear compel the lies, Dr. Younis said. "A woman's father or brother, they feel it is their duty to kill her" if she has been raped, Dr. Younis said. "It is the tribal law. They will get only six months in prison and then they are out."

Sanariya's family took her to a doctor three days after her attack only because the bleeding had not stopped. She had been sitting on the stairs at about 4 p.m. on May 22 when an armed man dragged her into an abandoned building next door. He shot at neighbors who tried to help the girl. He fled when she began screaming during the assault.

Her mother refuses to let her outside now to play. Fatin lied to her family and said an operation had been done to restore Sanariya's hymen. But when her eldest brother, Ahmed, found out otherwise, he wanted to kill Sanariya, Fatin said.

Out of earshot of her family, Sanariya said she feels no better now, two months after the attack. "I don't sleep at night," she said in the hallway. "I don't sleep."

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COMMENTARY

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

 

And We Didn't Even Have to Read His Lips
By Michael Kinsley

July 16, 2003

Once again, a mysterious criminal stalks the nation's capital.

First there was the mystery sniper.

Then there was the mystery arsonist.

Now there is the mystery ventriloquist.

The media are in a frenzy of speculation and leakage. Senators are calling for hearings. All of Washington demands an answer: Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President Bush's State of the Union speech?

No investigation has plumbed such depths of the unknown since O.J. Simpson's hunt for the real killer of his ex-wife. (Whatever happened to that, by the way?)

Whodunnit? Was it Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a candlestick? Condoleezza Rice in the Situation Room with a bottle of Wite-Out and a felt-tipped pen?

Linguists note that the question "Who lied in Bush's State of the Union speech?" bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum, "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" They speculate that the two questions may have parallel answers.

But philosophers are still struggling to properly analyze the Grant's Tomb issue — let alone answer it. And experts say that even when this famous 19th century presidential puzzle is solved, it could be many years before the findings can be applied with any confidence to presidents of more recent vintage.

Lacking any real-life analogy that sufficiently captures the complexity of the Speech-gate puzzle and the challenge facing investigators dedicated to solving it, political scientists say the best comparison may be to the assassination of Maj. Strasser in the film "Casablanca."

If you recall, Humphrey Bogart is standing over the body, holding a smoking gun. Claude Rains says, "Maj. Strasser has been shot! Round up the usual suspects." And yet the mystery of who killed the general is never solved.

Ever since Watergate, a "smoking gun" has been the standard for judging any Washington scandal.

Many a miscreant has escaped with his reputation undamaged — or even enhanced by the publicity and pseudo-vindication — because there was no "smoking gun" like the Watergate tapes.

But now it seems that even this standard has been lifted. You would think that on the question of who told a lie in a speech, evidence seen on TV by millions of people around the world might count for something.

Apparently not.

The Bush administration has borrowed from Groucho Marx: "Who are you going to believe — us or your own two eyes?"



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
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A Firm Basis for Impeachment
Robert Scheer

July 15, 2003

Does the president not read? Does his national security staff, led by Condoleezza Rice, keep him in the dark about the most pressing issues of the day? Or is this administration blatantly lying to the American people to secure its ideological ends?

Those questions arise because of the White House admission that the charge that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was excised from a Bush speech in October 2002 after the CIA and State Department insisted it was unfounded. Bizarrely, however, three months later — without any additional evidence emerging — that outrageous lie was inserted into the State of the Union speech to justify the president's case for bypassing the United Nations Security Council, for chasing U.N. inspectors out of Iraq and for invading and occupying an oil-rich country.

This weekend, administration sources disclosed that CIA Director George Tenet intervened in October to warn White House officials, including deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley, not to use the Niger information because it was based on a single source. That source proved to be a forged document with glaring inconsistencies.

Bush's top security aides, led by Hadley's boss, Rice, went along with the CIA, and Bush's October speech was edited to eliminate the false charge that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger to create a nuclear weapon.

We now know that before Bush's January speech, Robert G. Joseph, the National Security Council individual who reports to Rice on nuclear proliferation, was fully briefed by CIA analyst Alan Foley that the Niger connection was no stronger than it had been in October. It is inconceivable that in reviewing draft after draft of the State of the Union speech, NSC staffers Hadley and Joseph failed to tell Rice that the president was about to spread a big lie to justify going to war.

On national security, the buck doesn't stop with Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA's concerns were backed by the State Department's conclusion that "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious."

For her part, Rice has tried to fend off controversy by claiming ignorance. On "Meet the Press" in June, Rice claimed, "We did not know at the time — no one knew at the time, in our circles — maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

On Friday, Rice admitted that she had known the State Department intelligence unit "was the one that within the overall intelligence estimate had objected to that sentence" and that Secretary of State Colin Powell had refused to use the Niger document in his presentation to the U.N. because of what she described as long-standing concerns about its credibility. But Rice also knew the case for bypassing U.N. inspections and invading Iraq required demonstrating an imminent threat. The terrifying charge that Iraq was hellbent on developing nuclear weapons would do the trick nicely.

However, with the discrediting of the Niger buy and the equally dubious citation of a purchase of aluminum tubes (which turned out to be inappropriate for the production of enriched uranium), one can imagine the disappointment at the White House. There was no evidence for painting Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.

The proper reaction should have been to support the U.N. inspectors in doing their work in an efficient and timely fashion. We now know, and perhaps the White House knew then, that the inspectors eventually would come up empty-handed because no weapons of mass destruction program existed — not even a stray vial of chemical and biological weapons has been discovered. However, that would have obviated the administration's key rationale for an invasion, so lies substituted for facts that didn't exist.

And there, dear readers, exists the firm basis for bringing a charge of impeachment against the president who employed lies to lead us into war.





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July 16, 2003

Rape (and Silence About It) Haunts Baghdad
By NEELA BANERJEE


AGHDAD, Iraq, July 15 — In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.

But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, "Let me go!"

"I am afraid of the gangsters," Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. "I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares."

Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital's streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported.

The breakdown of the Iraqi government after the war makes any crime hard to quantify.

But the incidence of rape and abduction in particular seems to have increased, according to discussions with physicians, law-enforcement officials and families involved.

A new report by Human Rights Watch based on more than 70 interviews with law-enforcement officials, victims and their families, medical personnel and members of the coalition authority found 25 credible reports of abduction and sexual violence since the war. Baghdadis believe there are far more, and fear is limiting women's role in the capital's economic, social and political life just as Iraq tries to rise from the ashes, the report notes.

For most Iraqi victims of abduction and rape, getting medical and police assistance is a humiliating process. Deeply traditional notions of honor foster a sense of shame so strong that many families offer no consolation or support for victims, only blame.

Sanariya's four brothers and parents beat her daily, Fatin said, picking up a bamboo slat her father uses. The city morgue gets corpses of women who were murdered by their relatives in so-called honor killings after they returned from an abduction — even, in some cases, when they had not been raped, said Nidal Hussein, a morgue nurse.

"For a woman's family, all this is worse than death," said Dr. Khulud Younis, a gynecologist at the Alwiyah Women's Hospital. "They will face shame. If a woman has a sister, her future will be gone. These women don't deserve to be treated like this."

It is not uncommon in Baghdad to see lines of cars outside girls' schools. So fearful are parents that their daughters will be taken away that they refuse to simply drop them off; they or a relative will stay outside all day to make sure nothing happens.

"Women and girls today in Baghdad are scared, and many are not going to schools or jobs or looking for work," said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "If Iraqi women are to participate in postwar society, their physical security needs to be an urgent priority."

Beyda Jafar Sadiq, 17, made the simple decision to go to school on the morning of May 22 and never returned. Her family has been looking for her ever since. They have appealed to every international nongovernmental organization, the Iraqi police and the American authorities. Her eldest brother, Feras, 29, has crisscrossed the country, visiting the morgue in Basra in the south, traveling to Amara and Nasiriya on reports from acquaintances that they saw a girl who looked like Beyda.

"I just want to find her," said Beyda's mother, Zakiya Abd, her eyes swollen with grief. "Whether she's alive or dead, I just want to find her."

Some police in Baghdad concede that at this point, there is little they can do to help. Their precinct houses were thoroughly looted after the war. Despite promises from the American authorities, Baghdad police still lack uniforms, weapons, communications and computer equipment and patrol cars.

"We used to patrol all the time before the war," said a senior officer at the Aadimiya precinct house. "Now, nothing, and the criminals realize there is no security on the streets."

The Human Rights Watch report alleges that sometimes when women try to report a rape or families ask for help in finding abducted women, they are turned away by Iraqi police officers indifferent to the crimes. Some law-enforcement officials insist abduction and rape have not increased, while other officials and many medical personnel disagree.

Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and now an adviser to the Interior Ministry, told of recently firing a precinct chief when he learned that the official had failed to pursue a family's report of their missing 16-year-old daughter. "The biggest part of the issue is a culture that precludes people from reporting," Mr. Kerik said. "It encourages people not to report."

If an Iraqi woman wants to report a rape, she has to travel a bureaucratic odyssey. She first has to go to the police for documents that permit her to get a forensic test. That test is performed only at the city morgue. The police take a picture of the victim and stamp it, and then stamp her arm. "That is so no one else goes in her place and says that she was raped, that she lost her virginity," said Ms. Hussein, the nurse.

At the morgue, a committee of three male doctors performs a gynecological examination on the victim to determine if there was sexual abuse. The doctors are available only from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. If a victim arrives at any other time, she has to return the next day, without washing away any physical evidence. Hospitals can check victims only for broader trauma, like contusions and broken bones.

Dr. Younis said she had seen more rape cases in the months after the war than before. Yet even when women come to the hospital with injuries that are consistent with rape, they often insist something else happened. A 60-year-old woman asserted that she had been hit by a car. The mother of a 6-year-old girl begged the doctor to write a report saying that her daughter's hymen had been ruptured because she fell on a sharp object, a common lie families tell in the case of rape, Dr. Younis said.

Shame and fear compel the lies, Dr. Younis said. "A woman's father or brother, they feel it is their duty to kill her" if she has been raped, Dr. Younis said. "It is the tribal law. They will get only six months in prison and then they are out."

Sanariya's family took her to a doctor three days after her attack only because the bleeding had not stopped. She had been sitting on the stairs at about 4 p.m. on May 22 when an armed man dragged her into an abandoned building next door. He shot at neighbors who tried to help the girl. He fled when she began screaming during the assault.

Her mother refuses to let her outside now to play. Fatin lied to her family and said an operation had been done to restore Sanariya's hymen. But when her eldest brother, Ahmed, found out otherwise, he wanted to kill Sanariya, Fatin said.

Out of earshot of her family, Sanariya said she feels no better now, two months after the attack. "I don't sleep at night," she said in the hallway. "I don't sleep."

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Joe Conason's Journal
While there may not be a prosecutable crime in the Niger yellowcake deception, there is undoubtedly an ongoing coverup.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

July 14, 2003 |

Despite George Tenet's humiliation at the hands of his dishonorable boss (and the boss's dishonorable minions), nobody is satisfied with the official White House excuses for the Niger yellowcake deception. That stewing dissatisfaction includes the administration's own top officials, whose story has shifted back and forth so many times that they can scarcely keep track of their own prevarications. They have yet to fashion a plausible narrative of their own actions.

A week ago, the administration admitted -- only six months too late -- that the Niger story was unsupported by facts. Then came the interoffice fracas over who was to blame, with Condi Rice shirking her own responsibility and placing it on Tenet. And now that Tenet has accepted that burden, even while pointing back at the White House in his official statement , Rice and Donald Rumsfeld insist that the story was "indeed accurate" and "technically correct" -- because the president attributed the false tale to British intelligence in his State of the Union address.


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July 15, 2003

Pattern of Corruption
By PAUL KRUGMAN


ore than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?

How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.

Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why we were going after a country that hadn't attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, U.S. security.

So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war.

The story of how the threat from Iraq's alleged W.M.D.'s was hyped is now, finally, coming out. But let's not forget the persistent claim that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, which allowed the hawks to pretend that the Iraq war had something to do with fighting terrorism.

As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.

And during the run-up to war, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, was willing to provide cover for his bosses — just as he did last weekend. In an October 2002 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he made what looked like an assertion that there really were meaningful connections between Saddam and Osama. Read closely, the letter is evasive, but it served the administration's purpose.

What about the risk that an invasion of Iraq would weaken America's security? Warnings from military experts that an extended postwar occupation might severely strain U.S. forces have proved precisely on the mark. But the hawks prevented any consideration of this possibility. Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days.

It gets worse. Knight Ridder newspapers report that a "small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department" were sure that their favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, could easily be installed in power. They were able to prevent skeptics from getting a hearing — and they had no backup plan when efforts to anoint Mr. Chalabi, a millionaire businessman, degenerated into farce.

So who will be held accountable? Mr. Tenet betrayed his office by tailoring statements to reflect the interests of his political masters, rather than the assessments of his staff — but that's not why he may soon be fired. Yesterday USA Today reported that "some in the Bush administration are arguing privately for a C.I.A. director who will be unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call witnesses."

Not that the committees are likely to press very hard: Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems more concerned about protecting his party's leader than protecting the country. "What concerns me most," he says, is "what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president."

In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their tracks by corrupting the system even further.  

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:: Beauxbeaux's Daddy 6:51 PM [+] ::
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Faulty Connection  

Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus , a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center .


As calls mount for a full-scale investigation into the Bush administration's manipulation of intelligence on Iraq's nonexistent nuclear and chemical weapons program, let's hope that the other causus bellum on which the administration based its war -- the alleged link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein -- also gets the scrutiny it deserves.

While the link was hyped less by administration officials than by right-wing idealogues and the conservative press, an organized campaign was nonetheless launched to persuade the American public that such a connection was real -- and represented a mortal threat.

A hint of such orchestration came in a June interview between Meet the Press host Tim Russert and former Gen. Wesley Clark, as publicized by the press watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

Clark: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

Russert: "By who? Who did that?"

Clark: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But -- I'm willing to say it -- but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."

Clark has never said who called him, but we can identify others who were asserting the same connection both on television and in print at the same time.

Without explicitly citing Iraq, Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle suggested -- even as the dust from the World Trade Center towers was settling over lower Manhattan -- that there had to be a state sponsor behind them.

"This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," he told The Washington Post . "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments. You don't walk in off the street and learn how to fly a Boeing 767."

Ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, Jr. was more direct. Speaking with Peter Jennings, he suggested Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center and continued: "[I]t's not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government, that... the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and... and on some matters has had direct contact with bin Laden."

He repeated that in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. Appearing with the State Department's former counterterrorism chief, Larry Johnson, Woolsey said, "My suspicion -- it's no more than that at this point -- is that there could be some government action involved together with bin Laden or a major terrorist group. And one strong suspect there I think would be the government of Iraq." (Johnson thought this highly unlikely. "Saddam is a lot of things," he said, "but he's not crazy.")

Later that evening, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) echoed Woolsey in a NPR interview: "I think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of elephant in the room today. There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it had associations with the previous effort to destroy the World Trade Center."

It remains unclear whether Woolsey, Perle, Kristol and the mystery person who tried to coach Clark really believed there was a connection, or whether they were trying to plant the idea in the public's mind in order to set the stage for war with Iraq. But recently revealed discussions within the administration now suggest the deception may have been intentional.

Forcing The Connection

CBS News' David Martin reported last September that ''[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks," FAIR pointed out recently. Martin attributed his account to contemporaneous notes by a Pentagon aide that quote Rumsfeld as asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL [for Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden]." The notes then go on to quote Rumsfeld as urging that the administration's response "go massive... sweep it all up, things related and not."

This was the mindset that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, brought with them to the administration's war council at Camp David four days later.

"Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had been examining military options in Iraq for months but nothing had emerged" before 9/11, wrote The Washington Post 's Bill Woodward and Dan Balz in their account of that meeting.

"Wolfowitz argued that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 created an opportunity to strike," according to the two reporters. "Now, Rumsfeld asked again: Is this the time to attack Iraq?"

"Powell objected," the Post account continues. "You're going to hear from your coalition partners, he told the president. They're all with you, every one, but they will go away if you hit Iraq. If you get something pinning 9/11 on Iraq, great -- let's put it out and kick them at the right time. But let's get Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq -- if we can prove Iraq had a role ." (emphasis added)

This was clearly taken as a challenge by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. No sooner had they returned to Washington than they convened a two-day meeting of the Perle-chaired DPB on how the crisis could be used to attack Iraq. The meeting, which the State Department was not even notified of, included a "guest" appearance from Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), on whose behalf Wolfowitz, Perle, Woolsey, and several other DPB members had been lobbying for years. According to the Wall Street Journal , several DPB members agreed that an attack on Iraq was indeed warranted, but that, following Powell's caution, it would be much easier to pull off if a link could be established between 9/11 and Hussein.

As a result, Woolsey was quietly dispatched to Europe -- again, without notice to the State Department, or even to the CIA -- to try to uncover evidence of such a link. So hush-hush was the mission that Woolsey himself has never said precisely what he was doing there, and the Pentagon disclaimed any information about it after it became public. (The State Department reportedly found out about the visit when British security forces called its embassy in London after detaining Woolsey for suspicious conduct in a sensitive area.) That he found nothing new to sustain the idea of a connection to Al Qaeda, let alone 9/11, didn't stop The Wall Street Journal from giving him space to recount all the rumors of Iraqi ties to intelligence and of Hussein's supposed involvement in the alleged assassination attempt against Bush Sr. in 1993. As a disappointed Woolsey told The New York Times on his return, "The first thing we have to do is develop some confidence that Iraq is involved in terrorist incidents against us, not meaning 9/11 " (emphasis added). A startling admission that, as of mid-October 2001, the war party had no evidence that Hussein was behind terrorist attacks against the United States.

With Help From The Fourth Estate

Even as the DPB was cloistered at the Pentagon, Perle was advising another effort across the Potomac to make Iraq an inevitable target of Bush's war on terror.

Shift to the headquarters of the then-obscure Project for the New American Century, an organization whose alumni include many of the most hawkish officials in the Bush administration. Just six floors below Perle's office at the American Enterprise Institute, William Kristol was circulating a draft letter published by The Washington Times on September 20, 2001, and signed by a veritable who's who of neo-conservative and right-wing ideologues. Many of these (Perle, Kristol, William Bennett, Eliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Clifford May, Norman Podhoretz and Randy Scheunemann, who would go on to head the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) would emerge as the most ubiquitous, persistent and vehement champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.

The letter laid out an agenda for the "war on terrorism" the hawks in the Pentagon and Cheney's office wanted to fight, an agenda that has since proven uncannily prescient. For our purposed, though, it is important for its explicit indifference as to whether Hussein was connected to 9/11.

"It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States," it said. " but even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power . Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism." (emphasis added)

The conclusion, then, is inescapable: the cadre -- both inside and outside the administration -- who would lead the United States to war 19 months later had already determined by no later than September 20 that 9/11 should be used as the pretext for Hussein's removal, regardless of his connection, if any, to Al Qaeda or the terrorist attacks themselves. But they felt the need to make the case for such a connection, to at least bring along the public, if not Washington's allies -- whose own intelligence agencies, including our own and Israel's, remained unconvinced. The result was a series of ever shakier, sometimes lurid, stories -- all jumped on and defended as gospel truth by the PNAC crowd and the various media and lobby groups associated with it.



Woolsey called the Ansar al-Islam story proof positive; Cheney called it "devastating."

The Flimsy Ties That Bind

Thus there was the (still-running) controversy over whether Mohammed Atta, the Saudi ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001 -- a story that originated, according to various accounts, with a single Middle Eastern informant of undetermined reliability who told Czech intelligence he had seen the two men seated together at a Prague café five months before the 9/11 attacks. The FBI, CIA and foreign intelligence services, including Mossad, have dismissed the story. According to Newsweek , the FBI has receipts proving Atta was traveling between Florida and Virginia Beach at the time. Yet as recently as last September, Cheney was coy on the question: "[W]e have reporting," he said during an interview, "that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center." (Note the similarity in phraseology used by Bush to describe "British" reports that Hussein had tried to acquire uranium in Africa.)

The fact that the story was not considered credible by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies did not prevent it from making a huge and continuing splash in the U.S. media. In addition to the PNAC cadre who have hyped it at every opportunity, The New York Times columnist William Safire and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal have hawked it as gospel, and the doubters as CIA dupes.

Then there was the report about the airline fuselage at the Iraqi military base at Salman Pak where, according to Perle and others, a defector (apparently channeled to the Pentagon from the INC) had sworn they had seen non-Iraqi Muslims being trained in hijacking. But U.S. intelligence officials had known about the fuselage since it was installed in the mid-1980s, understood that it had been used to train security personnel in preventing hijackings and, after interviewing the defector, dismissed the allegation.

Another story seized on by the hawks appeared in The New Yorker in spring 2002. The author, Jeffrey Goldberg, had traveled to northern Iraq, where he was given access to prisoners from Ansar al-Islam, a small group of Islamist guerrillas around Halabja. On the basis of one interview with a former drug-runner, Goldberg made it seem that Ansar was part of Al Qaeda and also linked to Saddam's intelligence services. Ansar soon became the key link, not only to Al Qaeda but to chemical warfare as well. The group was said to be developing poisons -- in other words, weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Woolsey called the story proof positive; Cheney called it "devastating."

It was indeed a great story, but nothing has since turned up to sustain the key elements. What evidence has emerged about Ansar's external links suggests the group may have been more closely tied to an Iranian security faction than to Baghdad. Its headquarters were obliterated in the opening stages of the war, and no traces of poisons turned up in the debris. The man reported to be the link between the group and Saddam is nowhere to be found. While the CIA was excoriated by Woolsey, Perle and others for not taking Goldberg's account more seriously, the Ansar lead appears to have collapsed on its own.

Then there was Parisoula Lampsos, Hussein's self-declared former mistress (also provided by the INC), who gave several juicy interviews on U.S. network television. In an appearance conveniently timed for maximum impact -- the day after Bush's 9/11 address to the United Nations -- Lampsos revealed to ABC's Primetime Thursday that Hussein's son Uday had told her that Hussein met personally with bin Laden at least twice in the mid-1990s, and on one occasion given him money. According to Newsweek , the CIA found her story incredible, but the hawks in Rumsfeld's office and their PNAC allies outside insisted that she get a hearing, which she did, and which apparently went nowhere. Perle called the rejection of her story "the latest example of the CIA's unfailing ability to spot intelligence when they see it."

The last story revolves around a mysterious and peripatetic Islamist fighter named Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was the apparent subject in Bush's State of the Union address in January, when he charged that "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda." Powell made this explicit one week later when, in the only direct reference to any link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council, he charged that Baghdad "harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."

Administration officials had been privately briefing selected reporters for several months about Zarqawi, who was believed to have been badly wounded during the bombing in Afghanistan. He reportedly escaped to Iran, then on to Baghdad, where his injured leg may have been amputated. Offiicals assumed Iraqi intelligence must have known about his presence, if it did not actually provide him and his followers with protection.

From there, rumors have the peripatetic Palestinian Zarqawi and his new (but unconfirmed) prosthesis visiting the Ansar group in northern Kurdistan to see how their poisons were coming along, traveling to the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, and attending a "terrorist summit" in south Lebanon. While in Bangkok, he is also alleged to have ordered the assassination of a USAID official in Jordan.

As with the other stories, doubts abound. Zarqawi, for example, is not considered part of Al Qaeda, or even a "collaborator," according to regional specialists. His various sightings are also said to be based on dubious accounts. Nor is it clear that Hussein knew about Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad, if indeed he was ever there. And, needless to say, neither he nor his followers has been found by U.S. troops, although he has been the target of a high-priority search. Intelligence files captured by U.S. troops in Baghdad have likewise turned up nothing.

Three months after U.S. troops captured Baghdad, evidence establishing a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda is as elusive as the yellowcake from Niger.

Selling It Anyway

So, three months after U.S. troops captured Baghdad, evidence establishing a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda -- let alone 9/11 -- is as elusive as the yellowcake from Niger. Yet just as the administration's talk about Baghdad's WMD programs was effective in rallying public opinion behind war, so the campaign to persuade Americans that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were comrades-in-arms has met with success.

Two-thirds of adult Americans believed that "Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the 9/11 attacks," according to a Pew Research Center poll taken just before the House of Representatives voted on the war resolution -- a smashing tribute to the persistence and effectiveness of Wolfowitz, Perle, Woosley & Co., considering the emptiness of the claim.

That percentage has declined over time, but a strong majority still believe that Hussein's Iraq supported Al Qaeda. According to a poll by released July 1 by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), no less than 25 percent of respondents believed that Iraq was "directly involved" in 9/11, while an additional 36 percent agreed with the statement that Iraq "gave substantial support to Al Qaeda, but was not involved in the 9/11 attacks."

The same poll found that 52 percent of respondents believe that the U.S. has actually found "clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization."

A mere 7 percent said "there was no connection at all."

The hawks still insist the evidence will show that Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots, and even that Hussein had a role in 9/11. So when the military announced this week that it had captured Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Sami al-Ani, the intelligence community went all-aquiver. Al-Ani was the Iraqi agent with whom Atta allegedly met at that Prague cafe back in April 2001.

"If he chose to, he could confirm the meeting with Atta," Perle told The Washington Post . "It would be nice to see that laid to rest. There's a lot he could tell us."

Perle offered one caveat, however. "Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the interrogating," he told the Post , suggesting that the CIA might play down the evidence.

The CIA, whose analysts have indeed been skeptical of the connection from the outset but were clearly overwhelmed by the combined machinations of the Pentagon hawks, the neocons, and their allies in the media, called Perle's suggestion "absurd."

"We're open to the possibility that they met, but we need to be presented with something more than Mr. Perle's suspicions," said spokesman Bill Harlow. "Rather than us being predisposed, it sounds like he is. He's just shopping around for an interrogator who will cook the books to his liking."

A more succinct summary of how we got from those mysterious calls to Clark on 9/11 to 148,000 troops in Iraq today would be difficult to imagine.


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Published: Jul 14 2003


 

:: Beauxbeaux's Daddy 8:46 AM [+] ::
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July 14, 2003

In First Step, New Iraq Council Abolishes Hussein's Holidays
By PATRICK E. TYLER


AGHDAD, Iraq, July 13 — Three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, 25 prominent Iraqis from a variety of political, ethnic and religious backgrounds stepped onto a stage here today and declared themselves the first interim government of Iraq.

The members of the Governing Council said they would begin meeting in continuous session on Monday to decide on a rotating presidency or a similar leadership structure. As its first act today, the Council abolished six national holidays that had been celebrated under Mr. Hussein's 24-year rule and created a new national day.

Two of the banned holidays were fast approaching, adding to the urgency of forming a government, Iraqis said. Monday, July 14, is the anniversary of the 1958 overthrow of the monarchy, and July 17 is the anniversary of the 1968 coup that brought Mr. Hussein's Baath Party to power.

In their place, the Council declared April 9, the day that Baghdad fell to allied forces as Mr. Hussein went into hiding, the national day of a new Iraqi state. That state will not emerge until the interim government decides on a process to write a new constitution and to hold the first democratic elections. No timetable for either task has been set.

Iyad Alawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord and a member of the Council, said the first priority of the government "will be security and the resumption of services." The Council was selected through negotiations between the main Iraqi opposition groups and the office of L. Paul Bremer III, the American civilian administrator for the occupation.

"We hope sometime next week to have declarations on security that will comfort the Iraqi people," he said without elaborating. Some Iraqis are pressing the United States military to form a paramilitary force of Iraqis to help defeat the remnants of Mr. Hussein's security forces believed to be involved in attacks on American soldiers.

The government formation took place under heavy security by American soldiers, who have cordoned off a broad section of central Baghdad that includes Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace and the convention center where today's ceremony took place. The Iraqis met privately for two hours and then had lunch with the Western overseers of the occupation — Mr. Bremer, and John Sawers, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain — and Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations representative, and other senior American and British officials.

When the 25 emerged for a news conference, 2 wore the black turbans of Shiite Islamic clerics descended from the Prophet Muhammad and 2 wore the flowing robes and headdresses of tribal sheiks. Three women were among them, two in head scarves and one without. The rest, men of various political stripes, wore business suits.

They arranged themselves in a semicircle as one of the clerics, Sayyed Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, read a one-page statement, saying, "The establishment of this Council is an expression of the national Iraqi will in the wake of the collapse of the former oppressive regime."

The occupation leaders looked up at them from the front row in the convention center hall. During weeks of negotiations, they agreed to cede considerable executive powers to Iraqis after initially resisting anything greater than an advisory role. They did so in the face of a daunting reconstruction agenda, a critical shortage of money and a security environment that resembles a low-intensity war for the more than 160,000 allied troops.

From here forward, the 25 Iraqis — doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, clerics, diplomats, political activists, businessmen and a judge — will share responsibility for the course of postwar Iraq.

A Kurd, Hoshyar Zebari, the political adviser to Massoud Barzani, leader of the largest Kurdish political party, was designated as the Council's press secretary.

But when they walked out on stage, it was the elderly cleric, Mr. Uloum, who approached the microphone. Holding the text of the statement just below his snowy white beard and squinting through thick glasses, he intoned, "In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate."

Establishing this interim government is the first significant political milestone in postwar Iraq, and some of the new government members expressed a strong determination to expand their powers.

"We hope that this Council will work for a very short time," said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the other Shiite cleric who represents the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq. "We should have a constitutional government and we should get rid of the occupation."

The very diversity of such a large Council raised questions of whether it would be able to project unified goals and principles in a chaotic transitional period where significant segments of the population were pulling in different directions.

In the north, Kurds are seeking to protect the autonomy they have won over the last 12 years. In the center, Sunnis are divided by mistrust for Western occupation and old loyalties to Mr. Hussein. In the south, Shiites worry that their majority status will be subordinated, as it was in the last century, to the Sunni minority.

Members of the Council said today that they had been assured that their decisions would not be vetoed by the occupation authority.

"I don't foresee that Mr. Bremer will ever cast a veto against any decision taken by the Council," said Adnan Pachachi, 80, a foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations during the pre-Hussein era of the 1960's. "We were assured that all decisions of the Council will be respected." Differences of opinion, he added, can "be managed easily through consultation."

Mr. Bremer was urged by a number of advisers to lower his profile so as to underscore the Council's independence. He has withdrawn significantly from asserting any role in organizing the task of writing a constitution. The Council will set up a preparatory committee to decide the process for selecting a drafting committee.

Great difficulties surround the constitutional question. Earlier this month, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the leading clerics of Shiite Islam, warned that the occupation powers should have no role in the constitutional process. A number of the council members said they would work to devise a selection process that would win the acceptance of the grand ayatollah, who has yet to meet with any official from the occupation powers.

The only non-Iraqi to speak at the ceremony was Mr. Vieira de Mello. "Iraq today finds itself in a unique and difficult situation: a great country beset by much recent tragedy, currently without full enjoyment of its sovereignty," he said. "Today, therefore, your convening marks the first major development towards the restoration of Iraq's rightful status as a fully sovereign state."

The liveliest moments of the news conference occurred when some council members disputed questions from the news media. The Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani criticized a BBC correspondent for suggesting that the interim government would have limited powers and therefore little legitimacy among the Iraqis.

"The Council has a lot of authority, appointing ministers, diplomats, budgets, security," Mr. Talabani said. He then accused the BBC of having been biased toward Mr. Hussein's government during the war.

The strongest comments were directed at the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera. "The satellite channels are expecting Saddam to come back, but he is in the trash can of history," Mr. Uloum shouted after someone else questioned the legitimacy of the interim government. "I am very sorry these Arab channels betrayed their Arab brothers."

Only one of the council members, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, expressed public gratitude to the United States and Britain for removing the former government.

A majority of the council members are drawn from the ranks of Iraqi opposition leaders in exile and Kurdish leaders from northern Iraq, who led the external fight to topple Mr. Hussein.

One Iraqi who carried on that struggle from inside Iraq, Abdul Karim Mahoud, said today, "Those who were outside of Iraq represent some Iraqi opposition groups, and we hope now that they're back in Iraq they will represent some of the Iraqis in this country."

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq13jul13,1,3811720.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

EDITORIAL

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

 

Rescue the Effort in Iraq

July 13, 2003

Guerrilla-style forces fire rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and rifles at U.S. soldiers. Iraqis who cooperate with Americans are murdered. Bitter grumbling grows because Iraqis have yet to see fully restored services, like electricity and water, amid the broiling heat. The basic political restructuring of Iraq lags as debate rages in Washington about the commitment of American resources. In short, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is turning into a disaster.

The Bush administration — which has offered dismissive, cavalier assurances that all's well and progressing in Iraq — must face the problems squarely and respond urgently. Send more troops, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000, to bolster the 140,000-plus there already. Send more civil administrators and aid workers; keep them in Iraq longer. Seek more international help, especially from experienced peacekeepers. Tell the troops, the Iraqis and the American public what the plan is for Iraq and how it will be executed.

The lack of international legitimacy for the war — a result of Washington's poor diplomacy — has handicapped U.S. efforts to rebuild a nation ravaged by years of conflict and sanctions. The Bush administration gave up on getting United Nations authorization for the conflict; that affected it little on the battlefield, but it hurts now — and a failed Iraqi reconstruction will be even more injurious to America. If U.S. promises go unfulfilled in Iraq, the world will view America as an invading bully that ousts regimes and leaves only wreckage. Its announced ambitions to spread democracy will be hollow.

President Bush's insistence that the United States will stay the course in Iraq, even with a present price tag of almost $4 billion a month, is far more welcome than his outrageous bluster — "bring them on" — concerning those Iraqis who would attack Americans. Iraqis have killed more than two dozen American troops since Bush declared major combat over May 1.

The violence and increasing anti-American sentiment — visible in graffiti — underscore the need for more soldiers to beef up patrols, collect intelligence and chase down attackers. The complex mission requires a blend of troops: combat forces to suppress guerrilla assaults and peacekeepers to stop petty crime, reopen schools and get buses back on the road. U.S. units in Iraq deserve rotation home, to be replaced by fresh troops. Morale suffers when combat forces must extend their tours to serve as peacekeepers; replacements can be sharper and more efficient. The Pentagon took a good step last week when it said the 3rd Infantry Division would be brought home after its tour had been lengthened by months.

The administration should press the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for help, specifically asking key alliance members France and Germany — which opposed this war — to assist. Washington should give the U.N. a bigger peacekeeping role. India and other nations hint that they will provide troops if this happens.

The Bush administration also should dispatch more diplomats to help establish vital local governments across Iraq more quickly. Retired envoys with Middle East experience could be invaluable in working with fledgling city councils to instill democratic self-rule after decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

When Iraqis see their countrymen in charge, the animosity toward U.S. troops will decline. When the electricity and water get back to prewar levels, the political climate will improve. U.S. officials must get Iraqi leaders — those with untainted pasts — to believe and spread the word that it's up to them, not just their occupiers, to rebuild the country. Iraqis also must absorb this history lesson — America wants to get out of other countries, not stay; think Germany and Japan after World War II.

L. Paul Bremer III, the top U.S. official in Iraq, sped up formation of a national government last week. A permanent government is a year or two away; financing reconstruction is still uncertain. But the U.S. should not pledge Iraq's future oil and gas revenues to raise funds. Those are Iraqi resources, to be spent as Iraqis wish — not Americans, already vulnerable to claims that they toppled Hussein to get Iraq's oil.

Each day of chaos increases Iraqi anger at and misunderstanding of America. Most Iraqis believe America can do anything it wants: Washington desires oil, so fields were guarded quickly and not set afire; if the electricity doesn't work, it must be because of U.S. wishes.

When it went to war, the U.S. accepted responsibility for rebuilding Iraq. This task will take years. But now the administration must display as much urgency about stopping guerrilla attacks and improving Iraqis' lives as it did in marching into combat.

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Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
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