War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: The Story of U.S. Exceptionalism in Iraq

War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: The Story of U.S. Exceptionalism in Iraq

By Ajamu Baraka

Global Research, March 26, 2013

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq, one of the most egregious expressions of naked power and imperial ambition since the Second World War.

The attack defied both an outraged world opinion — expressed by global mass demonstrations  — and the United Nations charter. It also marked a change from the previous veiled decorum of supposed adherence to international law that defined post-war international relations.  The Bush administration, armed with the ultimate expression of the arrogance of U.S. exceptionalism – legislation passed by the U.S. Congress – unleashed a murderous assault on the people of Iraq dubbed “Operation Shock and Awe.” 

Ten years later, the awesome consequences of that criminal assault are clear. More than a trillion dollars spent, almost five thousand American lives lost, more than 32,000 Americans wounded, estimates of a million dead Iraqis and almost five million displaced, an epidemic of Iraqi birth defects from “depleted” uranium, daily bombings, devastated public services and the dismemberment of the country. Yet, ten years later, no one, not one government official, has been held accountable. The obvious question is: how is it that, in light of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed by a State, there have been no investigations, prosecutions or convictions of the officials responsible for this assault?

The lack of accountability is even more incomprehensible in light of the fact that it is now widely acknowledged that the real reason for the Western invasion of Iraq had little to do with its concern about weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with its desire to steal Iraq’s oil.

American officials have long-since broken their silence on the phony excuses proffered to the American people to sucker them into supporting a war of choice against an Iraqi regime softened-up by a decade of crippling sanctions. Antonia Juhasz,  in an article written for CNN’s website, pointed out that the historical record is now unambiguously replete with evidence that the real motivation to attack Iraq was control of Iraq’s oil and that plans were being made as soon as ten days after the Bush Administration took power to figure out how to accomplish that objective.

But that was not the reason presented to the U.S. and the global public. What was presented was the argument that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that President Saddam Hussein and his government, therefore, posed a threat to the world (meaning the U.S.).  The “threat argument” was concocted to respond to any questions regarding the justification for waging war against a sovereign nation and was the basis for the ridiculous assertions by the Bush Administration that there was some operational cooperation between the government of Iraq and Ansar al-Islam, at the time loosely identified with the Al-Qaeda network.

Anyone with an even cursory understanding of the relationship between the Iraqi government and Al-Qaeda knew the assertion to be a laughable one, as Saddam Hussein was universally hated by the radical Islamic movement. However, with a compliant U.S. mainstream press and a U.S. public notorious for being one of the most unsophisticated in the world, it was relatively easy to not only make the argument that Iraqi WMDs posed a threat to the U.S. but also that Iraq was somehow connected to the attacks on 9/11.  The government was so successful in planting this notion in American minds that even after an avalanche of evidence to the contrary was revealed, in 2004 over 60 percent of those who voted for the re-election of Pres. George Bush believed that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11.

So if it is clear that the concern for WMDs was an elaborate hoax and that the attack on Iraq not only violated international law but even violated U.S. law, where is the investigation by the International Criminal Court?  Why don’t we see the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their boss George Bush in the dock at a Special Tribunal on Iraq?  And why has there been no accountability even under U.S. law?

Why the continued impunity, when the facts indicate that a crime of epic proportions was committed?  At a very minimum, there is enough evidence to justify an investigation into the attempts to evade, manipulate and distort U.S. law to further the narrow economic interests of powerful interests in the Bush Administration. Don’t “we, the people” deserve to know the details and role of the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Dick Cheney, that was formed right after the Administration took power?

Who pays the price for impunity?

The Iraqi Government nationalized its oil sector more than 30 years ago. But Western oil companies are now back. Riding in under the gun of the coalition of the willing, Western companies have now taken over the Iraqi oil sector, with 80 percent of production being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs. So Western oil is doing fine.

Did the U.S. media learn anything from the Iraqi war? It should have been clear that something had gone horribly wrong with a media culture that could allow itself to be reduced to a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the U.S. Government.  Sadly, it does not appear that any lessons were learned. What this episode has revealed is that by the early 2000s, a corporate media culture had emerged in the U.S. that embraced an ideological orthodoxy that framed its perception of the world in terms that did not diverge substantially from the positions and views of the economic and political elites in the country. The result is a mainstream media culture today that is more than willing to parrot the government’s line on the “big questions of war,” almost without question.

The latest example if this role is the hysteria being whipped up by the corporate media to push the Obama Administration to attack Syria because of unconfirmed “reports” that it’s military has used chemical weapons in the civil war that the U.S. orchestrated in the country. Here again, we see that the media still passes on information from unnamed governmental sources and when it takes editorial positions that find it on the same side as the government,  NATO and A-Qaeda in places like Libya or Syria it is seen as just an odd circumstance of history.

So neither government representatives nor associated institutions like the media and corporations pay the price for their role in crimes perpetrated internationally. The lawlessness and impunity of the West is paid for by the people of whichever nation finds itself in the crosshairs of U.S. and Western interests. It is paid for by the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, the working class families of the troops killed or injured, and the troops who returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress. A price has also been exacted  from all us who believe in the possibility of cooperative, global human progress

What the U.S. war on Iraq demonstrated is that in order to maintain their fantasies of continued global dominance, the U.S. and its colonialist allies will resort to naked piracy. But it is not gold trinkets and slaves that are the contemporary booty – it is whole nations. And while the undermining of the rule of law, the normalization of war to advance national interests and the hollowing out of the human rights idea in order to justify “humanitarian interventions” might seem to be beneficial in the short term,  the people of the world who have been  slowly liberating themselves from the conceptual myopia of colonization see very clearly the hypocrisy of the West’s supposed commitment to universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law when international crimes like the attack on Iraq go unpunished.

The result is that many are not moved by the West’s expressions of concerns for the people of Syria, when the U.S. and the West continue to support the occupation and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, kill innocents with drone strikes, and train and provide weapons to repressive states and terrorists groups. Many understand that if there was a real commitment to the equal application of international law and accountability, U.S. and British officials would be held to account for the crimes committed in Iraq.  But we all know that is not going to happen anytime soon.

Ajamu Baraka was the founding Director of the US Human Rights Network until June 2011.  He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he is editing a book on human rights entitled “The Fight Must be for Human Rights: Voices from the Frontline.” The book is due to be published in 2013.  

www.ajamubaraka.com

U.S. Steps up War on Syria: CIA is the Anchor of a Coordinated Secret Operation

U.S. Steps up War on Syria: CIA is the Anchor of a Coordinated Secret Operation

By Brian Becker

Global Research, March 27, 2013

ANSWER

While pretending to be cautious about its intervention in Syria, the Obama administration has conducted a massive clandestine operation over the past two years to pump guns, heavy military equipment and money to fuel the civil war that is destroying Syria.

The CIA is the anchor of this highly coordinated secret operation.

Under the CIA’s supervision, more than 160 military cargo flights have delivered weapons to anti-government armed units in Syria. (The New York Times, March 25)

Image right. Civilians killed by Syrian rebels, funded, armed and trained by the U.S.

One of the ridiculous fictions about the war against Syria is that the Obama administration publicly claims “caution” in arming the rebels, in contrast to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have openly acknowledged their role in fueling the civil war by sending arms and money to the enemies of the Assad government.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both absolute and hereditary monarchies whose existence is completely dependent on their role as clients of the United States. So too is the royal family in Jordan, which allows its territory to be a transfer pivot for the massive arms shipments into Syria.

Qatar, with its citizen population of only 250,000 people, does not derive its fighting posture toward Syria from a robust military capability. That is a joke. Rather, Qatar is the location of the Pentagon’s Central Command Forward Headquarters and its Combined Air Operation Center. Qatar is also home to Al Jazeera, which promotes the cause of the armed rebellion against the Assad government.

Qatar is not directing anything except that which the Pentagon approves.

The equally hideous Saudi royal family remains on the throne only because of its close ties to the Pentagon and CIA.

The Saudi monarchy is protected by U.S. imperialism because it is part of an undeclared but real U.S. sphere of influence, and it is the largest producer of oil in the world. The U.S. attitude toward the Saudi monarchy was put succinctly by Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he said that the U.S. government “will not permit” a revolution in Saudi Arabia such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, which removed the U.S. client regime of the Shah. Reagan’s message was clear: The Pentagon and CIA’s military forces would be used decisively to destroy any democratic movement against the rule of the Saudi royal family.

Reagan’s explicit statement in 1981 has in fact been the policy of every successive U.S. administration, including the current one.

It is hard to overstate the extreme irony of Secretary of State John Kerry’s public condemnations of Iran and Russia for maintaining their longstanding relationships with the sovereign and secular government of Syria, while the United States uses the most anti-democratic hereditary monarchies in the Middle East as their clients to fuel a civil war under the banner of “democracy” and “change.”

U.S. policy appears as irony, but it reveals a remarkable consistency and sameness in purpose regardless of whether the occupant in the White House is a conservative Republican or a centrist Democrat. Liberal Democrats in Congress and right-wing Tea Party types are unanimous in their boisterous and vile support for overthrowing the independent governments in the Middle East. At most, their differences are about some tactics versus other tactics. They profess the same goals and objectives. The invasion and war in 2003 overthrew a nationalist, secular and independent government in Iraq. The NATO bombing war of Libya destroyed Qaddafi’s government, which was likewise nationalist, secular and independent. Now the U.S. war machine and clandestine spy services are determined to destroy a similar government in Syria.

The fevered demonization campaign directed at Syria’s government by the same forces that protect the most retrograde monarchies in the Middle East should give pause to those on the “left” who function as an echo chamber for the arguments and rationales provided by the corporate-owned media and the U.S. government.

The U.S. seeks only puppets and client regimes in a region that possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil. The rest is rhetoric. That is the ABCs of the endless pursuit of regime change by the United States against independent governments whose origin and existence was a consequence of the anti-colonial revolutions that rocked the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s.

Statement by Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition

The Media Didn't Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media

The Media Didn't Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media

by Jim Naureckas on 27-03-2013

BRussells Tribunal

The headline on a story (3/22/13) by Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi: On Iraq, Journalists Didn't Fail. They Just Didn’t Succeed.

Some of the millions of people who weren't worth listening to about the Iraq War. (CC Photo: JL McVay)

To make that case, though, he has to redefine "failure" so far down that it's hardly possible to avoid failing.

"Thousands of news stories and columns published before the war described and debated the administration’s plans and statements, and not all of them were supportive," he says. I suppose the North Korean media might fail by that standard, but few others.

"It wasn't impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots," writes Fahri. It was not actually like the dystopian novel 1984, where

Paul Farhi

every scrap of contrary information went down the Memory Hole!

You know what, Paul Farhi? Skeptics are aware that it was possible to "connect the dots," because they did so, in real time–citing the same exceptional journalists whom you now cite to prove that the media as a whole were doing their job.

But the real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense of what reality is like. By this basic standard, the corporate media failed.

Walter Pincus

Farhi trots out journalists' old, tired excuses for this failure:  Condoleezza Rice's talk of mushroom clouds and Colin Powell's entirely dubious claims about WMDs "turned everyone irrational," says the Post's Walter Pincus.  "The consensus was universal,” says the L.A. Times' Doyle McManus. Even if such claims were true, which theypatently aren't, what else would you call a media system that responds to a crisis with irrational groupthink but afailure?

A comforting streak of fatalism runs through Farhi's piece. The idea that "a more confrontational press could have stopped the march into Iraq" is "wishful thinking," he writes; it implies that "the media could single-handedly override the president’s influence and that of other leaders."   Former Post executive editor Leonard "Downie believes that no amount of media skepticism would have stopped the administration. 'We were going to war,' he said."

You may have thought that corporate media outlets that are read, watched and listened to by cumulatively tens of millions of people are powerful shapers of public opinion–turns out no. How comforting the belief in the media's powerlessness must be to people who would otherwise fear they shared responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But Farhi does not just dispute that journalists have the power to change history; he has doubts about the ability of journalists to do journalism. Quoting Pincus again: "If there's disagreement inside the government about what's true and what isn't, how the hell can the press determine what's true?"

It's the kind of statement that makes me wonder why the Washington Post doesn't close up shop and recommend that people log in instead to the White House blog. If journalists can't tell truth from falsehood, or at least move us closer in that direction, what are they doing besides reformatting press releases?

Colin Powell at the UN

But it's really not impossible to distinguish credible from incredible claims. During his press-addling WMD performance, Colin Powell declared:

It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX…. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law.

But as Newsweek (2/24/03) reported, Kamel had also said that "Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." Who quotes evidence so selectively–and deceptively? Someone who's lying, that's who (FAIR Media Advisory, 2/27/03).

Or take Pincus' piece from March 16, 2003,  "U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms," the most on-point of the Post pieces cited by Farhi to make his case that the Post's pre-war performance "doesn't sound like failure." Even this piece didn't come out and say that anyone thought there were no WMDs to be found–only that "U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden." And because the truth, as Churchill put it, must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies, Pincus provided the administration's comeback:

Although senior intelligence officials said they are convinced Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, they feel they will not be able to prove it until after an invasion, when U.S. military forces and weapons analysts would have unrestricted access. These officials said the administration is withholding some of the best intelligence on suspected Iraqi weapons–uncertain as it is–from UN weapons inspectors in anticipation of war.

Right, the Bush administration could have pointed out where those weapons were hidden–if they had wanted to. Would you trust a reporter who swallowed this explanation to watch your car?

And here's what passes for dissenting opinion in what may be the Post's single best example of not failing to be properly skeptical of administration WMD claims:

Some officials charge the administration is not interested in helping the inspectors discover weapons because a discovery could bolster supporters in the UN Security Council of continued inspections and undermine the administration's case for war.

Well if AL GORE believed there were WMDs…! (CC Photo: JD Lasica, socialmedia.biz)

Farhi also has an argument about how reporters were hemmed in by journalistic standards–a version of  his colleague David Ignatius' line (4/27/04) that "the media were victims of their own professionalism" (Extra!, 11-12/04). Here's Farhi:

Congress's unwillingness to stand up to the president was critical…. There were no hearings that could have featured skeptical government experts disputing the official line….

Administration officials hogged media attention with scary, on-the-record statements. On the other side, there were few authoritative sources countering them. Even Al Gore believed that Iraq had WMDs….

Pincus and other reporters found people in the intelligence community who questioned the administration's case. But those with the most knowledge about classified material were unwilling to be identified publicly. And while anonymous sources are fine for suggesting the presence of smoke, they don't cinch the case for fire.

You'll notice the common thread here: A lack of "government experts," "authoritative sources" (like Al Gore!) or on-the-record secret agents. Journalists wanted to write fair, balanced journalism–but they just couldn't find enough people in the government who would tell them that the government was lying.

Meanwhile, there were millions of people marching in the streets, holding vigils, signing petitions, calling and writing their representatives–all in an effort to stop the war. These people had leaders, journalists, experts they relied on–the very people who had been "connecting the dots" left by Farhi's non-failing media.

Did media give a platform to these folks–who, aside from representing a significant segment of public opinion, had the not-inconsiderable virtue of being right? No, they deliberately turned their back on them. Out of 393 sources who discussed the prospect of war on the ABC,CBS, NBC and PBS evening news shows from January 30 until February 12, 2003, according to a FAIR study (3/18/03),  "only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups."

"If you want to say the press failed, you have to ask, what was the press supposed to do?" the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib told Farhi. Well, it was supposed to provide the accurate information and the space for public debate that democracy requires. But by the account of Farhi and his sources, corporate media never had any intention of doing either of these things. It's hard to say that the press failed at something it never tried to do in the first place.

P.S.: Farhi's piece ran while the Washington Post killed a far more critical piece on Iraq and the media it asked Greg Mitchell to write. Apparently the Post thought his piece didn't offer many "broader analytical points or insights." Still, Farhi positions himself as a brave contrarian standing up against media self-flagellation. Whatever gets you through the night.

Living with No Future Iraq, 10 Years Later

Living with No Future Iraq, 10 Years Later

by Dahr Jamail on 27-03-2013

BRussells Tribunal

Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis.

Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind.  This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.

But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead.  This sort of thing happens again and again.

Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt.  Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives -- women and children -- gunned down by American snipers.One of them, an 18-year-old girl has been shot through the neck by what her family swears was an American sniper. All she can manage are gurgling noises as doctors work frantically to save her from bleeding to death.  Her younger brother, an undersized child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomits as doctors race to keep him alive. He later dies while being transported to a hospital in Baghdad.According to the Bush administration at the time, the siege of Fallujah was carried out in the name of fighting something called “terrorism” and yet, from the point of view of the Iraqis I was observing at such close quarters, the terror was strictly American. In fact, it was the Americans who first began the spiraling cycle of violence in Fallujah when U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division killed 17 unarmed demonstrators on April 28th of the previous year outside a school they had occupied and turned into a combat outpost. The protesters had simply wanted the school vacated by the Americans, so their children could use it. But then, as now, those who respond to government-sanctioned violence are regularly written off as “terrorists.” Governments are rarely referred to in the same terms.

10 Years Later

Jump to March 2013 and that looming 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion.  For me, that’s meant two books and too many news articles to count since I first traveled to that country as the world’s least “embedded” reporter to blog about a U.S. occupation already spiraling out of control. Today, I work for the Human Rights Department of Al Jazeera English, based out of Doha, Qatar.  And once again, so many years later, I’ve returned to the city where I saw all those bloodied and dying women and children.  All these years later, I’m back in Fallujah.

Today, not to put too fine a point on it, Iraq is a failed state, teetering on the brink of another sectarian bloodbath, and beset by chronic political deadlock and economic disaster.  Its social fabric has been all but shredded by nearly a decade of brutal occupation by the U.S. military and now by the rule of an Iraqi government rife with sectarian infighting.

Every Friday, for 13 weeks now, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated and prayed on the main highway linking Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, which runs just past the outskirts of this city.

Sunnis in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq’s vast Anbar Province are enraged at the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki because his security forces, still heavily staffed by members of various Shia militias, have been killing or detaining their compatriots from this region, as well as across much of Baghdad.  Fallujah’s residents now refer to that city as a “big prison,” just as they did when it was surrounded and strictly controlled by the Americans.

Angry protesters have taken to the streets. “We demand an end to checkpoints surrounding Fallujah.  We demand they allow in the press.  We demand they end their unlawful home raids and detentions.  We demand an end to federalism and gangsters and secret prisons!” So Sheikh Khaled Hamoud Al-Jumaili, a leader of the demonstrations, tells me just prior to one of the daily protests. “Losing our history and dividing Iraqis is wrong, but that, and kidnapping and conspiracies and displacing people, is what Maliki is doing.”

The sheikh went on to assure me that millions of people in Anbar province had stopped demanding changes in the Maliki government because, after years of waiting, no such demands were ever met.   “Now, we demand a change in the regime instead and a change in the constitution,” he says. “We will not stop these demonstrations. This one we have labeled ‘last chance Friday’ because it is the government’s last chance to listen to us.”

“What comes next,” I ask him, “if they don’t listen to you?”

“Maybe armed struggle comes next,” he replies without pause.

Predictably, given how the cycle of violence, corruption, injustice, and desperation has become part of daily life in this country, that same day, a Sunni demonstrator was gunned down by Iraqi security forces.  Lieutenant General Mardhi al-Mahlawi, commander of the Iraqi Army’s Anbar Operations Command, said the authorities would not hesitate to deploy troops around the protest site again “if the protesters do not cooperate.”  The following day, the Maliki government warned that the area was becoming “a haven for terrorists,” echoing the favorite term the Americans used during their occupation of Fallujah.

Today’s Iraq

In 2009, I was in Fallujah, riding around in the armored BMW of Sheikh Aifan, the head of the then-U.S.-backed Sunni militias known as the Sahwa forces. The Sheikh was an opportunistic, extremely wealthy “construction contractor” and boasted that the car we rode in had been custom built for him at a cost of nearly half a million dollars.

Two months ago, Sheikh Aifan was killed by a suicide bomber, just one more victim of a relentless campaign by Sunni insurgents targeting those who once collaborated with the Americans.  Memories in Iraq are long these days and revenge remains on many minds.  The key figures in the Maliki regime know that if it falls, as is likely one day, they may meet fates similar to Sheikh Aifan’s.  It’s a convincing argument for hanging onto power.

In this way, the Iraq of 2013 staggers onward in a climate of perpetual crisis toward a future where the only givens are more chaos, more violence, and yet more uncertainty.  Much of this can be traced to Washington’s long, brutal, and destructive occupation, beginning with the installation of former CIA asset Ayad Allawi as interim prime minister.  His hold on power quickly faltered, however, after he was used by the Americans to launch their second siege of Fallujah in November 2004, which resulted in the deaths of thousands more Iraqis, and set the stage for an ongoing health crisis in the city due to the types of weapons used by the U.S. military.

In 2006, after Allawi lost political clout, then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad tapped Maliki as Washington’s new prime minister. It was then widely believed that he was the only politician whom both the U.S. and Iran could find acceptable.  As one Iraqi official sarcastically put it, Maliki was the product of an agreement between “the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil.”

In the years since, Maliki has become a de facto dictator. In Anbar Province and parts of Baghdad, he is now bitterly referred to as a “Shia Saddam.” Pictures of his less-than-photogenic face in front of an Iraqi flag hang above many of the countless checkpoints around the capital.  When I see his visage looming over us yet again as we sit in traffic, I comment to my fixer, Ali, that his image is now everywhere, just as Saddam’s used to be. “Yes, they’ve simply changed the view for us,” Ali replies, and we laugh. Gallows humor has been a constant in Baghdad since the invasion a decade ago.

It’s been much the same all over Iraq.  The U.S. forces that ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime immediately moved into his military bases and palaces. Now that the U.S. has left Iraq, those same bases and palaces are manned and controlled by the Maliki government.

Saddam Hussein’s country was notoriously corrupt.  Yet last year, Iraq ranked 169th out of 174 countries surveyed, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. It is effectively a failed state, with the Maliki regime incapable of controlling vast swaths of the country, including the Kurdish north, despite his willingness to use the same tactics once employed by Saddam Hussein and after him the Americans: widespread violence, secret prisons, threats, detentions, and torture.

Almost 10 years after U.S. troops entered a Baghdad in flames and being looted, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous places on Earth. There are daily bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The sectarianism instilled and endlessly stirred up by U.S. policy has become deeply, seemingly irrevocably embedded in the political culture, which regularly threatens to tip over into the sort of violence that typified 2006-2007, when upwards of 3,000 Iraqis were being slaughtered every month.

The death toll of March 11th was one of the worst of late and provides a snapshot of the increasing levels of violence countrywide.  Overall, 27 people were killed and many more injured in attacks across the country. A suicide car bomb detonated in a town near Kirkuk, killing eight and wounding 166 (65 of whom were students at a Kurdish secondary school for girls). In Baghdad, gunmen stormed a home where they murdered a man and woman. A shop owner was shot dead and a policeman was killed in a drive-by shooting in Ghazaliya. A civilian was killed in the Saidiya district, while a Sahwa member was gunned down in Amil. Three government ministry employees in the city were also killed.

In addition, gunmen killed two policemen in the town of Baaj, a dead body turned up in Muqtadiyah, where a roadside bomb also wounded a policeman. In the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, gunmen killed a blacksmith, and in the northern city of Mosul, a political candidate and a soldier were both killed in separate incidents. A local political leader in the town of Rutba in Anbar Province was shot and died of his injuries, and the body of a young man whose skull was crushed was found in Kirkuk a day after he was kidnapped. Gunmen also killed a civilian in Abu Saida.

And these are only the incidents reported in the media in a single day.  Others regularly don’t make it into the news at all.

The next day, Awadh, the security chief for Al Jazeera in Baghdad, was in a dark mood when he arrived at work.  “Yesterday, two people were assassinated in my neighborhood,” he said. “Six were assassinated around Baghdad. I live in a mixed neighborhood, and the threats of killing have returned. It feels like it did just before the sectarian war of 2006. The militias are again working to push people out of their homes if they are not Shia. Now, I worry everyday when my daughter goes to school. I ask the taxi driver who takes her to drop her close to the school, so that she is alright.” Then he paused a moment, held up his arms and added, “And I pray.”

“This Is Our Life Now”

Iraqis who had enough money and connections to leave the country have long since fled.  Harb, another fixer and dear friend who worked with me throughout much of my earlier reportage from Iraq, fled to Syria’s capital, Damascus, with his family for security reasons. When the uprising in Syria turned violent and devolved into the bloodbath it is today, he fled Damascus for Beirut. He is literally running from war.

Recent Iraqi government estimates put the total of “internally displaced persons” in Iraq at 1.1 million. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis remain in exile, but of course no one is counting.  Even those who stay often live as if they were refugees and act as if they are on the run.  Most of those I met on my most recent trip won’t even allow me to use their real names when I interview them.

My first day in the field this time around, I met with Isam, another fixer I’d worked with nine years ago. His son narrowly escaped two kidnapping attempts, and he has had to change homes four times for security reasons. Once he was strongly opposed to leaving Iraq because, he always insisted, “this is my country, and these are my people.” Now, he is desperate to find a way out. “There is no future here,” he told me. “Sectarianism is everywhere and killing has come back to Baghdad.”

He takes me to interview refugees in his neighborhood of al-Adhamiyah. Most of them fled their homes in mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods and towns during the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007. Inside his cobbled-together brick house with a roof of tin sheeting held down with old tires, one refugee echoes Isam’s words: “There is no future for us Iraqis,” he told me. “Day by day our situation worsens, and now we expect a full sectarian war.”

Elsewhere, I interviewed 20-year-old Marwa Ali, a mother of two. In a country where electric blackouts are a regular event, water is often polluted, and waste of every sort litters neighborhoods, the stench of garbage and raw sewage wafted through the door of her home while flies buzzed about. “We have scorpions and snakes also,” she said while watching me futilely swat at the swarm of insects that instantly surrounded me. And she paused when she saw me looking at her children, a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. “My children have no future,” she said. “Neither do I, and neither does Iraq.”

Shortly afterward, I met with another refugee, 55-year-old Haifa Abdul Majid. I held back tears when the first thing she said was how grateful she was to have food. “We are finding some food and can eat, and I thank God for this,” she told me in front of her makeshift shelter. “This is the main thing. In some countries, some people can’t even find food to eat.”

She, too, had fled sectarian violence, and had lost loved ones and friends. While she acknowledged the hardship she was experiencing and how difficult it was to live under such difficult circumstances, she continued to express her gratitude that her situation wasn’t worse.  After all, she said, she wasn’t living in the desert.  Finally, she closed her eyes and shook her head.  “We know we are in this bad situation because of the American occupation,” she said wearily. “And now it is Iran having their revenge on us by using Maliki, and getting back at Iraq for the [1980-1988] war with Iran. As for our future, if things stay like they are now, it will only keep getting worse. The politicians only fight, and they take Iraq down into a hole. For 10 years what have these politicians done? Nothing! Saddam was better than all of them.”

I asked her about her grandson.  “Always I wonder about him,” she replied. “I ask God to take me away before he grows up, because I don’t want to see it. I’m an old woman now and I don’t care if I die, but what about these young children?”  She stopped speaking, looked off into the distance, then stared at the ground.  There was, for her, nothing else to say.

I heard the same fatalism even from Awadh, Al Jazeera’s head of security.  “Baghdad is stressed,” he told me.  “These days you can’t trust anyone. The situation on the street is complicated, because militias are running everything. You don’t know who is who. All the militias are preparing for more fighting, and all are expecting the worst.”

As he said this, we passed under yet another poster of an angry looking Maliki, speaking with a raised, clenched fist.  “Last year’s budget was $100 billion and we have no working sewage system and garbage is everywhere,” he added. “Maliki is trying to be a dictator, and is controlling all the money now.”

In the days that followed, my fixer Ali pointed out new sidewalks, and newly planted trees and flowers, as well as the new street lights the government has installed in Baghdad. “We called it first the sidewalks government, because that was the only thing we could see that they accomplished.”  He laughed sardonically. “Then it was the flowers government, and now it is the government of the street lamps, and the lamps sometimes don’t even work!”

Despite his brave face, kind heart, and upbeat disposition, even Ali eventually shared his concerns with me.  One morning, when we met for work, I asked him about the latest news.  “Same old, same old,” he replied, “Kidnappings, killings, rapes. Same old, same old. This is our life now, everyday.”

“The lack of hope for the future is our biggest problem today,” he explained.  He went on to say something that also qualified eerily as another version of the “same old, same old.”  I had heard similar words from countless Iraqis back in the fall of 2003, as violence and chaos first began to engulf the country.  “All we want is to live in peace, and have security, and have a normal life,” he said, “to be able to enjoy the sweetness of life.”  This time, however, there wasn’t even a trace of his usual cheer, and not even a hint of gallows humor.

“All Iraq has had these last 10 years is violence, chaos, and suffering. For 13 years before that we were starved and deprived by [U.N. and U.S.] sanctions. Before that, the Kuwait War, and before that, the Iran War. At least I experienced some of my childhood without knowing war. I’ve achieved a job and have my family, but for my daughters, what will they have here in this country? Will they ever get to live without war? I don’t think so.”

For so many Iraqis like Ali, a decade after Washington invaded their country, this is the anniversary of nothing at all.

Dahr Jamail is a feature story staff writer and producer for the Human Rights Department of Al Jazeera English. Currently based in Doha, Qatar, Dahr has spent more than a year in Iraq, spread over a number of trips between 2003 and 2013. His reportage from Iraq, including for TomDispatch, has won him several awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism. He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.

Copyright 2013 Dahr Jamail

'US manipulated public opinion before Iraq war'

'US manipulated public opinion before Iraq war'

by RussiaToday on 26-03-2013

BRussells Tribunal

The US used every possibility to prove that Iraq was reluctant to cooperate in the war against terror, while it wasn’t, argues Salim Khalaf al-Jumayli, a former Iraqi intelligence officer, who made the revelation to RT.

Iraqi soldiers inspect the wreckage of an old Iraqi tank destroyed during the 2003 US-led invasion in the southern city of Basra.(AFP Photo / Essam Al-Sudani)

Ten years after Iraq was occupied by the US, RT Arabic channel Rusiya Al-Yaum talked with a man who played a key role in getting intelligence to the Iraqi government right before the invasion. Their guest was General Salim Khalaf al-Jumayli, an Iraqi intelligence officer, former chief of the American desk of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

RT: Mr. Salim, as an officer you destroyed all documents after the war was over. You burned them in a safe house near Baghdad. But I am sure there is still a lot of information that you committed to memory. Let’s start with the pretext that the US used to justify the invasion. They claimed that Iraq had ties with Al-Qaeda. Is it true or was it just a pretext?

Salim Khalaf al-Jumayli: Of course, America did everything to prepare public opinion inside the US and internationally for the war against Iraq. There were two major parts to this work: the US tried to convince everyone that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it had close ties with Al-Qaeda and terrorists in general. In the 1980s, we did have certain relations with some organizations. But in the 1990s, we received orders to stop all contact with any organization that had terrorist connections. Talking about ties with Al-Qaeda, George Bush said that President Saddam Hussein had sent his envoys to meet with Osama bin Laden, but he never mentioned what the result of that meeting was. In 1992, after the war with Kuwait, Iraq was trying to restore relations with Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. At that moment, Saudi Arabia was very anti-Iraq, and the President ordered to put all our efforts into changing that situation. We had to gather intelligence that could help us reach that goal. So we put more personnel in the Gulf countries department, and focused on Saudi Arabia. I was responsible for Syria at the time. We had connections with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Adnan Uqla’s group. They had connections with Osama Bin Laden who was in Sudan at the time. That group offered to establish contacts with Bin Laden in order to work against Saudi Arabia. We got permission to establish that contact through the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, namely through a brother of Adnan Uqla, who was in an Arab country bordering with Iraq. We invited him to Baghdad, and I met with him at the Mansour Milia Hotel. I told him to get our message to Osama bin Laden. We all were against the American presence in Saudi Arabia. We had the same enemy, therefore we could work together undermining the Saudi regime and pressuring it to remove Americans from the Arabian Peninsula. This person went to Sudan with our message, there he met with Osama bin Laden. Then we got a reply from bin Laden – he said the Ba’ath regime in Iraq was apostate, and that it was because of the Iraqi regime that the Americans came to the Middle East, therefore he couldn’t have any contacts with this regime. There were other attempts to establish a connection, through Hassan al-Turabi for example. But Osama bin Laden’s position never changed. All of this happened before 1995, when he moved to Afghanistan and began to work against the Russian presence.

RT: Against the Najibullah regime…

SHJ: Americans also contacted bin Laden, they were the ones who transferred him to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians.

RT: If bin Laden refused to work with Saddam Hussein, does it then mean that it was the US who cooperated with al-Qaeda and not Iraq?

SHJ: I would not define it as cooperation though as it was later revealed they did have contacts. They coordinated their actions and supported al-Qaeda’s fight against the Russians in the Soviet Union. When Bush said that Saddam Hussein sent an envoy to bin Laden, he didn’t talk of the results of that mission. So formally his statement was true but in terms of the meaning he was wrong.

RT: So that’s about Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Now let’s talk a little bit about the weapons of mass destruction. Did Iraq really have these weapons as America claimed when it invaded the country?

SHJ: One more thing about Al-Qaeda. Before the war against Iraq, the US media talked a lot about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who allegedly was in Iraq and had connections with the Iraqi regime. I didn’t have any information about that. And since al-Zarqawi was from Jordan, I asked my colleague at the Jordan desk about that. He said that they had received reports from Jordan’s intelligence about Musab al-Zarqawi being sick and getting treatment at a hospital in Baghdad. He even told me that this hospital was in Bataween. We searched the area, but didn’t find Musab al-Zarqawi. So we had no connections with Musab al-Zarqawi or Al-Qaeda. There was an attempt to establish a connection with the Taliban through one of the ministers, who was in Pakistan. Iraqi intelligence proposed this, but Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz said that it was an unstable regime and it wouldn’t benefit Iraq to have relations with it.

US soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, ride on a military vehicle as they leave their base on a mission in Tikrit, 180 Kilometers (110 miles) north of Iraqi capital Baghdad.(AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

RT: What about weapons of mass destruction? Did Iraq actually have WMD that could threaten the entire world or the region?

SHJ: They fabricated a certain problem, analyzed it and drew their conclusions based on that. The data they received from various sources wasn’t true. This was their attempt of swaying public opinion. In terms of the intelligence operation, Iraq was a closed country, and they obviously had no sources within the country that would’ve told them the truth. So they relied on other sources that fed them lies such as, for instance, photos of trucks, portable labs which according to their allegations were used for producing chemical weapons. They were actually used for checking food products supplied for the government. But they took photos of those labs and presented them as units for producing WMD.

RT: Mr. Salim, could you tell us as a counter-intelligence agent whether Iraq actually benefited from this powerful secrecy wall around it? Perhaps, had there been more transparency, and had the opponents known more about it and drew their conclusions based on that, there would not be such a perception of Iraq as an unknown power, like a dreadful black box?

SHJ: Certainly, a counter-intelligence agent’s work implies providing certain data to the opponents but you’re the one who should have it under control. From my experience, I am absolutely convinced, had the Americans had an Iraqi source that was telling them truth they wouldn’t have done what they did, in spite of having problems between the CIA and the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice], who wanted to impose her opinion by making certain changes in the CIA reports. If only the CIA had a trustworthy and truthful information source within Iraq. So I’d like to stress again that in the counter-intelligence operation you should let the opponent have its sources inside your country, who you keep under control. You should ensure there’s a certain information leak to the extent you want to have it. Even if this source gets certain information, as it happened in our case, it’s better to let them learn it as the real situation meets our statements. We’ve always insisted that we didn’t have WMD.

Indeed, the Inspection Commissions lost their trust after particular documents were discovered at a fowl farm in a small area called Salman. They were the only ones we had but they didn’t believe it. Before the war, in our secret communication we confirmed that: they convinced the world in the need of entering Iraq in order to resolve two major issues, WMD and ties with Al-Qaeda. But what would they tell the world if they invaded Iraq and didn’t find WMD or ties with Al-Qaeda? You may have noticed that the entire talk was held in a different key. After a while, they changed the entire plan and said they were pursuing democratic goals in Iraq. And once chaos began in Iraq they called it‘constructive’. Chaos seized the entire Arabic region. In their strategy they believed that America would rule this whole area once they overthrew Saddam Hussein; but it actually worked out the opposite way when chaos seized the entire area.

RT: As I understand, you had contacts or cooperation with the US political bodies or Intelligence?

SHJ: No, we had contacts in the US Administration via American intermediaries of Lebanese origin. We exchanged letters. So we had no contacts with the US political bodies or intelligence services. We wanted to have a meeting with the CIA or anyone in the US administration to explain the situation to them explicitly but we never succeeded.

RT: Were you prepared for cooperation with the international community, for instance, with Europe or the US in then counter-terrorism area?

SHJ: We were, and we sent a number of letters on that matter. In 1993, a truck full of explosives drove into the World Trade Center. That attack was developed and executed by an Iraqi American who came from Samarra, Iraq. This man fled back to Iraq following the attack. The US intelligence followed him and reported that he arrived at Iraq so we started looking for him. It took us six months before we found him working at a car workshop. The Iraqi intelligence detained him and put him to jail. We delivered a letter saying that we had crucial information on the executor of the WTC attack, and Iraqi American, and that we were willing to cooperate in order to pass this information over to them. Their reply was that we should pass this information to them in writing, and refused to meet with us. At the same time, they promised a $25mln reward to anyone who’d inform them of that individual or his whereabouts. They realized we had him, and that we informed them about it.

Following the 9/11 attack, they tried to act as intermediaries between us and the US intelligence via the Egyptian intelligence in order to arrange for this man’s extradition. The Egyptians and the relevant US forces had a number of meetings. We were willing to extradite him. He was an American and we had no right to keep him. But we wanted to have guarantees that the extradition would take place within the official framework. The US intelligence wanted to fly over for him on a special aircraft, however, our President didn’t approve it. He said it would be unacceptable to come over and pick up that man, as we had our own aircraft and we could send him over in an Iraqi aircraft. The Americans didn’t’ agree to that. Just imagine how persistent they were in this matter. They didn’t want Iraq to prove that it was against terrorism and that it was willing to cooperate in this matter. Following that the intelligence authorities persuaded our President to fly this man over by an Egyptian aircraft. When handing such a man over both sides were supposed to sign statements of transfer and acceptance, in presence of an intermediary. We drew up those statements which were very explicit, and the Americans refused to sign the acceptance statement.

RT: And the only reason they did that was to claim that Iraq was reluctant to cooperate in the war with terror?

SHJ: That’s right.

RT: So what happened to that person?

SHJ: He stayed behind bars until the day the intervention started, and the prisoners were set free. He walked off and to date, no one knows where he is. The only reason why the Americans declined the deal was that they wanted to avoid confirming officially that they had got the guy. And we needed some guarantees! We kept this guy detained after his arrest in 1992, but we held those talks with the US in 2002. We had held him under arrest for ten years.

RT: Do you remember his name?

SHJ: We gave him an alias and used it all the way. We called him Aboud – at least, that was his name in our database. Even in his personal file he is registered as “Aboud”.But I think I remember his original name: it was Saied, I believe. Saied from Samarra.

RT: Was he one of the Islamic fundamentalists? I’m talking of Al-Qaeda, for instance…

SHJ: He had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. He had perpetrated that attack as an act of revenge for the First Gulf War. He had two accomplices: one from Egypt, the other from Pakistan.

Three Iraqi detainees await inside a Humvee military vehicle during a raid in the area by US troops, on outskirts of Tikrit, 180 kms (110 miles) north of Iraq's capital Baghdad.(AFP Photo / Mauricio Lima).(AFP Photo / Mauricio Lima)

RT: You’ve mentioned a “security belt” in Iraq. In this regard I recall my conversation with the late head of the Soviet intelligence Leonid Shebarshin, who died a year ago. When talking about capturing Kuwait, he told me that US intelligence had failed to penetrate into Iraq and gain information from the inside of the country. They tried recruiting officers of the Soviet intelligence service who were dealing with Iraq. Soviet counter-intelligence revealed their intentions and disrupted the plan. What lessons did Soviet counter-intelligence teach the Iraqi security services?

SHJ: Our counter-intelligence is based on principles borrowed from Russia. The beginning of our work dates back to 1975 – the days of the late Barzan al-Tikriti, an early golden age of intelligence apparatus, which started growing stronger at the time. During the period of Fadhil al-Barak as the head of Iraqi intelligence, from 1984 to 1989, the development of the apparatus was making great strides: the procedure of information processing was formed, the structure of state security and procedure of contacting secret services and sources were shaped. Overall, all our procedures have been adopted from Russia, and all our counter-intelligence “pundits” have been educated in Russia.

They were our first highly qualified specialists. Then we organized training within the state security apparatus, supplementing the process of education with the experience of Germany and Greece. The Russian method of approaching your goal is multi-step, thus the process is long and successive. In the late 90’s we decided to change this strategy of work and began to reduce the number of stages in the recruiting process. The reason for this was that we had to work under huge pressure, which required great commitment and efforts from us. Moreover, the aggression towards Iraq was really serious. We were short of time and couldn’t afford to spend a whole year recruiting a person, so we had to make our decision within one month. Still we stayed subtle and tried not to come out too soon, just in case the person was not inclined to cooperate with us.

RT: You’ve recruited a number of people. It is said that you’ve even penetrated into the US Department of Defense!

SHJ: Our penetrating into the US Department of Defense was something that even Russia failed to implement. We have recruited a high-ranking officer from the National Security Agency of the United States Department of Defense. We managed to leak a great deal of information, and I studied this information twice. However, not all of this information was genuine – a part of it was supposed to mislead us. This officer even unveiled the general scenario of the war with Iraq, the US military strength in Turkey, information about troops and counter-intelligence in countries neighboring Iraq such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states. He was the one who confirmed there would be no attacking from Turkey. Guided by this information we relocated the Adnan division from the Mosul region closer to Baghdad, thus fortifying positions of the troops around the city. The US counter-intelligence suspected we had a source in the Department of Defense and was deliberately exposing tons of all sorts of information. But we knew which of the information was true.

RT: So the information was selected, right?

SHJ: Yes, misleading information was easy to identify, and so was the true. We knew everything.

RT: So you had reasons to be certain that an invasion was imminent. Did you share these findings with the leadership of Iraq, particularly President Saddam Hussein?

SHJ: Our job was to gather information on American presence in the region, and locate CIA presence in Iraq, identifying their strategy and plans, the targets they might be looking for in Iraq, and their proxies in our country. Most CIA lairs in Iraq were located in the north. We had information that the Americans would invade as soon as they amassed 75,000 troops in the Gulf. On February 24, which was about a month ahead of the invasion, we sent a report to the command staff, informing them that the American forces stationed in the Gulf had swollen to 73,000 in strength, coming close to the benchmark for launching an invasion. At the same time, the Americans were feinting leaks to make us believe the invasion would start somewhere in April or May. But we were certain that it would kick off any day now.

RT: Does that mean that the leaders of Iraq actually had a chance of avoiding the war? Or was the war predetermined, and the United States was going to invade Iraq regardless of whether it did or didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda?

SHJ: We were positive that there would be war. The American media propaganda machine had been blatantly manipulating public opinion internationally and inside the United States. It was already too late for them to call off the war effort. And for us, it was difficult to sway public opinion after 9/11. There was a missed opportunity here: prior to the 9/11 attacks, it was still possible for us to come to terms with Washington by making some serious concessions. But after 9/11, with the US administration, and especially the Department of Defense, becoming dominated by hardliners, we found it increasingly difficult to deal with the Americans. We had the American Jewish lobby to thank for that, as they were investing serious efforts in toppling “the Iraqi regime.” For your information, all five of the senior policy advisers in the US Department of Defense at the time were Jewish. All those people who masterminded this war were Jewish. They all subsequently went below the radar, and today, it’s impossible to trace them.

An Iraqi Kurdish boy holds up a green flag behind US soldiers during a demonstration in Kirkuk, 255 kilometres (155 miles) north of Baghdad.(AFP Photo / Abdelhak Senna)

RT: What about the high-profile decision makers – the group of neo-conservative decision makers who are responsible for starting this war?

SHJ: I have already mentioned those who were officially in charge of the war: Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and on top of them all, Dick Cheney and President Bush. But the policy advisers I’m referring to were a group within the DoD, who effectively assumed the role of intelligence, national security community, the State Department, and so on. Throughout history, decision making powers are normally shared rather than concentrated in a single office. In the United States, the national security agenda is usually shaped collectively by the CIA, the National Security Council, presidential advisors, foreign policy think tanks, mass media, etc. And the Pentagon certainly has a say, too. But during the period in question, strategic decision were made exclusively by a single institution: the Department of Defense. The Department of State objected to their war plan, and so did the CIA.

The CIA told the Pentagon, “Toppling the Iraqi regime is the easy part, but what are your scenarios for Iraq once you remove Saddam Hussein?” The DoD replied, “Just let us overthrow him, and then everything will stabilize.”

That’s the kind of mind frame that dominated the American war effort. There was no sustainable, long-term strategy, and that’s why it all ended in chaos. Of course, any sensible individual who would care to take a good look at the situation in Iraq back then would have realized that “the regime” was actually a secular government that opposed religious extremism. Up until 2003, there wasn’t a single Iraqi citizen who would be a member of Al Qaeda. There was one report – just one report that we received – fingering an individual named Ali al-Jaburi as an operative with Al Qaeda’s financial arm. We did a search and came up with thousands of Iraqis by that name, but we never found the al-Jaburi we were looking for.

Now look what happened to Iraq after 2003. We had warned the Americans that if the regime would fall, Iraq would devolve into a jihadist stronghold, and Iran would expand its area of influence across the Gulf region. It was us who had checked terrorist activity and contained Iran’s quest for regional domination. I am sure that all of our messages and information did reach US decision makers, up to the very top.

RT: Did the Iraqi leadership believe that America would stop short of starting the war because of its pragmatic policy and little interest in wreaking havoc and endangering its allies in the Persian Gulf?

SHJ: I think our leadership believed that the US administration could foresee the implications of toppling the Iraq regime, that they knew this could tear the country apart under the influence of sectarian extremists, and enable Iran’s influence to reach the Gulf. That the American administration would do something as stupid as letting the Iraq regime fall and allowing Al-Qaeda and Iran to spread their influence across the region was totally inconceivable. Our authorities thought that the war wouldn’t last long and that afterwards the US would put forward certain conditions and we would say yes. But no one had expected Americans not only to crush the regime but the whole country as well in such a brutal manner. They even went as far as damaging their own country! They lost people and money. It’s those wars that sparked the economic crisis they are going through now. No one had thought that Americans would act so irrationally.

RT: What happened to your sources in the US?

SHJ: We had three types of sources. Two of them can be characterized as military sources. One at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, another in the Gulf, one more in the Pentagon. Those were the military sources. Besides, we had our informants in the Congress and the National Security Council. Another category is the so-called “hostile diaspora” or the Iraqi opposition activists abroad who worked to knock down the ruling regime in Iraq. These include people who live in the US and who cooperate with our special department. This department is responsible for our connections in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the UN. In order to be able to accuse somebody of being our informant in the States, there must be proof that they cooperated with the Iraqi intelligence and were paid for that. The Prosecutor General’s Office should have enough grounds to press charges – in other words, a case should be started either in the FBI or here in Iraq. But we have destroyed all our files on the US, and Americans have failed to submit sufficient proof to take any of those people to court. As for our sources on the American side – they are gone and that’s all we know about them.

RT: You may refuse to answer this question, but I will still try and ask it. A few days after the attack, you were arrested by American soldiers. Did they try to make you speak or find out about your sources in the US?

SHJ: On April 9, Baghdad fell. On April 12, I set on fire all the archives we kept on the US, Western Europe and Asian countries.

RT: How long did it take you to burn them?

SHJ: A total of four days after I took the decision and ordered to burn these files – there were tons of documents. But I made sure they were all destroyed. On April 22, I was arrested. Those guys wanted to make me speak. (In his book, the CIA director wrote that they had successfully located an important informant in the intelligence. The pilots were told to get ready for an air strike. We insisted that we needed him alive. That was important for us….) They broke into my house at five in the evening.

RT: Did you consider attempting an escape?

SHJ: No. I was sure I would get caught no matter where I go. I was responsible for the archive on the US, I had all the information. I wasn’t worried, because the archive had been burned. And words are just words. Then they started investigating me. About 37 investigation teams were assigned to my case. The FBI wanted to know about our sources in the US. The CIA tried to find out the identities of double agents who worked for both Iraq and the US and whether or not we controlled “Sureyya”. I was investigated for 9 months. And a special team from the Pentagon assigned to the Ministry of Defence case also opened a criminal case against me and investigated me for a week, for 8 hours daily. Just in connection with that case.

RT: With no results?

SHJ: No. They asked me about our source in the Pentagon.

RT: Did you try not to reveal your sources?

SHJ: As much as I could, but I couldn’t deny everything. They had some information of their own as for our contacts and sources among the population. The important thing is that none of them talked.

RT: Let’s talk about a sensitive subject – did you really try to bribe Mr El Baradei?

SHJ: I work for intelligence, and 90% of intelligence work is illegal! It’s true for all intelligence services around the world. If you always observe the law, you won’t be able to work for intelligence. We encouraged El Baradei to tell the truth, in which case the Americans would have tried to get rid of him. If they had tried to do that, we were ready to take his side and support him. All he had to do is tell the truth, and there would have been no need to worry about his position or financial security. He started to waver at the meeting that took place on January, 19th, but he didn’t voice support for the use of force against Iraq. We didn’t have a way to contact him directly, only through intermediaries. There were two of them, both Egyptians. One has recently passed away, and the other is in good health. The money was to be delivered to the Egyptian ambassador in Vienna or Geneva, I can’t recall which. My Schengen visa was ready. The person who was in charge of transporting the money is still alive, by the way. I was carrying a letter that I was to deliver to Mr El Baradei. We weren’t going to ask him to sign for the delivery or anything of the sort, of course. I couldn’t say that this money was for him. The deal was to take place in a park on the territory of the Egyptian Embassy, without a word spoken in the process. Eventually this plan was discarded. We wanted to deliver the money before January, 19th, since that was when the decisive meeting was to take place. After that there was no point in going through with the plan.

US soldiers of the 82nd Airborne division take position during a search for a weapons cache in Fallujah, 50 kms (30 miles) west of Baghdad.(AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

RT: So you’re not even sure whether Mr El Baradei knew about this deal?

SHJ: No, I don’t know that for sure.

RT: And where did all the experienced, skilled staff of the intelligence service go? It’s like it disappeared after the occupation.

SHJ: After the occupation 600 experienced officers made up the core of a new intelligence service. Neither the head of the intelligence service nor the top officials came back to work there, except maybe one or two. The people who returned were heads of the departments and such. And so the new intelligence service was created. Then the government turned against these people, fired them and made their names public. Their families were banished from the Sunni regions they lived in because they returned to work in the intelligence service. Most of them left Iraq and moved to Dubai, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and other countries.

RT: And my last question. Were there any cases of treason within senior military command?

SHJ: As far as I know, there were no such cases. I am absolutely sure of it. The military command remained united. But last-minute changes to our battle plans led to the destruction of three Republican Guard divisions that were moving to cut into the rolling American columns as they stretched along the western bank of the Euphrates. Of course, we had no support from the air.

They were able to tap into our communications, so they focused on that. They managed to recruit a communications expert from special services who knew how the communications system of the President’s backup residencies worked.

RT: Was he an Iraqi?

SHJ: Yes, he was an Iraqi. When the Dora neighborhood in Baghdad got hit this person vanished without a trace.

So, the country was occupied. After that the resistance started. I sincerely hope that Iraq will see stability once again.