Just How Sorvergein Is Iraq, Mr. Bush?

If Iraq is a sovereign nation, they can ask anyone to leave any damn time they please for improper use of a pea-shooter, wearing the wrong color skin color, any color turban, or for any freakin' reason, for that matter...or they can not allow them in to begin with.

If you can recall, Mr Bush, we do that all the time.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's prime minister wants private military contractor Blackwater out of his country after an Iraqi probe found Blackwater guards randomly shot civilians without provocation in a Baghdad square last month, an aide said Tuesday.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and most Iraqi officials are "completely satisfied" with the findings and are "insisting" that Blackwater leave the country, al-Maliki adviser Sami al-Askari told CNN.

The U.S. State Department and the FBI are conducting their own investigation into the September 16 killings in western Baghdad's Nusoor Square, and a joint U.S.-Iraqi commission is reviewing the results of both probes. Mirembe Natango, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said policy recommendations would be up to that commission.

"We need to let the joint commission do its work," Natango said.

The State Department relies on Blackwater contractors to provide security for U.S. Embassy staff and has paid the company more than $830 million for its services since 2004, according to the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the department has received "no specific request" from Iraq to withdraw the company's contractors.

Iraqi officials said 17 people, including women and children, were killed and 27 were wounded when Blackwater guards fired on motorists around Nusoor Square. The Iraqi investigation has concluded the shootings were an act of "premeditated murder" and recommended that Blackwater pay $8 million to families of each of the people killed.

Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince said Sunday the team was attacked and was defending itself at an intersection not far from the heavily guarded Green Zone.

"There was definitely incoming small arms fire from insurgents," Prince said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." There was no "deliberate violence," he added. Watch more on the Blackwater investigation »

Don't Miss

• Blackwater CEO: Guards were 'definitely' fired on
• Survivors of Blackwater shooting in Iraq tell FBI their stories
• Source: Soldiers found no evidence gunmen fired on Blackwater

But survivors have told FBI investigators harrowing stories of being shot at by the guards despite presenting no threat. And the first U.S. soldiers to arrive on the scene have told military investigators that they found no evidence the contractors were fired upon, a source familiar with a preliminary U.S. military report told CNN.

The soldiers found evidence suggesting the guards fired on cars that were trying to leave, and found that weapon casings on the scene matched only those used by U.S. military and contractors, the military source said.

The shootings placed new scrutiny on the operations of Blackwater and other security firms in Iraq, where an estimated 25,000 private contractors protect diplomats, reconstruction workers and government officials. Under a provision put into place in the early days of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, security contractors have immunity from Iraqi law.

Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to place private contractors overseas firmly under U.S. law, allowing American courts to prosecute crimes committed in a war zone. E-mail to a friend

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Do We Have Another Saddam In Iraq?

Ex-Investigator Details Iraqi Corruption

He Tells House Panel That Maliki's Government Thwarted Probes

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007; A16

The Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has thwarted investigations into corruption at the top levels of his administration, including probes of his relatives, while nearly four dozen anti-corruption employees or their family members have been brutally murdered, the former top Iraqi corruption investigator told a House panel yesterday.

Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former commissioner of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, has sought asylum in the United States, according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Radhi said his investigators had uncovered "rampant" corruption in Iraqi ministries that had cost the country as much as $18 billion, but only 241 cases, out of 3,000 forwarded to the courts, had been adjudicated.

"We have learned the hard way that the corrupt will stop at nothing," Radhi said. "They are so corrupt that they will attack their accusers and their families with guns and meat hooks, as well as countercharges of corruption." Radhi recounted how one staff member "was gunned down with his seven-month-pregnant wife," his security chief's father was found dead on a meat hook and how the body of the father of another staff member was riddled with holes from a power drill.

Radhi's grim account was buttressed by documents released by the committee showing how Maliki's office blocked investigations, by similar assessments from a new report by the Government Accountability Office, and by testimony from Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. Comptroller General David M. Walker said the GAO found that the Bush administration lacks direction and has no clearly defined strategy to improve the performance of Iraqi ministries.

But unsuccessful efforts by lawmakers to elicit at the hearing a response from the State Department on the extent of Iraqi corruption resulted in a series of increasingly testy exchanges. Waxman, angered because the State Department had retroactively classified internal memos that had begun to appear on the Internet, charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is facing a confrontation with Congress because "these efforts to silence debate are an absolute embarrassment."

Waxman asked Larry Butler, a deputy assistant secretary of state and the State Department witness: "Do you believe that the government of Iraq currently has the political will or the capability to root out corruption within its government?"

"Mr. Chairman, questions which go to the broad nature of our bilateral relationship with Iraq are best answered in a classified setting," Butler responded.

Waxman tried several more times, but Butler calmly insisted that such a discussion could take place only in a classified briefing.

Waxman asked: "Why can you talk about the positive things and not the negative things? Shouldn't we have the whole picture?"

"Mr. Chairman, I would be very pleased to answer those questions in an appropriate setting," Butler responded, eliciting laughter in the hearing room.

"An appropriate setting for positive things is a congressional hearing, but to say anything negative has to be behind closed doors?" Waxman asked.

"This goes to the very heart of diplomatic relations and national security," Butler said. "This is our ability to . . ." Waxman cut Butler off in mid-sentence. "It goes to the heart of propaganda," he said.

Waxman said that State's position was "absolutely absurd," but Republicans sprang to Butler's defense. "I'm not disappointed in your testimony," Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said. "In my judgment, you're being asked to say that individuals in Iraq are corrupt and then we have to work with those individuals."

Radhi delivered his opening statement in English, then took questions through an interpreter. He said Maliki had refused to recognize the independence of the Commission on Public Integrity, set up in 2004, though that independence is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution. Giving one example, he said that a legal provision dating from 1971 had been invoked to prevent the transmission of cases to court "unless we received permission from the minister of the agency we were investigating."

As for corrupt ministers, cases could not proceed without permission from Maliki. In particular, Radhi pointed to an inability to investigate corruption involving oil, which he said "resulted in the Ministry of Oil effectively financing terrorism through these militias," which control the transport and distribution of oil.

Some Republican lawmakers tried to cast doubt on Radhi's credibility. Rep. Dan Burton (Ind.) accused Radhi of working for "the Saddam Hussein regime" from 1979 to 1992 as public prosecutor. "How did you get those jobs?" he asked.

Radhi, speaking through an interpreter, said that he received them through "my hard work, my studying and my work at the judicial institute," but that he was jailed and "they broke the bones of my head" because "under Saddam Hussein, I refused to do what he was asking."

Butler, the State Department official, lauded Radhi. "I can only offer tribute to the courage and the tenacity of the judge, and his departure from the scene is a blow," he said. "It may be a while before somebody with his capacity and willingness steps in to replace him."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Iraqis To U.S. Senate: Butt Out Of Our Business

Iraq PM: Senate Proposal "a Catastrophe"
CBS News/The Associated Press

Friday 28 September 2007

Prime Minister sharply rejects government decentralization plan pushed by Biden, others.

Baghdad - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Friday rejected a U.S. Senate proposal calling for the decentralization of Iraq's government and giving more control to the country's ethnically divided regions, calling it a "catastrophe."

The measure, whose primary sponsors included presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., calls for Iraq to be divided into federal regions for the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities in a power-sharing agreement similar to Bosnia in the 1990s.

In his first comments since the measure passed Wednesday, al-Maliki strongly rejected the idea, echoing the earlier sentiments of his country's vice president.

"It is an Iraqi affair dealing with Iraqis," he told The Associated Press while on a return flight to Baghdad after appearing at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. "Iraqis are eager for Iraq's unity. ... Dividing Iraq is a problem and a decision like that would be a catastrophe."

Iraq's constitution lays down a federal system, allowing Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north to set up regions with considerable autonomous powers. But Iraq's turmoil has been fueled by the deep divisions among politicians over the details of how it should work, including the division of lucrative oil resources.

Many Shiite and Kurdish leaders are eager to implement the provisions. But the Sunni Arab minority fears being left in an impoverished central zone without resources. Others fear a sectarian split-up would harden the violent divisions among Iraq's fractious ethnic and religious groups.

On Thursday, Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said decisions about Iraq must remain in the hands of its citizens and the spokesman for the supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr agreed.

"We demand the Iraqi government to stand against such project and to condemn it officially," Liwa Semeism told the AP. "Such a decision does not represent the aspirations of all Iraqi people and it is considered an interference in Iraq's internal affairs."

In Other Developments:

• Turkey and Iraq signed a counterterrorism pact Friday aimed at cracking down on separatist Kurdish rebels who have been attacking Turkey from bases in Iraq. The agreement, however, falls short of meeting Ankara's demand to send troops in pursuit of Kurdish rebels fleeing across the border into northern Iraq, Turkey's Interior Minister Besir Atalay said. "It was not possible to reach a deal on chasing Kurdish rebels, however, we hope this issue will be solved in the future," Atalay said. "We are expecting this cooperation against terrorism to be broadened as much as possible."
  
  
• A military panel on Friday acquitted Spc. Jorge G. Sandoval on charges he killed two unarmed Iraqis, but it convicted him of planting evidence on one of the men in attempt to cover up the shooting. Sandoval, 22, had faced five charges in the April and May deaths of two unidentified men. While prosecutors said Sandoval did nothing to stop the slaughter of unarmed men, his defense lawyers said he was only following the orders of his superiors in both the April and May incidents.
  
  
• South Korea plans to send an assessment team to Iraq next month to help determine whether to end or extend its 1,200-troop mission there, a Defense Ministry official said Friday. The team of about 10 officials will make a weeklong trip to Iraq, and their findings will be reflected in a report to parliament next month.
  
  
• Australia said it has taken command of the multinational naval task force guarding Iraq's two oil terminals in southern Iraq for the third time. The job protecting the vital facilities rotates between Australia, Britain and the United States.

Iraq's prime minister also said he discussed the role of U.S. troops and private security contractors in the country, stressing that Iraq is a sovereign nation and it should have control over its own security.

Security "is something related to Iraq's sovereignty and its independence and it should not be violated," he said.

Al-Maliki's comments come after a Sept. 16 shooting in central Baghdad that killed some 11 Iraqi civilians allegedly at the hands of Blackwater USA guards providing security for American diplomats.

The North Carolina-based company said its employees were acting in self-defense against an attack by armed insurgents. Iraqi officials and witnesses have said the guards opened fire randomly, killing a woman and an infant along with nine other people, but details have widely diverged.

In a related story, a congressional investigation publicized Thursday found that Blackwater triggered a major battle in Iraq by sending an unprepared team of security guards into an insurgent stronghold, a move that led to their horrific deaths and a violent response by U.S. forces. (Read more.) Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has been warning about the dangers of relying on private contractors since early in the war, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

The Washington Post reported Friday that a preliminary U.S. Embassy report found the shooting involved three Blackwater teams.

It said one was ambushed near a traffic circle and returned fire before fleeing the scene, another was surrounded by Iraqis when it went to the intersection and had to be extracted by the U.S. military and a third came under fire from eight to 10 people in multiple locations.

The report said the three teams had been trying to escort a senior U.S. official who had been visiting a "financial compound" back to the U.S.-protected Green Zone when a car bomb struck about 25 yards outside the entrance. The official was unharmed, it said.

An unnamed U.S. State Department official described the report to the newspaper and stressed it was only an initial account.

The New York Times also reported Friday that the shootings occurred as Blackwater was trying to evacuate senior American officials with the United States Agency for International Development after an explosion occurred near the guarded compound where they were meeting.

Participants in the operation said at least one guard continued firing on civilians while colleagues called for the shooting to stop, according to the newspaper's account, which cited American officials who have been briefed on the investigation.

It also said those involved have told U.S. investigators they believed they were firing in response to enemy gunfire but at least one guard also drew a weapon on a colleague who did not stop shooting.

American officials have publicly remained mum on their findings pending the results of a series of investigations.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Bush is Never To Blame For Anything...

If you don't believe that, just ask him, or his mother.

NYT Editorial

The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki

Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s removal, only to get Mr. Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Mr. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq’s first democratically chosen leader under the American-sponsored constitution.

Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.

Sectarian fracturing even extends to the electricity grid, where armed groups have seized control of key switching stations and refused to share power with Baghdad and other provinces.

The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

That distinction is enormously significant, since President Bush’s current troop buildup is supposed to buy, at the cost of American lives, a period of relative calm for Iraqi politicians to bring about national reconciliation. How much calm it has brought is the subject of debate. But just about everyone in Washington now agrees that Mr. Maliki has made little effort to advance national unity.

The most recent intelligence report on Iraq, released yesterday, concludes that Mr. Maliki’s government is unable to govern and will become “more precarious” over the next six months to a year.

That is why there can be no serious argument for buying still more time at the cost of still more American lives and an even greater cost for Iraqis. A report by an Iraqi correspondent for The Times earlier this week described the deadly sectarian hatreds that have torn apart life in his home province, Diyala, which is almost equally divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

The same day, an Op-Ed article by seven American soldiers serving in Iraq underscored the extent to which American troops have worn out their welcome among Iraqis as social and economic conditions have deteriorated and rampant lawlessness has destroyed the most basic sense of personal security.

When it comes to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, Washington and Baghdad are often at cross-purposes. In the western province of Al Anbar, the American military has registered some gains by enlisting local Iraqi Sunnis to fight against foreign-led Al Qaeda formations. That strategy depends on the sense of Iraqi nationhood among local Sunnis. But the Maliki government prefers to concentrate on fortifying Shiite political power and exploiting the immense oil reserves of southeast Iraq. It is hard to imagine any Shiite government acting very differently.

Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

We Need To Leave Iraq, Yesterday

No Pressure, Mr Prime Minister...we are leaving.

How's that for no pressure?

Do what you want and Good Luck, to you, Sir.

Maliki warns US senators Iraq will not accept foreign pressure

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a delegation of visiting US lawmakers on Saturday that foreign powers should not try to influence the Iraqi political process.

He also resisted calls for his Shiite-led government to rehabilitate former members of ousted Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein's regime.

Maliki met a group of US congressmen shortly after their chamber voted for a law calling for a timetable for American troop withdrawal from Iraq.

"During his meeting with members of the US Congress headed by Democratic Senator Ben Nelson (news, bio, voting record), Maliki said allowing influence over our affairs to this state or that is a red line that we will not cross," his office announced.

Thursday, the US Senate passed a law that would tie 124 billion dollars in war funds to a commitment to begin withdrawing American forces by October and completing the pull-out on March 31, 2008.

Many US lawmakers have criticised Maliki's government for failing to make progress towards a number of so-called benchmarks -- political reforms which they feel will help to hasten the end of Iraq's sectarian conflict.

But President George W. Bush has vowed to veto any bill which ties the hands of military commanders, while Iraq's Shiite premier insists that Iraq's problems are caused by hardline factions within his Sunni foes.

"Maliki said there are two dangers threatening Iraq, namely Al-Qaeda and the Saddamists, whom he said are leading the arbitrary killings aganist all Iraqis with their differing sects and affiliations," the statement said.

Maliki's statement appeared to warn against calls from US policy-makers for a review of the policy of de-Baathification, under which former members of Saddam's ruling party are barred from public life.

"He said allowing these people access to authority threatens national unity rather than calming the situation as some believe," it said, adding that such a move would hurt Iraqis who "did not resort to crimes and violence."

According to the website of Senator Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, he was in Iraq with Senator Jeff Sessions (news, bio, voting record) of Alabama and two members of the House of Representatives, Lee Terry (news, bio, voting record) of Nebraska and Devin Nunes (news, bio, voting record) of California.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.