Antiwar.com Blog

Eli at Left I has some devastating info on Shahristani, the name apparently being hyped by Washington for new Iraqi PM, much to Brahimi’s irritation. First, the hype:

When Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy in Iraq, appeared on Iraqia, the US-run local television station on Monday night, he sought to reassure viewers that the caretaker government he was selecting would be truly sovereign, even if its powers were limited.

It was part of a series of interviews with the local media aimed at highlighting the leading role played by the UN and lending legitimacy to the transition process. In the interviews, Mr Brahimi has been stressing that he is trying to find a consensus among Iraqis but that he had not yet reached a decision.

Within hours of his appearance on Iraqia, however, Mr Brahimi’s central message was undercut by US officials’ suggestion that Hussein Shahristani, a well-respected nuclear scientist who had been jailed at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam Hussein, was the leading candidate for prime minister. For the past year, Mr Shahristani has been living in Karbala, the Shia holy city.

UN officials and the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad on Wednesday rushed to deny the reports, insisting that the decision was in the hands of the UN, not the US State Department in Washington.

From Eli’s post he sounds like another Curveball. Here’s a bit:

“I have information from inside Iraq that Saddam plans to distribute his chemical weapons in particular in major Shiite towns in southern Iraq. He plans to remotely detonate them and expose the population to nerve agents and cause very large scale civilian deaths.”

And a couple days ago he said they were being moved around:

“I believe these are still in Iraq and being moved around to avoid detection by the UN inspection team,” Hussein Shahristani said in Manilla.

Read the rest.

No wonder the White House likes him.

Surely there can’t be anything more idiotic out there:
“…today, in Iraq as in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, we’ve tied ourselves to Muslim people. We’re helping them. In the long run, they’ll understand that and appreciate that.”
– Rich Tucker, The Heritage Foundation, writing on Townhall.com

Col. Thomas Pappas, in sworn testimony, said the idea of using dogs came from the Commandant of American Gulag Guantanamo, and approved by Commandant “I See Nothing” Sanchez, confirming the testimony from the number one Rumsfeld henchman Cambone at the Taguba hearing. As Mark Rothschild writes on AntiWar.com:

The seventy year-old Democrat pressed Cambone further, reading verbatim from a still-secret “annex” of the Taguba report, which presumably is an extract from an order by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commanding general in Iraq.

Senator Levin read aloud from the secret annex:

“The interrogation officer in charge will submit memoranda for the record requesting harsh approaches for the commanding general’s approval prior to employment: sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs.”

He then turned to Cambone, demanding to know:

“Secretary Cambone, were you personally aware of that permissible interrogation techniques in the Iraqi theater included sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs?”

Cambone answered calmly, relating that ultimate control over the list of “approved techniques” had been in the hands of Lieutenant General Sanchez , “No, sir. That list, both in terms of its detail and its exceptions, were approved at the command level in the theater.”

The gun-toting Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, a native of the rough and tumble US/Mexico border region known to locals as “the valley,” is the Commanding General in Iraq. Sanchez’ order approving the use of dogs and the other methods was dated, October 19, 2003. But Sanchez, whose career must surely now be on the brink, was not the only official to be scathed by the revelation that specific written lists of “approved techniques” exist.

Under questioning by Senator Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts, Undersecretary Cambone admitted that his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also has his own list of “approved techniques,” saying that when interrogators at Guantanamo Bay want to surpass the severity of the techniques on Rumsfeld’s list, the permission of the Secretary of Defense himself is required.

But remember, Sanchez’s departure from Iraq has nuuuuthing to do with any of this. Miller’s departure will undoubtedly be unrelated also.

According to Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti (Evening News), the most influential Albanian drganizer of the event was Richard Holbrooke, while many of his former cohorts from the Clinton days took part: Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark and James Rubin, as well as local Congressman Eliott Engel, known supporter of Albanian causes.
“The purpose of the meeting was to raise funds and secure Albanian-American votes for Democratic presidential candidate [John] Kerry,” says the Novosti report, adding that in return, the Democrats promised Albanians the independence of Kosovo.
The unnamed Novosti source in New York also claims that Kosovo Albanians sent a low-level delegation to the meeting, trying to stay below radar. Among the conclusions of the gathering, the report alleges, was that the process of Kosovo’s separation was proceeding according to plan; that the March attacks on Serbs did some short-term damage to the cause, but that in the big picture, the ethnic cleansing that occurred actually served the Albanians’ purpose.
Kosovo and American Albanians were supposedly also told that if Kerry were elected, he would most likely appoint Holbrooke the new Secretary of State, and he would continue Albright’s policies, namely support the independence of Kosovo.
General Wesley Clark, reportedly admonished the Kosovo Albanians for the March events, tlling them to “influence their local commanders so as to improve relations with KFOR,” say Novosti.
According to the paper, the participants agreed to organize the All-Albanian Congress, which would formulate the new strategy of Albanian national policy in the Balkans; the Congress would take place mid-summer, in Macedonia… Continue reading “Democrats pushing Albanian cause?”

James Taranto of the War Street Journal puts a little wiggle in his EEG!

UPDATE: I do take issue, by the way, with Taranto’s assertion that suicide bombing is a “particularly horrific” kind of murder–it may be particularly terrifying, since you never know when or where it might happen, but it’s no more horrific than, say, firing a missile into an apartment complex. (Unless, as Taranto suggests, you get all choked up about the self-inflicted death of the poor bomber.)

Arthur Silber reveals the five-step plan that preceded the 12-step plan that preceded the five-step plan.