Category Archives: war in Iraq

NEWS: Waxman’s on the job

White House feels Waxman’s oversight gaze
By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, October 25, 2007

For months, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, has been threatening, subpoenaing and just plain badgering Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come before his panel to answer questions about the run-up to the Iraq war, corruption and State Department contracting.

Today, Rice will finally appear. But Waxman (D-Calif.) has not spent the week on a victory lap. He has found time to produce evidence accusing State Department security contractor Blackwater Worldwide of tax evasion, to fire off a letter to Rice demanding information about alleged mismanagement of a $1 billion contract to train Iraqi police, and to hold a hearing on uranium poisoning on Navajo land.

Waxman has become the Bush administration’s worst nightmare: a Democrat in the majority with subpoena power and the inclination to overturn rocks. But in Waxman the White House also faces an indefatigable capital veteran — with a staff renowned for its depth and experience — who has been waiting for this for 14 years. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Adminstration of torture

General claims Bush gave ‘marching orders’ on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
By Nick Juliano, Raw Story, October 2, 2007

More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.

amazon-administrationoftorture.jpgIn Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

“[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. “Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ‘stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.” [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: U.S. officials upbraid Kurds for failing to halt guerrillas

U.S. officials upbraid Kurds for failing to halt guerrillas
By Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, October 24, 2007

In unusual criticism, United States officials on Tuesday upbraided Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq for failing to curb the Kurdish guerrillas who operate unchecked in the autonomous region and use it as a safe haven for ambushes inside Turkey.

Those raids, which the Turkish authorities say have killed at least 42 people in the past month, have led the Turks to threaten an invasion into Iraq. Turkish armored vehicles continued to rumble into position on Tuesday along the mountainous border.

Until now, American officials have focused their public comments on delicately warning the Turks not to invade Iraq. But that changed on Tuesday when the State Department’s senior Iraq adviser, David M. Satterfield, laid some blame at the door of Kurdish leaders, who have been the staunchest supporters of the American military occupation of Iraq. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Use of contractors by State Dept. has soared

Use of contractors by State Dept. has soared
By John M. Broder and David Rohde, New York Times, October 24, 2007

Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, administration officials said Tuesday, but they said that the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts.

It was the first time that the administration had outlined the ballooning scope of the contracts, and it provided a new indication of how the State Department’s efforts to monitor private companies had not kept pace. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished.

A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCorp International and Blackwater USA to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 17 contract compliance officers at the State Department’s management bureau overseeing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

OPINION: “I’m tired of being branded a terrorist: tired that a human life lost in my county is no loss at all.”

To be a journalist in Iraq
Editorial, New York Times, October , 2007

“To be a journalist in violence-ridden Iraq today, ladies and gentlemen, is not a matter lightly undertaken. Every path is strewn with danger, every checkpoint, every question a direct threat.

“Every interview we conduct may be our last. So much is happening in Iraq. So much that is questionable. So much that we, as journalists, try to fathom and portray to the people who care to know.

“In every society there is good and bad. Laws regulate the conduct of the society. My country is now lawless. Innocent blood is shed every day, seemingly without purpose. Hundreds of thousands have been killed for seemingly no reason. It is our responsibility to do our utmost to acquire the answers, to dig them up with our bare hands if we must.

“But that knowledge comes at a dear price, for since the war started, four and half years ago, an average of about one reporter and media assistant killed every week is something we have to live with.” [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: U.S. tax dollars at work

2 reports assail State Dept. role in Iraq security
By Eric Schmitt and David Rodhe, New York Times, October 23, 2007

A pair of new reports have delivered sharply critical judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions.

A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

At the same time, a government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police officers in Iraq. [complete article]

Bush’s request for wars increases to $196 billion
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, October 23, 2007

President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve $196 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other national security programs, setting the stage for a new confrontation with Democrats over the administration’s handling of Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s request increased the amount of the proposed spending by $46 billion over the $150 billion already requested this year. Much of the added spending would pay for new armored vehicles designed to withstand attacks by mines and roadside bombs, and a rise in operational costs because of the increase in the force in Iraq, now at more than 160,000 troops. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Kurds fighting on two fronts

In Iraq, conflict on a second Kurdish front
By Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times, October 23, 2007

Deadly raids into Turkey by Kurdish militants holed up in northern Iraq are the focus of urgent diplomacy, with Turkey threatening invasion of Iraq and the United States begging for restraint while expressing solidarity with Turkish anger.

Yet out of the public eye, a chillingly similar battle has been under way on the Iraqi border with Iran. Kurdish guerrillas ambush and kill Iranian forces and retreat to their hide-outs in Iraq. The Americans offer Iran little sympathy. Tehran even says Washington aids the Iranian guerrillas, a charge the United States denies. True or not, that conflict, like the Turkish one, has explosive potential. [complete article]

Bush administration urges Iraqi Kurds to help end raids into Turkey
By Helene Cooper and David S. Cloud, New York Times, October 23, 2007

Scrambling to forestall a threatened Turkish retaliatory attack in northern Iraq, the Bush administration pressed Iraq’s Kurdish leaders on Monday to rein in the Kurdish group whose raids into Turkey have heightened tensions along the border.

But American officials acknowledged that neither the United States nor Iraq had done much recently to constrain the Kurdish group, known as the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K. Current and former Bush administration officials said a special envoy appointed by the Bush administration in 2006, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who had retired from the military after serving as NATO’s supreme allied commander, had recently stepped down in frustration over Iraqi and American inaction.

The United States lists the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization, but American military commanders in Baghdad have long resisted calls by Turkey to devote American military resources to going after the group in mountainous northern Iraq. The commanders say they have barely enough troops to deal with the insurgency in Iraq, so using them to contain the P.K.K. has never been a serious option. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Bin Laden calls for unity among insurgents

New audiotape from Osama Bin Laden urges Iraqi insurgents to put aside divisions and unite
AP, October 22, 2007

Osama bin Laden has scolded his al-Qaida followers in Iraq and other insurgents, saying they have “been lax” for failing to overcome fanatical tribal loyalties and unite in the fight against U.S. troops.

The message of his new audiotape reflected the growing disarray among Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgents and bin Laden’s client group in the country, both of which are facing heavy U.S. military pressure and an uprising among Sunni tribesmen.

In the brief tape played Monday on Al-Jazeera television, the terrorist leader urged militants to “beware of division … The Muslim world is waiting for you to gather under one banner.” [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Sadr calls for restraint

Mahdi Army chief calls for restraint
AP, October 22, 2007

Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Monday urged his Mahdi Army militiamen to refrain from harming or killing fellow Iraqis on the pretext of self-defense.

In what appeared to be a call on Iraqi forces to stop cooperating with the U.S. military, al-Sadr said Iraq’s army and police must not kill Iraqis in the joint U.S.-Iraqi security campaign launched more than eight ago.

It was not clear what prompted al-Sadr’s short statement, which was issued a day after the U.S. military said it had killed 49 suspected militants during a dawn operation in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City enclave, a Mahdi Aramy stronghold, to capture an Iranian-linked militia chief. The wanted individual was not captured. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

FEATURE: Bush’s return to the imperial strategy of the great powers of Europe

Bush’s neo-imperialist war
By John B. Judis, The American Prospect, October 22, 2007

In 1882 the British occupied Egypt. Although they claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed. The U.S. Army Area Handbook aptly describes the British decision to stay:

At the outset of the occupation, the British government declared its intention to withdraw its troops as soon as possible. This could not be done, however, until the authority of the khedive was restored. Eventually, the British realized that these two aims were incompatible because the military intervention, which Khedive Tawfiq supported and which prevented his overthrow, had undermined the authority of the ruler. Without the British presence, the khedival government would probably have collapsed.

The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolt tossed them out. They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt’s finances and foreign policy.

On Sept. 13, 2007, George W. Bush issued his report to the nation on the progress of “the surge” in Iraq. Echoing the British in Egypt, he promised “a reduced American presence” in Iraq, but he added ominously that “Iraqi leaders from all communities … understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency. These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship — in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, Iraqi leaders who owe their positions to the U.S. occupation want the Americans to stay indefinitely, and Bush is ready to oblige them, albeit with a smaller force. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Turkey’s president: “If Iraq keeps harboring terrorists, Turkey has the right to destroy this.”

Kurds from Iraq kill 17 soldiers in Turkey
By Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, October 22, 2007

An audacious cross-border ambush by Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq killed at least 17 Turkish soldiers Sunday, ratcheting up pressure on the Turkish government to launch a military offensive into Iraq. The Turkish military said Monday that eight of its soldiers were also missing after the raid, as scattered protests broke out around the country among groups demanding retaliation.

The pre-dawn attack took place as the U.S. military said its troops killed 49 fighters in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, one of the highest death tolls for a military operation since President Bush declared an end to active combat in 2003.

But Iraqi officials and residents of the vast Shiite enclave, loyal to powerful anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said 13 people were killed and all of the victims were innocent civilians, including children. They warned that the attack could lead Sadr to rescind a suspension of his militia’s operations. [complete article]

See also, Iraq says Kurdish rebels will announce ceasefire (The Guardian).

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: U.S. planners see Shiite militias as rising threat

U.S. planners see Shiite militias as rising threat
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, October 22, 2007

Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker have concluded that Shiite extremists pose a rising threat to the U.S. effort in Iraq, as the relative influence of Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq has diminished drastically because of ongoing U.S. operations.

This judgment forms part of the changes that Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, approved last week to their classified campaign strategy for the country, which covers the period through summer 2009. The updated plan anticipates shifting the U.S. military effort to focus more on countering Shiite militias — some backed by Iran — that have generated new violence as they battle for power in the south and elsewhere in Iraq, said senior military and diplomatic officials familiar with the plan.

“As the Sunni insurgents quit fighting us, the problems we have with criminality and other militia, many of them Shia, become relatively more important,” said a U.S. Embassy official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not finalized. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

OPINION: The mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars

Suicide is not painless
By Frank Rich, New York Times, October 21, 2007

It was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: British raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners

SAS raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners
By Michael Smith, The Sunday Times, October 21, 2007

British special forces have crossed into Iran several times in recent months as part of a secret border war against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds special forces, defence sources have disclosed.

There have been at least half a dozen intense firefights between the SAS and arms smugglers, a mixture of Iranians and Shi’ite militiamen.

The unreported fighting straddles the border between Iran and Iraq and has also involved the Iranian military firing mortars into Iraq. UK commanders are concerned that Iran is using a militia ceasefire to step up arms supplies in preparation for an offensive against their base at Basra airport.

An SAS squadron is carrying out operations along the Iranian border in Maysan and Basra provinces with other special forces, the Australian SAS and American special-operations troops. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS & ANALYSIS: The Turkish cross-border threat

Who’s bluffing on the Turkish-Iraqi border?
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, October 20, 2007

The dictionary definition of “terrorist” says: “A person, usually a member or group, who uses or advocates terrorism,” adding that it is a “person who terrorizes or frightens others”.

By all accounts, both definitions apply to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that is operating against Turkey from northern Iraq, with approximately 3,500 insurgents, under the watchful eye of the United States. The PKK after all “uses” and “advocates” terrorism and it does “terrorize” and “frighten” the people of Turkey. The US seemingly agrees with this terminology, and so does the European Union. Both say that the PKK is a “terrorist group” but are unable – or unwilling – to lift a finger to halt its military operations in Turkey.

Much of the world currently seems fixated on the Turkish-Iraqi border, where 60,000 Turkish troops are mobilized on high-alert, awaiting orders to carry out cross-border operations into Iraqi Kurdistan. On Wednesday, the Turkish Parliament voted in favor of a one-year mandate for the Turkish Army to carry out strikes to root out the PKK from Iraq. Out of 550 deputies, an impressive 526 voted for the military adventure. [complete article]

Iraq president assails Syria’s support for Turkish cross-border threat
By Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, October 21, 2007

President Jalal Talabani of Iraq has criticized Syria for supporting Turkey’s threat to carry out military attacks against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

Mr. Talabani said in an interview that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had crossed a “red line” by speaking approvingly of Turkey’s threat of a cross-border offensive against the rebels.

“Usually I refrain from commenting on Syrian positions to maintain our historical good relations,” Mr. Talabani, himself a Kurd, said in the interview, published Saturday in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. “But this time I cannot support this crossing of a red line.” [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

NEWS: Syria shuts main exit from war for Iraqis

Syria shuts main exit from war for Iraqis
By Thanassis Cambanis, New York Times, October 21, 2007

Long the only welcoming country in the region for Iraqi refugees, Syria has closed its borders to all but a small group of Iraqis and imposed new visa rules that will legally require the 1.5 million Iraqis currently in Syria to return to Iraq.

The change quietly went into effect on Oct. 1. Syrian officials have often threatened to stem the flow of refugees over the past eight months, but until now have backed down after pleas from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

For more than a year, 2,000 to 4,000 Iraqis have fled into Syria every day, according to United Nations officials. On the last four days that the border remained open, the officials said, 25,000 Iraqis crossed into Syria.

“The door is now closed to Iraqis in every direction,” said Sybella Wilkes, a spokeswoman here for the United Nations refugee agency. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

ANALYSIS: Scenarios for a post-occupation Iraq

Post-U.S. Scenarios: the bad, the worse, and the ugly
By Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, October 18, 2007

Let’s just get the wishful thinking out of the way first. Peace won’t break out if and when the United States leaves Iraq; violence will continue, and possibly get worse. That’s not a rationale for leaving the troops in place, just a hard reality. How bad, exactly, will it be? Here are four scenarios, ranging from the horrific to the somewhat hopeful. [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail

ANALYSIS: The first hints of a new sovereign and unified Iraq?

First steps
Badger, Missing Links, October 18, 2007

“When you are surrounded by nothing but failure, then any success you can achieve will have a magnified effect,” writes historian Bashir Nafie in an overview of Iraqi politics. His starting point is the recent announcement of a six-faction resistance alliance (the gist of which was to unite two MB-related factions with the four-faction Iraqi-Islamist Reform and Jihad grouping led by the Islamic Army in Iraq). A small step, to be sure, says Nafie.

But look at what is going on in the other camps. The initial push from the National Pact proposed by Tareq al Hashemi (for instance he talked to Sistani about it) has quickly died, the problem here being that Hashemi, for all his occasional displays of courage, refuses to see things as they are. Under foreign occupation, proposals and visions and so on will inevitably be mutually conflicting, moreover they will, each of them, benefit from only the narrowest of popular support. Proposals based on “good will” alone in these circumstances will go nowhere. There needs to be a “central political force” with broad support (and Nafie doesn’t find it necessary to spell out the obvious, namely that this includes rejecting the foreign occupation). [complete article]

Facebooktwittermail