U.S. Allies Pay Heavy Price for Iraq Assistance - South Koreas, Colombians, Japanese, & Spaniards Dead

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...&e=18&u=/nm/iraq_dc

U.S. Allies Pay Heavy Price for Iraq Assistance - South Koreas, Colombians, Japanese, & Spaniards Dead
By Andrew Marshall
November 30, 2003

 Guerrillas killed a dozen people from four nations helping the U.S. military in Iraq (news - web sites) in weekend ambushes, sparking new concern among Washington's allies about the risks of getting involved in stabilizing the country.

Two South Koreans died on Sunday when their car was sprayed with bullets near Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s hometown, a day after ambushes killed seven Spanish intelligence agents, two Japanese diplomats and their Iraqi driver, and a Colombian contractor.

Officials in Seoul said the South Koreans killed on Sunday were electricity workers sub-contracted to an unnamed U.S. firm. Reuters journalists at the scene saw a car peppered with bullets.

The Koreans died on the same highway as two Japanese diplomats, who were gunned down by on Saturday along with their Iraqi driver as they bought food at a roadside stall.

The Colombian civilian contractor was killed and two colleagues were wounded when their convoy was ambushed on Saturday near Balad, north of Baghdad.

On Sunday morning, youths were jumping on the wreckage of the burned-out vehicles in which the Spaniards died.

"We're happy about what happened," said 20-year-old Abdul Qader, a student. "We don't like the Americans or the Spanish."

Facing the Horrific Every Day - Army Hospital in Baghdad Is First Refuge for U.S. Casualties

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...28?language=printer

Facing the Horrific Every Day - Army Hospital in Baghdad Is First Refuge for U.S. Casualties
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 29, 2003

BAGHDAD -- The patient was talking. He had arrived one recent Saturday night at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, bare-chested and bleeding from wounds in both legs. In the emergency room, when his voice rose above the din of the machines and medical staff, it was a good sign.

"Oh, I'm doing dandy," the soldier said as he lay prone on a green Army litter, his tone dripping with sarcasm but not bitterness. Two medics wheeled him into Trauma Room No. 2, where everyone seemed to exhale with relief at the soldier's sense of humor. The ER staff, dressed in beige boots, camouflage pants and scrub tops, worked crisply but without the urgency that accompanies a patient near death.

"We're going to expose you, okay?" said Maj. Jason Boardman, a general surgeon from West Point, N.Y.

"I was born naked, it's okay," the soldier quipped. He turned his head to the side and told an administrator his name. VanBuren. Matthew. 21, from Kansas City, Kan. A private first class with the 1st Armored Division's HHC 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, a cavalry unit.

Using dull-tipped scissors, Lt. Hope Simmons, 25, a nurse from Tampa, carefully cut through the uniform pants. "Ow. If you press on my thigh again, I'm going to punch you," VanBuren deadpanned.

Soon VanBuren was naked except for a thin blue gown draped across his private parts. The medical staff pored over the rest of his body. Hot shrapnel from a roadside bomb had gouged the underside of his left thigh, leaving a hole the size of a grapefruit that oozed blood and flesh. On his lower right leg, another shrapnel wound was bleeding. His right shoulder was injured, but it was not clear how seriously.

"Just sit back and relax," Boardman told VanBuren. "We're going to do all the work."

Since the largest U.S. Army hospital in Iraq opened its doors on April 10, nearly all U.S. casualties have passed through its first-floor emergency room. Some come already dead. Some arrive with one arm instead of two, a shattered leg or a face wiped away by an explosion.

Assaults on U.S. troops have numbered as many as 45 a day in recent weeks. For the staff at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, located within the U.S.-led occupation authority's headquarters at one of former president Saddam Hussein's palaces, that translates into a dozen patients some days. Twenty-four hours in the hospital's emergency room with soldiers stripped of their uniforms and gritty exteriors revealed the physical and emotional toll.

About 70 percent of the hospital's patients are wounded soldiers; the rest are Iraqi civilians and prisoners, along with a small number of U.S. civilian contractors, said Maj. Mark White, director of patient administration.

The number of soldiers treated for serious combat injuries is not publicly disclosed. Instead, the hospital releases statistics on patient admissions -- a total of 1,659 U.S. soldiers through Oct. 30. The combined number of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi patients admitted per month has increased since September, and this month was expected to reach about 400, White said.

Soldiers stay here for up to two days; those with serious wounds requiring further treatment are sent on to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and, if necessary, to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

"They come in here saying, 'Did he make it? Did my driver make it?' " said Lt. KomKwuan Pholtavee, 24, an ER nurse from Bellmore, N.Y. In their haze of pain and fear, she said, "I've had soldiers think that I'm their wife."

The worst that Maj. Michael Hilliard, 33, an emergency physician, saw back home in San Antonio were car crash and gunshot victims. Here, he estimates that he has treated the broken bodies of more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers.

"The injuries are horrific," he said. "They are beyond anything that you see in a textbook, and they are the worst that I have ever seen."
'No Pulse, No Pulse!'



The ER night crew came on at 6 p.m. Some had finished up an unusually flavorful Army rations dinner of chicken fajitas. Others silently watched movies on a laptop computer or read e-mail.

The staff was clustered around the nurses' station outside the ER, tucked away in the back of the ground floor of the three-story, 76-bed hospital that was once the private clinic for Hussein's relatives. The large wooden desk had a clunky military telephone and radio keeping the staff in touch with the hospital's operations center, which would announce when a medical helicopter was about to arrive.

Around 8 p.m., the radio crackled.

"EMT, this is China Base," said a soldier at the center, using the hospital call sign.

"China Base, EMT," replied First Lt. Chris Haese, 33, an ER nurse from Brillion, Wis., who was listening for radio traffic.

"Air evac coming in. One litter, urgent, IED shrapnel," the soldier said.

A medical evacuation helicopter was carrying a soldier seriously wounded by shrapnel from a roadside bomb -- in military speak, an improvised explosive device, or IED.

Haese made a quick check of the supplies in Trauma Room 1. Simmons, the ER nurse, pulled on white rubber gloves and went through the ER's double receiving doors to wait. As the helicopter approached the helipad, three medics from the ER put on green helmets and climbed into what resembled a golf cart, then sped out of the hospital's black rear gates to pick up the patient.

The vehicle returned minutes later, a soldier hitched to the front. He lay on a narrow green stretcher, wrapped in a blanket. A resuscitator covered his nose and mouth, and the helicopter medic pumped the balloon to assist the soldier's breathing. The sky was black, but outdoor lights flooded the hospital's back parking lot.

"On the count of three," one medic said. "One, two, three!" Up went the soldier from the stretcher and onto a narrow wheeled cot. Blood had pooled on the black backboard left behind.

With a short run, they wheeled the patient into the trauma room. Hilliard stood at the head of the cot while the rest of the staff crowded around the sides, hooking up IVs, touching every inch of the soldier's body in a search for wounds and signs of life.

"Does he have a pulse?" Hilliard shouted. He turned around to reach for a sonogram that would show heart activity. "There's no pulse, no pulse!" a nurse responded.

The helicopter medic, still in his flight suit and helmet, quickly briefed Sgt. Dylan Jones, 26, of Philadelphia, the night medic in charge of operations. A roadside bomb had exploded in Sadr City, the Shiite Muslim slum in northeastern Baghdad. "I gotta go pick up another one," the medic said, and rushed out.

Flying shrapnel from the explosion had breached the soldier's skull and spattered blood on the right side of his face. Hilliard checked the extent of the injury. The soldier's helmet lay a few inches from his head, covered in blood on the right side.

The crisp, hurried movements of the trauma team slowed. Boardman, the general surgeon, ripped off his white latex gloves and walked away, muttering expletives.

Drops of dark red blood pooled on the white marble floor. The remaining staff peeled away from the soldier's bedside. Pvt. Kurt R. Frosheiser, 22, of Des Moines, was dead.

It was 8:17 p.m. Maj. Benjamin S. Gonzalez, 41, of Mesa, Ariz., assistant chief of emergency medicine at Walter Reed Army Hospital, now the chief of the Baghdad ER, was the first to speak.

"We've got another one coming in about three minutes," he said.
A Very Fine Line



Another patient dead, thought Maj. Fred H. Brennan, 38, a soft-spoken, bespectacled sports doctor from Fort Belvoir. A soldier.

"It's never easy to see it," Brennan said. "It's a very fine line for us between compassion and being hardened to it. You can't dwell on it for very long because it gets to you. We feel for him."

He sighed. "But if you dwell on him, you can't do your job."

VanBuren, the chatty soldier from Kansas, came in by ambulance, unaware that Frosheiser had arrived moments earlier. Both men were victims of the Sadr City bomb; VanBuren had been driving the Humvee when the explosion happened. He worried about his friend and feared the worst.

"God, I hope he's going to be okay," he said as he lay prone.

An Army chaplain quietly slipped into the trauma room and asked VanBuren if he could pray with him. He agreed. They clasped hands.

"My buddy Frosh, he was fresh out of basic," VanBuren said. "He got to the unit about a week ago, from Des Moines." He started to cry.

"I was teaching him my job so that if I got hurt, he could take over for me," he said, the tears sneaking out from the corners of his bright blue eyes.

"He was a good guy and a good soldier. I didn't want for him to die."

The commander of the hospital, Col. Beverly Pritchett, 46, from Buffalo, came into the trauma room to survey the scene, as she often does after a soldier's death or other serious incident.

Pritchett walked up to VanBuren in Bed No. 4, introduced herself and shook his right hand. She stroked his bare left shoulder.

"I'm going to take real good care of you," she said. "Just take some deep breaths."

"My mother, she's going to kill me," VanBuren said.

"No, she's not going to kill you," Pritchett answered softly. "She's going to be so happy that you're alive."

Across the room, Spec. Alrick Williams, 20, of Geist, Ind., waited for treatment in Bed No. 5. He had come in shortly after 9 p.m. with small, dark-red cuts from shrapnel on the right side of his face, near his right eyebrow. His head rested on a mud-brown Meals Ready to Eat bag. Williams, a gunner, was a member of the 716th Military Police Battalion.

"We went to Baghdad to pick up some supplies," Williams said slowly, squinting as a medic cleaned out his minor wounds with a squirt bottle.

"We were supposed to leave during the day, but we ended up leaving at night because we were waiting for another unit. There were seven vehicles. We picked up the rear, and then next thing you know, an IED goes off. It was very loud, and I went deaf for a minute, and I couldn't breathe."

Williams said he had already survived a previous rocket-propelled grenade attack, and in October his battalion lost a commander and two other soldiers in an ambush near a mosque in Karbala, south of Baghdad.

"I thank the Lord," Williams said. "We've already had three deaths in our battalion, and we don't need one again."

By 1 a.m., the ER was quiet. VanBuren was upstairs having orthopedic surgery to remove a shrapnel fragment embedded in his right leg. A corporal who had arrived with Williams and who had lost two inches of bone in his arm from the roadside blast was sleeping off his surgery. A soldier from the 82nd Airborne Division was in the ER operating room, while his commander sat outside, blank-faced and nervous. The ER staff settled back into the nurses' station and began to play cards.

"This is an average night; this is not even a busy night," said Simmons, the ER nurse.
'That Kid's a Hero'



Morning brought fresh faces, the day shift. The wait for patients resumed.

On the third floor, VanBuren lay on a hospital bed, surrounded by seven of his buddies. They had brought him a pair of spurs and a certificate honoring his bravery.

Spec. Ronald Dekker, 21, from Tucson, stood at VanBuren's bedside, listening. VanBuren told him he'd be leaving for Landstuhl in 24 to 48 hours.

"It'll be two to three weeks before I can be on my feet again," he said. Both of his legs were wrapped in white bandages.

His X-rays lay at the foot of his bed in a yellow envelope. The soldiers took them out and held them up to the light, curious to see the piece of shrapnel embedded in his leg bone.

The surgeon had given VanBuren the jagged bit of metal, which he kept by his bed in a small plastic cup with a lid. It was rectangular and narrow, a piece of artillery shell the size of half a pinky. VanBuren planned to keep it, melt it down and make it into a medallion he'd wear around his neck.

"It's all I have to remember my friend by," VanBuren said. He started to cry. Dekker reached down and gave him a hug.

Frosheiser had arrived in the unit about eight days before he died, VanBuren said. Because they both hailed from Midwestern cities and shared a love for the Kansas City Chiefs, VanBuren had taken the young soldier with delicate ears and a boyish smile under his wing.

VanBuren recalled that one Friday, usually a maintenance day for the trucks, lamenting the need to change a mirror and look at the transmission. VanBuren left for two hours on a mission, and when he came back, Frosheiser had put in a brand-new mirror, serviced the transmission and put in fluids.

"He knew it had to get done, and he got it done without being asked," VanBuren said. "I decided right at that point that this guy could be an excellent soldier. He needed someone to be there for him and teach him the ropes."

Staff Sgt. Darrell Clay, 32, from Fayetteville, N.C., also thought someone should show Frosheiser the ropes. When a call came to pick up a noncommissioned officer, Clay thought it might be useful to take along two of the unit's newest privates, including Frosheiser, so they could start to get a feel for the city.

"We were training them how to drive around Baghdad, Iraqi culture, what to expect during Ramadan, just getting them up to speed pretty much," he said, speaking softly in VanBuren's cramped hospital room.

VanBuren was the driver. Clay sat in the passenger seat. In the rear, a private named Plumley sat in the right seat and Frosheiser in the left. The gunner, Spec. Watson, peered out from the top.

"We were moving at a pretty fast clip," VanBuren said. "Then, all of a sudden, there was this nasty sound and smell of smoke and explosives. I couldn't hear much out of my left ear."

Clay told VanBuren to hit the gas. "My plan was to haul ass to get us to Assassins' Gate," VanBuren said, referring to the main gate of the U.S.-led administration headquarters in Baghdad.

"You did the right thing," Clay said.

That whole time, VanBuren said, he didn't hear a peep from his friend. Clay told VanBuren to pull over. "I didn't want to tell him why," he said, but it was to assess Frosheiser's condition.

When he stopped the Humvee, VanBuren got out and bandaged his own bleeding legs with the field dressing attached to his flack vest. His friend was slumped over in his seat.

Capt. Joel Raoelina, 37, of Logan, Utah, the chaplain of the battalion, stood in the corner of the room, listening, never chiming in. He had rushed over to the 28th Combat Support Hospital the evening before to see VanBuren. Then he stayed with Frosheiser's body in the hospital morgue, a small room near the ER trauma rooms.

Raoelina prayed with VanBuren that night. The chaplain never told him that Frosheiser had been killed.

"I don't think anybody told him," Raoelina said. VanBuren just knew.

At the end of the afternoon, VanBuren's company commander, Capt. Jonathan Redmond, came by. The soldiers in the unit cleared away so VanBuren could talk one-on-one with Redmond, the most senior officer in the room. Soon he hugged VanBuren and walked away. The rest of the unit followed suit, also giving hugs and filing out.

"I love you, man," Dekker said.

"I'll see you in a few months," VanBuren replied.

Redmond stood in the hospital hallway, the soldiers in the unit milling around him. "That kid's a hero," the commander said. "Let's pin the medallion on him, send him home and get him back in the fight as soon as he's ready."

100 Gitmo Detainees May Go Free

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/10/terror/main557846.shtml

100 Gitmo Detainees May Go Free
December 01, 2003

More than 100 prisoners will be released from U.S. custody at the detainment camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and more will follow, military officials said.

It wasn't clear if the men and boys to be transferred from Guantanamo would face further detention or prosecution in their own countries. The first of two new transfers is scheduled for the end of December, and the other in January, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The official did not say where the prisoners would be sent and a military spokeswoman declined Sunday to provide details about future transfers from the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We do expect there will be other transfers but because of operational procedures, I can't talk about any details," Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said. "We only talk about detainee movements after an operation is complete."

The military official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that one of the boys who would be transferred shot and killed a special operations soldier in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001 and 11,500 American troops remain.

The official did not know why the boy was being released from U.S. custody, but the military has said previously that the main purpose of the detention mission is intelligence gathering.

On Sunday, a Canadian citizen returned home after being released in October from Guantanamo. Abdulrhaman Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and held as an "enemy combatant" by U.S. authorities for nine months, he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Khadr, the son of a suspected al Qaeda financier, said U.S. authorities refused to return him to Canada and instead flew him to Afghanistan.

After his release, Khadr went to Iran and then Turkey before arriving late last week in Bosnia, he told CBC.

At the Canadian Embassy in Sarajevo, Khader, who did not have a passport, was given a special permit to return to Canada, he told CBC. He was accompanied on his return to Toronto by a Canadian consular official.

The United States holds about 660 prisoners from 44 countries at the base in eastern Cuba but the government declines to provide a breakdown of their citizenship, ages or the reasons they are being held.

The government has not charged them or given them access to lawyers.

The United States has released 88 of the prisoners since the government began holding suspects at the base in Cuba in January 2002.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the official in charge of the detention mission, said Wednesday that the three youngest boys at the jail, who range from 13 to 15 would be transferred soon, but he did not give a date.

Before their capture by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, some of the youths held at the base were sexually abused; and they have received therapy at Guantanamo, the official said. The boys are kept separate from the adult population at the jail.

Separately, Britain and the United States are negotiating a deal to send nine British detainees back home.

Clive Stafford Smith, a U.S.-based British human rights lawyer, told The Observer, a British newspaper, that two of the nine British detainees, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, were likely to be released and not charged with a crime while the other seven would serve sentences in British jails after pleading guilty to unspecified charges in the United States.

The British Foreign Office declined to confirm the report and said that discussions with U.S. officials were continuing.

CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk called the news of the upcoming releases "a clear indication that the White House is under pressure from allies as well as from the Supreme Court to set standards for the holding of suspects in the war on terror."

Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether foreigners held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba should have access to American courts. The appeals came from British, Australian and Kuwaiti citizens held there.

There has been criticism of Bush administration plans to try some of the Guantanamo detainees in military tribunals. The American Bar Association has pressed the administration to drop plans to let agents eavesdrop on conversations between terrorism suspects and defense lawyers and should ease other restrictions to ensure military tribunals are fair and open.

President Bush has recommended six detainees, including the Australian and two Britons, to be the first to face tribunals. It has not definitely been decided that they will be tried, nor on what charges.

Once the prosecutor decides on charges, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will then make a separate decision on whether the suspects will actually face trials by what the Pentagon calls military commissions.

The Pentagon has refused to state what the men were suspected of doing, where they were captured or where they might be tried. It also has not said what would happen if the men were found innocent, raising at least the possibility that they might still be detained even if acquitted.

Thwarted Ambush in Iraq - 54 dead - Was Highly Coordinated, U.S. Officials Say

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/01/internat...nted=print&position=

Thwarted Ambush in Iraq - 54 dead - Was Highly Coordinated, U.S. Officials Say
By EDWARD WONG
December 01, 2003

American military officials said today that a pair of ambushes of American forces in central Iraq on Sunday reflected a level of planning, scale and coordination not seen among guerrilla forces since the regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted last spring.

"Are we looking at this one closely? Yes." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said today. "Is this something larger than we have seen over the past couple of months? Yes. Are we concerned about it? Yeah, we will look at it and we will take the appropriate measures."

American forces killed 54 people in the intense firefight in the town of Samarra after soldiers delivering Iraqi currency to two banks were bombarded with small-arms and antitank-grenade fire, General Kimmitt, a senior military spokesman, said. He added that 22 attackers had been wounded and that one had been detained. On Sunday, the military put the number of Iraqis killed at 46.

A military statement said that "many of the dead attackers were found wearing fedayeen uniforms," a reference to the militias loyal to Mr. Hussein that put up some of the fiercest resistance to the American-led invasion last spring.

American military officials said that the attackers had been moving in cars, had split their force of 30 to 40 people into smaller groups at each bank, and had set up ambush points on routes into and out of the city.

"It is our belief that this was a coordinated effort," Col. Frederick Rudesheim told reporters at a news conference outside Samarra today. He said the attackers had launched the ambush with small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

The Associated Press quoted residents in Samarra as saying that American forces had responded by firing at random, prompting civilians to get guns and join the fight. The news agency said many civilians had expressed bitterness about recent American raids in the night.

Military officials said the clash was the largest battle in the country since coalition forces toppled the Hussein government last spring. They originally reported that at least 18 of the attackers had been wounded and 11 had been captured. General Kimmitt did not explain the discrepancies in the figures given on Sunday and today. No American deaths were reported.

The soldiers, members of the Fourth Infantry Division, met simultaneous ambushes on two convoys rolling separately through Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, according to a division spokesman, Master Sgt. Robert Cargie.

The convoys were delivering new Iraqi dinars to two banks and were guarded by about 100 American soldiers. When the shooting began, the Americans responded with automatic-rifle fire, Bradley fighting vehicles and other weapons, officials said.

Afterward, large shell casings, rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles were strewn across the field of battle. So were dozens of bodies, apparently all Iraqi, many clad in the ninja-like black uniforms of fedayeen paramilitary fighters loyal to the overthrown Hussein government, according to Sergeant Cargie. Five American soldiers and one civilian traveling with one of the convoys were wounded.

Coalition firepower overwhelmed the attackers, Sergeant Cargie said.

The American display of firepower was among the most deadly for Iraqi fighters since the occupation began. But residents and police officers in Samarra said that less than a dozen Iraqis had been killed and contended that many of the wounded were civilians, The A.P. reported from the scene. The residents were clearly incensed at the immense firepower used by the Americans.

U.S. Forces Kill 54 Iraqis in Samarra - Biggest Display of Iraqi Insurgency

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U.S. Forces Kill 54 Iraqis in Samarra - Biggest Display of Iraqi Insurgency
By SLOBODAN LEKIC, Associated Press Writer
December 01, 2003

U.S. forces repulsed two coordinated attacks by insurgents in Samarra, killing 54 Iraqis in the bloodiest combat reported since the end of the war that ousted Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime, the military said Monday.

But local residents said troops fired randomly at townspeople, and that most of those who died were civilians caught up in the clash.

The scale of the attacks and their apparent coordination indicated that rebel units retain the ability to conduct synchronized operations despite a massive U.S. offensive this month aimed at crushing the insurgency.

A U.S. military spokesman said the clash was initiated by attackers, many wearing uniforms of Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitary force, who simultaneously attacked two U.S. convoys at opposite sides of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad.

Associated Press Television News images showed scenes of devastation, with buildings pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes, and about two dozen badly damaged cars, apparently run over by armored vehicles. A bus abandoned in the middle of a street had its front sheared off. Fences and walls of several residential homes were destroyed, apparently by shelling.

Lt. Col. William MacDonald of the 4th Infantry Division said that after barricading a road, the attackers opened fire from rooftops and alleyways with bombs, small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. U.S. troops responded with 120mm tank rounds and 25mm cannon fire from Bradley fighting vehicles.

U.S. fire destroyed three buildings the attackers were using, MacDonald said. "It sounds like the attack had some coordination to it, but the soldiers responded, used their firepower, used tank and Bradley fire and other weapons available to them, to stop this attack and take the fight to the enemy," he said.

Samarra residents said most of those killed were ordinary townspeople who tried to flee the firefight.

"No one wants these Americans to enter this holy city. We don't want them to defile (it), and that's why this battle happened," said resident Mawlud Jassim. "Many Iraqis were killed and the Americans sustained big losses in lives and equipment."

Hossam Shaker, who had a shrapnel wound to his left arm, said a shell exploded among a group of workers walking out of the gate of the Samarra Pharmaceutical Plant at the end of the morning shift.

"American forces opened fire randomly on passersby and on (people) in the marketplace," said Shaker, interviewed Monday at the town's general hospital.

Seven Spanish intelligence agents and two Japanese diplomats died in separate attacks near Baghdad. - November 30, 2003

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Seven Spanish intelligence agents and two Japanese diplomats died in separate attacks near Baghdad.
By SLOBODAN LEKIC, Associated Press Writer
November 30, 2003

In Mahmudiyah, 18 miles south of Baghdad, assailants ambushed a team of Spanish military intelligence officers Saturday, killing seven agents. One Spaniard escaped the assault. Television footage of the aftermath of the ambush showed several bodies along a highway as cars, their headlights on, drove by at dusk. People milled around, and a young man ? apparently aware he was being filmed ? kicked his foot in the air over a body. Another rested his foot on a corpse, an arm raised in triumph. "We sacrifice our souls and blood for you, oh Saddam," some in the group chanted in Arabic, witnesses said.
</blockquote>
On Sunday, witnesses at the scene, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, said the Spaniards had been traveling in a pair of sport utility vehicles when men in a car behind them opened fire. One of the SUVs careered off the road into a ditch.

The occupants fled the car and were shot at the roadside, perhaps by a second group of attackers involved in the ambush. On Sunday, the charred remains of the car could be seen in a watery ditch at the side of the road, with a group of villagers scavenging its parts.

Witnesses said the four men in the second car were also killed at the side of the road nearby, apparently by a grenade. Blood could be seen on bushes nearby, and a broken pair of glasses lay on the road.

"All of them are Jews," said 15-year-old Tareq Jassim, a villager at the scene Sunday. "All of them are occupiers." </blockquote>

The two Japanese diplomats were killed by unidentified gunmen Saturday as they stopped to buy food and drinks at a stand outside the village of Mukayshifa on the road between Baghdad and Tikrit, Lt. Col. William MacDonald said Sunday.

The diplomats, on their way to attend a reconstruction conference, were not traveling with a military escort, MacDonald said.

The attacks on U.S. allies appear to be part of an effort to undercut the coalition. Insurgents also have targeted Iraqis seen as collaborating with the occupation authorities, such as police and local officials.

Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After U.S. Raid Kills 9 Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/internat...nted=print&position=

Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After U.S. Raid Kills 9 Children
By CARLOTTA GALL
December 08, 2003

Their embroidered caps, shredded with shrapnel, lay beside a half-dozen small rubber galoshes and caked pools of blood. Seven boys and two girls died here on Saturday morning in an American airstrike, and their bodies were still lying in the dust when American soldiers arrived by helicopter to assess the results of the attack three hours later, villagers and American soldiers at the scene said Sunday.

A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign aid workers, might have gotten away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Some villagers said the suspect and his family, whose house was unscathed in the attack, had not been seen for weeks.

Villagers said the dead boys, who were 8 to 12 years old, had been in front of a house, and the girls, 9 and 10, had been fetching water from a stream alongside it when two American A-10 attack jets firing rockets and machine guns struck at 10:45 a.m.

"The boys were playing marbles," said one villager, thrusting forward a gnarled hand with three chipped glass marbles he said he had retrieved from the dust.

The rockets made 30 to 40 small craters in the ground around where the children had died. The 10th victim, an uncle of the two girls, rushed toward the stream after the first plane struck and was cut down beside them, said a woman who identified herself as the man's mother and the dead girls' grandmother.

Villagers in this small hamlet about 185 miles south of Kabul in southeastern Afghanistan said they buried the victims on Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon, the men were mourning in an open-air mosque and the women were weeping inside the houses. As some men showed journalists and a government delegation around the scene of the killings, they wondered aloud how the Americans could attack so indiscriminately when searching for just one man who, they said, was not even in the village.

On the ground in the village, residents contradicted that assertion. Captain Cordeiro confirmed that the soldiers had found nine dead children and one dead adult who could have been the target, he said. But he said that the soldiers had not talked to villagers or identified the dead man.

Villagers said he was Abdul Muhammad, 25, who had returned 10 days earlier from Iran, where he had been working for three years digging wells. The woman who identified herself as his mother said she had finally arranged his wedding and he had returned for his engagement party, which was just five days away. "I was so pleased to have my son back," said the woman, who said her name was Guldana. "And now he is dead."

She had lost not only her son in the airstrike but her two granddaughters, Bibi Toara, 10, and Bibi Tamama, 9.

Two brothers in the village, Sarwar Khan and Hamidullah, lost three children between them, they said. "The Americans are all the time making these mistakes," said Mr. Khan, who two sons, Faizullah, 8, and Obeidullah, 10, were killed. "What kind of Al Qaeda are they? Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?"

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in American airstrikes in the two years since the United States began its military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. After several disastrous raids last year in which planes bombed officials loyal to the Karzai government and after one incident that killed 48 civilians at a wedding party last July, the United States had appeared to restrict air assaults to more precise attacks, and only when groups of militants were engaged by coalition troops.


Coalition Strike in Afghanistan Kills 9 Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/asia/07AFGH.html

Coalition Strike in Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
By CARLOTTA GALL and JOHN H. CUSHMAN, Jr.
December 07, 2003

 United States warplanes attacking a suspected member of the Taliban killed nine children in the southeastern province of Ghazni on Saturday, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Sunday morning. One man was also killed in the attack, they said.

In a statement issued early on Sunday from the headquarters of the American-led military forces at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, the military said ground forces searching the area after the attack found the bodies of the children as well as the body of the suspect.

"Coalition forces regret the loss of any innocent life," the statement said. It said the troops remaining in the area "will make every effort to assist the families of the innocent casualties and determine the cause of the civilian deaths."

The statement said a commission was being set up to investigate the incident. It did not describe the air attack in any detail.

A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai in Kabul said that when first reports arrived from the region, the American military had denied that the attack occurred. Mr. Karzai has frequently asked the United States military to take greater care with bombing raids on civilian areas and with they intelligence it receives, which has often proved erroneous.

In another incident, eleven people from one family were killed when a bomb landed on their house near the Pakistani border in Paktika Province. The United States military quickly acknowledged the mistake, saying the attack was aimed at a group of militants whe were trying to escape across the border.

On Oct. 30. American planes bombed a village in the northern province of Nuristan, killing six members of one family, most of them women and children, and two religious students in the village mosque. The military has not yet confirmed that its planes were in the area that night.

From the BBC - *Mistakes accepted by US

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3298945.stm

Dec 2001: 65 killed in bombing of convoy of tribal elders

April 2002: Four Canadian soldiers killed

July 2002: 48 killed when bomb hits wedding party

April 2003: 11 killed by bomb in village of Shkin

Dec 2003: Nine children killed by bomb near Ghazni

Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After U.S. Raid Kills 9 Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/internat...nted=print&position=

Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After U.S. Raid Kills 9 Children
By CARLOTTA GALL
December 08, 2003

Their embroidered caps, shredded with shrapnel, lay beside a half-dozen small rubber galoshes and caked pools of blood. Seven boys and two girls died here on Saturday morning in an American airstrike, and their bodies were still lying in the dust when American soldiers arrived by helicopter to assess the results of the attack three hours later, villagers and American soldiers at the scene said Sunday.

A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign aid workers, might have gotten away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Some villagers said the suspect and his family, whose house was unscathed in the attack, had not been seen for weeks.

Villagers said the dead boys, who were 8 to 12 years old, had been in front of a house, and the girls, 9 and 10, had been fetching water from a stream alongside it when two American A-10 attack jets firing rockets and machine guns struck at 10:45 a.m.

"The boys were playing marbles," said one villager, thrusting forward a gnarled hand with three chipped glass marbles he said he had retrieved from the dust.

The rockets made 30 to 40 small craters in the ground around where the children had died. The 10th victim, an uncle of the two girls, rushed toward the stream after the first plane struck and was cut down beside them, said a woman who identified herself as the man's mother and the dead girls' grandmother.

Villagers in this small hamlet about 185 miles south of Kabul in southeastern Afghanistan said they buried the victims on Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon, the men were mourning in an open-air mosque and the women were weeping inside the houses. As some men showed journalists and a government delegation around the scene of the killings, they wondered aloud how the Americans could attack so indiscriminately when searching for just one man who, they said, was not even in the village.

On the ground in the village, residents contradicted that assertion. Captain Cordeiro confirmed that the soldiers had found nine dead children and one dead adult who could have been the target, he said. But he said that the soldiers had not talked to villagers or identified the dead man.

Villagers said he was Abdul Muhammad, 25, who had returned 10 days earlier from Iran, where he had been working for three years digging wells. The woman who identified herself as his mother said she had finally arranged his wedding and he had returned for his engagement party, which was just five days away. "I was so pleased to have my son back," said the woman, who said her name was Guldana. "And now he is dead."

She had lost not only her son in the airstrike but her two granddaughters, Bibi Toara, 10, and Bibi Tamama, 9.

Two brothers in the village, Sarwar Khan and Hamidullah, lost three children between them, they said. "The Americans are all the time making these mistakes," said Mr. Khan, who two sons, Faizullah, 8, and Obeidullah, 10, were killed. "What kind of Al Qaeda are they? Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?"

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in American airstrikes in the two years since the United States began its military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. After several disastrous raids last year in which planes bombed officials loyal to the Karzai government and after one incident that killed 48 civilians at a wedding party last July, the United States had appeared to restrict air assaults to more precise attacks, and only when groups of militants were engaged by coalition troops.


Coalition Strike in Afghanistan K

Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns - Wrapping Entire Villages in Barbed Wire

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/internat...nted=print&position=

Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns - Wrapping Entire Villages in Barbed Wire
By DEXTER FILKINS
December 07, 2003

ABU HISHMA, Iraq, Dec. 6 ? As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.

The Americans embarked on their get-tough strategy in early November, goaded by what proved to be the deadliest month yet for American forces in Iraq, with 81 soldiers killed by hostile fire. The response they chose is beginning to echo the Israeli counterinsurgency campaign in the occupied territories.

So far, the new approach appears to be succeeding in diminishing the threat to American soldiers. But it appears to be coming at the cost of alienating many of the people the Americans are trying to win over. Abu Hishma is quiet now, but it is angry, too.

In Abu Hishma, encased in a razor-wire fence after repeated attacks on American troops, Iraqi civilians line up to go in and out, filing through an American-guarded checkpoint, each carrying an identification card printed in English only.

"If you have one of these cards, you can come and go," coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. "If you don't have one of these cards, you can't."

The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger.

"I see no difference between us and the Palestinians," he said. "We didn't expect anything like this after Saddam fell."

The practice of destroying buildings where Iraqi insurgents are suspected of planning or mounting attacks has been used for decades by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli Army has also imprisoned the relatives of suspected terrorists, in the hopes of pressing the suspects to surrender.

The Israeli military has also cordoned off villages and towns thought to be hotbeds of guerrilla activity, in an effort to control the flow of people moving in and out.

American officials say they are not purposefully mimicking Israeli tactics, but they acknowledge that they have studied closely the Israeli experience in urban fighting. Ahead of the war, Israeli defense experts briefed American commanders on their experience in guerrilla and urban warfare. The Americans say there are no Israeli military advisers helping the Americans in Iraq.

Writing in the July issue of Army magazine, an American brigadier general said American officers had recently traveled to Israel to hear about lessons learned from recent fighting there.

"Experience continues to teach us many lessons, and we continue to evaluate and address those lessons, embedding and incorporating them appropriately into our concepts, doctrine and training," Brig. Gen. Michael A. Vane wrote. "For example, we recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas." General Vane is deputy chief of staff for doctrine concepts and strategy, at the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command.

American officers here say their new hard-nosed approach reflects a more realistic appreciation of the military and political realities faced by soldiers in the so-called Sunni triangle, the area north and west of Baghdad that is generating the most violence against the Americans.

Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating.

"You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force ? force, pride and saving face."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, announced the get-tough strategy in early November. After the announcement, some American officers warned that the scenes that would follow would not be pretty.

Speaking today in Baghdad, General Sanchez said attacks on allied forces or gunfights with adversaries across Iraq had dropped to under 20 a day from 40 a day two weeks ago.

"We've considerably pushed back the numbers of engagements against coalition forces," he said. "We've been hitting back pretty hard. We've forced them to slow down the pace of their operations."

In that way, the new American approach seems to share the successes of the Israeli military, at least in the short term; Israeli officers contend that their strategy regularly stops catastrophes like suicide bombings from taking place.

"If you do nothing, they will just get stronger," said Martin van Creveld, professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He briefed American marines on Israeli tactics in urban warfare in September.

The problems in Abu Hishma, a town of 7,000, began in October, when the American military across the Sunni triangle decided to ease off on their military operations to coincide with the onset of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

In Abu Hishma, as in other towns, the backing off by the Americans was not reciprocated by the insurgents. American troops regularly came under mortar fire, often traced to the surrounding orchards.

Meanwhile, the number of bombs planted on nearby roads rose sharply. Army convoys regularly took fire from a house a few miles away from the village.

The last straw for the Americans came on Nov. 17, when a group of guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the front of a Bradley armored personnel carrier. The grenade, with an armored piercing tip, punched through the Bradley's shell and killed Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot, one of its crewmen.

The grenade went straight into the sergeant's chest. With the Bradley still smoldering, the soldiers of the First Battalion, Eighth Infantry, part of the Fourth Infantry Division, surrounded Abu Hishma and searched for the guerrillas. Soldiers began encasing the town in razor wire.

The next day, an American jet dropped a 500-bomb on the house that had been used to attack them. The Americans arrested eight sheiks, the mayor, the police chief and most members of the city council. "We really hammered the place," Maj. Darron Wright said.

Two and a half weeks later, the town of Abu Hishma is enclosed in a barbed-wire fence that stretches for five miles. Men ages 18 to 65 have been ordered to get identification cards. There is only way into the town and one way out.

"This fence is here for your protection," reads the sign posted in front of the barbed-wire fence. "Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot."

American forces have used the tactic in other cities, including Awja, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. American forces also sealed off three towns in western Iraq for several days.

"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.

The bombing of the house, about a mile outside the barbed wire, is another tactic that echoes those of the Israeli Army. In Iraq, the Americans have bulldozed, bombed or otherwise rendered useless a number of buildings which they determined were harboring guerrillas.

In Tikrit, residents pointed out a home they said had been bulldozed by American tanks. The occupants had already left, they said.

"I watched the Americans flatten that house," said Abdullah al-Ajili, who lives down the road.

American officers acknowledge that they have destroyed buildings around Tikrit. In a recent news conference, General Sanchez explained the strategy but ignored a question about parallels to the Israeli experience.

"Well, I guess what we need to do is go back to the laws of war and the Geneva Convention and all of those issues that define when a structure ceases to be what it is claimed to be and becomes a military target," General Sanchez said. "We've got to remember that we're in a low-intensity conflict where the laws of war still apply."

In Abu Hishma, residents complain that the village is locked down for 15 hours a day, meaning that they are unable to go to the mosque for morning and evening prayers. They say the curfew does not allow them time to stand in the daylong lines for gasoline and get home before the gate closes for the night.

But mostly, it is a loss of dignity that the villagers talk about. For each identification card, every Iraqi man is assigned a number, which he must hold up when he poses for his mug shot. The card identifies his age and type of car. It is all in English.

"This is absolutely humiliating," said Yasin Mustafa, a 39-year-old primary school teacher. "We are like birds in a cage."

Colonel Sassaman said he would maintain the wire enclosure until the villagers turned over the six men who killed Sergeant Panchot, though he acknowledged they may have slipped far away.

Colonel Sassaman is feared by many of Abu Hishma's villagers, who hold him responsible for the searches and razor wire around the town. But some said they understood what a difficult job he had, trying to pick out a few bad men from a village of 7,000 people.

"Colonel Sassaman, you should come and live in this village and be a sheik," Hassan Ali al-Tai told the colonel outside the checkpoint.

The colonel smiled, and Mr. Tai turned to another visitor.

"Colonel Sassaman is a very good man," he said. "If he got rid of the barbed wire and the checkpoint, everyone would love him."

Iraq to Stop Counting Civilian Dead

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...civilian_casualties

Iraq to Stop Counting Civilian Dead
By NIKO PRICE, Associated Press Writer
December 10, 2003

Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian casualties from the war and told workers not to release figures already compiled, the head of the ministry's statistics department told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The health minister, Dr. Khodeir Abbas, denied that he or the U.S.-led occupation authority had anything to do with the order, and said he didn't even know about the survey of deaths, which number in the thousands.

Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department, said the order came from the ministry's director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, who told her it was on behalf of Abbas. She said the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, didn't like the idea of the count either.

"We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn't agree with it," she said, adding: "The CPA doesn't want this to be done."

Abbas, whose secretary said he was out of the country, sent an e-mail denying the charge.

"I have no knowledge of a civilian war casualty survey even being started by the Ministry of Health, much less stopping it," he wrote. "The CPA did not direct me to stop any such survey either."

"Plain and simple, this is false information," he added.

Despite Abbas' comments, the Health Ministry's civilian death toll count had been reported by news media as early as August, and the count was widely anticipated by human rights organizations. The ministry issued a preliminary figure of 1,764 deaths during the summer.

A spokesman for the CPA confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail, saying the occupation authority contacted the minister by phone and asked him to respond. The CPA didn't provide a phone number, and the minister didn't respond to e-mails requesting further comment.

The CPA spokesman said the coalition had no comment.

Shabandar's office said he was attending a conference in Egypt.

The U.S. military doesn't count civilian casualties from its wars, saying only that it tries to minimize civilian deaths.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, called that policy irresponsible.

"That deliberate ignorance of the past risks condemning the U.S. military to repeating its mistakes into the future and needlessly risking further civilian deaths," he said by telephone from New York.

Roth said the government doesn't count because "politically, it's embarrassing to talk about civilian casualties in one's war effort."

The Associated Press conducted a major investigation of Iraq (news - web sites)'s wartime civilian casualties, documenting the deaths of 3,240 civilians between March 20 and April 20. That investigation, conducted in May and June, surveyed about half of Iraq's hospitals, and reported that the real number of civilian deaths was sure to be much higher.

The Health Ministry's count, which was to be based on the records of all Iraq's hospitals, promised to be more complete.

The ministry began its survey at the end of July, when shaky nationwide communication links began to improve. It sent letters to all hospitals and clinics in Iraq, asking them to send back details of civilians killed or wounded in the war, ministry officials said then.

Many hospitals responded with statistics, Mohsen said, but last month Shabandar told her that Abbas wanted the count halted. He also told her not to release the information she had already collected, she said.

"He told me, `You should move far away from this subject,'" Mohsen said. "I don't know why."

Abbas, the minister, suggested such a study wouldn't be feasible.

"It would be almost impossible to conduct such a survey, because hospitals cannot distinguish between deaths that resulted from the coalition's efforts in the war, common crime among Iraqis, or deaths resulting from Saddam's brutal regime," he wrote.

In fact, the ministry didn't plan to distinguish between casualties caused by U.S. and Iraqi attacks. The AP survey didn't make the distinction either, instead counting all civilian deaths in the war.

Mohsen insisted that despite communications that remain poor and incomplete record-keeping by some hospitals, the statistics she received indicated that a significant count could have been completed.

"I could do it if the CPA and our minister agree that I can," she said in an interview in English.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed in the war is well documented. The Pentagon (news - web sites) says 115 American military personnel were killed in combat from the start of the war to May 1, when President Bush (news - web sites) declared major combat over, and 195 since. Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime fell April 9.

Iraqi civilians, too, have continued to die both in U.S. raids of suspected insurgent hideouts and in the rebels' attacks.

Rebels have struck at U.S. military convoys and installations, as well as at Iraqis — such as police officers, politicians and interpreters — who they consider to be collaborating with the coalition forces.

Iraq kept meticulous records of its soldiers killed in action but never released them publicly. Military doctors have said the Iraqi military kept "perfect" records, but burned them as the war wound down.

Cluster Bombs, Decapitation Bombing Killed Hundreds, Says Human Rights Watch

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...4536750811071238212

Cluster Bombs, Decapitation Bombing Killed Hundreds, Says Human Rights Watch
Jim Lobe, OneWorld US
December 12, 2003

WASHINGTON D.C., Dec. 12 (OneWorld) Hundreds of civilians were killed by Coalition cluster bombs and air strikes designed to decapitate the Iraqi leadership, according to a new report by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), which said the high cost in civilian casualties caused by the two tactics may have violated the laws of war

The report, which found that U.S.-led Coalition forces in Iraq (news - web sites) generally tried to comply with international humanitarian law, nonetheless concluded that U.S. ground forces were too eager to use cluster munitions in populated areas, and that 50 decapitation attacks failed to hit a single one of their targets, but caused dozens of civilian deaths and injuries.

Coalition forces generally tried to avoid killing Iraqis who werent taking part in combat, said Kenneth Roth, HRWs executive director. But the deaths of hundreds of civilians could have been prevented.

The 147-page report, Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, also details numerous violations of international humanitarian law by Iraqi forces, including their use of human shields, the abuse of Red Cross and Red Crescent emblems, the use of anti-personnel landmines, and the deployment of weapons and other military equipment in mosques, hospitals and archaeological and cultural sites.

In many cases, the Iraqi military failed to take adequate precautions to protect civilians from military operations, and its practice of donning civilian clothes necessarily put other civilians at risk.

International humanitarian law does not outlaw all civilian casualties in wartime, but it requires armed forces to take all feasible precautions to avoid harming civilians. It also requires them to refrain from attacks that are indiscriminate or where the anticipated harm to civilians exceeds the possible military gain.

The report is based primarily on the research of three experts who conducted battle damage assessment (BDA) missions to the main areas of fighting in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys where civilian deaths had been reported and other sites where cluster bombs were used. The delegation also relied on hospital and U.S. military records it was able to obtain.

HRW has previously conducted BDA missions to Yugoslavia and Afghanistan (news - web sites).

At each of the sites, the team studied the ballistic evidence and interviewed Coalition soldiers, residents, and victims for their accounts of what took place. Because Iraqi soldiers dispersed during the war, however, HRW said it proved virtually impossible to find any who took part in specific battles.

The team did not try to estimate the total number of civilian deaths that resulted from hostilities during the war. The Associated Press (AP) estimated after canvassing 60 of Iraqs 124 hospitals immediately after the war that well over 3,420 civilians were killed, while the Los Angeles Times concluded that at least 1,700 civilians were killed and more than 8,000 more injured in Baghdad after it surveyed 27 hospitals there.

London-based Medact, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, concluded in a study released last month that a total of between 5,700 and 7,356 civilians were killed between March 20 and May 1 as a result of hostilities. AP also reported Wednesday that an effort by the Iraqi health ministry to count the total number of casualties was suspended this week, allegedly on orders from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

The report concluded that the use of cluster weapons, particularly by U.S. and British ground forces, caused more civilian casualties than any other factor in the Coalitions military campaign in March and April. U.S. and British forces together used almost 13,000 cluster munitions, containing a total of nearly two million submunitions, or bomblets, that killed or wounded more than 1,000 civilians.

Most of the civilian casualties resulting from the air war occurred during a total of 50 U.S. attacks that targeted the Iraqi leadership, including two high-profile attacks against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) himself, one of which killed 18 civilians and destroyed three homes in the Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad. According to the report, each of the attacks missed their target, and Iraqis who spoke to HRW about the attacks it investigated stated repeatedly that they believed the intended targets, including the Mansur attacks on Hussein, were not even present when the strikes took place.

HRW found that the militarys decapitation strategy relied almost exclusively on intercepts of satellite phones backed up by inadequate corroborating intelligence. Thuraya satellite phones used by the leadership provide geo-coordinates that are accurate to within only a 328-foot (100-meter) radius, and thus U.S. intelligence could not determine the origin of a call with a high degree of accuracy, particularly considering that population density of the targeted areas.

This flawed targeting strategy was compounded by a lack of effective assessment both prior to the attacks of the potential risks to civilians and after the attacks of their success and utility, according to the report.

The decapitation strategy was an utter failure on military grounds, since it didnt kill a single Iraqi in 50 attempts, said Roth. But it also failed on human rights grounds. Its no good using a precise weapon if the target hasnt been located precisely, he added.

On the other hand, HRW found that Coalition air strikes against pre- planned fixed targets apparently caused few civilian casualties, and the U.S. and British air forces generally avoided civilian infrastructure, although so-called dual-use targets, that included electrical and media facilities were hit.


 
The report also praised the relative restraint on the part of the U.S. Air Force in using cluster bombs, noting that frequency of its use of such weapons has progressively declined from the 1999 Kosovo campaign and the 2001 Afghanistan war.

But U.S. ground forces resorted much more readily to cluster munitions, according to Ross, who said they need to learn the lesson that the Air Force seems to have adopted: cluster munitions cannot be used in populated areas without huge loss of civilian life.

In a single day, U.S. cluster-munition attacks in Hilla on March 31 killed at least 33 civilians and injured 109, while the same weapon was implicated in high civilian casualties in Najaf and Nasariya, as well. One hospital director told HRW that cluster munitions caused 90 percent of the civilian injuries that his hospital treated during the war.

Moreover, the Coalition is believed to have left behind many tens of thousands of cluster-munition duds, those that did not explode on impact and then become de facto landmines that have already caused dozens of casualties.

The report also took Coalition forces to task for failing to secure vast arsenals of weapons that were abandoned by Iraqi forces during the war. Not only have these been used to mount guerrilla attacks on Coalition forces, but many civilians, including children, searching for playthings or scrap metal have been killed or injured at these sites, the report said.

War and Never Having to Say You're Sorry - McNamara the Vietnam Villian

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/movies/1...nted=print&position=

War and Never Having to Say You're Sorry
By SAMANTHA POWER
December 14, 2003

SOMETIME in the mid-1960's, the Vietnam War became known as "McNamara's War." In the seven years Robert S. McNamara served as Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon. B. Johnson, the United States commitment in Vietnam soared ? in a soothingly gradual fashion ? from fewer than a thousand Americans to just under half a million. Mr. McNamara, in turn, went from being heralded as a whiz kid to being hounded as a war monger. In 1965, a Quaker protester set himself on fire below Mr. McNamara's Pentagon office window. In 1967, antiwar activists tried to burn down the his vacation home in Aspen, Colo. And in 1972, an artist who spotted him on a ferry tried to heave him into the Atlantic Ocean.

A quarter of a century later, Mr. McNamara broke his silence, publishing "In Retrospect," his best-selling memoir. He asked how he and his fellow leaders could have pushed for a war he at last acknowledged was "wrong, terribly wrong." But after the deaths of three million Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans, many saw Mr. McNamara's public reckoning as, at best, incommensurate with the carnage and at worst, dishonest and self-serving. In a stinging editorial in 1995, The New York Times dismissed his "prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late," contrasting the fates of the dead with that of Mr. McNamara, who, despite his torment, "got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard."

The debate over Vietnam and the debate over Robert McNamara ? debates that overlap, but that over the years have grown distinct ? refuse to subside, partly because Mr. McNamara, now 87, refuses to go away. In "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara," opening Friday, Errol Morris, the ingenious Cambridge-based director of such documentaries as "The Thin Blue Line" and "Mr. Death," has given Mr. McNamara a big-screen chance to reflect upon a career of watching fallible human beings like himself make decisions that imperil or extinguish human lives.

While Mr. McNamara uses the film to propagate the "lessons" of his six decades in public life, Mr. Morris has another agenda: to raise questions that are moral, timeless and rarely broached with such subtlety. How do decent men commit or abet evil acts? And once they have done so, how should they interact with their victims, live with their consciences and pass along their insights? It is the indefatigable relevance of these questions that keep Americans at once enthralled and repelled by Robert S. McNamara. And it is the long-standing aversion of American decision-makers to address past mistakes that has helped undermine the American standing around the world and has hindered our ability to learn from history.

Mr. Morris is a first-class investigator, and he has hunted down fresh and provocative material, on subjects like the firebombing of the Japanese in World War II and Kennedy's intentions regarding Vietnam. He has elicited from Mr. McNamara a number of startling admissions. And he has released the film at a time when war and quagmire are very much on the mind of Americans. Revisiting Vietnam and the images of sprightly young G.I.'s so eager to serve, one is reminded how soldiers can be led astray by reckless ideology, shoddy intelligence and liberal hubris; how small, sequential decisions necessitate and compound one another; and how our faith in our own good intentions and our ignorance of local culture can undermine our objectives. (Among the 11 lessons Mr. Morris gleans from Mr. McNamara, Lesson No. 1 is "empathize with the enemy.")

But Mr. Morris is less interested in policy than in metaphysics. In a recent interview in New York, where he was promoting the film, he said he first became interested in Mr. McNamara because of an "endless fascination" with the extent to which "people who engage in evil believe in some real sense that they are doing good." Mr. Morris seems reflexively drawn to the gray zones of human morality. If "real Iagos" permeated the planet, the filmmaker rightly notes, life would be simpler, and in the end, probably safer. But the story gets more complicated when a man like Robert McNamara ? who is not only debonair, but introspective and self-critical ? comes along. "If evil is somewhat more ineluctable, it also becomes somewhat more problematic," Mr. Morris observes. "What is it? Where is it? Is it in some of us? Is it in all of us?"

And under what circumstances, he might have added, can we rationalize it? The most stirring scenes in "The Fog of War" surround America's firebombing of 67 Japanese cities in World War II, during which time Mr. McNamara was working under Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Mr. Morris unearthed spine-curdling government reports showing the raw calculus undertaken to speed America's victory. "In order to do good," Mr. McNamara says, articulating the film's ninth lesson, "recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil." In a single bombing raid, he recalls, "We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo ? men, women and children." Some 900,000 Japanese civilians were killed overall. Was he aware this would happen? "Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it," Mr. McNamara tells Mr. Morris. "Lemay said, `If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He ? and I'd say I ? were behaving as war criminals." He asks, "What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?" The answer, of course, is that war's winners write the history books, and, if they can help it, they avoid legal accountability.

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war. And even after he was forced out by President Johnson in 1967, he refused to air his criticisms, though the war raged on for another eight long years.

Today he declines comment on Iraq out of the same sense of bureaucratic loyalty. To the suggestion that dissent is often the highest form of loyalty, he responds, "I think it's irresponsible for an ex-secretary of defense to comment, particularly if the comments are critical ? about a president who is in the midst of a war with tens of thousands of American lives at risk, and is dealing with very, very delicate issues and relationships with other nations and with the U.N., and therefore I haven't and I'm not going to."

But Mr. McNamara's views can be inferred from the film. "What makes us omniscient," he asks, rhetorically. "Have we a record of omniscience?" He concludes, "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our case, we better re-examine our reasoning."

Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen. In fact, Mr. McNamara is one of very few senior American government officials ever to admit major error without being forced to do so. In an interview last month, I asked him why. "People don't want to admit they made mistakes," he said. "This is true of the Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of nongovernmental organizations and it's certainly true of political bodies. My rule has been to surface the tough problems. It's very unpleasant to argue with people you admire and associate with. But you have to force debate."

BY now, Mr. McNamara has learned how to speak about the trauma in his past in much the same way one learns to speak of the death of a loved one: by rote. In our conversation, he often repeated verbatim what he had said on camera. If a question probed tender territory, he pivoted, transitioning skillfully to one of his policy causes, like nuclear nonproliferation or the International Criminal Court. But despite all his best efforts, Mr. McNamara still broke down several times during the filming of "The Fog of War" ? "a sign of weakness," he told me, embarrassed. On camera, he remains stoic as he says that his wife and son got ulcers when he was secretary of defense, and that his wife, who died in 1981, "may even ultimately have died from the stress." Mr. McNamara's emotions get the better of him when he goes on to say something he must know to be untrue. "But," he insists, waving his pen for emphasis, "they were some of the best years of our lives and" ? here the tears start ? "all members of my family benefited from it." He quickly masters the lump in his throat, and proclaims, unconvincingly: "It was terrific." In our interview, Mr. McNamara's eyes filled with tears at precisely the same moment. Though some politicians are known to muster tears as a ploy for sympathy, in the case of Mr. McNamara, who is famously controlling, they seemed anything but calculated; rather, they offered evidence that his public poise is outmatched by his personal demons.

Remarkably, what seems to grate at people most about Mr. McNamara these days is less his role in shaping a disastrous Vietnam policy than what many take to be his public martyrdom. While it is true that his reckoning is partial and unsatisfying, and while it is true that the book did help launch him back into the limelight, it is also true that he had a lot to lose by awakening the ghosts of Vietnam. By choosing to excavate the past, he has exposed himself to ridicule, resuscitated his lowest moments in public life and let an emotional genie out of the bottle. And since Mr. McNamara seems to have generated more scorn than those who never acknowledged error ? e.g., Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, and three American presidents ? it is unlikely that other officials will be eager to follow his example.

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations. With the proliferation of class-action suits and the advent of global courtrooms, American officials are now explicitly counseled to avoid public reckoning, for fear of creating legal liability (or constraining their ability to do it all over again, when it suits them). Whether regarding the Vietnam War, America's cold war assassinations or our misguided former alliance with Saddam Hussein, American officials keep their eyes fixed on the future. They rarely admit responsibility for failure, for costly meddling or for large-scale human suffering. They resist debate ? internally or publicly ? on how good intentions went astray. And they most certainly don't apologize to those harmed.

On those the rare occasions when American officials have expressed remorse for previous policies, they have tended to do so offhandedly. And while on these shores, such utterances were ignored or derided as insincere, in the countries grievously affected, many victims and survivors welcomed the gesture with surprising grace.

In keeping with tradition, Mr. McNamara has never apologized to the Vietnamese or the American people for the Vietnam War. But he has broken with house rules by expressing regret for mistaken policy choices. "I'm very proud of my accomplishments," he says in the film. "I'm very sorry that in the course of accomplishing something I made errors."

Errol Morris says Mr. McNamara's failure to apologize used to trouble him. But after taping 23 hours of interviews with him, and sharing many more meals and phone calls, the discomfort subsided. In truth, Mr. Morris says, he has come to like Robert McNamara, and to understand why so many of the tirades against him find fault with a "mea culpa" that he never issued. "An apology empowers us," Mr. Morris said, during our interview. "The person says, `I'm very, very, very sorry,' and we can say, `I accept your apology,' or we can say, `Sorry, but saying sorry is not enough.' People so strongly wanted to say, `I do not forgive you for what you've done' that they imagined an apology that didn't exist."

Of course, compiling the lessons of history hardly guarantees that they will be applied. Soon after Donald Rumsfeld assumed the job of secretary of defense in 2000, he actually took the unusual step of circulating a handout that distilled his 40 years of service. Mr. Rumsfeld's lessons were not dissimilar from those Mr. Morris elicited from Mr. McNamara. They include:

"It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."

"Don't divide the world into `them' and `us.' "

"Visit with your predecessors from previous administrations . . . Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs."

The lessons, known as "Rumsfeld's Rules," were posted on the Pentagon Web site when Mr. Rumsfeld took office. They have since been removed.

Samantha Power's book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," won the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction this year.

Israeli Commandos Refuse to Serve in W.Bank, Gaza

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...israel_commandos_dc

Israeli Commandos Refuse to Serve in W.Bank, Gaza
By Megan Goldin
December 21, 2003

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Thirteen fighters in Israel's most celebrated commando unit have publicly refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because they believe the army's operations there are immoral, Israeli media reported.

The commandos announced their refusal to serve in a letter sent to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has come under increased pressure to halt efforts to quash a three-year-old Palestinian uprising and instead engage in peace treaty talks. "We will no longer be party to an oppressive rule in the territories and the disregard for the human rights of millions of Palestinians," the 13 Sayeret Matkal reservist commandos wrote in their letter, according to local television stations.

"We will no longer be a defensive wall against settlements," added the letter, in a reference to Jewish settlements in lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

The Sayeret Matkal, or General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, is Israel's most elite commando unit and has often been compared to the U.S. military's Delta Force or the British army's SAS.

It has carried out some of the Israeli army's most daring missions including the rescuing of 106 passengers taken hostage by Palestinian guerrillas at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976.

During the uprising, the Sayeret Matkal has been involved in raids to arrest senior Palestinian militant commanders behind a suicide bombing campaign against Israel.

The commandos' letter followed a petition earlier in the year from 27 air force pilots -- all but nine of whom had retired -- as refusing to carry out missions against Palestinian militants in which civilians could be killed.

The 13 signatories to the commando letter were all identified as being reservists, but it was not clear how many were still involved in active military duty.

Sharon's office declined to comment, but military officials described the letter as political, noting that it was sent to Sharon and not military commanders.

"It is very serious that reserve soldiers are using their military past and the name of the unit in which they served as a vehicle to publish their political views," an army spokesman said about the letter.

One of the signatories, identified as Zohar, told Channel One Television: "This is not a political letter...we spoke of the phenomena of occupation which corrupts."

The commandos' letter joined the pilots' letter as the most high-profile acts of defiance by members of the armed forces since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when a tank brigade commander resigned rather than invade Beirut, after saying he saw children through his field glasses.

Some of Israel's top military and political figures served in the Sayeret Matkal, including former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose elder brother was killed in the Entebbe rescue operation.

Israeli television stations said it was likely that those signatories still in active service would be dismissed from the unit. The air force removed the nine combat pilots still in active duty after they signed their protest letter in September.

"We must get rid of Arafat" warns Bush - He wants Action Not Speeches !

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...sh_031221103534&e=1

"We must get rid of Arafat" warns Bush - He wants Action Not Speeches !
December 21, 2003

US President George W. Bush told an Israeli journalist that "we must get rid of" Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Bush's comments came in a brief exchange with the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot's correspondent during a Christmas drinks party in Washington.

Israel's security cabinet approved Arafat's "removal" in September, with one minister even suggesting that he could be assassinated, but Washington warned Israel not to attempt to expel him. Bush was non-commital about Sharon's speech, saying that he would wait to see what happened on the ground. "Speeches are good things, but they are words. I am waiting for action," he was quoted as saying. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who is the Bloodthirsty of them all ...

Attacks Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...27?language=printer

Attacks Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 27 -- The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq's economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated.

Plans to privatize state-owned businesses -- a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free-market system -- have been dropped over the past few months. So too has a demand that Iraqis write a constitution before a transfer of sovereignty.

With the administration's plans tempered by time and threat, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government.

"There's no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Right now, everyone's attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer."

The new approach, U.S. diplomats said, calls into question the prospects for initiatives touted by conservative strategists to fashion Iraq into a secular, pluralistic, market-driven nation. While the diplomats maintain those goals are still attainable, the senior official said, "ideology has become subordinate to the schedule."

"The Americans are coming to understand that they cannot change everything they want to change in Iraq," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite Muslim political party that is cooperating with the U.S. occupation authority. "They need to let the Iraqi people decide the big issues."

Bremer's plan for Iraqis to write a constitution before he departed had been intended to prevent extremists from dominating the drafting process. U.S. officials acknowledge that risk exists, but said it had been outweighed by the need to end the civil occupation by the summer. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq will go on longer, military officials have said.

With goodwill toward Americans ebbing fast, Bremer and his lieutenants have also concluded that it does not make sense to cause new social disruptions or antagonize Iraqis allied with the United States. Selling off state-owned factories would lead to thousands of layoffs, which could prompt labor unrest in a country where 60 percent of the population is already unemployed.
Food Rationing System



An unwillingness to assume other risks has also scuttled, at least temporarily, plans to overhaul a national food rationing program that was a cornerstone of Hussein's welfare state. Several senior officials want to replace monthly handouts of flour, cooking oil, beans and other staples -- received by more than 90 percent of Iraqis -- with a cash payment of about $15. Although the proposal has the enthusiastic support of economic conservatives in the occupation authority, concerns about the logistics have put the effort on hold.

"It's a great idea that the academics thought up, but it wasn't in tune with the political realities," said a U.S. official familiar with discussions of the issue. "We have to look at what we gain versus what we risk. Right now, we don't need to be adding any more challenges to those we already have."

A similar philosophy extends to the disarmament of various militias backed by political groups. Although the occupation authority wanted to quickly disband the Kurdish pesh merga militias by moving members into the new army and police force, U.S. officials have not pressed the issue with Kurdish leaders, who remain strong supporters of the American occupation. U.S. officials are also taking a measured approach toward a Shiite militia whose sponsoring party is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

At the same time, the occupation authority has substantially decreased the number of new recruits it intends to put through a three-month boot camp designed to build an improved, professionally trained army. Instead, the occupation authority is increasing the ranks of police officers and civil defense troops, who can be deployed faster but receive far less training and screening than the soldiers.

Bremer also recently allowed the creation of a new force, comprising former members of five political party militias, to pursue insurgents with American training and support.

"The Americans promised to limit our security forces to a professional army and a professional police," said Ghazi Yawar, a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council. "They should not tolerate these militias. They should be dissolving them."

Yawar and his fellow Sunni Muslims, a minority that had long ruled Iraq, are concerned that Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, and Kurds, who have lived autonomously for 12 years, will have little incentive to demobilize their militias after the occupation.

"The Americans have to deal with this issue," he said. "It would be irresponsible to leave it up to the Iraqis."

Across Iraq, efforts are underway to rebuild after years of war, economic sanctions and gross mismanagement by Hussein's government. Hundreds of schools have been refurbished with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Extensive rehabilitation and expansion of the country's electrical, water and sewage systems are slated to begin next year, paid for by an $18 billion U.S. aid package. "We are going to see a massive reconstruction program that will further demonstrate the depth of American commitment to Iraq," Bremer said in a recent interview.

But there has also been a noticeable dampening of some early ambitions to remake Iraq. In June, as he returned to Baghdad aboard a U.S. military transport plane after speaking at an international economic conference, Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold. "We have to move forward quickly with this effort," he said. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands is essential for Iraq's economic recovery."

Asked recently about privatization, he said it was an issue "for a sovereign Iraqi government to address."

The administration's decision to shift privatization and the drafting of a constitution to the provisional government has been generally well received by Iraqi political leaders, who want to deal with those subjects themselves. But a small, quiet minority of political figures, including a few members of the Governing Council, contend that aggressive market-oriented policies must be enacted by the occupation authority. The provisional government, they fear, will not be willing to assume the risk of revamping the ration system or shutting down a factory with thousands of workers.

"The Americans are the only ones who can implement these changes," one of the council's 25 members said. "If they leave it up to Iraqis, it will never get done."

Bremer and his aides voiced similar concerns until Nov. 15, when he agreed to abandon his insistence that a constitution be written before a transfer of sovereignty. A few weeks before the new arrangement was announced, a top American official here stated that requiring the drafting of a "constitution before sovereignty is the only way to guarantee we'll get a constitution."

By handing over sovereignty first, the administration has ceded veto power over the final document and is forcing Iraqis to confront a raft of contentious issues, from Kurdish demands for autonomy to Shiite demands for Islamic law, without a referee. In September, Bremer warned that electing a government without a constitution "invites confusion and eventual abuse."

Under the Nov. 15 agreement, Iraqi political leaders are to draft a "basic law" that will serve as an interim constitution until a permanent one is written. Bremer has said that the basic law will include a bill of rights, recognition of an independent judiciary and other "guarantees that were not in Saddam's constitution." His aides contend that discussions about federalism and the relationship between religion and government that will occur during the writing of the basic law will ease the process of drafting a permanent constitution, but other American officials are more skeptical.

"We're requiring a country that lacks a democratic tradition and the institutions of civil society, but has plenty of ethnic and religious tension, to sort out a lot of very challenging things," the senior American official said. "It's not ideal, but what choice do we have? Nobody wants us to extend our stay here."

Privatization, the official said, illustrates the dilemma well: It is a step that needs to be taken -- and that Bremer wanted to take -- but it has been deemed too difficult and dangerous to accomplish now.
Reversal on Oil Factory



With a bloated workforce, decrepit factories and goods that cannot compete with imports, the State Company for Vegetable Oils is the sort of government-run business that economists working for the occupation authority had wanted to shove into the private sector as soon as possible.

One of 48 companies owned by the Ministry of Industry, the enterprise was a flagship of Hussein's socialist economy. Its six factories produced consumer goods -- from partially hydrogenated cooking oil to shampoo and detergent -- that filled the domestic market and were cheaper than imported products.

Although the company posted impressive profits, they were illusory. The government subsidized imports of raw materials, charging the company only $1 for each $6,000 worth of materials brought in.

American experts who examined the company over the summer believed it would be foolish for Iraq's new government to continue the subsidies. What was needed, they concluded, was a private owner who would buy raw materials and sell finished products at market prices. In exchange for investing in new manufacturing equipment and modernizing the product line to better compete with imports, they decided the new owner should have the right to shut down older factories and reduce the number of employees to bring costs under control.

In late June, Bremer outlined his vision for a free-market Iraq before hundreds of business executives attending a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan.

"Markets allocate resources much more efficiently than politicians," Bremer said. "So our strategic goal in the months ahead is to set in motion policies which will have the effect of reallocating people and resources from state enterprises to more productive private firms."

The vegetable oil company's director at the time, Faez Ghani Aziz, agreed with Bremer. "We need outside investors," he said shortly after the speech. "We cannot continue like this."

Bremer's chief economic adviser over the summer, Peter McPherson, advocated a speedy move toward privatization, citing studies of the economic transformations in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. "This needs to be done quickly," McPherson, president of Michigan State University, said in July. "Experience shows us that the faster you do it, the more beneficial it is for the economy."

But as resistance attacks grew more intense, security worries quickly trumped economic ambitions in Bremer's office. No one wanted to do anything that would increase the number of jobless Iraqis who might be recruited to fight the occupation. Practical concerns also surfaced: The closure of Baghdad's airport to commercial flights meant few investors could travel to Iraq.

Iraqi officials expressed further doubts about fast privatization. They argued that waiting for a year or two for Iraq to stabilize would increase the prices at which the government could sell factories. They also raised fears that former Baathists would use ill-gotten money to buy up state firms.

In late July, the debate took a grim turn. After refusing to rehire dozens of workers who had been dismissed before the war, Aziz, the director of the vegetable oil company, was gunned down on his way to work. His killing sent a wave of panic through the Ministry of Industry. All of a sudden, no one wanted to talk about privatization.

Faced with growing reluctance among officials at the ministry and on the Governing Council, Bremer and his advisers stopped advocating a fast sell-off of state firms. "It's just disappeared from the agenda," an official with the occupation authority said. "It was just too risky."

The Ministry of Industry recently decided to lease 35 factories to Iraqi and foreign investors on the condition that they not fire a single employee. "The Americans first thought with the easy change of regime in Iraq there should be parallel drastic decisions on the economic front," said Mehdi Hafedh, Iraq's interim minister of planning. "But now they realize they cannot be too aggressive."

Blair under fire from top clergy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3353387.stm

Blair under fire from top clergy
December 29, 2003

Tony Blair has been criticised by two Church of England leaders for his handling of the war in Iraq. Dr David Hope, the Archbishop of York, questioned the legitimacy of the war and warned that the prime minister would have to answer in the end to God. And the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, called Mr Blair a "vigilante".

The criticism comes a day after the US official running Iraq contradicted Mr Blair's claim the country had labs for developing weapons of mass destruction.

Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said it was time for the government to admit it had been wrong about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Dr Hope, Britain's second most senior church leader, criticised Mr Blair for not listening to opponents during the war in Iraq.

In an interview in the Times, he said: "We still have not found any weapons of mass destruction anywhere.

"Are we likely to find any? Does that alter the view as to whether we really ought to have mounted the invasion or not?

"Undoubtedly a very wicked leader has been removed but there are wicked leaders in other parts of the world."

'Not credible'

Dr Wright said he did not think Mr Blair and US President George W Bush had the credibility to deal with the problems in Iraq. "For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing," he told the Independent.

"This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it."

Mr Blair has staunchly defended his decision to go to war and said he was "ready to meet my maker". I sure hope that the time of your meeting is rapidly advanced.

Dr Hope warned him: "There is a higher authority before whom one day we all have to give an account."

Mr Cook warned Mr Blair he might never win back public trust after the Iraq war.

On Sunday, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, appeared to contradict a statement made by Mr Blair that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed "massive evidence" of clandestine labs. It was not true, said Mr Bremer, and it sounded like a "red herring" made up by someone to upset the rebuilding effort.

'Undignified'

Mr Cook said the ISG report had only reported laboratories which were suitable for chemical research. The prime minister had tried to turn that "innocuous" finding into a threat when everyone in Britain could see Saddam Hussein had not had weapons of mass destruction, he argued. "It really is time that the prime minister accepted that himself," Mr Cook told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "It is undignified for the prime minister to continue to insist he was right when everyone can see he was wrong," he added.

On Sunday, Downing Street was standing by the prime minister's comments, which they said referred to "already published material" in an interim report by the Iraq Survey Group.