Free Iraq

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"Corruption costs Iraq $4 billion annually.
$8.8 billion the U.S. gave the Iraqi government cannot be fully accounted for.
More than 20% of the government’s Ministry of Interior staff are “ghost employees”—nonexistent workers who collect paychecks.
As much as 30% of Iraq’s refined oil ends up on the black market or is illegally taken out of the country.
The U.S. government says the insurgency raises $25 to $100 million a year smuggling oil.
$9 billion in oil revenues has been lost, almost as much as Saddam Hussein stole from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program over five years."
Down the Drain, March 1, 2007 (Do take a look at the section "Blood Money: What a Life Is Worth in Iraq")
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Updates

"The US military, whose medical staff oversaw the woman's examination, said it was aware of the various reports, but could not confirm anything." Rape claim splits Iraq government, February 20, 2007

"A key discrepancy has emerged over the woman's medical report.Musawi said the report, taken by American doctors, concluded that no sexual assault had occurred. But U.S. officials said they had not released the report and would not do so unless there was a legal proceeding (emphasis added)." Rape claim threatens Iraq security plan, February 22, 2007

حادث اغتصاب جديد تعرضت له سيدة ( ماجده محمد أمين ) في مدينة تلعفر

Below is a statement of the Iraqi islamic Party on what happened to Sabrine (in Arabic)

بيان صادر عن الحزب الإسلامي العراقي بخصوص ما حدث لصابرين - 25 شباط 2007

تحديث: الطالباني: الصدر طلب من بعض رجال الميليشيا مغادرة العراق ـ 15 شباط 2007

Update

Dear Imad,

I think your opposition to the Sadr movement is unduly influencing your judgement, customary astuteness and thoroughness.

I have seven logical/rational conundrums relating to the Maliki "directive":

1. The US and their half-baked ally Maliki draw up the Baghdad security plan. They decide to target Sadr and his senior cadres as part of the plan. Maliki then decides to save his ally Sadr, to whom he owes his premiership, by writing a top secret directive to spirit away 11 senior Sadrists. (Presumably he forgot to tell Sadr to tell Abdulhadi Al-Darraji and Hakim Al-Zamili, senior Sadr aides, that they were going to be arrested by US-led Iraqi forces. He must have also forgotten to add that hundreds of Sadr's activists were about to be arrested in US-led dawn raids. But never mind, let us assume he was absent minded.

2. Maliki decides to consult famous CIA agent Mouafaq Al-Rubai'i before he sends the directive. This obviously means that the CIA and the US forces knew of the directive, which means that they too changed their minds and decided to save Sadr's bacon. Unless of course they didn't like it but forgot to do anything about it.

3. Maliki then decides to send the directive to Sadr's Office, but copies it to the Sadr movement's bitter enemies, SCIRI, who are also Maliki's opponents, as they wanted Adil Abdulmahdi as prime minister and not him.

4. Maliki commits high treason, all on paper and fully documented and signed by himself, by copying the directive to the Iranian Embassy. Mind you one could argue that if he betrays his country to Bush, why not to any other side.

5. One mystery is why would Maliki consult the CIA agent about a directive that undermines the US plan?

6. Another mystery is, having consulted the CIA man, he then proceeds to write it all down and copy it to so many people? Why not just whisper it in the ear of Sadr or an aide ?

7. Last but not least, the whole world knew, and the US officials and papers have been telling us for many weeks, that the Baghdad security plan included hitting Sadr's activists. The so called 11 did not need a top secret directive to tell them to hide away. All the Iraqi and Arab TV channels were telling them the US-led forces will be after them. It is a well known tactic of irregular forces to melt away and fight another day.

I think that this "directive" is the work of the US-led occupation's disinformation department. We need to be very careful, Imad, because they are trying to divide and sub-divide the Iraqi people and make them hate and kill each other, as the only way of avoiding complete defeat, Siagon-style, in Iraq.

I appeal to you not to publish such unverifiable documents, or at least to refrain from endorsing their 'authenticity'.

Best, Sami (I hope you don't mind if I copied this email to friends of mine) February 16, 2007

Thank you, Sami. One then conludes from your analysis and conclusion "I think that this "directive" is the work of the US-led occupation's disinformation department", that the US-led disinformation department are pre-empting their own Surge by advising Sadr beforehand on how he and his top echelon should slither away. Bravo.

"Mr Khadduri,

As a mere spectator of your correspondence with Sami, I must agree with him that you show an incomprehensible, to me, dislike for Al Sadr.

He seems to be very anti-occupation.I read a recent interview of his with a Spanish newspaper and I must admit I was impressed by his fortitude and views. I don't believe for one moment that those killings are on his orders (we have pretty good evidence that Mossad-CIA tandem is using Lebanon-Palestinian methods to justify the occupation.

I am also convinced that those bombings are not at all "suicide" bombings but rather planted by the occupiers) You were anti-Saddam and I suppose against his Baathists who are the backbone of the Iraqi resistance. I discard that you can possibly be an Al Qaida sympathizer. May I ask you, who are you for? Some Angels? And how many divisions does your side have? Your friend Sami's got a point.

Rgds, Peter Vujacic"

Thank you, Peter, for your comments.

On Muqtada:

If you listen to his tirades (posted, alas in Arabic as he does not know English), on several of my previous postings, e.g. this and others, you would immediately realize that the Italian interview (translated by BBC) is definitely polished by 'excellent’ translators, either from the Arabic to Italian, or from the Italian into English. They must be excellent story writers. I can not tell you really who is the better phrase polisher of the two, but Muqtada's 'speeches and statements' do make Bush's utterances sound like coming from a master interlocutor (which was the title of a recent posting here that included one of Muqtada's 'political' positions which he ended with the profound statement that "politics has become a child's play".

In short, he could not have said what was reported. It was so heavily massaged that it impressed even you.

As for who...??

No, I do not believe in angels, nor in Al-Qaida's crimes against innocent Iraqis (and Resistance Fighters who do not abide by their demands to join them or quit) and their demand that we must succumb to their Islamic State.

Suffice it to say that I assume that you have heard of the several Patriotic Iraqi Resistance Forces.

They are whom I am for.

As for how many divisions do they comprise, even a few effective regiments would do, minus seven US airplanes in three weeks, and this after four years.

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"the United Nations began its first large-scale screening this month of Iraqis who have fled to Syria and Jordan since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It hopes to register 135,000 to 200,000 of them to determine which Iraqis have fled persecution at home and would be eligible for refugee status.
The United Nations expects 13,000 to 20,000 Iraqis to be deemed eligible for resettlement abroad. The United States hopes to resettle at least 5,000 of that group this year, with the first arriving in late spring or summer."
More Iraqi Refugees Are Headed to U.S., Feburary 13, 2007

These interpeters are hugging the US flag so tight that they just might be included. (video) PS: Removed

While these will not. (video)
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Interview with ' secular' Sayyed Ayyad Jamaludeen ............ هي هاي الديمقراطية اللي دنموت من أجلها!! المُعمم أياد جمال الدين ـ
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This is a well documented expose of the utter repeated failures over four years of trying to subjugate Haifa Street, a stone's throw from the Green Zone:

"Even before the Americans arrived on Haifa Street in January as the vanguard of the new Bush strategy to pacify Baghdad, previous experience strongly suggested that the effort was doomed to failure. A month later, that expectation has certainly been fulfilled.

Unfortunately, there are some genuinely new, grim elements to the battle for Haifa Street; elements that threaten to make the coming Baghdad-wide "surge" dramatically more damaging than its predecessors. To begin with, there is the far greater application of American air power; bombing runs and high caliber assaults from helicopter gunships have dramatically increased the death and destructiveness of the still ongoing battle, rendering much of Haifa Street an unlivable graveyard.

Added to this is the systematic and largely successful effort of the Sunni jihadists to expel the Shia minority from the area, an effort triggered by the initial American incursions. And then, overlaid on top of the cleansing of the Shia minority, came the contrary cleansing of the Sunni majority; engineered by the Iraqi military that arrived in the neighborhood with the Americans, and conducted their own purge with the support or acquiescence of the U.S. military.

The Haifa Street battle sadly shows that Bush's new strategy will measurably increase the violence in Baghdad above already intolerable levels. With more troops at their disposal, American generals will try to pacify many more neighborhoods like Haifa Street and cities like Tal Afar that need "to be brought back under Iraqi security control." And when they do this, they will bring the same mix of horror that they brought to Haifa Street, including brutal air power, house-to-house searches and fighting, sectarian violence, massive dislocation, and ethnic cleansing.

Like the other campaigns initiated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, this new strategy will make things measurably worse."
Baghdad Surges into Hell: First Results from the President's Offensive, February 12, 2007
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See the video in the previous posting: "The sectarian violence that is tearing Baghdad apart", January 28, 2007
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The late Majid Khadduri - His books
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"Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki complained that the long-awaited Baghdad security operation was off to a slow start and warned that insurgents were taking advantage of the delay to kill as many people as possible."
PM says Baghdad operation too slow, February 8, 2007
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"It was claimed early in 2005 that the United States was considering resort to what has been called the "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq, in which, as had been done in El Salvador in the 1980s, U.S. Special Forces would train paramilitary squads to hunt down and assassinate rebel leaders and their supporters. [1] A year earlier, it was reported that a sizable fund had been appropriated for the creation of an exile-based paramilitary unit for Iraq, and that the money would more broadly "support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revengeful Iraqi security force." It was expected that this would lead to "a wave of extrajudicial killings" of armed rebels, but also of "nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists." [2] "
Endnotes:
1. Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "'The Salvadoran Option'," Newsweek, January 14, 2005.
2. Quoted in Craig Murrary, "Civil War in Iraq: The Salvadoran Option and US/UK Policy," , October 19, 2006"
Iraq: The Genocide Option, January 24, 2007

Previous postings in this site on the "Salvadoran Option" :

The “Salvador option”, with dressings, is being served in Iraq, April 22, 2005

Getting to Know the General, May 2, 2005

"Combat terrorism" by causing it, May 16, 2005

CIA terrorism in Iraq ..... Who? US?, June 1, 2005

"We learned quickly" .... Rumsfeld had already, many times, claimed that non-distinction. Keep fooling yourself. August 24, 2005

Phoenix and the Salvador Option - Non-transparent CIA 'precedents' in Iraq's torrent of bloodshed, September 16, 2005

British 'aid' to CIA covert operations in Iraq? September 22, 2005

Samara's black day .... لا سُـرّ من رأى, February 23, 2006
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General Adnan Thabit, center, and his American adviser,

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"The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it.
U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city's population and the front line of al-Sadr's campaign to drive rival Sunni Muslims from their homes and neighborhoods, said al-Sadr's militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they've trained and armed.
"Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."
The Bush administration's plan to secure Baghdad rests on a "surge" of some 17,000 more U.S. troops to the city, many of whom will operate from small bases throughout Baghdad. Those soldiers will work to improve Iraqi security units so that American forces can hand over control of the area and withdraw to the outskirts of the city.
The problem, many soldiers said, is that the approach has been tried before and resulted only in strengthening al-Sadr and his militia. "
Mahdi Army gains strength through unwitting aid of U.S., February 1, 2007


This is how the brave American soldiers drive their Humvees in the streets of Baghdad winning the 'minds and hearts' of the Iraqis (video)
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