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In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America’s dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage

An exclusive golf course backs onto a spacious two-storey house. A coiled green garden hose lies on the lawn. The grey-slatted wooden shutters are closed. And, like the other deserted luxury houses in this gated community near Bryan, Texas, nothing moves.

Retired Colonel Jim Steele, whose military decorations include the Silver Star, the Defence Distinguished Service Medal, four Legions of Merit, three Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart, is not at home. Nor is he at his office headquarters in Geneva, where he is listed as the chief executive officer of Buchanan Renewables, an energy company. Similar efforts to track him down at his company’s office in Monrovia are futile. Messages are left. He doesn’t call back.

For over a year the Guardian has been trying to contact Steele, 68, to ask him about his role during the Iraq war as US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s personal envoy to Iraq’s Special Police Commandos: a fearsome paramilitary force that ran a secret network of detention centres across the country – where those suspected of rebelling against the US-led invasion were tortured for information.

On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion the allegations of American links to the units that eventually accelerated Iraq’s descent into civil war cast the US occupation in a new and even more controversial light. The investigation was sparked over a year ago by millions of classified US military documents dumped onto the internet and their mysterious references to US soldiers ordered to ignore torture. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a 20-year sentence, accused of leaking military secrets.

Steele’s contribution was pivotal. He was the covert US figure behind the intelligence gathering of the new commando units. The aim: to halt a nascent Sunni insurgency in its tracks by extracting information from detainees.

It was a role made for Steele. The veteran had made his name in El Salvador almost 20 years earlier as head of a US group of special forces advisers who were training and funding the Salvadoran military to fight the FNLM guerrilla insurgency. These government units developed a fearsome international reputation for their death squad activities. Steele’s own biography describes his work there as the “training of the best counterinsurgency force” in El Salvador.

Of his El Salvador experience in 1986, Steele told Dr Max Manwaring, the author of El Salvador at War: An Oral History: “When I arrived here there was a tendency to focus on technical indicators … but in an insurgency the focus has to be on human aspects. That means getting people to talk to you.”

But the arming of one side of the conflict by the US hastened the country’s descent into a civil war in which 75,000 people died and 1 million out of a population of 6 million became refugees.

Celerino Castillo, a Senior Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who worked alongside Steele in El Salvador, says: “I first heard about Colonel James Steele going to Iraq and I said they’re going to implement what is known as the Salvadoran Option in Iraq and that’s exactly what happened. And I was devastated because I knew the atrocities that were going to occur in Iraq which we knew had occurred in El Salvador.”

It was in El Salvador that Steele first came in to close contact with the man who would eventually command US operations in Iraq: David Petraeus. Then a young major, Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 and reportedly even stayed with Steele at his house.

But while Petraeus headed for the top, Steele’s career hit an unexpected buffer when he was embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair. A helicopter pilot, who also had a licence to fly jets, he ran the airport from where the American advisers illegally ran guns to right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. While the congressional inquiry that followed put an end to Steele’s military ambitions, it won him the admiration of then congressman Dick Cheney who sat on the committee and admired Steele’s efforts fighting leftists in both Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In late 1989 Cheney was in charge of the US invasion of Panama to overthrow their once favoured son, General Manuel Noriega. Cheney picked Steele to take charge of organising a new police force in Panama and be the chief liaison between the new government and the US military.

Todd Greentree, who worked in the US embassy in El Salvador and knew Steele, was not surprised at the way he resurfaced in other conflict zones. “It’s not called ‘dirty war’ for nothing; so it’s no surprise to see individuals who are associated and sort of know the ins-and-outs of that kind of war, reappear at different points in these conflicts,” he says.

A generation later, and half the world away, America’s war in Iraq was going from bad to worse. It was 2004 – the neo-cons had dismantled the Ba’athist party apparatus, and that had fostered anarchy. A mainly Sunni uprising was gaining ground and causing major problems in Fallujah and Mosul. There was a violent backlash against the US occupation that was claiming over 50 American lives a month by 2004.

The US Army was facing an unconventional, guerrilla insurgency in a country it knew little about. There was already talk in Washington DC of using the Salvador option in Iraq and the man who would spearhead that strategy was already in place.

Soon after the invasion in March 2003 Jim Steele was in Baghdad as one of the White House’s most important “consultants”, sending back reports to Rumsfeld. His memos were so valued that Rumsfeld passed them on to George Bush and Cheney. Rumsfeld spoke of him in glowing terms. “We had discussion with General Petraeus yesterday and I had a briefing today from a man named Steele who’s been out there working with the security forces and been doing a wonderful job as a civilian as a matter of fact.”

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos, many of them among the toughest survivors of the old regime, including General Adnan Thabit, sentenced to death for a failed plot against Saddam but saved by the US invasion. Thabit, selected by the Americans to run the Special Police Commandos, developed a close relationship with the new advisers. “They became my friends. My advisers, James Steele and Colonel Coffman, were all from special forces, so I benefited from their experience … but the main person I used to contact was David Petraeus.”

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With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multimillion dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US taxpayer. The exact amount they received is classified.

With Petraeus’s almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele’s field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force. One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban.

Shia militia members from all over the country arrived in Baghdad “by the lorry-load” to join the new commandos. These men were eager to fight the Sunnis: many sought revenge for decades of Sunni-supported, brutal Saddam rule, and a chance to hit back at the violent insurgents and the indiscriminate terror of al-Qaida.

Petraeus and Steele would unleash this local force on the Sunni population as well as the insurgents and their supporters and anyone else who was unlucky enough to get in the way. It was classic counterinsurgency. It was also letting a lethal, sectarian genie out of the bottle. The consequences for Iraqi society would be catastrophic. At the height of the civil war two years later 3,000 bodies a month were turning up on the streets of Iraq — many of them innocent civilians of sectarian war.

But it was the actions of the commandos inside the detention centres that raises the most troubling questions for their American masters. Desperate for information, the commandos set up a network of secret detention centres where insurgents could be brought and information extracted from them.

The commandos used the most brutal methods to make detainees talk. There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman took part in these torture sessions, but General Muntadher al Samari, a former general in the Iraqi army, who worked after the invasion with the US to rebuild the police force, claims that they knew exactly what was going on and were supplying the commandos with lists of people they wanted brought in. He says he tried to stop the torture, but failed and fled the country.

“We were having lunch. Col Steele, Col Coffman, and the door opened and Captain Jabr was there torturing a prisoner. He [the victim] was hanging upside down and Steele got up and just closed the door, he didn’t say anything – it was just normal for him.”

He says there were 13 to 14 secret prisons in Baghdad under the control of the interior ministry and used by the Special Police Commandos. He alleges that Steele and Coffman had access to all these prisons and that he visited one in Baghdad with both men.

“They were secret, never declared. But the American top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about these prisons. The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture. The ugliest sort of torture I’ve ever seen.”

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According to one soldier with the 69th Armoured Regiment who was deployed in Samarra in 2005 but who doesn’t want to be identified: “It was like the Nazis … like the Gestapo basically. They [the commandos] would essentially torture anybody that they had good reason to suspect, knew something, or was part of the insurgency … or supporting it, and people knew about that.”

The Guardian interviewed six torture victims as part of this investigation. One, a man who says he was held for 20 days, said: “There was no sleep. From the sunset, the torture would start on me and on the other prisoners.

“They wanted confessions. They’d say: ‘Confess to what have you done.’ When you say: ‘I have done nothing. Shall I confess about something I have not done?’, they said: ‘Yes, this is our way. The Americans told us to bring as many detainees as possible in order to keep them frightened.’

“I did not confess about anything, although I was tortured and [they] took off my toenails.”

Neil Smith, a 20-year-old medic who was based in Samarra, remembers what low ranking US soldiers in the canteen said. “What was pretty widely known in our battalion, definitely in our platoon, was that they were pretty violent with their interrogations. That they would beat people, shock them with electrical shock, stab them, I don’t know what else … it sounds like pretty awful things. If you sent a guy there he was going to get tortured and perhaps raped or whatever, humiliated and brutalised by the special commandos in order for them to get whatever information they wanted.”

He now lives in Detroit and is a born-again Christian. He spoke to the Guardian because he said he now considered it his religious duty to speak out about what he saw. “I don’t think folks back home in America had any idea what American soldiers were involved in over there, the torture and all kinds of stuff.”

Through Facebook, Twitter and social media the Guardian managed to make contact with three soldiers who confirmed they were handing over detainees to be tortured by the special commandos, but none except Smith were prepared to go on camera.

“If somebody gets arrested and we hand them over to MoI they’re going to get their balls hooked, electrocuted or they’re going to get beaten or raped up the ass with a coke bottle or something like that,” one said.

He left the army in September 2006. Now 28, he works with refugees from the Arab world in Detroit teaching recent arrivals, including Iraqis, English.

“I suppose it is my way of saying sorry,” he said.

When the Guardian/BBC Arabic posed questions to Petraeus about torture and his relationship with Steele it received in reply a statement from an official close to the general saying, “General (Ret) Petraeus’s record, which includes instructions to his own soldiers … reflects his clear opposition to any form of torture.”

“Colonel (Ret) Steele was one of thousands of advisers to Iraqi units, working in the area of the Iraqi police. There was no set frequency for Colonel Steele’s meetings with General Petraeus, although General Petraeus did see him on a number of occasions during the establishment and initial deployments of the special police, in which Colonel Steele played a significant role.”

But Peter Maass, then reporting for the New York Times, and who has interviewed both men, remembers the relationship differently: “I talked to both of them about each other and it was very clear that they were very close to each other in terms of their command relationship and also in terms of their ideas and ideology of what needed to be done. Everybody knew that he was Petraeus’s man. Even Steele defined himself as Petraeus’s man.”

Maass and photographer Gilles Peress gained a unique audience with Steele at a library-turned-detention-centre in Samarra. “What I heard is prisoners screaming all night long,” Peress said. “You know at which point you had a young US captain telling his soldiers, don’t, just don’t come near this.”

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Two men from Samarra who were imprisoned at the library spoke to the Guardian investigation team. “We’d be tied to a spit or we’d be hung from the ceiling by our hands and our shoulders would be dislocated,” one told us. The second said: “They electrocuted me. They hung me up from the ceiling. They were pulling at my ears with pliers, stamping on my head, asking me about my wife, saying they would bring her here.”

According to Maass in an interview for the investigation: “The interrogation centre was the only place in the mini green zone in Samarra that I was not allowed to visit. However, one day, Jim Steele said to me, ‘hey, they’ve just captured a Saudi jihadi. Would you like to interview him?’

“I’m taken not into the main area, the kind of main hall – although out the corner of my eye I can see that there were a lot of prisoners in there with their hands tied behind their backs – I was taken to a side office where the Saudi was brought in, and there was actually blood dripping down the side of this desk in the office.

Peress picks up the story: “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I look around and I see blood everywhere, you know. He (Steele) hears the scream from the other guy who’s being tortured as we speak, there’s the blood stains in the corner of the desk in front of him.”

Maass says: “And while this interview was going on with this Saudi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting Allah Allah Allah. But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

One of the torture survivors remembers how Adnan Thabit “came into the library and he told Captain Dorade and Captain Ali, go easy on the prisoners. Don’t dislocate their shoulders. This was because people were having to undergo surgery when they were released from the library.”

General Muntadher fled after two close colleagues were killed after they were summoned to the ministry, their bodies found on a rubbish tip. He got out of Iraq and went to Jordan. In less than a month, he says, Steele contacted him. Steele was anxious to meet and suggested he come to the luxury Sheraton hotel in Amman where Steele was staying. They met in the lobby at 8pm and Steele kept him talking for nearly two hours.

“He was asking me about the prisons. I was surprised by the questions and I reminded him that these were the same prisons where we both used to work. I reminded him of the incident where he had opened the door and Colonel Jabr was torturing one of the prisoners and how he didn’t do anything. Steele said: ‘But I remember that I told the officer off’. So I said to him: ‘No, you didn’t — you didn’t tell the officer off. You didn’t even tell General Adnan Thabit that this officer was committing human rights abuses against these prisoners’. And he was silent. He didn’t comment or answer. I was surprised by this.”

According to General Muntadher: “He wanted to know specifically: did I have any information about him, James Steele? Did I have evidence against him? Photographs, documents: things which proved he committed things in Iraq; things he was worried I might reveal. This was the purpose of his visit.

“I am prepared to go to the international court and stand in front of them and swear that high-ranking officials such as James Steele witnessed crimes against human rights in Iraq. They didn’t stop it happening and they didn’t punish the perpetrators.”

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Steele, the man, remains an enigma. He left Iraq in September 2005 and has since pursued energy interests, joining the group of companies of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher. Until now he has stayed where he likes to be – far from the media spotlight. Were it not for Bradley Manning’s leaking of millions of US military logs to Wikileaks, which lifted the lid on alleged abuses by the US in Iraq, there he may well have remained. Footage and images of him are rare. One video clip just 12 seconds long features in the hour-long TV investigation into his work. It captures Steele, then a 58-year-old veteran in Iraq, hesitating, looking uncomfortable when he spots a passing camera.

He draws back from the lens, watching warily out of the side of his eye and then pulls himself out of sight.

Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena, Teresa Smith, Ben Ferguson, Patrick Farrelly, Guy Grandjean, Josh Strauss, Roisin Glynn, Irene Baqué, Marcus Morgan, Jake Zervudachi and Joshua Boswell
Wednesday 6 March 2013 16.16 GMT Last modified on Friday 3 October 2014 16.50 BST

Find this story at 6 March 2013

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

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BEIRUT — The talk now is all about whether Syria and Iraq will end up as divided states. The impetus for such speculation derives firstly from the latest Saudi, Qatari and Turkish joint resolve to mount huge numbers of jihadists on Syria’s borders. According to two senior political figures I spoke to, up to 10,000+ Wahhabist/Salafists (predominantly An-Nusra/Al Qaeda) have been gathered by the intelligence services of these latter states, mostly non-Arabs from Chechnya, Turkmenistan, etc. Plainly, Washington is aware of this (massively expensive) Saudi maneuver and equally plainly it is turning a blind eye to it.

Secondly, the speculation about a coming fractured Iraq has gained big momentum from ISIS’s virtually unopposed walk-in to Ramadi. The images of long columns of ISIS Toyota Land Cruisers, black pennants waving in the wind, making their way from Syria all the way — along empty desert main roads — to Ramadi with not an American aircraft in evidence, certainly needs some explaining. There cannot be an easier target imagined than an identified column of vehicles, driving an arterial road, in the middle of a desert.

Do these two cases of a Nelsonian “blind eye” have something to do with persuading the GCC at Camp David to sign up to the statement that they accepted that an agreement with Iran on its nuclear program was in their “security interests”? After all, Obama desperately needs it to paint Netanyahu as the isolated outlier on the Iran deal issue and thus undercut his ability to influence Congress.

Coincidentally, a highly redacted U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment from August 2012 has been released through a federal lawsuit. It states that “If the situation unravels [in Syria], there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” The assessment says that the creation of such a Salafist principality would have “dire consequences” for Iraq and would possibly lead to the creation of an Islamic State and would “create the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.”

A few days after the release of the DIA assessment report, John Bolton lent weight to its claims: “I think the Sunni Arabs are never going to agree to be in a state [Iraq] where the Shia outnumber them 3-1. That’s what ISIS has been able to take advantage of. I think our objective should be a new Sunni state out of the western part of Iraq, the eastern part of Syria run by moderates or at least authoritarians who are not radical Islamists.”

Well, this is exactly what has happened. Should we be surprised? The idea of breaking up the large Arab states into ethnic or sectarian enclaves is an old Ben Gurion “canard,” and splitting Iraq along sectarian lines has been Vice President Biden’s recipe since the Iraq war. But the idea of driving a Sunni “wedge” into the landline linking Iran to Syria and to Hezbollah in Lebanon became established Western group think in the wake of the 2006 war, in which Israel failed to de-fang Hezbollah. The response to 2006, it seemed to Western powers, was to cut off Hezbollah from its sources of weapons supply from Iran.

In short, the DIA assessment indicates that the “wedge” concept was being given new life by the desire to pressure Assad in the wake of the 2011 insurgency launched against the Syrian state. “Supporting powers” effectively wanted to inject hydraulic fracturing fluid into eastern Syria (radical Salafists) in order to fracture the bridge between Iran and its Arab allies, even at the cost of this “fracking” opening fissures right down inside Iraq to Ramadi. (Intelligence assessments purpose is to provide “a view” — not to describe or prescribe policy. But it is clear that the DIA reports’ “warnings” were widely circulated and would have been meshed into the policy consideration.)

But this “view” has exactly come about. It is fact. One might conclude then that in the policy debate, the notion of isolating Hezbollah from Iran, and of weakening and pressurizing President Assad, simply trumped the common sense judgement that when you pump highly toxic and dangerous fracturing substances into geological formations, you can never entirely know or control the consequences. And once you go down this road, it is not easy to “walk it back,” as it were: the toxicity is already suffused through the rocks. So, when the GCC demanded a “price” for any Iran deal (i.e. massing “fracking” forces close to Aleppo), the pass had been already partially been sold by the U.S. by 2012, when it did not object to what the “supporting powers” wanted.

Will then the region fragment into a hardcore Wahhabist/Salafist corridor stretching across Syria and Iraq, while the non-Wahhabist other states (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen — and Hezbollah) stand in armed opposition to this entity? Perhaps. We do not know. But statements by Hezbollah’s Deputy Leader, Shiekh Naim Qassem and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, suggest that neither Iran nor Hezbollah will accept a “fracked” Syria. (It is less clear however whether this applies to Iraq too, though we suspect that for Iran, it does.)

Similar comments have been made by a senior Hashad leader in Iraq: “It is impossible to eliminate ISIS in Iraq without following it into Syria. We will put our differences with Syria on one side and will join efforts to fight and eliminate ISIS … The U.S. knew that ISIS would expand in Syria and was planning to divide Iraq. This plan is over…” These comments may presage a more proactive response by Iran (and it is hard to see that Russia and China will not be more proactive too, given the composition of the forces now being groomed by Saudi and Turkish intelligence).

But there is another point to this speculation: It leaves out Lebanon. If Syria and Iraq are to be “fracked” — and hard-core Sunni fundamentalism return “to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi,” in the words of the DIA assessment, why should Tripoli (capital of Libya) and the north of Lebanon prove immune from this “fracturing”? Lebanon’s Tripoli was in fact the first ISIS-style “emirate.”

The reason why a Salafi-jihadist movement should have originated in Tripoli needs a little background. A city of half a million people, Tripoli is, in a nutshell, the seat of Sunni strength in Lebanon. Traditionally, Tripoli had been the center of militant pan-Arabist nationalist and Nasserist sentiment, and until the Lebanese civil war, it lay in the mainstream of Levant Sunnism. Militant Arabism in Tripoli had Arabist nationalist and Nasserist sentiment, and until the Lebanese civil war, it lay in the mainstream of Levant Sunnism. Militant Arabism in Tripoli had been so pronounced in the 1920s and 1930s that its inhabitants had fiercely opposed inclusion of Tripoli into a “Greater Lebanon.” In the 1930s, Sunnis from Tripoli took part in an armed revolt against the prospect of a “Greater Lebanon,” demanding Tripoli’s inclusion with the Syrian cities of Homs, Hama and Aleppo into a separate Sunni Arab-nationalist autonomy.

While the birth of jihadism in Tripoli can be ascribed to the outset of the civil war in 1975, the beginning of the substantive shift in the character of Sunni Islam in Tripoli may be dated to 1947, when the Salafist Sheikh Salim al-Shahal returned from Saudi Arabia to Tripoli to find the first Wahhabi-orientated Salafist movement. During Lebanon’s civil war, Al-Jama’a — the Lebanese equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) — fragmented and splintered under the stress. With Syria’s intervention in Lebanon in 1976, a host of radical Al-Jama’a offshoots inspired by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran sprang up. In 1982, these Al-Jama’a breakaway factions formed Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami (the Islamic Unification Movement). The hardline MB offshoots, now united as “Tawhid,” then seized control of Tripoli from the Syrian-backed militia forces.

Strengthened by arms and training from the PLO and an influx of trained Syrian MB operatives after President Assad’s ferocious crushing of the MB revolt in Hama in February 1982, Tawhid forces imposed Islamic law at gunpoint in neighborhoods which they controlled. The “Islamic Republic” of Tripoli lasted for a period of two years (e.g. banning alcohol, forcing women to wear the veil, etc.). Dozens and dozens of secular political opponents (mostly Communists) were executed, sparking an exodus of Christians from the city. In subsequent years, Saudi influence in Tripoli predominated, and Tripoli spawned diverse Salafist groups — absorbing many MB members who survived the Syrian crackdown — and witnessed a progressive migration towards radical jihadism.

In short, were Aleppo and other parts of Syria and large swathes of Iraq to be “fracked,” then expect the same for Tripoli and north Lebanon too.

Posted: 06/01/2015 12:38 pm EDT Updated: 06/01/2015 12:59 pm EDT
RAMADI

Find this story at 1 June 2015

Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com

Iraq’s vice-president for reconciliation says air strikes alongside failure to reconcile Shias and Sunnis may drive more tribes to join jihadis
Bombing in Kobani, Syria

From the air, things appear to be going well for the US-led coalition that has dropped more than 1,700 bombs on Islamic State (Isis) targets in Iraq and Syria, scattering the terror group in some areas and slowing its momentum in others.

But the view on the ground tells a different story, officials and tribal leaders in Iraq say. The absence of a political process to accompany the air strikes is instead driving Sunni communities to consider allying with Isis, they claim, especially in sensitive areas around Baghdad.

Iraq’s vice-president for reconciliation, Iyad Allawi, said a lack of a political process between the Shias who dominate the country’s power base, and disenfranchised Sunnis was a “grave mistake” that could mean the air attacks end up achieving little.

“The whole strategy needs to be revisited and readdressed and the international allies should be part of this,” Allawi told the Guardian. “People are asking me what will come after Isis. What would be the destiny of [local] people? Are they going to be accused of supporting or defeating Isis? Would they be accused of being Ba’athists? It is going to be really difficult for them to engage without reconciliation.”

Allawi said the areas surrounding Baghdad – where Isis had made inroads even before the group overran Iraq’s second city, Mosul, last June – are now increasingly unstable and vulnerable.

“The Baghdad belt demonstrates the lack of strategy and reconciliation. There is widespread ethnic cleansing there, militias are roaming the areas. Scores and scores of people … have been expelled from their areas and they can’t go back because of the dominance of the militias.”

A senior Iraqi official, Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, who advises the government on Isis, agreed. “The areas around Baghdad are suffering from a lot of sectarian violence and the tribes there have started to reflect on the idea of joining Isis. The tribes believe that there are moves to deport them from their lands.”

Samarra to the north of the Iraqi capital and Sunni areas just to the south remain tense and dangerous, despite more than seven months of air strikes that have supported the embattled Iraqi military and the large number of Shia militias that fight alongside it.

Controlling both areas is considered vital to establishing control of Iraq. Two other senior Iraqi officials contacted by the Guardian during the week claim the security forces’ relative control now would fast melt away if tribes threw their weight behind the insurgency.

Tribal leaders themselves echo those fears, insisting deep distrust between them and the government could push some tribes to opt for the clout of Isis over moribund political moves.

“The tribes are divided this time on defending the government, said Anbar-based tribal leader Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Bahari. “We don’t have faith in the government especially because they are mainly dealing with the sheikhs of tribes who fled years ago and are staying in Amman or Dubai for fear of their lives.

“The government didn’t make a mistake once or twice. They kept repeating the same mistake over and over and the government didn’t deliver any of their promises till now. Why would we trust them?

“The situation around Baghdad is fragile. Most of the areas are under Isis. The situation in Abu Ghraib [on Baghdad’s western outskirts] is very fragile and the army will probably lose it in any day.”

Hashimi said the air strikes both in Iraq and Syria were of limited use: “The Americans have used three tactics: creating obstacles and defence; attacking weapons storages and oil refineries to cut Isis finances; and attacking the structure of the organisation. They haven’t done much to the latter and Isis have started adapting to the American strategy which has reduced the damage to them.

“The American advisers … are embarrassed for not delivering their promises to the Sunnis. Relatively speaking, the Americans are losing.”

US officials in Baghdad have spent much of the past three months trying to prevent a further slide away from state control. Officials have rekindled some links with tribal leaders who led a successful counter insurgency at the height of the civil war in 2007 against Isis’s predecessor, the Islamic State of Iraq.

That collaboration was dubbed “the Awakening” and using popular support is again central to plans to drive Isis away from towns and cities it occupies. Washington announced on Friday that it would send 400 troops to train Syrian rebels to fight against Isis.

Now though, Iraqi tribes are resisting taking the lead on another Awakening, believing the last one gave them few long-term benefits. While the revolt did restore tribal control over Anbar province, the toll in blood and treasure was high. More importantly, it did nothing to change the balance of power with Baghdad, which increasingly saw the Sunnis of Anbar as a fifth column – a view that has led some Sunni communities to join the revitalised insurgency.

Isis insiders say the group retains strategic control over the Euphrates valley area, which stretches north-west from Anbar to the Syrian border. In this area, many of the weapons it looted from abandoned Iraqi Army depots last June and from Syrian bases it has also over-run, are stored in small towns and villages.

It has less success, however, in the far north of the country, where Irbil was briefly threatened last summer and where more than 300 of the 900 or more strikes to have been launched inside Iraq have hit.

Across the border in Syria, the Kurdish town of Kobani near the Turkish border has been struck by jets close to 600 times – accounting for the vast majority of attacks in the country. Kobani, however, remains contested between Kurdish militias and Isis, who have lost an estimated 400 fighters trying to seize the town.

“The horror which will come up after liberating areas from Isis is too enormous if we don’t care about what happens next,” said Allawi. “We have to find jobs for these people, by reconstructing the areas, by giving people rights to go back and support their provinces. We shouldn’t create new armed people in the streets.”

Martin Chulov in Beirut
Sunday 18 January 2015 18.06 GMT Last modified on Monday 19 January 2015 00.02 GMT
Additional reporting by Mais al-Baya’a

Find this story at 18 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

(New York) – Militias, volunteer fighters, and Iraqi security forces engaged in deliberate destruction of civilian property after these forces, following US and Iraqi air strikes, forced the retreat of Islamic State fighters (also known as ISIS) from the town of Amerli and surrounding areas in early September 2014, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Iraqi government should rein in the militias and countries participating in the fight against ISIS, including the United States and Iran, should ensure military operations and other related support in the fight against ISIS are not paving the way for such abuses.

The 31-page report, “After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli,” documents, through field visits, analysis of satellite imagery, interviews with victims and witnesses, and review of photo and video evidence, that militias looted property of Sunni civilians who had fled fighting, burned their homes and businesses, and destroyed at least two entire villages. The actions violated the laws of war. Human Rights Watch also documented the abduction of 11 men during the operation, in September and October.

“Iraq can’t win the fight against ISIS’s atrocities with attacks on civilians that violate the laws of war and fly in the face of human decency,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Militia abuses are wreaking havoc among some of Iraq’s most vulnerable people and exacerbating sectarian hostilities.”

On March 2, 2015, Iraqi security forces and Shia militias launched an assault on Tikrit, the capital of Salah al-Din province, to rout ISIS from the area. Tikrit was the scene of a massacre of at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers by ISIS last June.

At the end of August, following a three-month siege by ISIS, ground operations by pro-government Shia militias and Iraqi and Kurdish government ground forces, supported by Iraqi and United States air strikes, pushed ISIS away from Amerli, in Salah al-Din province. Except for some sporadic clashes, the area has since remained largely free of ISIS fighters, residents say.

Following the operations to end the siege, militias, volunteer fighters, and Iraqi security forces raided Sunni villages and neighborhoods around Amerli in Salah al-Din and Kirkuk provinces. Many were villages that ISIS had passed through and in some cases used as bases. Militias appear to have planned at least some of the attacks in advance, raising questions as to whether government political and military bodies that oversee the militias are responsible for planning the attacks.

Elsewhere in Iraq and in Syria, Human Rights Watch has documented serious abuses and war crimes by al-Qaeda and later ISIS, that most likely amount to crimes against humanity.

Many Sunni residents fled the area during the ISIS siege of Amerli. Individuals interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that ISIS had targeted the homes and property of those believed to be linked to the Iraqi government but otherwise had not attacked residents.

Twenty-four witnesses, including Peshmerga officers and local sheikhs, told Human Rights Watch they saw militias looting villages around Amerli after the offensive against ISIS ended and just before militias destroyed homes in the town. They said they saw militiamen taking items of value – such as refrigerators, televisions, clothing, and even electrical wiring – out of homes, then setting the houses on fire.

Residents told Human Rights Watch that the militias, whose vehicles and insignias identified them as including the Badr Brigades, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, Kita’ib Hezbollah, and Saraya Tala’a al-Khorasani, destroyed, in part or entirely, numerous villages between the towns of al-Khales, in southern Diyala province, and Amerli, about 50 kilometers north.

Officers of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces that joined the government in the Amerli operation told Human Rights Watch they saw 47 villages in which militias had destroyed and ransacked homes, businesses, mosques, and public buildings.

Satellite imagery analyzed by Human Rights Watch corroborated witness accounts. The imagery showed that most of the damage resulted from arson and intentional building demolition inflicted after militias and security forces had lifted the Amerli siege and ISIS had fled the area, between early September and mid-November.

Human Rights Watch did not document reports of killings of civilians in this operation but has documented allegations of militia killings and other abuses in numerous other areas of Iraq in several reports in 2013 and 2014. Media reports of militia abuses during the course of fighting increased dramatically in late 2014 and 2015. On February 17, the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr condemned militia abuses and announced a freeze of the activities of the two militias he oversees, Youm al-Mawoud and Saraya al-Salam, that had also been fighting against ISIS.

In a March 12 letter, Prime Minister Abadi’s office responded to Human Rights Watch’s February 25 letter conveying the main findings of the report. The prime minister’s office acknowledged that there were “individual lapses unconnected to government conduct.” The response noted that there were arrests in some of these individual cases, but that alleged victims did not appear before the court to testify regarding their allegations. It stated that abuses attributed to Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization) forces were in fact committed by ISIS, and that “most of the material from Internet websites” was “false footage.” The response did not comment on satellite imagery evidence showing that most arson damage took place after the areas in question came under militia and Hashd al-Shaabi control.

The Iraqi government should rein in the militias with the aim of disbanding them, Human Rights Watch said. Prime Minister Hayder al-Abadi should take immediate steps to protect civilians in areas where militias are fighting, assess and provide for the humanitarian needs of people displaced by militias, and hold accountable militia leaders and fighters responsible for serious crimes, such as those documented in this report.

In a December 18, 2014 opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, al-Abadi pledged to “bring … all armed groups under state control. No armed groups or militias will work outside or parallel to the Iraqi Security Forces.” The abuses that Human Rights Watch documented show that it is imperative for al-Abadi to make good on this pledge.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should publicly document crimes by militias and security forces against civilians as well as the crimes of ISIS, Human Rights Watch said. Countries providing military assistance to Iraq, including the United States and Iran, should require the government to show that it is taking effective steps to end the very serious crimes by militias.

“Iraq clearly faces serious threats in its conflict with ISIS, but the abuses committed by forces fighting ISIS are so rampant and egregious that they are threatening Iraq long term.” Stork said. “Iraqis are caught between the horrors ISIS commits and abusive behavior by militias, and ordinary Iraqis are paying the price.”

MARCH 18, 2015

Find this story at 18 March 2015

Find the report here

© Copyright 2015, Human Rights Watch

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked “specific information” on “many key aspects” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that’s not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had “overstated” its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.” But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

Related: ‘Leading the Fight Against the Islamic State: The Battle For Iraq, Dispatch 10’

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenewald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

‘The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.’
For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on “disarming” Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and “freeing” the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the government funded think-tank RAND Corporation last December titled “Blinders, Blunders and Wars” said the NIE “contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively.”

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons and “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.”

But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

Related: White House Considers Declassifying 28 Pages on Alleged Saudi Government Role in 9/11

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq’s alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had “bulletproof” evidence linking Hussein’s regime to the terrorist group.

“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

“As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand,” the NIE said. “The presence of al-Qa’ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit.”

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress’s later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq’s chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

“Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai’ida members beginning in December 2000,” the NIE says. “He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.”

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, “reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons.”

Related: Senate torture report finds the CIA was less effective and more brutal than anyone knew

“Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” the Senate torture report said. “Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear.”

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that “none of the [redacted] al-Qa’ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa’ida’s interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely.”

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein’s links to al Qaeda: While the Iraqi president “has not endorsed al-Qa’ida’s overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization.”

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. “Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period,” the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, “The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.”

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of “intelligence”: a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

“We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters,” the NIE said. “The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise,” although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant “were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters.”

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that “the NIE’s bio weapons claims” was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

“There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material,” he now says about the unredacted NIE. “I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction.”

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE “didn’t influence [their] decision.” Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE’s five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a “poor job” on the NIE, “probably the worst of the modern NIE’s, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn’t support it.”

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” and that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why “Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes.” The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” and “this is the more likely end use.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also disagreed with the intelligence community’s assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

The CIA’s 25-page unclassified summary of the NIE released in 2002 did not contain the State or Energy Departments’ dissent.

“Apart from being influenced by policymakers’ desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed,” the RAND study concluded. “Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam’s possession of WMDs was often seen as deception.”

Related: ‘Primary Sources,’ the VICE News FOIA blog

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

“ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

By Jason Leopold
March 19, 2015 | 6:10 pm

Find this story at 19 March 2015

The documents

Copyright Vice.com

The best war inquiry was into the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was conducted by the poet Alfred Tennyson in eight weeks, and reached a one-line conclusion, “Someone had blunder’d.” It has never been bettered.

Everyone knows who blundered in Iraq. It was Tony Blair. Mild interest may still attach to the question, why? But no one is sitting in an agony of suspense. No great issue turns on the verdict. Even the Labour party, whose cringing submission to the whim of Blair must mean it carries a share of blame, has purged itself of guilt. The Iraq war is yesterday. It is history.

So why the shocked headlines about “Chilcot verdict delayed”? History is always late. We do not read “Mantel’s delayed verdict on Boleyn execution”; we do not read “Starkey late with verdict on Magna Carta”. The Chilcot inquiry was a ploy of Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, somehow to get his own back. At the time, in 2009, David Cameron said it was “an establishment stitch-up”. He little imagined it would be still be there when he was the establishment, and had to defend it.

The writing of Chilcot – its hearings ended in 2011 – has become a ghostly whodunnit. It has taken longer to write than War and Peace, and at a rumoured million words is near double the length. A post-edit, called Maxwellisation, grants a right of reply to those criticised, not just before publication but, it appears, before the conclusions are written. This mechanism is a victims’ racket for delay. It compares ill with the US Congress’s laudably savage report on the CIA and Iraq, published last month with no right-of-reply nonsense. (Will Chilcot, I wonder, disclose his Maxwellisation exchanges under freedom of information?)

The chief victim, Blair, has furiously protested that he is not playing a delaying game. He now seems to regard Iraq as a personal matter between him and God. More serious objection has come from the security service. Its addiction to prying into other people’s secrets is not reciprocated when others want to pry into its own. In addition, the American friends are apparently coy about Anglo-American relations in 2002-3. In particular, the disclosure of private chats between Blair and George Bush at Camp David would mean such chats would end, for ever.

I have some sympathy with the Americans (and the Brits) on this confidentiality. But Chilcot has already said he will redact such minutes and convey only the gist of them. Besides, what is new? Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, published back in 2004, was based on interviews with Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and 74 others, with access to “personal notes, calendars, official and unofficial records, phone transcripts and memos”. It contains verbatim calls with Blair. With that and the witness evidence from the Chilcot hearings, notably from the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, it is hard to believe there are still “lessons to learn”.

Chilcot is a mountain made from a molehill. No recent event has been so scrutinised as the Iraq war, with the standard bibliography running to some 200 entries. It was always an American fiasco, with Britain as a bit player. Blair’s role was summed up in the excruciating “cojones” exchanges with Bush. The truth is that Chilcot should really be investigating a personal infatuation, not an invasion.

At some stage the concept of blame and responsibility has to pass from politicians and lawyers to historians. Some people feel that as long as there are victims, such as families of dead soldiers and civilians, there must be a quasi-judicial closure. I disagree. Like the current craze for “historical” sex prosecutions and repeated Hillsborough inquests, the cost of deflecting police and court resources must be prohibitive.

Chilcot can only be a work of history. The Iraq war was a tragedy for all concerned, apart from defence contractors, and one from which that country is suffering more than ever. There was no shortage of prior warnings. Like Vietnam, Iraq was a classic folly as described by the historian, Barbara Tuchman: “one perceived as counterproductive in its own time … recognised by contemporaries.”

Inquiries into such follies are political acts, conforming to the mood of the day, usually to exonerate or whitewash those in power at the expense of their enemies. The war in Afghanistan was every bit as foolish as Iraq, but it was regarded as a “good” intervention, and one that could hardly be pinned on Blair. No inquiry is in the offing.

The Franks report on the causes of the Falklands war was meant to expiate Thatcher’s guilt for leaving the islands undefended, and thus enable her to revel in her victory. Franks was shameless in confining any guilt to the body of his report, leaving Thatcher the joy of a final exoneration. He later attributed his whitewash to “the mood of the day”.

In the case of Bloody Sunday, “guilt” was erased by the mind-numbing delay of the Saville report, eventually published 38 years after the event, at a cost of £400m. Chilcot is a peccadillo against this shocker. Each of these inquiries gets longer. Between the world wars, they took an average of two months. By the 1960s, this had stretched to 11 months; since then the average is 20 months, not counting Saville and Chilcot. This has to be dreadful governance. Legal process obliterates clarity. “Fairness to all” is code for fees. The years roll by and guilt dissolves into tedium.

A public inquiry is a lantern on the stern, not a searchlight on the bow. The longer it takes, the less it is visible and the less people care. The ideal inquiry is immediate and quick, whatever the risk of unfairness. Better still would be Alice in Wonderland: “Inquiry first, decision afterwards.” Why was there no inquiry before Andrew Lansley’s reform to the NHS? Why none today into Trident renewal, or HS2, or last year’s “return to Iraq”, or those many government decisions of which, one day, someone will ask: who was the idiot? It is reminiscent of Orwell’s Crimestop, “the faculty of protective stupidity”.

David Davis MP calls the delay to Chilcot “incomprehensible”. The SNP’s Angus Robertson calls it “an absolute scandal”. But surely it is just a very expensive history book. I can see the old timers shrugging and switching the television to Wolf Hall. That is their sort of inquiry.

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday 21 January 2015 19.22 GMT Last modified on Thursday 22 January 2015 00.04 GMT

Find this story at 22 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Outcry at yet another postponement to findings of inquiry, which stopped taking evidence in 2011

The six-year-longBritish inquiry into the 2003 Iraq invasion and its aftermath will not be published before the general election, prompting an outcry from those demanding that the long overdue reckoning should be put before the voters.

Sir John Chilcot, the chairman of the inquiry, will set out his reasons for the further postponement in an exchange of letters with David Cameron on Wednesday. The inquiry was set up in 2009 and took public evidence from its last witness in 2011.

The prime minister has already expressed his personal frustration at the repeated delays, and a cross-party group of backbenchers had been due to stage a debate and vote in parliament on 29 January, demanding publication before the election.

Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time of the war, has insisted he is not the culprit behind the delay in publication; his allies have suggested the blame lies with the civil service and sensitivities about the relations between the UK and US intelligence agencies.

There has been a stand-off between those demanding that the personal exchange of messages between the former US president George W Bush and Blair in the run-up to the war be published, and those saying such a move would represent an unprecedented breach of confidence concerning one of the most sensitive episodes in British foreign relations.

It is understood the publication date of the inquiry was discussed by the UK and American delegations when Cameron met Barack Obama at the White House last week. But the threat of a Commons vote will have added urgency to the issue.

In June last year Chilcot announced he was satisfied that the “gist” of talks between Blair and Bush could be made public, removing a big obstacle to publication of his report. Chilcot is understood to have sent “Salmon letters” to those who were to be criticised to give them an opportunity to respond before the report’s publication, which will have led to further delays following objections from those criticised.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, reacted furiously, saying the public, soldiers and families affected needed closure after six years of delay, adding that the public will think the findings are being “sexed down” to meet the needs of the establishment.

In a letter to Chilcot, he said: “I welcome your efforts to ensure the inquiry has been methodical, rigorous and fair in its approach. I also support your efforts to allow individuals criticised in the report to see the draft criticism and make representations to the inquiry before publication.

“However, neither administrative processes nor a constant back and forth between the inquiry and witnesses criticised should frustrate an independent report so important to the country’s future from being published as soon as possible.

“The public have waited long enough and will find it incomprehensible that the report is not being published more rapidly than the open-ended timetable you have now set out.

“We need to see a much clearer and more defined timetable, known publicly, with strict deadlines and a firm date for publication.

“If the findings are not published with a sense of immediacy, there is a real danger the public will assume the report is being ‘sexed down’ by individuals rebutting criticisms put to them by the inquiry, whether that is the case or not.”

Angus Robertson, the SNP’s Westminster leader said: “If Chilcot is to be delayed again it would be an absolute scandal.”

Blair previously said he wanted the Chilcot report to be published as soon as possible and that he resented claims he was to blame for its slow progress.

He has made repeated attempts to justify the highly controversial invasion, but has conceded that, for a variety of reasons, including disputes in the Bush administration, the detail and quality of post-war planning was inadequate.

Blair is determined to rebut the argument that he lied to parliament over the intelligence he had been given over the likelihood that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The basis of this claim and the key informants have emerged and been discredited. Ministers have conceded that if the final report were not completed by the end of February, it would be wrong to release it in the heat of a closely fought election campaign.

Although Ed Miliband was not in parliament at the time of the invasion, and has said he would have opposed the war, Labour probably has least to gain from the reopening of the debate about the basis of the invasion and its continuing consequences, including the rise of Islamic State, or Isis.

The Conservatives, including an agonised Cameron, backed the invasion at the time, but the Tories subsequently said they had been misled about the intelligence. Although Cameron pushed through military action in Libya, and, in principle, air strikes to punish Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, the prime minister has generally been a sceptic about humanitarian military action. The Liberal Democrats opposed the war and probably would gain most politically from publication.

David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who has been a leading voice in calling for the report to be published before the election, said it was incomprehensible that the report was being delayed until after the election.

Davis told the Guardian: “Frankly this is not good enough. It is more than five years since it started. It is incomprehensible as to why this is [being delayed]. We need to know why. This is not simply some formality. This is for the whole country to understand why we made a terrible mistake in Iraq. Simply putting it off is not good enough.

“Why has this taken so long? What is going on that is preventing this? The report was created in the first place by a Labour government in order to get an understanding of what went wrong. I can think of no reason why this should be deferred.”

Davis has been a driving force behind the backbench Commons vote next week that would call on Chilcot to publish in a few weeks. He said the vote would not bind Chilcot in case there was complex legal justification for the delay. But Chilcot would have been expected to explain to MPs the delay. “We are getting neither. We are getting neither the report nor the explanation,” he said.

Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt
Wednesday 21 January 2015 00.21 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 21 January 2015 09.17 GMT

Find this story at 21 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

A lot can change in five years. In December 2005 the Guardian opened its pages for me to respond to a leak – the Bush-Blair memo in which both leaders discussed the possibility of bombing Al-Jazeera’s Qatar HQ, where more than 1,000 people work. While those who leaked the memo were imprisoned, its detailed contents were never disclosed. Earlier this year I learned from a senior US official that the discussions had indeed taken place.

I was not surprised. Our bureaus in Kabul and Iraq had previously been bombed by the US in an attempt to stifle the channel’s independence; one of our journalists in Iraq was killed. But this did not deter us from our mission to provide “the opinion and the other opinion” – our motto; to give a voice to the voiceless; to hold centres of power to account; and to uphold our editorial independence no matter what the cost. We maintained these values even as the US bombed our offices, continuing our coverage of both sides of the story.

The Arab world, the region in which we are located, continues to see its share of bloodshed and war. Our audience, often the victim of these conflicts, demands honesty, credibility and integrity. If we get a story wrong, or are biased, it could mean the difference between life and death for viewers. They have come to expect independence as a standard.

This week our independence was once again called into question. Cables from the US embassy in Doha were made accessible by WikiLeaks, alleging that Qatar was using Al-Jazeera as a tool for its foreign policy. While nothing could be further from the truth, US diplomats had the freedom to express their opinions. But interpretation and conjecture cannot take the place of analysis and fact. They focused on the source of our funding rather than our reporting, in an attempt to tarnish our work. Judgments made in the cables are plainly erroneous, such as the assertion that we softened our coverage of Saudi Arabia and the Iranian elections due to political pressure – one needs only to look at our reporting of these events to see that this is not the case. We are journalists not politicians – we are not driven by political agendas, for or against anyone.

Journalists across the world picked up the story, and while some were careful to place it in context, many uncritically took the claims as fact. The Guardian’s report went well beyond even what was stated in the cables; the article clearly misunderstood the rhetorical statements reportedly made by Qatar’s prime minister, which then fed the false claim that al-Jazeera was being used as a “bargaining chip”. Those who understand the Middle East also know that Al-Jazeera’s coverage is no obstacle to a durable peace in the region. Context, analysis and a deep knowledge of the region are essential to a proper reading of the cables. Without these, journalism is another unwitting tool for centres of power.

The region where we are situated is host to some of the most repressive governments in the world, where freedom of expression is silenced, journalists languish in prisons, and independent civil institutions are rare. Allegations that we lack independence are part of our daily routine – they no longer surprise us.

But we take measures to protect our editorial integrity in spite of intimidation from governments and regimes – our journalists have been banned, imprisoned, tortured and killed. Al-Jazeera’s bureaus have routinely been closed, many times by Arab regimes with which Qatar has good relationships. Although banned in these countries, we continue to cover their stories with depth and balance. To institutionalise our independence we have ensured diversity among our staff, and have more than 50 nationalities represented – with no majority of any one nationality.

Questions about al-Jazeera’s independence and its relationship with Qatar, our primary source of funding, are asked in almost any interview I give. Because the region has a history of state-controlled media it’s assumed our host country must impact upon our editorial policy. But the Qatari government has kept its distance – it is similar to the kind of model one sees in other publicly funded arm’s length broadcasters such as the BBC. Qatar’s prime minister openly criticises al-Jazeera, and has talked about the “headaches” caused by our independence. But we subject state officials to the same hard questions and journalistic standards we have for everyone else. Al-Jazeera has strong editorial policies to protect its independence from the influence of power – one only has to look at the screen to witness this.

While we don’t claim to get it right all of the time (we are only human), we have got it right most of the time. We have placed a great deal of value on reporting from the field. Had the US diplomats actually watched al-Jazeera’s reports, they would have heard the voices and players who were shaping conflicts, wars and emerging democracies. By analysing our content they would have gained insights into the region. When George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and most media outlets echoed his simplistic version of events, al-Jazeera was providing pictures and analyses that predicted the coming storm. At the time we were roundly criticised, often by states who had friendly relations with Qatar. And in Afghanistan, while others broadcast images of progress and calm, al-Jazeera highlighted the growing influence of the Taliban, reflecting the politics on the ground. In these cases and many others, time has vindicated our reporting. Had these diplomats listened to the voices reflected in our coverage perhaps some of their mistakes could have been averted.

Those who lobby against al-Jazeera seek to delegitimise the work of dedicated and courageous journalists who put their lives on the line. For 14 years we have committed ourselves to safeguarding our editorial independence. Our audiences rely on us for this, and we will not be affected by pressure from regimes, states, media or other centres of power. We have full confidence in our mission as journalists.

Wadah Khanfar
The Guardian, Friday 10 December 2010 21.46 GMT

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Al-Jazeera quits Iraq as Americans accused over deaths

The Arab satellite television channel al-Jazeera is to pull its reporters out of Iraq after one of them was killed during a US air raid on Baghdad.

“I cannot guarantee anyone’s safety,” the news editor, Ibrahim Hillal, told reporters. “We still have four reporters in Baghdad, we will pull them out. We have one embedded with US forces in Nassiriya; we want to pull him out.”

The move followed a day in which three journalists were killed by US fire in separate attacks in Baghdad, leading to accusations that US forces were targeting the news media.

Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, was killed when an American tank fired a shell directly at the Reuters suite on the 15th floor at the Palestine hotel, where many journalists are staying.

Jose Couso, 37, a cameraman for the Spanish television channel Tele 5, was wounded in the same attack and died later in hospital. Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf bureau chief of Reuters, was also injured, along with a British technician, Paul Pasquale, and an Iraqi photographer, Faleh Kheiber.

Earlier, al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayyoub, a 35-year-old Palestinian who lived in Jordan, was killed when two bombs dropped during a US air raid hit the satellite station’s office in the Iraqi capital.

American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi television, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof.

All the journalists were killed and injured in daylight at locations known to the Pentagon as media sites. The tank shell that hit the Palestine hotel slammed into the 18-storey building at noon, shaking the tower and spewing rubble and dirt into hotel rooms at least six floors below.

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The attack brought pandemonium in the hotel which lies on the east side of the Tigris. It was adopted by all remaining western journalists in the city after advice from the Pentagon to evacuate from the western side of the river.

Central command in Qatar said its troops had been responding in self-defence to enemy fire but witnesses dismissed that claim as false. According to a central command statement, “commanders on the ground reported that coalition forces received significant enemy fire from the hotel and consistent with the inherent right of self-defence, coalition forces returned fire”.

The statement added: “Sadly a Reuters and Tele 5 journalist were killed in this exchange. These tragic incidents appear to be the latest example of the Iraqi regime’s continued strategy of using civilian facilities for military purposes.”

But journalists in the hotel insisted there had been no Iraqi fire.

Sky’s correspondent, David Chater, said: “I never heard a single shot coming from the area around here, certainly not from the hotel,” he said.

BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar added that none of the other journalists in the hotel had heard any sniper fire.

Chater said he saw a US tank pointing its gun at the hotel and turned away just before the blast. “I noticed one of the tanks had its barrel pointed up at the building. We went inside and there was an almighty crash. That tank shell, if it was an American tank shell, was aimed directly at this hotel and directly at journalists. This wasn’t an accident. It seems to be a very accurate shot.”

Geert Linnebank, Reuters editor-in-chief, said the incident “raises questions about the judgment of the advancing US troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad”.

Journalists, a watchdog group that defends press freedoms, demanded an invesigation in a letter to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. “We believe these attacks violate the Geneva conventions,” the letter said, adding that even if US forces had been fired on from the Palestine hotel “the evidence suggests that the response of US forces was disproportionate and therefore violated humanitarian law”.

During the Afghan war, two supposedly smart US bombs hit the Reuters office in Kabul and many suspect the attack was no accident. It happened at a strategic moment, two hours before the Northern Alliance took over the city.

US military officials at central command said they were investigating and added that the casualties were “regrettable”. “We know that we don’t target journalists,” said Brigadier General Vince Brooks, deputy director of operations.

Al-Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayyoub was broadcasting live to the satellite station’s 7am news bulletin when US aircraft fired two missiles at the bureau building, killing him and injuring a colleague. Two Iraqi staff are missing.

Ibrahim Hilal, al-Jazeera’s chief editor at its headquarters in Qatar, said a US warplane was seen above the building before the attack. “Witnesses saw the plane fly over twice before dropping the bombs. Our office is in a residential area and even the Pentagon knows its location,” he said.

Al-Jazeera correspondent Majed Abdul-Hadi said the bombardment was probably deliberate.

In Doha last night al-Jazeera’s chairman, Hamad bin Thamer, said the channel “could not ascertain” if its Baghdad bureau had been targeted by the US. But he dismissed American claims that there had been gunfire coming from the building at the time of the attack.

“This was absolutely and categorically denied by other reporters and our reporters present on the ground,” he said.

Mr Ayyoub, 35, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, had not intended to go to Baghdad but as the war dragged on he felt he had to work there, and al-Jazeera agreed to let him work in Baghdad.

His widow, Dima Ayyoub, launched a vitriolic attack on America: “My message to you is that hatred breeds hatred,” she said in a live telephone link-up from her home in Amman, Jordan. “I cannot see where is the cleanness in this war. All I see is blood, destruction and shattered hearts. The US said it was a war against terrorism. Who is committing terrorism now?”

Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad, Rory McCarthy in Doha, Jonathan Steele in Amman and Brian Whitaker
Wednesday 9 April 2003 07.30 BST

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Some of the first questions asked of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed upon his capture and during the time during which he was waterboarded were about possible connections between al Qaeda and Iraq, according to a review of several reports on U.S. intelligence operations.
The mastermind of the September 11 attacks was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and according to Office of Legal Counsel memos released last month, was waterboarded 183 times that same month.
The substance of the intelligence that was being sought from him has been an object of some speculation, with several defenders of the interrogation practice arguing that the goal was to prevent an impending attack on America. But a line buried on page 353 of the July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-Iraq war intelligence strongly suggests that the interrogation was just as centered on a possible Iraq-al-Qaeda link as terrorist activity.
“CTC [Counter Terrorist Center] noted that the questions regarding al-Qaida’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture.”
Revelations that KSM was questioned about possible al Qaeda ties to Iraq at roughly the same time that he was undergoing waterboarding provides some key insight into the purpose of the CIA interrogations. A recently de-classified Senate Armed Services Committee report quoted army psychologist Maj. Paul Burney as saying that a large part of his time on a Behavioral Science Consultation Team was “focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.” McClatchy newspapers, meanwhile, published an article last month citing a former intelligence official acknowledging that the Bush administration had pressured interrogators to use harsh techniques to produce evidence connecting the terrorist organization and Iraq’s regime.
The efforts at establishing a link never bore fruit. Burney went on to note that “we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.” Meanwhile, earlier in the July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report, it is noted that KSM was “unaware of any collaborative relationship between al-Qaida and the former Iraqi regime, citing ideological disagreements as an impediment to closer ties. In addition, he was unable to corroborate reports that al-Qada associate Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi had traveled to Iraq to obtain medical treatment for injuries sustained in Afghanistan.”
That said, reports showing that waterboarding would be used as a means of establishing a link between Iraq and al Qaeda does appear to diffuse the notion that so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were only being used in “ticking time bomb” scenarios.
Some former senior Bush administration officials have publicly echoed this version of events. “[W]hat I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S.,” wrote former Colin Powell chief of staff and prominent Bush critic, Lawrence Wilkerson, on the Washington Note, “but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.”
Sam Stein
Posted: 06/15/2009 5:12 am EDT Updated: 05/25/2011 1:20 pm
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(CNN) — Finding a “smoking gun” linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.
The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney’s office kept close tabs on the questioning.
“Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,” Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been “relentlessly digging” since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
“I couldn’t walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I’m pretty sure it’s fairly accurate,” he told CNN.
Most of Wilkerson’s online essay criticizes Cheney’s recent defense of the “alternative” interrogation techniques the Bush administration authorized for use against suspected terrorists. Cheney has argued the interrogation program was legal and effective in preventing further attacks on Americans.
Critics say the tactics amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in U.S. custody and have called for investigations of those who authorized them.
Representatives of the former vice president declined comment on Wilkerson’s allegations. But Wilkerson told CNN that by early 2002, U.S. officials had decided that “we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run.”
“The priority had turned to other purposes, and one of those purposes was to find substantial contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad,” he said.
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The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration’s case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.
Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney’s office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now “compliant,” meaning agents recommended the use of “alternative” techniques should stop.
At that point, “The VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods,” Wilkerson wrote.
“The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts.”
Al-Libi’s claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a “blot” on his record.
Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.
Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi’s allegation “pivotal” to the Bush administration’s case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service’s inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.
“This is my opinion,” Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general’s office. “Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Burney’s account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April. Other interrogators reported pressure to produce intelligence “but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaeda,” the Senate report states.
Cheney criticized Powell during a television interview over the weekend, saying he no longer considers Powell a fellow Republican after his former colleague endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
Wilkerson said he is not speaking for his former boss and does not know whether Powell shares his views.
May 14, 2009 — Updated 0311 GMT (1111 HKT)
By Matt Smith
Find this story at 14 May 2009
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WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.
“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Excerpts from Burney’s interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney’s statement “very significant.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
A senior Guantanamo Bay interrogator, David Becker, told the committee that only “a couple of nebulous links” between al Qaida and Iraq were uncovered during interrogations of unidentified detainees, the report said.
Others in the interrogation operation “agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida,” the report said.
The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.
Military interrogators, however, continued employing some techniques in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.
Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.
(John Walcott and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.)
BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY
McClatchy Newspapers April 21, 2009
Find this story at 21 April 2009
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Leading counterterrorism expert said despite group’s dramatic rise, it does not pose a direct threat of major attack on a US city
US intelligence officials have concluded that Islamic State (Isis) militants do not currently pose a direct threat of a major attack on an American city and, despite the group’s dramatic rise to prominence in the Middle East, is not comparable to “al-Qaida pre-9/11”.
Details of the current US intelligence community’s assessment of Isis were made public on Wednesday in rare public remarks by Matthew Olsen, the departing director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Speaking a day after a video emerged showing Isis fighters murdering Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist beheaded by the group in a month, Olsen conceded the militant group had made dramatic territorial gains in Syria and Iraq, and displayed an unprecedented skill at using the internet for propaganda.
He said it viewed itself as “the new leader in the global jihadist movement” although US intelligence officials maintain al-Qaida currently poses a more serious adversary.
But Olsen played down the risk of a spectacular al-Qaida-style attack in a major US or even European city, adding: “There is no credible information that [Isis] is planning to attack the United States”. He added there was “no indication at this point of a cell of foreign fighters operating in the United States – full stop”.
The leading counterterrorism expert said said it was “spot on” to conclude that Isis is significantly more limited than al-Qaida was, for example, in the run-up to 9/11, when it had underground cells across Europe and the US. “We certainly aren’t there,” Olsen said. “[Isis] is not al-Qaida pre-9/11”.
His assessment – effectively the view of the US government’s foremost terrorist monitoring agency – contrasts with the flurry of reports indicating alarm and even panic in western governments over the prospect of foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq.
The response has been particularly heated in the UK, the source of as many as 500 fighters who have traveled to the region to fight with Isis. The masked militant who appeared on video beheading both Sotloff and another American journalist, James Foley, is British, and the UK government has vowed a fierce response against returning jihadists.
Olsen said that returning fighters were what the US was “most concerned about”, but said they were most likely to commit lone attacks and played down the chances of a more sophisticated terrorist atrocity.
In comments at the Brookings think tank, he charted the rapid rise of Isis, which has exploited the three-year civil war in Syria, making stunning territorial gains, carving out a sanctuary from which to coordinate its expansion across northern Iraq. He said the group now commands 10,000 fighters and has laid claim to an area of Syria and Iraq roughly the size of the UK.
In doing so, the militant organisation has gained weapons, equipment and helped build on a financial war chest which, the US estimates, grows by $1m each day from illicit oil sales, smuggling and ransom payments.
But Olsen cautioned: “As dire as all of this sounds, from my vantage point it is important that we keep this threat in perspective and we take a moment to consider it in the context of the overall terrorist landscape.” He added that the core al-Qaida remained the dominant group in the global jihadist movement, even if though it has recently been outpaced by Isis’s sophisticated propaganda machine.
Olsen said that more than 1,000 Europeans and more than 100 Americans are believed to have traveled to the Syria to fight in the civil war, and a substantial portion are believed to have aligned themselves with Isis.
He acknowledged the risk they could return to their countries of origin, or travel to other locations in the Middle East, to attack other western targets. He said that “left unchecked, [foreign fighters loyal to Isis] will seek to carry out attacks closer to home”.
But he said the potential risk was of “individuals – one, two” attacking the US, rather than a coordinated, larger-scale atrocity. The acutest threat, Olsen insisted, was against US assets and personnel in the region, particularly in Baghdad. An attack on the US mainland was more likely to be “a smaller scale attack; brutal, lethal, but nothing like a 9/11 kind of attack”.
Paul Lewis in Washington
Wednesday 3 September 2014 21.06 BST
Find this story at 3 September 2014
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The inability of the United States government to anticipate the ISIS offensive that has succeeded in taking control of a large part of Iraq is already being referred to as an “intelligence failure.” To be sure, Washington has unparalleled technical capabilities to track money movements and to obtain information from the airwaves. It is adept at employing surveillance drones and other highly classified intrusive electronic methods, but there is an inherent problem with that kind of information collection: knowing how the process works in even the most general way can make it relatively easy to counter by an opponent who can go low tech.
Terrorists now know that using cell phones is dangerous, that transferring money using commercial accounts can be detected, that moving around when a drone is overhead can be fatal, and that communicating by computer is likely to be intercepted and exposed even when encrypted. So they rely on couriers to communicate and move money while also avoiding the use of the vulnerable technologies whenever they can, sometimes using public phones and computers only when they are many miles away from their operational locations, and changing addresses, SIM cards, and telephone numbers frequently to confuse the monitoring.
Technical intelligence has another limitation: while it is excellent on picking up bits and pieces and using sophisticated computers to work through the bulk collection of chatter, it is largely unable to learn the intentions of terrorist groups and leaders. To do that you need spies, ideally someone who is placed in the inner circle of an organization and who is therefore privy to decision making.
Since 9/11 U.S. intelligence has had a poor record in recruiting agents to run inside terrorist organizations—or even less toxic groups that are similarly structured—in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Information collected relating to the internal workings of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, dissident Sunni groups in Iraq, and now ISIS has been, to say the least, disappointing. To be fair this is often because security concerns limit the ability of American case officers to operate in areas that are considered too dangerous, which is generally speaking where the terrorist targets are actually located. Also, hostile groups frequently run their operations through franchise arrangements where much of the decision making is both local and funded without large cash transfers from a central organization, making the activity hard to detect.
In the case of ISIS, even the number of its adherents is something of a guesstimate, though a figure of 5,000 fighters might not be too far off the mark. Those supporters are likely a mixed bag, some motivated to various degrees by the ISIS core agenda to destroy the Syrian and Iraqi governments in order to introduce Sharia law and recreate the Caliphate, while others might well be along for the ride. Some clearly are psychological outsiders who are driven by the prospect of being on a winning team. They are in any event normally scattered over a large geographical area and divided into cells that have little in the way of lateral connection. They would, however, be responsive to operational demands made by the leadership, headed by Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Moving in small groups while lacking a huge baggage train or infrastructure, it was relatively easy to concentrate to push into Iraq and link up with dissident Sunni tribesmen without necessarily coming to the attention of spies in the sky, American drones flying out of Turkey.
It should be assumed that the U.S. intelligence community has no spies inside ISIS at any level where it might be possible to collect significant or actionable information. In the past, successful penetration of a terrorist organization has come about when a dissident member of the group surfaces and volunteers his services in return for money or other considerations. This is how law enforcement and intelligence agencies broke the Euro terrorists who were active in the 1970s and 1980s, but its success depended on the radical groups being composed largely of middle-class students who were ideologically driven but by nature not necessarily loyal to a political cause or its leaders. The defector model does not appear to have been repeated successfully recently with the demographically quite different radical groups active in Syria, at least not at a level where actionable intelligence might be produced.
Lacking a volunteer, the alternative would be to run what is referred to as a seeding operation. Given U.S. intelligence’s probable limited physical access to any actual terrorist groups operating in Syria or Iraq any direct attempt to penetrate the organization through placing a source inside would be difficult in the extreme. Such efforts would most likely be dependent on the assistance of friendly intelligence services in Turkey or Jordan.
Both Turkey and Jordan have reported that terrorists have entered their countries by concealing themselves in the large numbers of refugees that the conflict in Syria has produced, and both are concerned as they understand full well that groups like ISIS will be targeting them next. Some of the infiltrating adherents to radical groups have certainly been identified and detained by the respective intelligence services of those two countries, and undoubtedly efforts have been made to “turn” some of those in custody to send them back into Syria (and more recently Iraq) to report on what is taking place. Depending on what arrangements might have been made to coordinate the operations, the “take” might well be shared with the United States and other friendly governments.
But seeding is very much hit or miss, as someone who has been out of the loop of his organization might have difficulty working his way back in. He will almost certainly be regarded with some suspicion by his peers and would be searched and watched after his return, meaning that he could not take back with him any sophisticated communications devices no matter how cleverly they are concealed. This would make communicating any information obtained back to one’s case officers in Jordan or Turkey difficult or even impossible.
All of the above is meant to suggest that intelligence agencies that were created to oppose and penetrate other nation-state adversaries are not necessarily well equipped to go after terrorists, particularly when those groups are ethnically cohesive or recruited through family and tribal vetting, and able to operate in a low-tech fashion to negate the advantages that advanced technologies provide. Claiming intelligence failure has a certain appeal given the $80 billion dollars that is spent annually to keep the government informed, but it must also be observed that it is also a convenient club for Republicans to use to beat on the president, which might indeed be the prime motivation.
The real problem for Washington is that penetrating second-generation terrorist groups such as those operating today is extremely difficult, and is not merely a matter of throwing more money and resources into the hopper, which has become the U.S. government response of choice when confronted by a problem. Success against terrorists will require working against them at their own level, down in the trenches where they recruit and train their cadres. It will necessitate a whole new way of thinking about the target and how to go after it, and will inevitably result in the deaths of many more American case officers as they will be exposed without elaborate security networks if they are doing their jobs the right way. It is quite likely that this is a price that the U.S. government will ultimately be unwilling to pay, and that unreasonable expectations from Congress will only result in more claims that there have been yet more intelligence failures.
By PHILIP GIRALDI • July 23, 2014
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
Find this story at 23 July 2014
Copyright http://www.theamericanconservative.com

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BAGHDAD: When American forces raided a home near Fallujah during the turbulent 2004 offensive against the Iraqi Sunni insurgency, they got the hard-core militants they had been looking for. They also picked up an apparent hanger-on, an Iraqi man in his early 30s whom they knew nothing about.
The Americans duly registered his name as they processed him and the others at the Camp Bucca detention center: Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry.
That once-peripheral figure has become known to the world now as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State, and the architect of its violent campaign to redraw the map of the Middle East.
“He was a street thug when we picked him up in 2004,” said a Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “It’s hard to imagine we could have had a crystal ball then that would tell us he’d become head of ISIS,” he said, using a former abbreviation of the Islamic State group.
At every turn, Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’ involvement in Iraq – most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action. And now he has forced a new chapter of that intervention, after Islamic State military successes and brutal massacres of minorities in its advance prompted President Barack Obama to order airstrikes in Iraq.
Baghdadi has seemed to revel in the fight, promising that the group would soon be in “direct confrontation” with the United States.
Still, when he first latched on to al-Qaida, in the early years of the US occupation, it was not as a fighter, but rather as a religious figure. He has since declared himself caliph of the Islamic world, and pressed a violent campaign to root out religious minorities, like Shiites and Yazidis, that has brought condemnation even from al-Qaida leaders.
Despite his reach for global stature, Baghdadi, in his early 40s, in many ways has remained more mysterious than any of the major jihadi figures who preceded him.
American and Iraqi officials have teams of intelligence analysts and operatives dedicated to stalking him, but have had little success in piecing together the arc of his life. And his recent appearance at a mosque in Mosul to deliver a sermon, a video of which was distributed online, was the first time many of his followers had ever seen him.
Baghdadi is said to have a doctorate in Islamic studies from a university in Baghdad, and was a mosque preacher in his hometown, Samarra. He also has an attractive pedigree, claiming to trace his ancestry to the Quraysh Tribe of the Prophet Muhammad.
Beyond that, almost every biographical point about Baghdadi is occluded by some confusion or another.
The Pentagon says that Baghdadi, after being arrested in Fallujah in early 2004, was released that December with a large group of other prisoners deemed low level. But Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who has researched Baghdadi’s life, sometimes on behalf of Iraqi intelligence, said that Baghdadi had spent five years in an American detention facility where, like many Islamic State fighters now on the battlefield, he became more radicalized.
Hashimi said that Baghdadi grew up in a poor family in a farming village near Samarra, and that his family was Sufi – a strain of Islam known for its tolerance. He said Baghdadi came to Baghdad in the early 1990s, and over time became more radical.
Early in the insurgency, he gravitated toward a new jihadi group led by the flamboyant Jordanian militant operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Though Zarqawi’s group, al-Qaida in Iraq, began as a mostly Iraqi insurgent organization, it claimed allegiance to the global Qaida leadership, and over the years brought in more and more foreign leadership figures.
It is unclear how much prominence Baghdadi enjoyed under Zarqawi. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer now at the Brookings Institution, recently wrote that Baghdadi had spent several years in Afghanistan, working alongside Zarqawi. But some officials say the American intelligence community does not believe Baghdadi has ever set foot outside the conflict zones of Iraq and Syria, and that he was never particularly close to Zarqawi.
The American operation that killed Zarqawi in 2006 was a huge blow to the organization’s leadership. But it was years later that Baghdadi got his chance to take the reins.
As the Americans were winding down their war in Iraq, they focused on trying to wipe out al-Qaida in Iraq’s remaining leadership. In April 2010, a joint operation by Iraqi and American forces made the biggest strike against the group in years, killing its top two figures near Tikrit.
A month later, the group issued a statement announcing new leadership, and Baghdadi was at the top of the list. The Western intelligence community scrambled for information.
“Any idea who these guys are?” wrote an analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence company that then worked for the US government in Iraq, in an email that has since been released by WikiLeaks. “These are likely nom de guerres, but are they associated with anyone we know?”
In June 2010, Stratfor published a report on the group that considered its prospects in the wake of the killings of the top leadership. The report stated, “the militant organization’s future for success looks bleak.”
Still, the report said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq, then an alternative name for al-Qaida in Iraq, “I.S.I.’s intent to establish an Islamic caliphate in Iraq has not diminished.”
The Sunni tribes of eastern Syria and Iraq’s Anbar and Ninevah provinces have long had ties that run deeper than national boundaries, and the Islamic State group was built on those relationships. Accordingly, as the group’s fortunes waned in Iraq, it found a new opportunity in the fight against President Bashar Assad’s government in Syria.
As more moderate Syrian rebel groups were beaten down by the Syrian security forces and their allies, the Islamic State group increasingly took control of the fight, in part on the strength of weapons and funding from its operations in Iraq and from jihadist supporters in the Arab world.
That fact has led US lawmakers and political figures, including former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to accuse Obama of aiding the group’s rise in two ways: first by completely withdrawing American troops from Iraq in 2011, then by hesitating to arm more moderate Syrian opposition groups early in that conflict.
“I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if we had committed to empowering the moderate Syrian opposition last year,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a recent hearing on the crisis in Iraq. “Would ISIS have grown as it did?”
But well before then, American actions were critical to Baghdadi’s rise in more direct ways. He is Iraqi to the core, and his extremist ideology was sharpened and refined in the crucible of the US occupation.
The American invasion presented Baghdadi and his allies with a ready-made enemy and recruiting draw. And the American ouster of Saddam Hussein, whose brutal dictatorship had kept a lid on extremist Islamist movements, gave Baghdadi the freedom for his radical views to flourish.
In contrast to Zarqawi, who increasingly looked outside of Iraq for leadership help, Baghdadi has surrounded himself by a tight clique of former Baath Party military and intelligence officers from Saddam’s regime who know how to fight.
Analysts and Iraqi intelligence officers believe that after Baghdadi took over the organization he appointed a Saddam-era officer, a man known as Hajji Bakr, as his military commander, overseeing operations and a military council that included three other officers of the former regime’s security forces.
Hajji Bakr was believed to have been killed last year in Syria. Analysts believe that he and at least two of the three other men on the military council were held at various times by the Americans at Camp Bucca.
Baghdadi has been criticized by some in the wider jihadi community for his reliance on former Baathists. But for many others, Baghdadi’s successes have trumped these critiques.
“He has credibility because he runs half of Iraq and half of Syria,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New American Foundation.
Syria may have been a temporary refuge and proving ground, but Iraq has always been his stronghold and his most important source of financing. Now, it has become the main venue for Baghdadi’s state-building exercise, as well.
Although the group’s capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, appeared to catch the US intelligence community and the Iraqi government by surprise, Baghdadi’s mafia-like operations in the city had long been crucial to his strategy of establishing the Islamic caliphate.
His group earned an estimated $12 million a month, according to US officials, from extortion schemes in Mosul, which it used to finance operations in Syria. Before June, the Islamic State group controlled neighborhoods of the city by night, collecting money and slipping in to the countryside by day.
The United Nations Security Council is considering new measures aimed at crippling the group’s finances, according to Reuters, by threatening sanctions on supporters. Such action is likely to have little effect because, by now, the group is almost entirely self-financing, through its seizing oil fields, extortion and tax collection in the territories it controls. As it gains territory in Iraq, it has found new ways to generate revenue. For instance, recently in Hawija, a village near Kirkuk, the group demanded that all former soldiers or police officers pay an $850 “repentance fine.”
Though he has captured territory through brutal means, Baghdadi has also taken practical steps at state-building, and even shown a lighter side. In Mosul, the Islamic State has held a “fun day” for kids, distributed gifts and food during Eid al-Fitr, held Quran recitation competitions, started bus services and opened schools.
Baghdadi appears to be drawing on a famous jihadi text that has long inspired al-Qaida: “The Management of Savagery,” written by a Saudi named Abu Bakr Naji.
Fishman called the text, “Che Guevara warmed over for jihadis.” William McCants, an analyst at the Brookings Institution who in 2005, as a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, translated the book in to English, once described it as “the seven highly effective habits of jihadi leaders.”
American officials say Baghdadi runs a more efficient organization than Zarqawi did, and has unchallenged control over the organization, with authority delegated to his lieutenants. “He doesn’t have to sign off on every detail,” said one senior US counterterrorism official. “He gives them more discretion and flexibility.”
A senior Pentagon official said of Baghdadi, with grudging admiration: “He’s done a good job of rallying and organizing a beaten-down organization. But he may now be overreaching.”
But even before the civil war in Syria presented him with a growth opportunity, Baghdadi had been taking steps in Iraq – something akin to a corporate restructuring – that laid the foundation for the group’s resurgence, just as the Americans were leaving. He picked off rivals through assassinations, orchestrated prison breaks to replenish his ranks of fighters and diversified his sources of funding through extortion, to wean the group off outside funding from al-Qaida’s central authorities.
“He was preparing to split from al-Qaida,” Hashimi said.
Now Baghdadi commands not just a terrorist organization, but, according to Brett McGurk, the top State Department official on Iraq policy, “a full blown army.”
Speaking at a recent congressional hearing, McGurk said, “It is worse than al-Qaida.”
New York Times Aug 11, 2014, 04.44PM IST
By Tim Arango and Eric Schmitt
Find this story at 11 August 2014
© 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.