19 March 2004 | |||||||||
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Iraqi Reporters Rebuff Powell, Leave News Conference
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters - 19 March) - Iraqi journalists walked out of a Baghdad news conference given by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday in protest at lack of security and the killing of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. troops. "We declare our boycott of the conference because of the martyrs," Najim al-Rubaie of Iraq's Distor newspaper said in a statement read at the start of the news conference as Powell and Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer looked on. "We declare our condemnation of the incident which led to the killing of the two journalists...who were killed at the hands of the American forces." More than 30 Iraqi journalists then stood up and walked out. Employees of Dubai-based satellite television channel Al Arabiya say U.S. soldiers opened fire on a car carrying an Arabiya crew on Thursday evening after another car ran through a checkpoint. Cameraman Ali Abdelaziz was killed and correspondent Ali al-Khatib died in hospital on Friday morning. After the walkout, Powell said he respected the right of the journalists to express their feelings. "It is something that would never have happened at an earlier time in the history of Iraq, certainly not in the last 30 years," he said. Powell said he regretted the loss of life of the journalists, and all loss of life in Iraq. "But let's be clear who is responsible for this," he said. "Those individuals left over from the old regime do not want to see the Iraqi people live in peace. They do not want to see democracy take root." Powell said he did not have the full details of the Arabiya incident but he was certain that troops would not have deliberately killed journalists. He said that sometimes in the confusion after a guerrilla attack, "mistakes happen, tragedies occur." Iraqi journalists demanded an investigation into the incident. "We walked out because we need them to ensure that we are safe under the occupation and yet they have done nothing," Ahmed al-Samraee, an Iraqi producer with the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite channel, said after the walkout. "I saw these people killed. They were shot dead on purpose," he said. A U.S. military spokesman said troops had shot dead an Iraqi on Thursday after his car ran through a checkpoint and hit a Humvee. He said the Iraqi was the only person in the car and he had no information on whether any journalists were killed or wounded. Neocons
at work: Israel gets its 1st slice of Iraqi pie
Some US political playmakers seem keen to help jewish state penetrate arab world Saddam Hussein’s ouster
offers way around
obstacles, via business deals if necessary, for Israeli interests to be promoted
By Ed Blanche*
The cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001, allowed them to put
that plan into action. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein and eliminating one
of Israel’s most implacable foes was a key objective. Once that was
achieved, the new, US-controlled Iraq could be used to help Israel
penetrate the Arab world, if not by diplomatic recognition then by
other means. So it did not come as a surprise last week when the
Israeli media reported that Israel’s Sonol fuel company is supplying US
forces in Iraq with 25 million liters of refined fuel a month under a
$70 million-$80 million contract. The contract was awarded by Kellogg
Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, whose dealings in
Iraq under the Bush administration have stirred great controversy, not
least because Cheney is its former CEO. The deal with Sonol, one of Israel’s largest
oil-product marketing firms, is the first known commercial link between
Israel and Iraq since US-led forces toppled Saddam in April 2003. But
there may well be others, because Israeli companies have been trying to
find a way around political roadblocks that prevent them from operating
in Iraq under US cover. The Sonol deal has emerged following months of backroom
lobbying by Israeli business interests in Washington with the Bush
administration for access to Iraq’s multi-billion-dollar reconstruction
program. For political reasons, the administration and the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad have excluded Israeli firms as
main contractors in the vast array of projects under way in Iraq. The
Israelis have accepted that. But they have been pressing hard for
subcontractor deals, and the Sonol contract could be the first. Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman,
recently gave an indication that this was the Israelis’ way in. There
were, he said, “very few restrictions on subcontractors.” Israel’s desire to exploit US control of Iraq became
abundantly clear in early 2003, when Israel’s finance minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, annulled a long-standing prohibition on Israeli
companies trading with Iraq, opening the door for possible business
following Saddam’s removal. Dozens of companies began procedures to export to Iraq.
In August 2003, Israel’s Export Institute organized a one-day
conference in Tel Aviv on how to do business in Iraq. Jordanian and Turkish companies that have experience
doing business with Iraq are favored, but firms from other countries
which supported the US invasion of Iraq, such as Australia, Britain and
Spain, are also being targeted. Israeli companies, particularly in the field of
agriculture, have made significant, albeit discreet, inroads into the
Muslim republics of Central Asia since the Cold War ended in 1991. The
corporate structures they have built there, particularly in relation to
Caspian Sea oil, could also be useful when it comes to getting into
Iraq by the back door. Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan in particular are
closely allied with Israeli commercial interests and Israeli military
intelligence. Some time before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Jewish
lobby groups in Washington, seeing the possibility of strengthening
Israel’s relations with the Arab world, initiated contacts with the
Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella organization for a variety
of groups opposed to Saddam and which was backed by the Pentagon. These
contacts were encouraged by the administration’s neocons. Among the key INC people they dealt with were the
organization’s leader, Ahmed Chalabi, and the director of the INC’s
Washington office, Entifadah Qanbar. They encouraged the Jewish groups
to believe that once Saddam had been eliminated, good relations with
Israel were possible. In that, they were recklessly optimistic. Iraqi hostility toward Israel pre-dated Saddam by
several decades and anyway it became clear once Saddam had been ousted
that Chalabi and his cohorts, most of whom had lived in exile for
decades, were not popular in postwar Iraq and were unlikely to hold
high office. Intelligence they provided to the Americans before, and
even after, the invasion proved to be deeply flawed and often
dangerously misleading. In the meantime, Israel is more tightly involved in
Iraq on the security front. A delegation from Israel’s foreign
intelligence service, Mossad, reportedly visited Baghdad in August 2003
to coordinate anti-terrorist efforts with the Americans. US forces have consulted the Israelis on
counterinsurgency strategies and urban warfare, and the results of this
have been that US military operations have begun to look increasingly
like Israeli operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hardly
likely to encourage Iraqis to deal with Israel. There have been suggestions in Israel that an old oil
pipeline built during the British Mandate in Palestine, from the Kirkuk
oil fields in northern Iraq to the port of Haifa on the Mediterranean,
could be rebuilt, opening a new export route from Iraq to Western
Europe and the US as well as providing Israel with its fuel
requirements. The pipeline, which ran through Jordan, was closed in
1948 when Israel became a state. The Jordanian section was sold for
scrap years ago. Politically, reviving that oil route seems to be
non-starter. It would antagonize most Iraqis and the Arab world at
large. It would also become a target for saboteurs, just as Iraq’s
other pipelines are now. But the idea continues to be kicked around in
Washington and Jerusalem. The Middle East Economic Survey, a highly respected
Cyprus-based oil industry newsletter, reported as recently as July 3,
2003, that an Israeli oil delegation had held secret talks with Kurdish
leaders in northern Iraq to examine the possibility of reactivating the
pipeline presumably if the Kurds establish an independent state
that incorporates the Kirkuk oil fields which the Kurds have long
claimed as theirs. In the early 1970s, the Israelis, with CIA backing, supported Iraq’s Kurds in their separatist war against the Baghdad regime, but abandoned them in 1975 when the Shah of Iran made peace with Iraq and the Kurds became a political liability. No doubt the Kurds have not forgotten that betrayal, but in the final analysis, getting a new state off the ground requires pragmatism rather than passion. * Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, is a Beirut-based journalist who has covered Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. |
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