JUly 2004

Miscellaneous Reports from Iraq

ENGLISH VIOLENCE AT A PREMIUM: The Programme Management Office has contracted the British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from "assassination, kidnapping, injury" Aegis, is being paid $293m to save the PMO... It turns out that Aegis's CEO, Tim Spicer, has a bit of an embarrassing past... . In the 90s, he helped to put down rebels and stage a military coup in Papua New Guinea, as well as hatching a plan to break an arms embargo in Sierra Leone.

ECONOMIC BETRAYAL:Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans, Europeans and south Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction itself became a prime target. ....According to the latest estimates, security costs are eating up 25% of reconstruction contracts - money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or telephone exchanges.


photo:www.scn.org

WATER:The state department has taken $184m earmarked for drinking water projects and moved it to the budget for the lavish new US embassy in Saddam Hussein's former palace. Short of $1bn for the embassy, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul". In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by the consumer group Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea, nausea and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water.

SADDAM KNEW HOW TO DO IT TOO: Iyad Allawi,.........a former CIA spy, he is already threatening to declare martial law, while his defence minister says of resistance fighters: "We will cut off their hands, and we will behead them." NAOMI KLEIN,Guardian.

to create public confusion:
The need to escalate disinformation and propaganda is also prevalent, particularly when the American public is loosing its stomach for the battle, when American lives are being lost each day and when the President continues to be caught red handed in one scandal after another. To rouse public opinion to support America's colonial war effort, the US intelligence community has created it own terrorist organizations.........this is precisely what we have in Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi,

AL ZARQAWI ALREADY DEAD?
America's new "public enemy No 1"is. Zarqawi and his group have been used from the justification for the invasion of Iraq to the latest "barbaric" videotaped beheadings that his group claims to have carried out. The US State Department has increased the reward for his arrest from $10 million to $25 million, which puts his "market value" at par with that of Osama. Interestingly, Al Zarqawi is not on the FBI most wanted fugitives list.Al-Zarqawi has no family history. He comes from an impoverished Palestinian family in Jordan. His parents are dead. He emerges out of the blue.


1,2,3:Al Zarqawi is often described as an "Osama associate", the bogyman, allegedly responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in several countries. In other reports, often emanating from the same sources, it is stated that he has no links to Al Qaida and operates quite independently. He is often presented as an individual who is challenging the leadership of bin Laden.

In Iraq, he is said to be determined to "ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites". But is that not precisely what US intelligence is aiming at ( "divide and rule") as confirmed by several analysts of the
US led war? Pitting one group against the other with a view to weakening the resistance movement.

The CIA, with its $30 billion plus budget, pleads ignorance: they say they know nothing about him, they have a photograph, but, according to the Weekly Standard (24 May 2004), they apparently do not know his weight or height.

CORE DISINFORMATION PROVIDES FUTURE POLITICAL GAIN:
In previous propaganda ploys, the CIA hired PR firms to organize core disinformation campaigns, including the Rendon Group. The latter worked closely with its British partner Hill and Knowlton, which was responsible for the 1990 Kuwaiti incubator media scam, where Kuwaiti babies were allegedly removed from incubators in a totally fabricated news story, which was then used to get Congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf War.

Al-Zarqawi was in the spot light following Colin Powell's flopped WMD report to the UN Security Council. Powell's speech presented "documentation" on the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida, while focusing on the central role of Al-Zarqawi:

INFACT IT IS EMERGING THAT IT IS ISRAEL WHO IS EMERGING AMONG THE KURDS NOT...."Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas ".British press reports, quoting official statements claimed that the terrorists had learnt to produce the ricin at the camp in Northern Iraq. Yet when US Special Forces in March 2003 raided the camp in Northern Iraq, nothing resembling biological or chemical weapons was found
(The New Yorker reported Monday,21st June.that Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in northern Iraq, providing training for Kurdish commando units and running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria.........The magazine quoted a senior Turkish official as saying that Ankara will stand up firmly to the division of Iraq."Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.")(Photos:US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, in Sulaimania June 19,2004 & Jalal Talabani, leader of the National Union of Kurdistan Party (left) and Turkish Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul (right), in Ankara yesterday, 22nd June,2004. Talabani denied that Israelis are assisting Kurdish forces in their bid to secede from Iraq, according to media reports. (Annahar, 6/23/04).alJazeerah)


THE ABU GHRAIB SCANDALWas it a coincidence? At the very outset of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, there were rumors of an Al Zarqawi terrorist attack on American Soil, in Jordan as well as in Iraq. .........."The State Department says terrorists are planning an attack on U.S. soil. High on their anxiety list, terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is
representative of a very real and credible threat. His operatives are planning and attempting now to attack American targets, and we are after them with a vengeance." CNN ....Bear in mind that the Attack on America report, focusing on "We are after them with a vengeance", was published one day following the CBS 60 minutes program on torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
(Complete transcript at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CBS405A.html ).

Mr. Wolfowitz, Rummsfeld's top deputy, told the House Armed Services Committee that one reason so many negative stories come out of Iraq is that "a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors — and rumors are plentiful." ............When challenged by Democratic lawmakers about the lack of a connection between Saddam and Sept. 11, Mr. Wolfowitz was unrepentant — and unmmoved by the 9/11 panel's conclusion that Saddam and Al Qaeda had no collaborative relationship.
"I don't need proof of involvement in Sept. 11 to be concerned that Saddam Hussein is providing mutual support to Al Qaeda,""The more they sense that we're impatient . . . the more car bombs there will be." He seems to imply that we're complicit in killing our soldiers if we don't sanguinely go along with the Bush administration's delusions.New York Times

GENERAL ZINNI believes these are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.
"I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do," says Zinni. "And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested."

Paul Bremer, photo electricintifada