Iraqi Informant Threw US Curveball on WMD For War

The Iraqi informant known as “Curve Ball” – whose fake story about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program helped build the case for the US-led invasion of Iraq – has been identified by the CBS 60 Minutes Program.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan first arrived in Germany as a refugee in 1999 and told authorities he had been a chemical engineer who managed a biological weapons factory, Djerf al-Nadaf, in Iraq.

Apparently, Mr Alwan told this story to increase his chances of being granted asylum in Germany. He further embellished the story when he told German officials that a dozen of his co-workers had died manufacturing biological weapons.

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Madrid Train Bombings Victim Families Rail Court Acquittals

The families of victims killed in the 2004 Madrid train bombings were outraged yesterday at the Spanish national court’s acquittals of seven defendants and the perceived leniency in sentences handed down to those convicted of the worst terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic militants on European soil.

On March 11, 2004 ten backpacks loaded with nails and dynamite exploded on four commuter trains during morning peak hour in Madrid. The blasts ripped apart several carriages, killing 191 people and wounding 1,841 more.

Spanish authorities brought a total of 28 suspects to trial – 19 Arabs, mostly from Morocco, and 9 Spaniards. Seven other men believed to have been ringleaders blew themselves up in a Madrid apartment three weeks after the attacks as police closed in to arrest them.

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US, Iran Rhetoric Feared Heading For Military Showdown

US lawmakers and the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency fear that heated rhetoric between the United States and Iran will escalate into a military conflict with devastating consequences throughout the Middle East and around the world.“My fear is that, if we continue to escalate from both sides, that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss,” said Mohamed ElBaredei, director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. “The Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire.”

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Draft for US Diplomats For American Embassy in Iraq?

In a move that has already drawn inevitable comparisons with military conscription, the State Department has announced on Friday that US diplomats may soon be compelled to serve one-year tours of duty at the American Embassy in Iraq.

The plan has been prompted by a chronic lack of volunteers for postings in Baghdad, where the US embassy now comes under daily fire from insurgents.

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Turkey Holds Crisis Meeting After Kurdish Rebel Attacks

Turkey’s Prime Minister will hold a Sunday evening crisis meeting with government and military officials after Kurdish rebels ambushed and killed 12 Turkish soldiers near the Iraqi border early Sunday.

This brings the death toll among Turkish soldiers and security personnel to 40 for the past month alone.

“Our parliament has granted us the authority to act, and within this framework we will do whatever has to be done,” said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, referring to Wednesday’s overwhelming vote by the Turkish parliament to allow military incursions into Iraq to strike back at the PKK.

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Turkey Expected to Grant Attacks On Kurdish PKK In Iraq

The Turkish parliament is expected to grant permission today for the country’s military to attack Kurdish PKK rebel forces in northern Iraq, who are blamed for a series of deadly attacks on Turkish troops.

While the parliament is expected to approve the action by a considerable margin, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is urging calm and insisting that military strikes within Iraq’s borders would not be automatic.

“Passage of this motion does not mean an immediate incursion will follow, but we will act at the right time and under the right conditions,” Mr Erdogan said on Tuesday. “This is about self-defense.”

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Blackwater CEO Prince Says Iraq Lawsuits Politically Motivated

Blackwater chairman and CEO Erik Prince has come out swinging at growing accusations that his contractors in Iraq are trigger-happy cowboys who fired without provocation on unarmed civilians last month in Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 27.

Mr Prince speculated that the attorneys representing four victims in a lawsuit against him and Blackwater only want to score political points and get media attention. He also suggested that the US military, which was on the scene minutes after the September 16 incident in Nisoor Square, did not conduct a thorough investigation.

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US Iraq War Taking Toll On Australia, UK, Allies

US President George Bush may soon lose his last major ally in the war in Iraq, with Australian Prime Minister John Howard calling a federal election despite his Liberal Party’s trailing the opposition badly in the polls, mainly as a result of the Iraq war.

The announcement of the Australian general election comes days after retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition troops in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, called the war in Iraq “a nightmare with no end in sight”.

It also comes less than a week after UK Prime Minster Gordon Brown announced that he would reduce the number of British troops in Iraq from 5,500 to 2,500 by next spring and suggested that all British troops could be brought home by the end of 2008. That would neutralize much of the political damage done to Britain’s Labour Party by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to take the country to war in Iraq, in time for the next British election.

Mr Howard is seeking a fifth term as Australia’s prime minister, but is struggling against a stinging backlash from the Australian public, who have always been overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq even before the US-led invasion.

Australia’s involvement in the war is tipped to be a major election issue.

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party has long pledged to withdraw Australian troops from combat roles in Iraq if he is elected. While he supports Australia’s alliance with the US, he maintains that “being a good ally doesn’t mean that you have to comply with everything the United States says.” He added that he would not “leave our ally immediately in the lurch” and would act only following “clear-cut consultations with the Americans”.

Australian voters have maintained an intense interest in the war, and the comments of Mr Sanchez have been widely reported in the national news media.

Speaking to military reporters in Arlington, Virginia on Friday, Mr Sanchez held the Bush administration, the State Department and Congress equally responsible for what he called a “dereliction of duty”.

He said US politicians had poorly planned the mission, had not given the military the resources and support required for success, and had ignored early warning signs of civil unrest which had helped the insurgency to take hold.

He added that such incompetence and indifference to a mission would be punishable by immediate dismissal and court martial in the military.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” said Mr Sanchez.

He singled out the “neglect and incompetence at the National Security Council level”, accusing it of a “catastrophic failure” which placed the US and its military in “an intractable situation” in Iraq.

“There is no question America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” said Mr Sanchez.

The NSC issued a brief statement in response on Friday evening: “We appreciate his service to the country. As General (David) Petraeus and Ambassador (Ryan) Crocker said, there’s more work to be done but progress is being made in Iraq. And that’s what we’re focused on now.”

In Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer agreed that the situation is improving in Iraq.

“The fact is that the situation is getting better, which I think is the important point here,” Mr Downer told the Nine Network. “I mean, I think with the greatest of respect, General Petraeus, the general in charge there, our military people in Iraq, our diplomats on the ground there, people like me who have actually been there in recent times, talked to people, looked at the situation, are likely to know a fair bit about this.”

He implied that Mr Sanchez was “just playing a political game … or trying to make some rhetorical point”, although he did not make clear what political advantage Mr Sanchez may have been seeking.

“I think in terms of the substance of the issue, the situation is getting a lot better there,” said Mr Downer, who believes that Australians share the government’s view that Australia is “moving in the right direction”.

According to the most recent Australian newspoll, Mr Howard’s coalition government is trailing the Australian Labor Party by 56-44 percent in the two-party preferred vote. Mr Rudd is Australia’s preferred prime minister, leading Mr Howard by 48-38 percent.

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com

Blackwater Iraq Shootings Unprovoked? Evidence Mounts

Evidence continues to mount that Blackwater contractors fired without provocation on unarmed civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square on September 16, killing 17 people and wounding 27.

It has also emerged that Blackwater withdrew its membership from a professional security industry association two days after it announced that it would examine Blackwater’s conduct in the September 16 shootings.

New witness accounts of the Blackwater shootings have been given by three Kurds who watched events unfold from the rooftop of a building overlooking Nisoor Square. All three said they had seen no one fire on the Blackwater vehicles.

The US military has also said that US troops who arrived within minutes of the incident had determined that the Blackwater contractors had not been fired upon. The soldiers spoke to witnesses, took photographs of the aftermath and gathered forensic evidence from the scene. Most crucially, they found only cartridge casings that matched weapons used by US troops and contractors.

Blackwater and the US State Department have insisted that the contractors were forced to return fire when they were attacked by insurgents in Nisoor Square. The State Department has also supported Blackwater’s story that one of their vehicles had been disabled by insurgent gunfire and had to be towed away from the scene.

The three Kurdish witnesses are considered highly reliable for a number of reasons: their view from the rooftop was unobstructed; their perception of events is not clouded by the terror and chaos that gripped witnesses on the ground; and they are members of a pro-American political party and thus not hostile to the US presence in Iraq.

One of the Kurdish witnesses, a guard identified only as Sabah, saw Blackwater open fire on a white sedan killing a 20 year-old medical student and his mother. This had set in motion a gruesome chain of events. Sabah said there had been no provocation, “Nothing at all. No mortars. No shooting.”

“I call it a massacre,” said Omar Waso, another witness and a senior official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “It was one-sided shooting from one direction. There wasn’t any return fire.”

Mr Waso could not understand why contractors kept firing on the civilians long after it was clear that there was no resistance. Blackwater had even killed people trying to flee. Mr Waso saw one man get shot the back of the head.

After a brief lull in the gunfire, the Blackwater vehicles began moving out of the square – all of them on their own power. That is when one Blackwater guard unleashed a hail of gunfire on a bus filled with people. “The glass was all broken,” said Mr Waso. “Women and children, all of them were shouting and crying.”

Mr Waso then ran to the scene to assist victims and told an Iraqi soldier he should give chase. “Leave [the victims] and try to follow that company before they get away,” he said to soldier. “They killed innocent people for no reason.”

The September 16 incident has infuriated many in the US military, who have long argued that the brutal behavior of Blackwater contractors has worked against the US mission in Iraq. “If our people had done this,” said one US military official, “they would be court-martialed.”

In addition to the US military’s investigation, there are three additional inquiries underway into the Nisoor Square incident: one by the FBI, another by the US Congress and a third joint inquiry by the US-Iraqi governments.

One week ago, the Iraqi government announced that after its own immediate investigation into the Nisoor Square incident, it had found that Blackwater contractors “deliberately murdered” 17 unarmed civilians. It demanded that Blackwater pay the families $136 million dollars in compensation, that the US State Department terminate all Iraq-related Blackwater contracts within six months, and that the US government hand over the Blackwater contractors involved in the shootings to face criminal charges in Iraq.

On Friday, the families of four of the Nisoor Square victims sued Blackwater and its CEO, Erik Prince, for “creating and fostering a culture of lawlessness among employees” resulting in a “lengthy pattern of egregious misconduct in Iraq” including the “repeated callous killing of innocents”.

Meanwhile, it appears that Blackwater may have withdrawn its membership from the International Peace Operations Association in order to stop an inquiry by the association – one of Blackwater’s fiercest advocates in the wake of the September 16 shootings.

Blackwater withdrew its membership two days after the association agreed to look into the incident to determine whether Blackwater’s  “processes and procedures” complied with IPOA’s professional code of conduct.

IPOA’s director of programs and operations, J.J. Messner, said Blackwater had initially agreed that the review was appropriate, but then abruptly severed its relationship with the association for undisclosed reasons.

Sources: The New York Times; The Associated Press

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com

Blackwater Sued for Wrongful Deaths, Injuries

The scandal surrounding Blackwater USA deepened on Thursday with the filing of a civil lawsuit that accuses Blackwater of being a lawless, ruthlessly profit-driven army of mercenaries whose corporate culture encourages the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians.

The legitimacy of Blackwater’s contract with the US State Department has also been challenged, with the lawsuit pointing out that the US government is legally forbidden from doing business with mercenaries.

The sixteen-page complaint was filed on behalf of three people killed and one person seriously wounded in the September 16 shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square, where Blackwater contractors are accused of killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

The defendants named in the suit are Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and his empire of companies, who are alleged to have “created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst employees” resulting in a “lengthy pattern of egregious misconduct in Iraq” including the “repeated callous killing of innocents” according to the complaint.

The September 16 incident, described in the lawsuit as a “massacre”, was thus a “foreseeable and predictable” consequence of Blackwater corporate policy.

The complaint was brought by the families of Himoud Saed Atban, Usama Fadhil Abbas and Oday Ismail Ibraheem (who were killed on September 16) and Talib Mutlaq Deewan (who was critically injured in the same incident).

They have accused Mr Prince and Blackwater of extrajudicial killing, war crimes, assault and battery, wrongful death, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress and negligent hiring, training and supervision.

Blackwater is also said to have consistently underreported and attempted to cover up incidents in which its contractors engaged in “wrongful” and “excessive” use of force.

The document cites known cases whereby Blackwater fired on unarmed civilians, as well as the Christmas Eve 2006 incident in which Blackwater contractor Andrew Moonen shot and killed the Iraqi Vice President’s body guard in a drunken rage. On that and other occasions, say the plaintiffs, Blackwater kept the victims’ families quiet by paying them $15,000 each.

Opinions given by three US military officials are included to further substantiate the case that Blackwater’s operations are characterized by a pattern of excessive force. One military official is directly quoted as saying that Blackwater’s conduct in Nisoor Square on September 16 “was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong”.

References are also made to Washington Post articles that featured comments from military officials regarding Blackwater’s habitual misconduct. One US Army lieutenant colonel says that Blackwater contractors are “immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers. Their tendency is to shoot first and ask questions later.” In another article, a US commander complains that the contractors “act like cowboys over here … not seeming to play by the same rules everyone else tries to play by.” He added that the company has “a record of recklessness”.

The lawsuit notes that there are growing concerns that the misconduct of Blackwater is harming the US military’s counterinsurgency mission as well as harming “the reputation of the United States throughout the world”.

One of the more sinister allegations made against Mr Prince is that he has used his contractors’ willingness to kill innocent civilians as a corporate marketing advantage, to maintain the statistic that the company “has never had any American official under its protection killed in Iraq”.

Mr Prince’s alleged moral indifference is further said to be evidenced by his employment of foreign nationals who were once military officials in regimes known to have been involved in human rights abuses. Also noted is the ongoing investigation into Blackwater’s alleged smuggling of weapons into Iraq – weapons which ended up in the hands of militants the US regards as “terrorists”.

Then there are the public statements made by Blackwater’s executives that clearly identify the company as a mercenaries-for-hire service.

President Gary Jackson stated in 2003 that “I would like to have the largest, most professional private army in the world”. In March 2006, Blackwater executive Cofer Black boasted to a conference in Jordan that Blackwater could deploy a private brigade-sized force to any conflict or crisis zone.

Blackwater’s mercenary status calls into question the legitimacy of the company’s contract with the US State Department, which the lawsuit argues violates the US Anti-Pinkerton Act – legislation that forbids the US Government from employing companies that offer mercenary or quasi-military forces for hire.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages for death and injuries (physical, emotional and economic), punitive damages “in an amount sufficient to strip Defendants of all of the revenue and profits earned from their pattern of constant misconduct and callous disregard for human life”, and reimbursement for legal fees and other costs permitted by law.

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com