Video of US and Iraqi Special Operations Forces conducting a combat mission inside Sadr city, Baghdad in order to capture known insurgents and terrorists.
The Operation was conducted at an undisclosed date and time in support of operation Iraqi Freedom.
This Article details how the US came to the conclusion that Iraq was a threat concerning weapons of mass destruction and how and why an over zealous Bush administration led the US to this extremely expensive multi-year Occupation in Iraq.
To the surprise of few, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency-led survey group hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had admitted in one of his reports that none have yet been unearthed.
But the Iraq Survey Group’s leader, David Kay, did say that Saddam Hussein “remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons”. However, they have not found any, nor any evidence of any.
The report will come as more bad news for President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are under increasing pressure from their American and British constituencies for allegedly “cooking” or exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam as a pretext for going to war against him.
And now confirmed reports from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which says that information provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) about Iraq’s weapon’s programs was exaggerated and false.
Two DIA agents currently serving in Iraq, who also voiced bitterness about other aspects of US Iraq policy, spoke on condition of anonymity to Asia Times Online. The first, a 30-year veteran of the agency, complained that “the fixation on weapons is alienating intelligence staff”, calling it an “obsession”.
Officials in Washington now confirm that former Iraqi officials who had defected and were handed over to the CIA by the INC, the exile opposition group led by Chalabi, provided them with information on Iraq’s WMD program, which the Bush administration relied on to press its case for war.
In Iraq, this was confirmed by the same DIA agent. “The statements on WMD that the INC guys brought in matched conclusions they [Bush cabinet members] already had. We looked at the info and said ‘you can’t be serious, you have got to be kidding’.”
There has been an increase in the willingness of intelligence officials from the CIA and DIA to speak out about their skepticism over Iraq WMD claims since the end of the war and the failure to discover any evidence of their existence. Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix also recently asserted that Iraq had had no chemical or biological program since 1998, and no nuclear program since the first Gulf war of 1991.
The DIA agent went on to say, in Chalabi’s defense that “there were plenty of good reasons to attack Iraq, human rights, dictatorship, but the impetus to attack was the immediacy of a threat. Without Chalabi and his access to the Pentagon through [former CIA chief James] Woolsey and then [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, [Vice President Dick] Cheyney, [Pentagon head Donald] Rumsfeld and [Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J ] Feith the war wouldn’t have happened. The INC was very good at manipulating the press. They would say, ‘look at this, look at this’, and [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller would go to Baghdad and chase down a guy and her information provided the lever to go to war.”
This DIA agent, who has served as an interrogator at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the US holds alleged terrorists from Afghanistan called “illegal combatants”, also rejected claims still alleged by the vice president that there was a relationship between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and Saddam’s regime in Iraq. “There were four Iraqis in Guantanamo. More people had British passports than Iraqi ones.”
Now serving in Iraq as a security expert, the DIA agent criticized post-war policy as well, referring to what he described as “the coalition’s pursuit of a single point panacea with a semblance of political organization to hand over the country to them”, meaning the undue trust placed in Chalabi’s organization, as well as Iyad Alawi’s Iraqi National Accord. He also did not mince words with the staff of the office of the Coalition Provisional Administration (CPA), headed by L Paul Bremer. He viewed Bremer’s young staff as immature and inexperienced, citing the case where an aide to Bremer did not want to issue weapons licenses for a political organization to provide for its security,”she’s worried about issuing a few weapons licenses when they have whole armies”.
He added that Bremer’s predecessor Jay Garner was unfairly maligned due to inflated expectations. “Garner was friendly, approachable and personable. He got scapegoated by impatient people in DC. Now its DC politics and ‘what’s your stance on Israel’?” He also strongly criticized Bremer’s decision to dismiss all 400,000 members of the Iraqi army. “It was a dogmatic and ideological brain fart idea to dissolve the military. They should have used them for security. They should have issued an order mobilizing the regular army and put them on highways.” He ended his litany by adding that there was not even any cable television in the al-Rashid hotel where CPA staff were housed and they had to rely on short wave radio for news “they want to keep CPA staff as ignorant as possible”.
A lieutenant-colonel in the DIA who specialized in terrorism and the Muslim world also ridiculed the claims connecting Iraq and al-Qaeda, adding that administration officials relied on evidence provided by Laurie Mylroie in her book The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge. “From her book,” he said, “It was evident she hadn’t spent one day in the Middle East but she was close with Wolfowitz and as a result we had a guy on staff [at the DIA] whose job for two years was to debunk her allegations.”
The lieutenant-colonel maintained that the civilian staff of CPA, drawn from the State Department, were ineffective in Iraq. “The State Department just generates public policy papers,” he said, “they don’t do anything, they don’t run organizations.” He cited a recent CPA talking point that it would be run and structured like an embassy, “but embassies preserve the status quo, they don’t do anything, we are creating a revolution. Military officers are used to managing organizations and know they have to deal with everybody from top to bottom, but the State Department trains policy makers and they don’t want to hear stuff they disagree with.”
He added finally that Iraqis are ill informed about what the CPA does do because “CPA public affairs pay more attention to the foreign press then the local Iraqi press. English is a problem. Also they are used to a standard press conference and then send press releases that nobody reads. Even if Iraqi papers can find the numbers for CPA, nobody returns their calls.”
The 30-year veteran also confirms language difficulties in Iraq. “The entire government was unprepared for 9/11 [September 11] and for Iraq in terms of linguists and interrogators.”
Apparently the following article cites “secret military technology” as being the key component to the rapid decline in violence that we have seen in Iraq over the past several months.
I was just wondering why we have not heard of these operational capabilities mentioned anywhere else in the mainstream media, although the mention of it in this article is very general and non-specific.
WASHINGTON — The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.
The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would “get people killed,” Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.
“It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,” Woodward said.
In “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.
National security adviser Stephen Hadley, in a written statement reacting to Woodward’s book, acknowledged the new strategy. Yet he disputed Woodward’s conclusion that the “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was not the primary reason for the decline in violent attacks.
“It was the surge that provided more resources and a security context to support newly developed techniques and operations,” Hadley wrote.
Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote that along with the surge and the new covert tactics, two other factors helped reduce the violence.
One was the decision of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order a cease-fire by his Mehdi Army. The other was the “Anbar Awakening” movement that saw Sunni tribes aligning with U.S. troops to battle al Qaeda in Iraq.
Woodward told Larry King that while there is a debate over how much credit the new secret operations should get for the drop in violence, he concluded it “accounts for a good portion.”
“I would somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II,” he said “It’s a ski slope right down in a matter of months, cutting the violence in half. This isn’t going to happen with the bunch of joint security stations or the surge.”
The top secret operations, he said, will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement.”
While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.
“The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed,” he said. “It’s not news to them.
“If you were a member of al Qaeda or the resistance or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” Woodward said. “It is very dangerous.”
If life in the U.S. hasn’t already been downgraded enough by the economy caused mainly by the Iraqi and Afghanistan Conflicts then it is about to get worse if washington has its way by importing thousands of Iraqi Refugees into the U.S., Please somebody tell me, are they CrAzY!
The United States has surpassed its goal of admitting 12,000 Iraqi refugees this year and expects more, perhaps tens of thousands, next year, the State Department said on Friday.
The United States expects to admit a minimum of 17,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal 2009, which begins October 1, the department’s senior coordinator for refugees said. Thousands more Iraqis and their family members could arrive through a special visa program for people who worked for the United States or its contractors.
“I think you’ll see the U.S. government admitting over the course of fiscal 2009 tens of thousands of Iraqis into the United States,” coordinator James Foley told reporters.
Up to 3,000 could come from Baghdad, where the United States began interviews this year, he said.
So far this year, 12,118 Iraqi refugees have arrived and 1,000 more are booked to travel to the United States by the end of this month, when the U.S. fiscal year ends, he said.
That marks a huge leap from just 1,600 Iraqis admitted in the previous year. That number drew widespread criticism from refugee groups that said Washington should do more to help millions of Iraqis who have fled instability and violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
The number is still lower than what some other countries have taken. Sweden, a country of 9 million people, has admitted over 40,000 Iraqis since 2003.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 2 million Iraqis are living abroad, mostly in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Some 2.5 million are internally displaced.
One refugee advocacy group, Human Rights First, said it welcomed the news Washington had met its target for Iraqi arrivals in 2008 but that the “low” goal of resettling 17,000 refugees in fiscal 2009 should be raised to at least 30,000.
“The number of Iraqi refugees we have welcomed to our shores is still just a fraction of those in need,” said Amelia Templeton of the New York-based group. She said the U.N. refugee agency estimated that 85,000 Iraqi refugees from the most vulnerable groups would need resettlement next year.
Foley called on the government of oil-rich Iraq to do more to help Iraqi refugees abroad as well as plan for returning Iraqis by addressing their needs for security, social services and property compensation.
So far, he said, Iraq had spent only about $25 million to help its refugees abroad, and provided about $200 million for an initiative to help returning refugees. The latter amount was “rather small,” considering the number of Iraqi refugees and the improving security situation inside Iraq, Foley said.
“One cannot rule out in these situations the possibility that the refugees in large numbers themselves will decide it’s time to go back, but will the Iraqi government be ready for that? That’s what we have to prepare for I think,” Foley said.
The United States spent over $318 million in humanitarian aid for Iraqi refugees this year, Foley said. Washington sought support from other donors, “particularly in the region, not to mention, the government of Iraq itself.”
Foley said he was grateful that Syria, a country with which the United States has strained relations, had agreed to a new facility for refugee processing, which would enable Washington to handle larger numbers of refugees.
A 15yr old girl names Rania has been drugged, strapped with explosives, arrested by men she nearly blew up and then put into a detention center.
Iraqi police remove a suicide vest from an Iraqi girl in Baquba in this handout photo from the Iraqi police taken August 24, 2008.
Now she finds herself at the heart of a propaganda war being waged by the Iraqi security forces against the same al Qaeda militants who tried to use her as a remote-controlled bomb.
Police arrested the teenage Iraqi girl on Sunday in Iraq’s violent Diyala province, where the Sunni Arab militants are waging a bitter campaign against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
She was caught with a vest packed with explosives by a local neighborhood patrol in the provincial capital, Baquba. Initial reports said she had turned herself in, although police later said she was searched and they found the vest.
She cannot have been very willing to go through with it in any case or she would have detonated herself at the checkpoint, as many suicide bombers do when they are rumbled by security, police sources told Reuters.
U.S. military officials described her as an “unwilling” suicide bomber, as did the girl herself in a television interview for an Iraqi station obtained by Reuters.
Rania’s ordeal is far from over.
Wise to the potential publicity goldmine she could be as a poster-girl for al Qaeda’s callous tactics, police have paraded her on television and invited journalists to interview her, the first time they have been allowed access to a detainee.
Her interview was filmed under the scrutiny of prison officials after she had already been a captive for days. It was impossible to tell how much of it was her own story or coerced.
If Rania is to be believed, her profile matches that of other female suicide bombers in Iraq. Her father and brother both disappeared in 2006, she says, at the height of Iraq’s vicious sectarian conflict. Their bodies turned up weeks later.
“My father disappeared and my mother found his body in the morgue; they dumped my brother’s body in the river,” she said, as she sat on her cell bed, wrapped in a long black cloak.
Analysts say many female suicide bombers are motivated by a thirst for revenge for family members killed. But Rania says she never wanted to be a martyr. Then, staring blankly into the distance, she recounts how she was nearly blown to pieces.
“My husband took me to see some of his relatives I’d not seen before. I stayed the night. … Then, in the morning, they brought me breakfast with apricot juice. It tasted funny, so I asked what was in it. They told me ‘nothing, just drink’.”
Police said when they arrested her, she seemed drugged by a sedative, though it was not clear.
“I was feeling dizzy and sick for days,” she says.
After breakfast, an older woman who claimed to be a cousin of her husband started to put the vest on her, Rania said. She protested, but they told her not to worry. She must just go to a busy local market, where they would meet her. She was suspicious but they were older and very persuasive.
Her husband was in another room. Rania did as she was told.
Before she left the house, her husband reappeared by the door. He stopped her and asked her: “If we meet in the next life, will you choose me or another man.” She was unnerved by the question, but she joked: “I’d choose another man.”
She hasn’t seen him since.
Rania never got to the market. At a security checkpoint, a local Sunni Arab neighborhood patrol was suspicious of her long robe and searched her, finding wires then the explosive vest.
“I never intended to blow myself up. When stopped at the checkpoint, I wanted to turn myself in, but I was afraid,” she says. “Nobody told me how to use this vest. I don’t know if they meant to blow me up by remote control. I just don’t know.”
Her capture — or rescue — is clearly a victory for U.S. and Iraqi security forces in the propaganda war. It has shown an al Qaeda that looks vulnerable, less competent and increasingly resorting to desperate tactics. Police are seeking her husband.
“The fact he’s not shown up to help me yet shows he must have something to hide,” she says.
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