Perspective: On this day in Iraq -- October 12th edition

October 12, 2003: A U.S. Army soldier secures the scene after a car-bomb explosion near the Baghdad Hotel, thought to house an office of the CIA.


October 12, 2002:

Bush's evidence of threat disputed

With a resounding congressional endorsement behind him, President Bush confronts Iraq bolstered by the near-universal consensus that Saddam Hussein poses a security menace to his neighbors and the United States.

But while the political debate appears to be all but over, nagging questions remain about the evidence the administration has put forth to support its stance. In some cases, the evidence is at best insubstantial. In others, ambiguous intelligence data have given rise to interpretations that are highly subjective or just plain wrong.

In some instances, administration statements appear to run directly counter to assessments made by intelligence agencies. For example, Bush has warned darkly of the possibility that an unprovoked Iraqi attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction could come at any time. "The final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he said in a speech Monday in Cincinnati.

But in a letter delivered to Congress the next day, CIA Director George Tenet said the CIA had concluded that "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical or biological weapons) against the United States. Should Hussein conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."

The administration has also asserted as a given -- and few critics have questioned -- that the Baghdad regime has stockpiled and continues to develop vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. But a comprehensive British government report, based on its own intelligence agency findings, noted that most estimates were based on guesswork. "Without U.N. weapons inspectors, it is very difficult therefore to be sure about the true nature of many of Iraq's facilities," the British report stated.

Equally hard to assess is the extent of Iraq's links, if any, to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups -- an early and key rationale for attacking Iraq put forward repeatedly by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration hawks. More recently, Bush cited reports of Iraqi aid to Palestinian terrorist groups and al Qaeda and warned that Hussein could use them as proxies to attack the United States.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said Monday. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

Most terrorism experts agree, however, that links between Hussein's government and al Qaeda are murky at best. Until late summer, most administration officials -- and CIA and FBI investigators -- said that despite allegations of links between Mohamed Atta, the main planner of the terrorist attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence agent, there was no evidence of ties. They also noted that Osama bin Laden has long been hostile to the decidely secular Hussein.

One of the Palestinians cited by Bush, Abu Nidal, was last active in the 1980s and died in Baghdad in August. Another, Abu Abbas, conducted his last terrorist act in 1990, now renounces violence, and lives in the Gaza Strip with apparent Israeli permission.

Bush referred to a senior member of al Qaeda who received medical treatment in Iraq. U.S. officials said Tuesday that the operative in question is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who lost a leg during the U.S. war in Afghanistan and fled to Iran, then to Iraq, before leaving for an undisclosed destination.

Bush also referred to recent intelligence reports that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making and chemical warfare. But he held back from a direct statement that Hussein is helping bin Laden's terrorists, saying only that they "share a common enemy" -- the United States. After the speech, administration officials cautioned reporters against drawing tight links between Iraq and al Qaeda.

In his speech, Bush was more categorical about Iraq's nuclear program. "Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the (U.N.) International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium enrichment sites," he said. "That same year, information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue."

In fact, the engineer, Khidhir Hamza, who co-wrote a book titled "Saddam's Bombmaker," retired from Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and left Iraq in 1995. "Hamza had some good information about Iraqi nuclear programs until his departure from Iraq, but that's it," said David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS, where Hamza worked as an analyst from 1997 to 1999. "But he went off the edge. He started saying irresponsible things."

Bush also cited satellite photographs showing that Iraq has reconstructed buildings at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. He said Iraq has tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

"If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year," Bush warned.

But the authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London, concluded in a report issued last month that "Iraq does not possess facilities to produce fissile material in sufficient amounts for nuclear weapons" and that "it would require several years and extensive foreign assistance to build such fissile material production facilities."

A recent public report by the CIA said that unless Iraq is able to obtain enriched uranium abroad, it will take at least five years to be able to develop the uranium necessary for a nuclear warhead.

The CIA report also acknowledges that some nuclear experts believe the tubes could have been intended for conventional weapons purposes, which are not proscribed by U.N. sanctions.

"Bush seems to be getting ahead of the facts," Albright said. "These tubes are not central to centrifuge, they're just not."

Albright said he had talked to experts on gas centrifuges at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, and "they disagree with how this intelligence is being used, but they have been ordered to keep quiet."

Gary Milhollin, a respected nuclear expert who is director of Iraq Watch in Washington, said the aerial photos prove little.

"We can't tell what's in those buildings. There isn't proof that there's biological or chemical weapons being made there. Those buildings could be used for civilian industrial uses. That's why we need to resume (U.N.) inspections to check them out."

Weapons experts also have questioned administration statements about the extent of Iraq's missile capability. While a 1998 report by U.N. inspectors supports Bush's statements that Iraq possesses Scud-type ballistic missiles with ranges of up to 400 miles -- far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey -- there is no evidence that these have been tested or that Iraq has any functional launchers.

Bush also warned in his Cincinnati speech that Iraq "has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these (unmanned aerial vehicles) for missions targeting the United States."

But many experts believe such remarks are highly exaggerated. Because Iraqi airspace is closely monitored by U.S. and British planes and radar systems, experts say, the slow-moving unmanned aerial vehicles would likely be shot down as soon as they crossed Iraq's borders. It's also unclear how the vehicles would reach the U.S. mainland -- the nearest point is Maine, almost 5, 500 miles away -- without being intercepted.

"As a guesstimate, Iraq's present holdings of delivery systems and chemical and biological weapons seem most likely to be so limited in technology and operational lethality that they do not constrain U.S. freedom of action or do much to intimidate Iraq's neighbors," said Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Read the rest at the San Francisco Chronicle


October 12, 2003:

A Tale Of Two Fathers

It's a classic story line in myth, literature and movies: a man coming into his own is torn between two older authority figures with competing world views; a good daddy and a bad daddy; one light and benevolent, one dark and vengeful.

When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the care of Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney, who had been his defense secretary in Desert Storm, would play the wise, selfless counselor. Poppy thought his old friend Dick would make a great vice president, tutoring a young president green on foreign policy and safeguarding the first Bush administration's legacy of internationalism, coalition-building and realpolitik.

Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as Bad Daddy usurped his son's presidency, heightened its conservatism and rushed America into war on the mistaken assumption that if we just acted like king of the world, everyone would bow down or run away.

Bush I officials are nonplused by the apocalyptic and rash Cheney of Bush II, a man who pushed pre-emption and peered over the shoulders of C.I.A. analysts, as compared with the skeptical and cautious Cheney of Bush I (who did not even press to march to Baghdad in the first gulf war, when Saddam Hussein actually possessed chemical weapons).

Some veterans of Bush I are so puzzled that they even look for a biological explanation, wondering if his two-year-old defibrillator might have made him more Hobbesian. Mr. Cheney spent so much time in his bunker reading gloomy books about smallpox, plague, fear and war as the natural state of mankind.

Last week, for the first time, W. -- who tried to pattern his presidency as the mirror opposite of his real father's -- curbed his surrogate father's hard-line crony Rummy (Mr. Cheney's mentor in the Ford years).

The incurious George, who has said he prefers to get his information from his inner circle rather than newspapers or TV, may finally be waking up to the downside of such self-censorship. You can end up hearing a lot of bogus, self-serving garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.

I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage of his vice president's Iraq speech on Friday, which was a masterpiece of demagogy.

On a day when many Republicans were finding a lesson of moderation in Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in California, Mr. Cheney once more chose a right-wing setting, the Heritage Foundation, to regurgitate his rigid ideology. While Arnold was saying to voters, ''You know best,'' Mr. Cheney was still propounding ''Father Knows Best.''

Even after the president was forced to admit after Mr. Cheney's last appearance on ''Meet the Press'' last month that the link the vice president drew between Saddam and 9/11 did not actually exist, that did not deter Mr. Cheney. He repeatedly tied Saddam and 9/11 and said, all evidence to the contrary, that the secular Iraqi leader ''had an established relationship with Al Qaeda.''

He characterized critics as naïve and dangerous when his own arguments were reductive and disingenuous. In justifying the war, he created a false choice between attacking Iraq and doing nothing.

The war in Iraq and its aftermath have proved that Mr. Cheney was wrong to think that a show of brute strength would deter our enemies from attacking us. There are improvements in Iraq, but it is still a morass, with 326 soldiers dead as of Friday. It's hard to create security when we are the cause of the insecurity.

Mr. Cheney lumped terrorists and tyrants into one interchangeable mass, saying that Mr. Bush could not tolerate a dictator who had access to weapons of mass destruction, was allied with terrorists and was a threat to his neighbors. Sounds a lot like the military dictator of Pakistan, not to mention the governments of China and North Korea.

To back up his claim that Saddam was an immediate threat, the vice president had to distort the findings of David Kay, the administration's own weapons hunter, and continue to overdramatize the danger of Saddam. ''Saddam built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction,'' Mr. Cheney said. Yes, but during the first Bush administration.

Perhaps the president now realizes the Cheney filter is dysfunctional. If Mr. Bush still needs a daddy to tell him what to do, he should call his own.

Read the rest at the NY Times


October 12, 2004:

Inside the Green Zone, Iraq Is More Midwest Than Mideast

In Baghdad's Green Zone, mortar shells come flying in so regularly that the Americans working there run office betting pools on when the next will arrive.

Other than that, life in the Green Zone is a lot like life in an American small town, William Langewiesche reports in "Welcome to the Green Zone," a long, fascinating article in the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

For more than a year, Americans have heard countless references to the Green Zone, aka the International Zone, where American officials and the new Iraqi government are headquartered, without learning much about what life is like there. But Langewiesche, a National Magazine Award-winning reporter, has a gift for conveying the feel of a place.

"After standing in a long, tense line and undergoing two body searches and identity checks," he writes, "you pass through the pedestrian gate and find yourself suddenly among green lawns, where office workers in combat boots stroll to lunch or simply wait at one of the shaded bus stops, chatting about NFL football, a General Motors recall, or some sitcom they saw on television last night. When the bus arrives, it is driven by an aging, affable Texan and he's got Alanis Morissette wailing psychobabble on Armed Forces Radio with the air conditioning cranked up really high."

Before the Americans invaded, this was the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's government -- "villas, palaces and monuments set in a parklike expanse that spreads for four square miles inside a meander of the Tigris River," Langewiesche writes.

When the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003, they set up headquarters in those palaces and villas, including the villa where Hussein's son Uday kept his pet lions.

In another part of the Green Zone, about 5,000 Iraqi squatters moved into buildings, and they're still there, living in a district that Langewiesche calls "the Green Zone's slum."

For the first few weeks in the Zone, life in the bomb-damaged buildings was primitive, with sporadic electricity, no air conditioning and precious little booze, except what was found in Uday's villa. But soon, American know-how made the place pretty comfortable for the roughly 5,000 Americans who live there.

"They live in large, sandbagged compounds or prefabricated, factory-furnished housing modules, which are actually modified shipping containers," Langewiesche writes. "They eat standard American food, almost all of it brought in from abroad. . . . They also have satellite TV, computers, DVDs and telephones with U.S. area codes, which function as if they were in New York or Virginia, and thus require people to make long-distance overseas calls, even to the city just next door."

In the early days, the Americans frequently left the Green Zone and ventured into Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. But since the anti-American insurgency escalated last spring, such trips have become exceedingly dangerous and most Americans seldom leave the Zone.

"Why bother?" Langewiesche writes with acid sarcasm. "A more prudent choice was to stay in the zone and require the Iraqis to come to you if for some rare reason you really needed to deal with them face-to-face."

The last scene in the article is a dry but devastating portrait of this year's Fourth of July party in the Green Zone, held about a week after the turnover of power to the new Iraqi government. There were patriotic songs, horseplay in the pool and lots of drinking.

"I saw no Iraqis there at all," Langewiesche writes. "I walked through the crowd looking at the characters, wondering as I had before what this enterprise was all about."

Read the rest at the Washington Post


U.S. wants NATO to take over Afghan mission

The United States is pressing NATO to take over the U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan, possibly as early as 2005, the U.S. ambassador to the alliance said Tuesday.
NATO currently commands the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and it has set up five Provincial Reconstruction Teams in northern Afghanistan. Its troops do not conduct combat missions as U.S. forces do.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to the alliance, told American reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday that the aim of the United States is to combine the U.S. and NATO missions under an alliance commander.

"There will be a lot of discussion about that tomorrow, but no decisions," Burns said, referring to Wednesday's NATO defense ministers meeting.

"It's a very complicated issue, how you put these two very different military missions together," Burns said. "But there will be a number of people who will support — we will certainly support — a direction to the military leaders of the alliance to go and look at this question and decide how we can best do that — give us a sense of how you put these two missions together."

Burns said he expects the alliance's military leaders to present answers at a planned February meeting of defense ministers in Nice, France.

He said integration of the forces could happen by 2005 or 2006.

The ambassador also said the United States is pressing NATO's newer members who once were part of the Soviet bloc, like Romania, to donate older Soviet-era military equipment that is urgently needed to equip Iraqi forces.

In the shorter term, the United States is pushing its NATO allies to accelerate the deployment of extra peacekeepers to Afghanistan.

Ahead of two days of talks beginning Wednesday, U.S. officials said they were seeking commitments that the alliance would expand its peacekeeping operation into western Afghanistan, which would free up U.S. troops to hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants hiding out in the south and east.

"NATO is behind. We should have been in the west by now, and we're not," Burns told reporters earlier at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "NATO ... needs to move faster, with a greater degree of commitment and political will."

After much prodding, NATO allies reinforced their peacekeeping mission from 6,500 troops to over 9,000 for the Afghan elections held at the weekend.

Despite that temporary deployment, the alliance is slipping behind with plans to expand its longer-term peacekeeping operation into the troubled western provinces from its bases in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and five northern cities.

On Iraq, NATO envoys agreed last week on the outline of plans to send about 300 instructors, and up to 10 times more guards and support staff, to help train the Iraqi armed forces.

About 40 NATO trainers have been in Baghdad since August, but U.S. officials said last week that the process was moving too slowly to have an impact before elections scheduled in Iraq early next year.

The alliance is playing only a small role in Iraq due to the reluctance of France, Germany and other member nations who opposed the war. Still, most of the 26 allies have troops in Iraq supporting the U.S.-led force.

Read the rest at USA Today


October 12, 2005:

Iraq security company under fire

The private security company at the centre of the "trophy video" controversy in Iraq has been accused of failing to ensure that all of its workers are properly trained to use guns.

Aegis Defence Services has been heavily criticised by the American government over the alleged failures, it can be revealed.

The British company, which was given a £220 million security contract by the US military last year, was also attacked for failing to ensure that its Iraqi employees were not insurgent spies.

The criticisms of the company, which was set up in 2002 by Lt Col Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer, appear in an audit report by the Office of the Special General Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction.

The alleged failings have emerged as another "trophy video", showing security contractors apparently opening fire on civilians, appeared on the web site AegisIraq.co.uk, which has been unofficially linked to Aegis Defence Services.

The new, 27-second video, which is accompanied by the Elvis Presley song That's All Right (Mama), shows a civilian car being attacked by security contractors, who open fire with a machine gun.

The company is already being investigated by the American military over whether any of its personnel were involved in similar shooting incidents captured in a series of other "trophy videos", first revealed by the Sunday Telegraph.

The criticisms will place further pressure on the security company, the largest of its kind in Iraq.

The 22-page report, which was produced earlier this year, states: "Aegis did not provide sufficient documentation to show that all of its employees that were issued with weapons were qualified to use those weapons, or that its Iraqi employees were properly vetted to ensure they did not pose an internal security threat."

Aegis employees maintain that they are the victims of a smear campaign either by a disgruntled employee or by another private security company.

A senior member of Aegis said that the company always operates within the American military rules of engagement and that it's employees operate a graduated response before opening fire on any civilian vehicle.

A spokesman for Aegis, said: "The Inspector General's Audit Report was issued in April 2005, following a physical inspection in October 2004.

"It was undertaken in the first four months of the manpower deployment of the contract.

"The audit found that paper training records evidencing Aegis in-theatre training since arrival were not in all cases fully complete at that time.

"This administrative matter was swiftly rectified as project deployment continued to develop. The Aegis contract was both renewed and expanded in the spring 2005."

The criticisms of the company, which was set up in 2002 by Lt Col Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer, appear in an audit report by the Office of the Special General Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction.

The alleged failings have emerged as another "trophy video", showing security contractors apparently opening fire on civilians, appeared on the web site AegisIraq.co.uk, which has been unofficially linked to Aegis Defence Services.

The new, 27-second video, which is accompanied by the Elvis Presley song That's All Right (Mama), shows a civilian car being attacked by security contractors, who open fire with a machine gun.

The company is already being investigated by the American military over whether any of its personnel were involved in similar shooting incidents captured in a series of other "trophy videos", first revealed by the Sunday Telegraph.

The criticisms will place further pressure on the security company, the largest of its kind in Iraq.

The 22-page report, which was produced earlier this year, states: "Aegis did not provide sufficient documentation to show that all of its employees that were issued with weapons were qualified to use those weapons, or that its Iraqi employees were properly vetted to ensure they did not pose an internal security threat."

Aegis employees maintain that they are the victims of a smear campaign either by a disgruntled employee or by another private security company.

A senior member of Aegis said that the company always operates within the American military rules of engagement and that it's employees operate a graduated response before opening fire on any civilian vehicle.

A spokesman for Aegis, said: "The Inspector General's Audit Report was issued in April 2005, following a physical inspection in October 2004.

"It was undertaken in the first four months of the manpower deployment of the contract.

"The audit found that paper training records evidencing Aegis in-theatre training since arrival were not in all cases fully complete at that time.

"This administrative matter was swiftly rectified as project deployment continued to develop. The Aegis contract was both renewed and expanded in the spring 2005."

Read the rest at the Telegraph


October 12, 2006:

Aura of fear and death stalks Iraq

Baghdad resounds to the tales of the dead. Not the distant, dry accounting of news wires, but terrifying close-up accounts. Six beheaded corpses are dumped with their heads between their knees in Muhammad's street in Ghazaliya, a largely Sunni suburb of Baghdad. US soldiers ask him to search the bodies for IDs, fearful the corpses may be booby-trapped. He manages to frisk two before the effort becomes too awful.
This summer Muhammad witnessed a mass attack by Shia gunmen from a neighbouring area to his own, of running battles outside his house, the loudspeakers on the mosques coordinating the defence.

A few days after the appearance of the headless bodies, a translator for a British colleague announces he has lost a relative. He is distraught as the family searches the morgue for the body. The kidnappers get in touch. Your relative is still alive and eating his evening meal, they say, but start searching for his body in three days.

After a while the numbers no longer seem to matter - only the impact on a society of a steady and encroaching tide of killing. The aura of fear, cruelty and death is claustrophobic and all enveloping.

No report or estimate of the death toll, however disputed, gets near to conveying the corrosive nature of so much killing, so routinely carried out.

Law and order does not exist as the police themselves are involved in the killing. There are so many bodies that their disposal has become a problem of waste management. Most cities have to cope with fly-tipping of rubbish. Baghdad has to cope with the fly-tipping of corpses.

In some areas of Baghdad, such as Sadr City, US soldiers welded down sewer covers to prevent bodies being dumped.

But that was when the death squads cared about concealment. Today there is little time for such niceties. The bodies are dumped on rubbish heaps, in rivers, on areas of open ground.

Often victims are shot on the street in front of waiting traffic, as a reminder, if anyone needed it, that the next bullet could be for them.

Most victims have their hands bound, their feet tied and many show signs of torture. Two years ago, journalists were reluctant to accept that victims were tortured with drills, nails and caustic liquids. No one disputes it today.

Some Sunni families have stopped going to Baghdad's morgue, which is in an area controlled by Shia militias, who are responsible for the death squads. The families of two recently murdered Sunni soldiers in a largely Shia battalion of the Iraqi army, their colonel said, were followed to the morgue and attacked. Funerals have also been targeted. Death follows death. Hospitals have been used for holding and torturing the disappeared.

The sound of killing has become routine. No one pays attention to the morning explosions until the reports come in - the numbers of the dead and where. Baghdadis soon develop an ear for these attacks. They can distinguish between the sound of improvised explosive devices buried in the road, and the sound of mortars and car bombs. These are now commonplace. The conversation stoppers are the ingenious and brazen: the secondary and tertiary bombs left to kill the rescue workers; the abductions in broad daylight by men in police uniforms from shops and factories, while their colleagues try to hide from the lethal sweep.

Jihadis have recently taken to renting a shop at the bottom of a housing block on a short lease. They fill it with explosives with the aim of bringing down the building.

But what scares most are the impromptu checkpoints. They can be mounted by police, militias and jihadis, but they can all have the same result. Utter the wrong name, show the wrong number plate, or the wrong ID, and you can be quickly ushered away to face summary execution.

And there is no end in sight.

Read the rest at the Guardian


US Military Deaths in Iraq Hit 2,757

As of Thursday, Oct. 12, 2006, at least 2,757 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,198 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

The AP count is five more than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Thursday at 10 a.m. EDT.

The British military has reported 119 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, six; El Salvador, four; Slovakia, three; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Romania, one death each.

The latest deaths reported by the military:

-- A soldier was killed Wednesday in Kirkuk province.

-- Three Marines were killed Monday in Anbar province; all assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.:

The latest identifications reported by the military:

-- Marine Sgt. Julian M. Arechaga, 23, Oceanside, N.Y.
-- Marine Lance Cpl. Jon E. Bowman, 21, Dubach, La

Read the rest at Fox News