Dahr Jamail reminds us that the American occupation will continue for many years to come, certainly well past the end of Barack Obama’s term in office.
Tag Archive for 'Iraq'
Just in case we’d forgotten why Washington should never pressure Israel (today it’s Iran, yesterday it’s Iraq and perhaps in years to come…Venezuela?):
As more than a dozen lawmakers go on record to ask the Obama administration to end the diplomatic spat with Israel following Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, some are now warning that a prolonged dispute could risk harming international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program.
“What are we doing playing hardball with an ally like this?” asked House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-VA, in an interview with The Cable. “What’s important here is for all of us to be focused on the nuclear threat from Iran … We’re dependent upon that ally to be with us to combat Iran’s nuclear program.”
Cantor phoned White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel last night to make clear his view that it’s time for the administration to get over its anger at Israel for announcing the approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem last week. He said he fears the White House is trying to capitalize on the incident to pressure the Israelis to agree to things Washington would otherwise not be able to get.
“There was an incident and no one defends the government of Israel over that, whether it was intentional or not,” Cantor said. “For the White House to seize on that incident and seize on that opportunity, that says a lot about the thinking of this administration.”
Cantor suggested there could be some legislative way of documenting Congress’s sentiments on this issue, but no specific plans have yet surfaced.
Congressional concern over how the row will impact Iran diplomacy has been bipartisan. Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand echoed Cantor in a statement Tuesday morning.
“While the timing of the East Jerusalem housing announcement was regrettable, it must not cloud the most critical foreign policy issue facing both counties — Iran’s nuclear threat,” Gillibrand said.”As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I am focused on strengthening international pressure on Iran’s regime to derail its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
Politico reports on a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Reps. Mark Kirk, R-IL, and Chris Carney, D-PA, which said, “While the recent controversy is regrettable, it should not overshadow the importance of the US-Israel alliance. A zoning dispute over 143 acres of Jewish land in Israel’s capital city should not eclipse the growing threat we face from Iran… We urge your Administration to refrain from further public criticism of Israel and to focus on more pressing issues affecting this vital relationship, such as signing and enforcing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act when it comes to your desk.”
Former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller said that U.S.-Israel cooperation on Iran was crucial and should not be sacrificed over this dispute.
“You can’t create a situation where we have no leverage over them and they think they’re basically on their own.”
The ground-breaking website Wikileaks – unafraid to publish pretty much any information that comes its way – is clearly a threat to the empire:
This document is a classifed (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out”. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whisteblowers”, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site”. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justificaton for the plan, the report claims that “Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Kora, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website”. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Cemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanmo Bay.
Praise the Lord. Finally, somebody realises that Israeli actions are directly affecting American interests and lives.
Sure, this has been clear for decades but better late than never.
The likely outcome from Washington? More “disappointment” with Israeli actions in Palestine and little else:
On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”
The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus’s instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders. “Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling,” a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. “America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding.” But Petraeus wasn’t finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command — or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus’s reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region’s most troublesome conflict.
Surprise, surprise. So the real issue with the UN Goldstone report over Gaza isn’t really the innocents killed, it’s that the recommendations could be used against the West (via the Forward):
In Congress, New York Democrat Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, is one of those leading the new argument against the report. Ackerman stressed, in a February 25 Foreign Affairs Committee hearing with Clinton, “It’s not Israel that I raise the concern about.” He said he was worried about the implications of Goldstone’s report for the United States.
The number of civilians killed by America’s military in Iraq and Afghanistan is “certainly a number multiplied by some huge multiple compared to the number of civilians that were killed as Israel pursued terrorists in Gaza,” Ackerman said. He warned that if Goldstone’s report were to be adopted as an international standard, American officials could be prosecuted for war crimes outside the United States.
I’ve written over the years about the many health effects of depleted uranium in Iraq. American forces stand accused of causing a massive rise in cancer amongst the local population.
Now, more questions are being asked about the Iraqi city of Fallujah, after at least two massive American attacks in the years after 2003.
Al-Jazeera reports (and features leading American reporter Dahr Jamail, who was actually in Fallujah in 2004 during the American siege):
My following article appears in the Huffington Post:
The arrival of the new American Ambassador to Australia was breathlessly welcomed by the Australia media pack in late 2009. Jeffrey Bleich, an American lawyer from California, assumed his position in Canberra and was introduced to the country through an interview on the public broadcaster ABC.
After the reporter Leigh Sales congratulated Bleich on his appointment, he was treated to softball questions and allowed to outline, unchallenged, the Obama administration’s agenda.
Sales and Bleich joked over the ambassador’s Elvis obsession but substantive questions were almost absent (or follow-ups probing Bleich’s non-answers). No comments about Obama’s continuation of Bush administration policies towards indefinite detention of terror suspects and warrantless wiretapping.
On the eve of Obama’s first visit to Australia in late March, the Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor Peter Hartcher informed his readers that, “the remark by the US ambassador to Australia that his kids are brushing up on their Wii skills is a marker of the rejuvenation of the alliance.”
Hartcher wrote:
“By bringing his family, Obama will give a new generation of Australians a sense of connection with their country’s chief ally… Where the relationship between [former Australian Prime Minister John] Howard and [George W.] Bush was forged in the fire of September 11 terrorism and the Afghan and Iraq invasions that followed, [Australian Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd and Obama have developed a post-crisis partnership.”
Both leaders would be able to “share satisfaction in the early progress of the new strategy in Afghanistan.”
The American/Australian alliance has always been built on supporting Washington’s wars, despite public opinion often opposing these engagements (such as the current Afghan deployment).
After the humanitarian and military disaster in Iraq, the only reason to maintain Australian troops in Afghanistan is to try and regain Washington’s credibility; a difficult task when civilians continue being killed. Australia’s objective has therefore nothing to do with bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.
Furthermore, Australians troops are suspected of committing war crimes in the country and military lawyers are inadequately trained to assess possible breaches of humanitarian law in the field.
A senior Australian Army media adviser who served in Afghanistan and Iraq accused the Australian government of a culture of excessive spin and unnecessary secrecy, lying about local engagement with the civilian populations and obscuring the mission’s purpose.
There is little discussion in the corporate media over what Australian troops are actually doing in Afghanistan. Instead, the public are mostly treated to articles advocating military escalation. Take this recent piece by Rupert Murdoch columnist, Greg Sheridan, arguing that, “a serious ally would take the lead in a province, as we did in Vietnam.” Public opinion, or morality, is damned.
America has consistently thanked Australia for its reliability. George W. Bush awarded John Howard the Presidential Medal of Freedom in early 2009. Bush said that, “He [Howard] never wavered in his support for liberty, and free institutions, and the rule of law as the true and hopeful alternatives to ideologies of violence and repression. That’s why I called him a man of steel.”
Howard was a full backer of Bush’s “war on terror”, including Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition.
Britain’s Tony Blair and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe were also awarded at the White House ceremony.
Managing the alliance between America and Australia takes little work or imagination from Washington. They have a country desperate to keep on its good side, able to offer its own thoughts but likely to fall into line, no matter what. Washington rightly believes that Australia watches over the Pacific, influencing and pressuring small nations heavily reliant on foreign aid.
Some mainstream commentators have suggested that Obama’s upcoming trip should allow serious discussion about China and energy co-operation.
But Obama’s fortunes are dwindling in America and key policies, on health and climate change, are stalled with little positive resolution expected any time soon. Although a senior Australian minister claimed last week that Obama’s visit would “generate a great deal of interest from the Australian public“, I know of a number of anti-war groups who will peacefully protest America’s ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and support for Israel.
Australian backing for America isn’t automatic and requires constant massaging by embedded journalists. The Australian-American Leadership Dialogue is a regular and private gathering of the political elites from both countries. Senior journalists, most of whom never disclose their participation, regularly return from meetings praising American initiatives.
As far as I know, there has never been a comprehensive article in the mainstream press that debunks the agenda of the Dialogue or the opinion-shapers involved. Instead, we are treated to occasional references without context.
Australia has long suffered from an inferiority complex towards its super-power boss. Disagreements aren’t unknown between Washington and Canberra – Kevin Rudd refused to help re-settle released Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay despite a request from the Obama administration – but Australia is far more comfortable seeing America as an irreplaceable friend who supposedly shares the same values. China is only a vitally important trading partner.
There is no doubt that Obama himself remains popular in Australia – his allegedly charming demeanour is still profiled in gossip magazines – but the mainstream media reports the torturous progress of the Democrat’s health care bill and the political effectiveness of the Tea Party movement.
Obama’s upcoming visit will be primarily an opportunity for Kevin Rudd in an election year to bask in the glow of a President whose popularity is diving in America but remains buoyant globally.
At a time when America’s ability to shape events in vast swathes of the world are in decline, including throughout South America and the Middle East, Obama will be pleased to visit an unquestioning ally.
Earth to the New York Times and Thomas Friedman. Backing an invasion of Iraq requires responsibility, not more platitudes. Of course, when you’re not doing the fighting, wars seem so noble:
Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.
Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out. Personally, at this stage, I only care about one thing: that the outcome in Iraq be positive enough and forward-looking enough that those who have actually paid the price — in lost loved ones or injured bodies, in broken homes or broken lives, be they Iraqis or Americans or Brits — see Iraq evolve into something that will enable them to say that whatever the cost, it has given freedom and decent government to people who had none.
The Iraq war may have convinced other Arab dictatorships to not upset Washington and London, but seriously, the British elite is forced to defend the debacle like this?
The Foreign Secretary told Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the war that Britain’s willingness to follow through on threats of military force had made some Arab governments more willing to “do business” with the UK.
Accepting that “a lot of people” strongly opposed the 2003, Mr Miliband said that Britain’s reputation had actually been strengthened in some parts of the Middle East.
“People in the region do respect those who are willing to see through what they say [they will do],” Mr Miliband said.
“Even people who disagreed with it say to me, ‘You’ve sent a message that when you say something, you mean it’.”
He added: “In the Arab world today, I don’t believe that the Iraq decisions have undermined our relationships or our ability to business. Some of our ambassadors say we are in stronger position.”
An ad by US veteran’s group VoteVets that argues for Congress pushing a clean energy bill to stop the US backing fundamentalist regimes in the Middle East. Putting aside the fact that American troops are largely being attacked in places like Iraq because they’re occupying another people’s land, there is no doubt that the over-reliance on foreign oil is a problem for many nations around the world:
It’s like Iraq’s Oil for Food program all over again. This New York Times article is fascinating yet one wonders if any examples can be given of the corporate world not colluding with dictatorships in the name of making profits:
The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington’s efforts to discourage investment there, records show.
That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves.
For years, the United States has been pressing other nations to join its efforts to squeeze the Iranian economy, in hopes of reining in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Now, with the nuclear standoff hardening and Iran rebuffing American diplomatic outreach, the Obama administration is trying to win a tough new round of United Nations sanctions.
But a New York Times analysis of federal records, company reports and other documents shows that both the Obama and Bush administrations have sent mixed messages to the corporate world when it comes to doing business in Iran, rewarding companies whose commercial interests conflict with American security goals.
Oh:
An invasion of Iraq was discussed within the Government more than two years before military action was taken – with Foreign Office mandarins warning that an invasion would be illegal, that it would claim “considerable casualties” and could lead to the breakdown of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.
Iraqis are yet to see true press freedom:
Before the U.S.-led invasion, billed as the liberation of Iraqis, newspaper journalist Nadjha Khadum was as close to a trailblazer in her field as the era permitted.
During the 1980s war between Iraq and Iran, she was embedded with the Iraqi army and filed dispatches from the front lines. Her 1991 exposé of corruption at the Iraqi tax agency led to a minister’s dismissal.
Her latest venture — launching an independent online news site — offers a snapshot of the present travails of Iraqis who yearned for basic freedoms during years of dictatorship. As Operation Iraqi Freedom draws to a close, Khadum is finding that the brand of freedom the United States ushered in is at best tenuous, at worst a temporary illusion.
My latest article for New Matilda is an interview with leading American reporter Mark Danner:
Leading US journalist Mark Danner calls a spade a spade and examines the political value of violence in this exclusive interview with Antony Loewenstein
Mark Danner has some unusual characteristics for a mainstream US journalist.
He has published in some of America’s finest literary journals and is an irregular contributor to the New Yorker and New York Review of Books. Yet despite his impeccable media establishment credentials he remains entirely capable of critiquing its failures.
In an exclusive interview with newmatilda.com last week, Danner covered a lot of ground. He is haunted by his country’s use, abuse and boasting of torture on “enemy combatants” and the inability or unwillingness of Obama to challenge the criminality of the Bush years.
I raised with him the roughly 700 military bases or outposts across the world that Washington acknowledges it operates, according to American historian Chalmers Johnson. When I asked Danner what the US needs them for, he spoke with a frankness unusual in a mainstream journalist about the way the media avoids using words “empire” and “imperialism” to describe America’s role in the world.
“People don’t want to use that kind of terminology because they’ll get placed on the Left. It is viewed as an inherent denunciation of American policy. To talk about empire, you’re automatically Noam Chomsky, you’re making a point about hegemony but I don’t see it like that. The United States has imperial visions and responsibilities and that’s just a fact. It obviously works differently to the Roman Empire or the British Empire.
“But the US worldwide has interests and it controls the sea-lanes. The American navy is absolutely unparalleled in the world and nobody rivals this power. There is no other worldwide navy, though the Soviets tried to build one and failed. That’s what empires do — they keep the sea-lanes clear. China is building a blue-water navy but it’s generally thought that Beijing wants to construct a ‘string of pearls’ — military bases from China to Africa because at this stage their foreign policy is primarily focused on securing resources.”
Danner was in town last week to give a talk at Sydney University, and to promote his most recent book, Stripping Bare the Body. During his talk Danner challenged the core beliefs of the American-led battle against terrorism by outlining the wide gulf between reality and rhetoric. He cited President Barack Obama’s “eloquent address” in Cairo last June that articulated the importance of reframing the relationship between the West and the Muslim world.
But Washington seemed to ignore the contradictions of an African-American president talking about democracy and human rights while still wholeheartedly backing dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are key targets for al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Danner observes that while such inconsistencies might escape the mainstream Western voter, they are at the very centre of the way people in non-Western countries see US behaviour. Obama’s seeming endorsement of the policies of client states such as these — or at least no public moves to condemn their brutality — plays directly into the hands of those who point to America as the great hypocrite.
In that context, Danner argued that the Muslim Brotherhood gaining influence in Egypt through democratic elections should be cautiously welcomed and a “salutary” lesson for a super-power long used to backing anti-democratic forces.
He argued that after one year in office, Obama would get a failing grade on the project of completely ending torture and closing Guantanamo Bay. More ominously, lamented Danner, many polls find a majority of Americans now believe that torture is necessary to keep the homeland safe from terrorist attack. “Fear is now a permanent feature of American life”, Danner said.
He reminded the audience that the filibuster technique, ruthlessly used by the Republicans in the last 12 months to block Democrat-led initiatives in Congress, had an ironic history. “It used to be something Democrats used to block civil rights legislation to allow African-Americans to vote”, Danner explained, “and today the same tool is being used by the Republicans against a African-American President.” He wasn’t optimistic that this political gridlock would be broken anytime soon.
Far from being a beltway analyst, commenting on events from the safety of the US, much of Danner’s fame stems from his influential first-hand coverage of conflicts outside the US and of the effects of his country’s foreign policy. As well, his work has dealt frequently with the seeming inability of the corporate press to report honestly on conflicts and trauma both near and far from America. “The verdict since 9/11 is quite mixed”, he told me. “What the press did in the run-up to the Iraq war was a terrible job. One of the mitigating reasons for that was that the Bush administration chose to make its case [over Iraq] on intelligence grounds and put journalists in the position of being seals, wanting fish. The ones who clapped most agreeably, such as Judith Miller at the New York Times, got the biggest fish. Intelligence stories depend on leaks. Secondly, the political elites essentially closed ranks over the invasion.”
Danner argues that the Iraq invasion potentially hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans, as the so-called “Left” didn’t want to be seen as being on the wrong side of history. “Anybody on the Democratic side who thought they might be President in 2004, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, all supported the war; it was the smart vote, in part because of what happened after the earlier Iraq conflict in 1991 when Democrats opposed a very popular war.”
Violence as a catalyst for action is something that Danner looks at in a variety of ways in his book. As he says, “for leaders in a democracy, charged with crafting a foreign policy that can attract consensus or at least acquiescence, the instinctual power exerted by the spectacle of violence is a reality to be managed and sometimes feared.”
And that’s a dynamic that has certainly applied to the rapacious relationship between the US and a place in which Danner did some of his most powerful early journalism: Haiti. In the aftermath of the recent earthquake, Danner wrote in the New York Times that the country needed a serious and long-term commitment from Washington to build a “new Haiti”, but not of the militaristic kind: “Haitians have grown up in a certain kind of struggle for individuality and for power, and the country has proved itself able to absorb the ardent attentions of outsiders who, as often as not, remain blissfully unaware of their own contributions to what Haiti is. Like the ruined bridges strewn across the countryside — one of the few traces of the Marines and their occupation nearly a century ago — these attentions tend to begin in evangelical zeal and to leave little lasting behind.”
Events have brought Haiti back to attention in the most unfortunate way. But it is hard to see a lot of hope for the US altering the way it goes about its business there or elsewhere. In one of the most telling passages in Stripping Bare the Body, Danner describes another US intervention in Haiti, this time during Clinon pesidency: “The Americans, exerting their overwhelming power to reshape the politics of a tiny immiserated land, failed disastrously in Haiti. They underestimated the nationalist response that would accompany their every move, blundering about like a watchmaker blinded by his own shadow.”
And to anyone who has watched the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, that’s a description that sounds tragically familiar.
America, an army politely instructed to avoid massacres:
A 2003 handbook for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq exhorts soldiers to “Do your best to prevent war crimes” and warns that “when an Arab is confronted by criticism, you can expect him to react by interpreting the facts to suit himself or flatly denying the facts.”
The document, obtained and posted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, runs nearly 100 pages outlining on the history of Iraq, the customs of Arabs, and the rules of war.
One of America’s finest journalists, Nir Rosen – fearless, intense and unafraid to embed with the “enemy” – writes that Iraq is not likely to descend back into chaos (but the West has still created a sick experiment in post-dictatorship development, something welcomed by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman):
It’s been frustrating to read the latest hysteria about sectarianism returning to Iraq, the threat of a new civil war looming, or even the notion that Iraq is “unraveling.” I left Iraq today after an intense mission on behalf of Refugees International. My colleague Elizabeth Campbell and I traveled comfortably and easily throughout Baghdad, Salahedin, Diyala and Babil. We were out among Iraqis until well into the night every day, often in remote villages, traveling in a normal Toyota Corolla. Our main hassle was traffic and having to go through a thousand security checkpoints a day.
…
From the beginning of the occupation the US government and media focused too much on elite level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the “street,” neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war and now perhaps for the same reason many are worried that there is a “new” sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. The US military is not on the streets and cannot accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists are busy covering the elections and the debaathification controversy, but not reporting enough from outside Baghdad, or even inside Baghdad.
Iraqis on the street are no longer scared of rival militias so much, or of being exterminated and they no longer have as much support for the religious parties. Maliki is still perceived by many to be not very sectarian and not very religious, and more of a “nationalist.” Another thing people would notice if they focused on “the street” is that the militias are finished, the Awakening Groups/SOIs are finished, so violence is limited to assassinations with silencers and sticky bombs and the occasional spectacular terrorist attack — all manageable and not strategically important, even if tragic. Politicians might be talking the sectarian talk but Iraqis have grown very cynical.
Mossad’s supposedly legendary ability to murder so-called “enemies” is praised by many Jews but simply shows the illegality of Israeli actions.
The recent killing in Dubai of a Hamas operative – according to former New York Times journalist and Iraq WMD story-teller Judith Miller, this was Israel’s third attempt – alerted the world to such methods once again (although an Israeli minister is now saying that the murder in Dubai wasn’t actually murder. Really.)
This account in the London Independent of Israel’s tracking and 2008 killing of Hizbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh is a remarkble story:
On Saturday morning, 2 February 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, the city’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door and together they drove off.
Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.
Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as Reuben. It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas [field agents] were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead letter-boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, to the effect that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.
They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. After Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
The role of Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraq invasion is infamous. Friend of the neo-cons, feeder of false WMD stories, backer of war and close to Iran.
Seven years on, nothing has changed.
The Iraq war receives far too little media coverage these days. The “good war” in Afghanistan is leading the bulletins. But reading about this document from an American army medic back from Iraq, the atrocities by the Americans remain largely unknown.
ABC yesterday featured a story and news report about the massive refugee crisis in Jordan, countless men, women and children unable to return to Iraq and trapped in limbo. Many will want to come to Australia:
A leading global migration expert says Australia is likely to see an increase in the number of Iraqi asylum seekers arriving by boat because of a refugee crisis in the Middle East.
Dr Philip Marfleet, from the University of East London, says conditions for thousands of Iraqi refugees across the Middle East are growing worse by the day and he has called on Australia to increase its intake of Iraqi refugees to help ease the situation.
…
“More and more people from Iraq and other crisis zones are likely to seek sanctuary in Australia … I would describe it as a chronic crisis,” he said.
“It’s extremely likely, I think, that over the coming years we will see more and more Iraqis emerging into the smuggling networks.”
Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled Iraq to Jordan, Syria and other surrounding countries since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Many are teachers, doctors and other professionals with their families.
These issues are discussed in the forthcoming book by my friend Mike Otterman, Erasing Iraq.
Patrick Cockburn, a Western journalist who doesn’t celebrate when the military “kills terrorists”, challenges the relationship between the mainstream media and the armed forces:
The press likes short wars. Its audience is never so eager for news as during an armed conflict. The first newspapers date from the wars of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Television likes the melodrama of exploding shells and blazing tanks. And it is this very eagerness to report the fighting that makes it so easy to manipulate. The US army successfully sold the “surge” in Iraq as a military victory so that the American public scarcely noticed that US troops were withdrawing, leaving Iraq in the hands of a government closely allied to Iran.