200 Iraqi Mutineers Detained

Marines in Fallujah are reported to be holding 200 Iraqis in detention for refusing to take part in the assault on Fallujah. These Iraqis are described as members of the 36th Battalion of the ICDC. The 36th Battalion is an interesting unit, supposedly made up of members the miitias of SCIRI, the INC, INA and Kurdish pershmergas.

Con artist and neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi Puppet Council made this statement in a phone interview with the Council on Foreign Relations

There’s been a lot of publicity about the fighting in Falluja and in the south, but what is going on in Baghdad and the Iraqi Governing Council? Are you working on, the build-up to the June 30 transition?

No. We’re working now on how to stop the fighting, provide relief to civilians, uphold the rule of law, and also take stock of the security apparatus of the Iraqi government and move forward, learning the lessons from the recent fighting.

Describe the fighting going on.

There are two kinds of fighting going on. There is a sustained effort by the coalition forces in the Falluja area to systematically and rigorously find the criminals who killed and burned the U.S. contractors [on March 31], and also to disarm the terrorists that are found in Falluja. [The interview occurred about 12 hours before a temporary halt in the fighting in Falluja was announced April 9]. That is being conducted systematically and with the cooperation of the Iraqi 36th battalion of the ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps], which has demonstrated its capability and its courage in the current crisis.

And they’re in Falluja?

They’re in Falluja now.

They’re fighting together with the U.S. Marines?

Yes.

Busted again. Then again, maybe Chalabi’s INC is the only part of the 36th fighting. Maybe not all of the 36th refused, only the ones with honor and integrity.

This issue of the 36th fighting in Fallujah very much concerns Iraqis, especially the question of whether the Kurdish pershmerga are involved. I posted this picture on my blog of Kurdish peshmerga patrolling Fallujah. Raed Jarrar later posted about the question of the peshmerga collaborating with the Marines, implying that this would be a divisive issue for Iraqis, possibly pitting Kurds against Arabs if it became known. I emailed Raed about the picture of the peshmerga and he linked it on his blog. Immediately, my blog was inundated with thousands of hits from Raed’s site, several Iraqi sites and email lists and blogs linked and thousands of people viewed the picture and subsequent posts on the subject. I think it is fair to conclude that this may be an explosive issue. It is still difficult to piece together exactly what has happened in Fallujah – who fought and who didn’t and the timeline is murky. One thing I should make clear, this 36th ICDC battalion and the Iraqis in detention in Fallujah are not the Iraqis who refused to fight a few days ago and turned around and returned to their base. That particular story was about an Army battalion.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Islam OnLine are both carrying this account of 200 Iraqis held in detention by the Marines. I’ll try to update this post if any more information surfaces.

A Head Rolled

No, not Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or Bremer. But, hey, it’s a start.

In keeping with the Bush administration policy of never admitting they are ever wrong about anything, they haven’t actually announced the fall from grace of one Khidir Hamza, the Iraqi who so obligingly spun lies for the New York Times’ Judith Miller.

The invasion of Iraq was premised on the existence of weapons of mass destruction. None has yet been found and most of the US detective teams are now wanly returning home. Did the NewYorkTimes assist in this process of deception? Very much so. Just look through the clips file of one of its better known reporters, Judith Miller.

It was Miller who first launched the supposedly knowledgeable Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza on the world, crucial to the US government’s effort to portray a nuclear-capable Saddam.
[…]
Thus far there’s been no agonized reprise from the Times on its faulty estimate of the credibility of Hamza.

Here’s Miller in the NY Times, September 19, 2002, beating the drums for war:

But Khidir Hamza, who led part of Iraq’s nuclear bomb program until he defected in 1994, disagreed. Estimating that Iraq was now close to what he called a “pilot plant” stage of nuclear production, Hamza said that centrifuges were “small, easily hidden, and emit very little radiation that can be detected.” Also, he said, such centrifuges do not require much power to operate, compounding the difficulty of finding them.

Now, the CPA is quietly letting Hamza’s contract expire and trying to expel him from his house in the “Green Zone.” Undoubtedly, he’ll get a warm welcome from the real Iraqis.

After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he had partial control of Iraq’s nuclear and military industries.

It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA. It is now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily guarded “Green Zone” where the CPA has its headquarters. He could not be contacted by The Independent but is believed to have taken up a job with a US company.

Dr Hamza’s fall from grace with the US administration is in sharp contrast with the seriousness with which it took his views on WMD before the war. Speaking excellent English, he was also regularly interviewed by US television and quoted by the press.
[…]
It was as if Dr Hamza had studied the agenda of the hawks in the US, who wanted to invade Iraq, and was willing to supply evidence supporting their arguments. Several other Iraqi defectors during the 1990s also produced information which they said proved Saddam was secretly producing WMD, but Dr Hamza was the most convincing because he was able to clothe his evidence in appropriate scientific jargon. He wrote a book, Saddam’s Bomb Maker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda.

One employer in the US decided that his account of his past simply did not stand up to examination but the US government stuck by him and made him a consultant to the US Department of Energy. Dr Hamza also hinted that Saddam had secret links to al-Qa’ida and might give them anthrax.

Back in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam, Dr Hamza’s position as a senior advisor was very influential. The US-appointed advisors share control over ministries with Iraqi ministers. The ministry was, among other things, in charge of monitoring and securing the remains of Iraq’s nuclear industry.

Dr Hamza’s life in Baghdad was not entirely happy. At first he lived outside the Green Zone with his family until a remotely detonated bomb exploded near his car on the morning of Christmas Eve, buckling the doors and blowing out the windows.

He and his son were in the car at the time but were not injured. Dr Hamza asked for and was given a house in the Green Zone. It is this which the CPA is now trying to recover.

Of the Iraqi defectors after the Gulf War in 1991 who built a career in the US by providing evidence that Saddam Hussein was covertly building up an arsenal of WMD, Dr Hamza was the most successful. Once the war was over and no WMD had been found, he was something of an embarrassment, all the more so since he could not do his job.

It’s almost mind-boggling to imagine how bad a job someone would have to do to get fired by the CPA considering the apparently low standards they have. OK, next…Chalabi.

Property question for libertarians

Who Owns the Gaza Settlements?

I was reading this article about what will happen to the houses, farms, and shops the Gaza settlers will leave behind when they are evacuated by the Israeli state and I realized I couldn’t quite sort out what the libertarian answer was to the question, “What should be done with the property? Who owns it?”

The Israelis are issuing statements that seem fairly reasonable, considering they answer most questions about disputed property with D9 bulldozers and Hellfire missiles. This article represents the Israeli position as follows:

JERUSALEM, Apr 16 (Reuters) Israel threatened today to demolish Jewish settler homes during a planned Gaza pullout unless it can work out a deal for handing them over to Palestinian refugees via an international agency.

Israel hopes to avoid a scorched-earth policy when it evacuates Gaza settlements under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial ”disengagement” initiative, which won U S support this week, according to a copy of the plan obtained by Reuters.

The plan states ”Israel will aspire to leave standing the real estate assets of the Israeli settlements”. But the Israeli government signalled that a key demand would have to be met for it to leave buildings intact, as U N officials have urged.

”We want the houses to go to refugees, and if they don’t we reserve the right to destroy them,” a senior official said.

He said Israel wanted to arrange the handover of settler homes through an international organisation, possibly the World Bank.

OK, so the Israelis want an international organization to dole out the houses to “refugees.”

A few questions.

Do the houses belong to Israel? What if the Israelis built the houses on land they stole from a Palestinian? Does Israel have any standing to decide who gets the houses? Is it right to raze the houses as they leave? (They did this when pulling out of the Sinai.)

The next complication is the Palestinian Powers That Be, whoever that is at the moment. This article quotes Palestinian cabinet minister Ghassan al-Khatib saying: ”Israel has no right to make conditions or dictations on how these properties will be dealt with.”

Sharon’s plan calls for evacuating some 20 Gaza settlements inhabited by 7,500 settlers. Gaza is home to 1.3 million Palestinians, many of them impoverished refugees and their descendants displaced during the war that led to Israel’s creation in 1948.

The Israeli demand for international involvement in transferring settlement housing to refugees appeared to be part of Sharon’s effort to freeze the Palestinian Authority out of implementation of his plan.

He has vowed to carry out the withdrawal initiative unilaterally, saying Israel has no peace partner to deal with. Palestinian officials have called on Sharon to coordinate any Gaza pullout with them.

It’s an odd situation and I can’t think of an analogy. The houses were built with money extorted from Americans and Israelis, mostly on land stolen from various Palestinians. The Israelis living in them now probably paid token amounts to the State in some cases and in others were heavily subsidized to the point they never paid anything for the properties. The Palestinians don’t have any real societal institutions that could manage a peaceful and orderly transfer of these properties.

So, what’s to be done?

I’m cross-posting this question on my blog if anyone would like to debate the issue in a threaded format.

The Real Choice

Though not about the Balkans per se, this has universal application.
Here is the brilliant Butler Shaffer at LRC, on a historical choice before all of us (prompted by the 9/11 Commission three-ring circus):
“As the bloody and repressive history of the 20th century segues into the 21st, it is time for humanity itself to ask whether political systems have become outmoded relics to be added to history’s trash pile. Levels of state power now exceed our capacities to absorb the resulting conflicts, destructiveness, and oppression and still retain our sense of humanity. The very existence of mankind demands that we discover new principles and systems by which we can peaceably live and cooperate with one another. It is time for us to renounce the self-appointed “authorities” who represent no one but their own interests, and to reclaim for our individual lives the power and authority that nature has bestowed upon each of us.”
(my emphasis)
Read the entire article here

Najaf-Waco Comparison

An interesting comparison of Najaf to Waco by Dr. Jean Rosenfeld via David Neiwert. I have printed the entire letter here because my old eyes sometimes have difficulty reading against dark backgrounds and I suspect I am not the only one with this disability.

David Neiwert: My friend Jean Rosenfeld, whose work I’ve mentioned previously is a religious-studies researcher at UCLA who specializes in analyzing extremist religious movements and the way religion can inspire violence. She was among the scholars consulted by the FBI during the Branch Davidian standoff at Waco (her recommendations, and those of other religious scholars, were made to the negotiating team, whose work in turn was ignored by the tactical units that were in charge of the scene there). I also consulted with Jean while I was covering the Freemen standoff in Montana — which, because the negotiating team was placed in charge, had a dramatically different outcome than that in Waco. (For details, see In God’s Country.)

She sees an important parallel in what is now happening in Iraq regarding the Sadrists, and is hoping that the government does not make the same mistakes there that they made at Waco. She recently penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that appears to have been ignored by that paper’s editors. So I’m going to publish it in full here.

    “One of the most difficult problems before and during a critical incident is one of access. The media understands this problem, but perhaps does not know that it is a major problem for people with expertise outside the agencies tasked to handle the incident.

    “There were experts outside the cordon at Waco who were effectively negotiating David Koresh out of Waco. This is now well documented. One of these experts was very effective during the Freemen crisis when he was brought on site by the FBI.

    “I have studied both critical incidents and written about them. I was involved in data gathering and sending memos during the Freemen critical incident.

    “Watch what is happening with al-Sadr in an-Najaf. This is a critical incident writ large of the type my colleagues and I have advised about, studied, and written about over a period of eight years. I am hypothesizing that we risk making the same mistake at an-Najaf with al-Sadr that we made at Waco, unless the knowledge gained from three critical incidents in the U.S. — the CSA (The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord), Branch Davidian, and Waco — has been transmitted to the U.S. military and CPA and has been incorporated into their strategies and tactics. I seriously doubt that this is the case.

    “I have written and spoken many times about how a religiously motivated critical incident, or standoff, differs qualitatively and markedly from a criminally-motivated hostage standoff. The latter is the model for defusing critical incidents among law enforcement and CT specialists. They remain uninformed and skeptical about these important differences to this day. The Freemen crisis actually began to unravel after scholars advised the FBI to “get a letter from God” to Gloria Ward that allowed her and her two children to leave the Clark ranch. They did so and she left. I have published an article about the Freemen crisis in a peer-reviewed journal and it was reprinted in the book, Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence, ed. by Catherine Wessinger.

    “[Coalition spokesman] Dan Senor is reported in the Times [last week] as saying, “The way we look at it is, there is no alternative to getting it (capturing or killing al-Sadr and eradicating the Sadr brigades) done … If we allow the violence to cause setbacks to the political process, the terrorists and the extremists will have scored an enormous victory.”

    “Aside from Senor’s mistakenly mixing the Sadrist crisis up with the al-Zarqawi letter that advocated sparking a Sunni/Shiite civil war — an agenda peculiar only to al-Zarqawi’s foreign jihadists in Iraq and not to any other faction even a faction within al-Qaida that we know of, Senor is taking the very same approach that the Waco tactical commanders took to the Branch Davidians. Negotiators at Waco dissented with the tactical team, but were overruled.

    “What is not known about Waco is that the final assault plan was amended on the ground by the tactical field commanders on the very day of the assault. That alteration had been discussed and rejected by the FBI brass over several weeks. Nonetheless, the FBI HRT commander, Richard Rogers implemented the rejected plan via a loophole signed by Janet Reno the morning of the final assault on April 19. That alteration was identical to the gassing and demolition plan that two Delta Force advisors seconded to the Justice Dept. in a principals meeting of April 14. Those two advisors supported the rejected plan that was later implemented “hypothetically” in order to conform to the letter of Posse Comitatus law. I also have published a peer-reviewed article with this finding. It is based on government documents–all open source. The rejected plan supported by Jeff Jamar, Richard Rogers, and the two Delta Force officers resulted in a disaster that did not have to happen. It was an ill-advised tactical approach to a religious community that feared that Satan was attacking them.

    “Those two Delta Force officers were Peter J. Schoomaker and “Jerry” Boykin, now both top officials in the US Army in charge of military planning for the war on terrorism.

    “So, watch an-Najaf. The religiously-motivated standoff may end with a whimper. Or it may end with a bang. It need not end violently or set off more violence against the US. If al-Sadr is killed, he will become a martyr to Shiites outside of Iraq. We have already seen demonstrations in support of al-Sadr elsewhere in Iraq among Sunnis and elsewhere in the Arab world. Al-Sadr is creating solidarity between Sunni and Shiite activist and militant groups. This is not in the longterm US interest.

    “I believe that the hard tactical approach being contemplated in an-Najaf, if negotiations now under way do not result in al-Sadr’s surrender — is the same approach contemplated and executed at Waco. Capturing or killing al-Sadr will not neutralize what he is regarded as symbolizing to Shiites angry at “occupiers” in Iraq or in Israel. It will only amplify it. There are better ways to defuse the problem of al-Sadr. We should not take a tactical approach because it suits the politics or flawed strategy of the current administration. We may have to change our strategy in Iraq to accommodate new realities instead. This may be tough political medicine, but it will save us from terrible consequences down the road.

    “I believe Senor’s approach is similar to the tactical one taken at Waco against another “messiah.” It resulted in many deaths and a legacy that led us to the “commemoration” atrocity in Oklahoma City. As one of many scholars who study these cases of religion and violence and who have not seen our findings incorporated into law enforcement (we did have some input into the FBI’s millennium approach) or the military, I am very concerned that the standoff in an-Najaf has the potential to become “another Waco.”

    “The wild card at an-Najaf is religion — a factor very few experts in fields other than ours fully understand and weigh in their calculations and strategies in these alarming and perplexing incidents.

    “So, please watch an-Najaf. Consult with knowledgeable experts outside the military cordon there, people who know what al-Sadr represents. He is not in league with Iran. SCIRI is closer to Iran. He is an Iraqi nationalist. He is a puritanical, orthodox Shiite. He does want political representation. We have mistakenly isolated him and his oppressed, impoverished, young supporters. That was dumb, but we should not now be dumber by making him a martyr in the Shiite fundamentalist pantheon.”

David Neiwert: It is worth observing, of course, that (as Atrios notes) the coalition appears determined to make this mistake, since its official stance is that “The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.

Double Standards

I was reading today in the news about a fugitive Chinese bank official accused of embezzling $485 million from his bank having been turned over by the US to Chinese officials. This brought to mind a somewhat similar criminal case, that of Ahmad Chalabi who, not only was accused but actually tried and convicted in absentia in Jordan of embezzling $200 million from his former bank (interestingly, Arthur Anderson managed to catch this crook). Instead of being turned over to our friend and ally Jordan for punishment, we instead are making him into the de facto if not de jure dicatator-to-be of Iraq. Although I am not really convinced at this point in time that being granted leadership of Iraq is a “reward,” it doesn’t somehow seem equal to the prison cell that the Chinese banker is looking forward to.

Apparently, this Administration can overlook any form of criminal behavior and even sell out their allies if it is to their advantage.