Iraq

Buried RAND Report to Resurface Today

Kate Klonick | June 30, 2008, 12:54PM

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Army quashed public release of a 2005 report by the RAND corporation, their federally-financed research arm, that came to some "sharp conclusions" about who was responsible for the myriad of shortcomings in Iraq.

According to the New York Times, that report will finally be released today:

In 2005, the RAND Corporation submitted a report to the Army, called "Rebuilding Iraq," that identified problems with virtually every government agency that played a role in planning the postwar phase. After a long delay, the report is scheduled to be made public on Monday.

The Times also describes the most recent study by the Army, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," the second volume of an ongoing history of the Iraq conflict.

Prepared from over 200 interviews conducted by military historians, the report attempts to avoid controversial elements of the conflict, often unsuccessfully:

[T]he study documents a number of problems that hampered the Army's ability to stabilize the country during Phase IV, as the postwar stage was called.

"The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff," the study noted. "The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place."

The study also discusses Gen. Tommy Frank's reorganizing of senior command in 2003, a move that served to further handicap the already paltry strategy for creating stability in Iraq:

A fundamental assumption that hobbled the military's planning was that Iraq's ministries and institutions would continue to function after Mr. Hussein's government was toppled.

"We had the wrong assumptions and therefore we had the wrong plan to put into play," said Gen. William S. Wallace, who led the V Corps during the invasion and currently leads the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.

Faced with a brewing insurgency and occupation duties that they had not anticipated, Army units were forced to adapt. But organizational decisions made in May and June 2003 complicated that task

.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)
Topics: Iraq

Iraq

Today's Must Read

Andrew Tilghman | June 30, 2008, 10:07AM

A couple weeks ago, we learned that Iraq's oh-so-very-sovereign Ministry of Oil was about to award a round of no-bid contracts to several western oil companies that would bring the large multinationals back into Iraq for the first time in more than 35 years.

The Bush Administration insisted that they were not going to interfere in this deal, which was between Iraq's democratic leaders and private-sector companies.

But today's New York Times report confirms what many people have suspected for years -- that U.S. officials are working behind the scenes to influence the future of Iraq's massive oil reserves.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.
...
The American government lawyers provided specific advice, the State Department official said, like: "These are the clauses you may want. You will need a clause on arbitration. You will need this clause to make this work."

Near the end of the story, the Times reports:

Advisers from the State, Commerce, Energy and Interior Departments are assigned to work with the Iraqi Oil Ministry, according to the senior diplomat. In addition, the United States Agency for International Development has a contract for Management Systems International, a Washington consulting firm, to advise the oil and other ministries. The agency's program is called Tatweer, the Arabic word for development.

A Washington consulting firm? Actually, Management Systems International is a subsidiary of a massive Australian company, Coffey International Ltd. focusing on mining, oil and gas infrastructure projects.

And guess who some of their clients are? Global oil companies including Cheveron, Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

So the company that touts big oil as clients is helping the Iraqi government negotiate with those companies -- and getting paid by the U.S. government to do so.

But USAID and the consulting firm they hired don't call that a conflict of interest, the call it "mentoring."

"The legal department of the Ministry of Oil passed us a draft of the contract," Samir Abid, a Canadian of Iraqi origin who is an employee of the Tatweer program, said in a telephone interview. "They passed it to us and asked for our comments because we were mentoring them."

U.S. officials suggested that the Iraqi's needed their help since they haven't dealt with western oil companies since the 1970s. That's when, you might recall, Saddam Hussein kicked out all the international oil firms and nationalized the Iraq National Oil Company.

The Times wrote Sunday, in a story about Iraq's oil in the Week in Review section, many oil experts say that Iraq is among the easiest places in the world to pull oil out of the ground.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (5)
Topics: Iraq, Oil

Iraq

Today's Must Read

Andrew Tilghman | June 23, 2008, 10:03AM

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has spent nearly $500 million on an Arabic language television and radio station.

Now an investigation finds that the project has not only been poorly run and hemorrhaged taxpayer money but is also airing bizarrely anti-American and anti-semitic coverage despite repeated complaints from the State Department and Congress.

ProPublica, in a joint investigation with 60 Minutes, finds that the al-Hurra network -- "the Free One" in Arabic -- has completely failed in its initial mission to counter the influence of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news network in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

For starters, there are problems with the staff, which often does not have any Arabic language skills or a background in broadcast journalism:

Alhurra's president, Brian Conniff, does not speak Arabic and is unable to understand anything broadcast on the radio and television networks he is paid to manage. Conniff has no journalism experience and worked previously as a government auditor. His news director, Daniel Nassif, grew up in Lebanon and has no background in television. Before coming to the network, he helped promote the political aspirations in Washington of a Lebanese Christian former general.

Then there is the accounting, which has failed to track millions in taxpayer dollars:

Financial accountability also appears to be lacking. In its four years, the network has been unable to provide full documentation to auditors to account for its spending, according to two people familiar with the records and a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office.

(The GAO report is here.)

Meanwhile, the station may have been doing more harm that good for America's image in the Middle East. Along with the story, ProPublica also publishes a series of documents showing the complaints about al-Hurra filtering into the State Department and Congress in recent years.

Read more »

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (11)
Topics: Iraq, Iraq Corruption

Iraq

"Curveball" Speaks

Andrew Tilghman | June 17, 2008, 5:20PM

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times landed a rare interview with the Iraqi known as "Curveball," the now-discredited source on whom the Bush Administration rested much of its case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

Living in Germany and speaking out for the first time, "Curveball" says everyone has been lying about him:

"I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life," he said. "I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

How did the Bush administration get it so wrong?

"I'm not the source of these problems," he said.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (13)
Topics: Iraq

KBR

Today's Must Read

Andrew Tilghman | June 17, 2008, 10:38AM

What would the U.S. military do without KBR, its largest logistical contractor?

That's not something the military ever wants to find out. The U.S. occupation of Iraq would collapse within days without KBR, which provides food, fuel, and potable water along with critical services ranging from complex engineering to cleaning out the port-o-potties.

And KBR knows it. A story on the front page of today's New York Times lays bare the leverage that KBR holds over the U.S. military.

In short, KBR can charge the U.S. government anything it wants under the implicit threat that the firm will halt logistical services to troops in Iraq. If the military doesn't pay up in full, KBR has warned, "it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services."

That's according to Charles M. Smith, the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the Iraq war. Smith, speaking out for the first time, said he was ousted from his job after he tried to question KBR's massive billing.

The Army itself admits to the Times that it really had no choice but to pay KBR.

"You have to understand the circumstances at the time," said Jeffrey P. Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command. "We could not let operational support suffer because of some other things."

Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

As chief of the Field Support Contracting Division of the Army Field Support Command, he was in charge of the KBR contract from the start. Mr. Smith soon came to believe that KBR's business operations in Iraq were a mess. By the end of 2003, the Defense Contract Audit Agency told him that about $1 billion in cost estimates were not credible and should not be used as the basis for Army payments to the contractor.

"KBR didn't move proper business systems into Iraq," Mr. Smith said.

Along with the auditors, he said, he pushed for months to get KBR to provide data to justify the spending, including approximately $200 million for food services. Mr. Smith soon felt under pressure to ease up on KBR, he said. He and his boss, Maj. Gen. Wade H. McManus Jr., then the commander of the Army Field Support Command, were called to Pentagon meetings with Tina Ballard, then the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for policy and procurement.

After Smith was pushed out, the Defense Department hired a contractor to approve KBR's billing. (The department's own auditors had agreed with Smith that KBR was not properly documenting its billing.)

U.S.-paid contractors now outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq. Many contractors are recruited from poor Asian countries and paid far less than Americans would demand.

We've heard before about the "profound systemic problems" with KBR's billing. But Smith's account is the first time we've heard about an implicit threat to cut off services to troops.

KBR doesn't have the best record of providing troops' services. The company was criticized in March for making troops sick by failing to provide clean water. And top military officials have given false statements to Congress to quell controversy over the company.

But there's not much the military can do about it. Installing another company with the infrastructure inside Iraq needed to provide the same services would be an all-but insurmountable undertaking. So Smith's account should really come as no surprise.

"In the end," Mr. Smith said, "KBR got what it wanted."

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (56) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (36)
Topics: Iraq, KBR

Iraq

Senate Report Shows Intel Debunked Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Before Bush's Speech

Andrew Tilghman | June 16, 2008, 5:33PM

Buried deep in the new Senate intel report is evidence that yet another pre-war Bush administration claim about Iraq had been discredited within the intelligence community, months before the president used the claim publicly as an argument for war.

In October 2002, a few weeks before Congress voted to authorize the Iraq invasion, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses."

Problem is, it wasn't true. More importantly, a lot of people at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency knew it probably wasn't true. That's one of the interesting revelations inside the Senate's recent 171-page Phase II report on whether White House statements were backed up by prewar intelligence.

Once again, it's important to make the distinction between good-faith flaws in prewar intelligence and evidence that the public was misled by a bogus case for war. (A lot of people have tried hard to make that a very hazy distinction in recent years)

As Newsweek noted, the Senate report reveals that: "The intelligence reports on chemical and biological weapons training came primarily from the interrogation of al Qaeda detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi."

But al-Libi had been widely discredited months before the president made that remark -- by both the CIA as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency.

From page 65 and 66 of Senate report:

A February 22, 2002 DIA Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary noted that Ibn al-Shaykh [al-Libi] "lacks specific details on the Iraq's involvement, the [Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Weapons] materials associated with the assistance and the location where the training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to debriefers that he knows will retain their interest. Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.

DIA reiterated some of these points in additional reports. On August 7, 2002, the CIA reported on al-Libi's credibility. The Summary of the report stated that questions persist about [al-Libi's] forthrightness and truthfulness" and later elaborating "in some instances, however, he seems to have fabricated information. Perhaps in an attempt to exaggerate his own importance, Ibn al-Shaykh claims to be a member of al-AQa'ida's Shura Council, a claim not corroborated by other intelligence reporting.

(emphasis added)

Intel officials long ago stopped trying to defend al-Libi as a source. He recanted in January 2004, leading the CIA to order all prior intelligence suggesting Iraq trained al Qaeda personnel in chemical and biological warfare "recalled and re-issued" in February 2004.

But the fact the intelligence community knew al-Libi was unreliable from early to mid-2002 casts many official statements in a new light. For example, al-Libi has been reported as a primary source for Colin Powell's claim that al-Qaeda received chemical or biological weapons training from Iraq when he addressed the United Nations in early 2003. Powell did not use his name, but referred to al-Libi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist" who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.

(U.S. forces captured al-Libi in Afghanistan in 2001 and flew him to Egypt, where he provided the false Iraq-al-Qaeda link while undergoing harsh interrogation.)

Also, we know that Bush's speech was vetted because that was the same speech on Oct. 7, 2002, that CIA director George Tenet personally called the president about and urged him not to make mention of Iraq's alleged effort to obtain uranium from Niger because intelligence sources did not support that claim.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (12) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (9)
Topics: George Bush, Iraq

Iraq

Would Googling Him Have Been So Hard?

Kate Klonick | June 11, 2008, 2:42PM

Success in Iraq is critical to U.S. national interests, which is why we've insisted on sending our best and brightest civilians there: loyal Republicans, young GOP political operatives, and in the case of Owen Cargol, a man who fancies himself "a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy."

As Inside Higher Ed reports today, Cargol resigned back in April as the first chancellor of the American University in Iraq, apparently for health reasons, but he'd been forced out of a previous position as president of Northern Arizona University after just four months for allegedly sexually harassing a NAU employee:

Cargol's 2001 resignation stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee's genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as "a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy."

The American University in Iraq, located in Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish-controlled north, was heralded as a progressive step towards democratization. It selected Cargol as its first chancellor in 2007, though why is unclear since, as Inside Higher Ed notes, his "checkered past. . . could have been revealed to university organizers in a simple Google search."

AU-I is a private, non-profit institution, but it was started with $10.5 million from the U.S. government and its board --which hired Cargol -- is stacked with prominent names:

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is chairman of the Board of Regents; and Barham Salih, Iraq's deputy prime minister, is president of the Board of Trustees. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a counselor to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, sits on the board. So too does Fouad Ajami, head of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Agresto, the new interim chancellor, brings his own bona fides. As detailed in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Agresto has close connections to Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, with whom Agresto served during a stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities. A self-described neoconservative who was "mugged by reality" in Iraq, Agresto "knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system" when he arrived with orders to rebuild it, The Washington Post reported.

How Agresto and his colleagues came to select Cargol to head AU-Iraq is unclear, but Cargol's decision to reinvent himself as an administrator in the Middle East preceded his work in Iraq. Before he took the chancellor's post, Cargol was provost of Abu Dhabi University, a private institution in the United Arab Emirates.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (22) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (9)
Topics: Iraq

Iraq

Phase II: What Was Missing

Kate Klonick | June 10, 2008, 5:50PM

Last week the Senate intel committee released their report on pre-war intelligence in Iraq, which confirmed the disconnect between intelligence information espoused by Bush Administration officials and what was actually known.

The parameters of Phase II were negotiated between Senate Republicans and Democrats, for years, so it was maybe doomed to be a document with glaring omissions. But as damning as parts of the report were (Rumsfeld's false testimony, etc.) it probably could have been a lot worse for the executive branch, had not large swaths of White House communications been excluded from the scope of the investigations.

As Walter Pincus of the Washington Post writes, "the panel did not review 'less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch.'"

Which basically means that only the speeches and public press statements by senior officials, fell within the purview of the intel. committee's investigation. As Pincus points out, that leaves out a number of the other ways the administration misled the public before going into Iraq:

One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants (many have since left or changed jobs) were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy aides led by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, as well as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his recently released book, What Happened, the Iraq Group "had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public."

"The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," McClellan wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary." [Emphasis ours]

Beyond rehashing sentiments of the Senate intel. committee's purposeful stonewalling and foreshortening of the investigation, Fred Kaplan at Slate
takes a different read on the line "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the executive branch." Kaplan believes the line addresses the covert pressure the White House placed on the CIA to play up its pro-war intelligence:

Another intriguing point, made fleetingly in the Senate report's preface, is that the committee reviewed "only finished analytic intelligence documents"--not "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the executive branch."

In other words (though the authors don't put it in these terms), the committee once again evaded the key question of whether the White House pressured the Central Intelligence Agency into hardening its October 2002 NIE on Iraq.

Unless this question is addressed, the report is beside the point. Its full, ungainly title is "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information." If those same government officials politicized the intelligence information, then the report only perpetuates the sham. (I am not saying this is the case, only that the committee should have investigated whether it is--should have reviewed those "less formal communications.")
[Emphasis ours]

In sum, while Phase II shed light on the "lies," or "misstatements," or "misinformation," or "whatever-you-want-to-call-it," of the administration's public claims in the days leading up to the Iraq war, it still leaves much to be desired in terms of scope and accountability.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (8)
Topics: Iraq

Iraq

Sen. Wyden: Rumsfeld Should Be Held Accountable

Kate Klonick | June 5, 2008, 4:34PM

As we've been reporting, Phase II of the Senate intel committee's report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq has been released, and all day lawmakers have been issuing statements of shock and incredulity.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the authoring Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called today for a review of whether then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress was true, given the information in the report.

Specifically cited are quotes from Rumsfeld's testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on September 18 and 19, 2002:

They now have massive tunneling systems... They've got all kinds of thing that have happened in the period when the inspectors have been out. So the problem is greater today. And the regime that exists today in the U.N. is one that has far fewer teeth than the one you are describing.
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002

Even the most intrusive inspection regime would have difficulty getting at all of [Saddam Hussein's] weapons of mass destruction. Many of his WMD capabilities are mobile; they can be hidden from inspectors no matter how intrusive. He has vast underground networks and facilities and sophisticated denial and deception techniques
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002

[W]e simply do not know where all or even a large portion of Iraq's WMD facilities are. We do know where a fraction of them are. . .[O]f the facilities we do know, not all are vulnerable to attack from the air. A good many are underground and deeply buried. . .
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 19, 2002.

On page 50 the report states it's conclusion after investigating these statements from Rumsfeld:

The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information. [Emphasis ours.]

Wyden had a thing or two to say about Rumfeld's "not substantiated" testimony:

This is stunning: the Secretary of Defense, testifying before Congress about whether or not ground forces would be strategically necessary in a war against Iraq, said that the Executive Branch "knew" something that it did not know.

The intelligence available at the time made this clear, and two months later a report prepared specifically for Secretary Rumsfeld directly contradicted what he told the Committee. As far as I know, neither Rumsfeld nor anyone else from his office made any attempt to contact the Committee and correct the public record, and the result was that Congress and the American people were misled on a question of the utmost importance. I do not think that this is a matter that Congress can afford to ignore and I hope that the Armed Services Committee will take a serious look at Secretary Rumsfeld's statements.

We'll be bringing you more from Phase II, but please, keep your comments and observations coming.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (31) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (14)
Topics: Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq

Iraq

Phase II

Kate Klonick | June 5, 2008, 10:52AM

The long wait is over. Phase II, the Senate intel committee's report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, is out.

There are two parts to the report, and you can read them here (warning: big .pdfs):

"Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information"

"Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"

There's a lot there, and as we read through it these next few hours (days), we'd welcome any insights from readers who are doing the same. You can flag sections you think are particularly interesting or relevant in the comments section below.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (42) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (15)
Topics: Iraq

Iraq

Shouldn't It Be Called Phase VII By Now?

Kate Klonick | June 4, 2008, 2:38PM

As TPM just reported, the Senate intelligence committee is releasing the much delayed Phase II report, which details and analyzes the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. We've prepped you for this before, but we think it's for real this time.

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (3)
Topics: Iraq

Iraq

Today's Must Read

Andrew Tilghman | June 2, 2008, 10:40AM

Could the U.S. ultimately end up privatizing its entire mission in Iraq?

That's what the latest round of contracts the U.S. government plans to let out in the coming months might suggest.

As Walter Pincus reports in today's Washington Post, the new contracts underscore the non-military involvement the U.S. is undertaking as public pressure mounts to reduce troop numbers

One contract could essentially begin to privatize the process of training the Iraqi security forces by hiring "mentors" to do what the U.S. military has struggled unsuccessfully to do for the past five years.

The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military "desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years," a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. ... The mentors will assist an U.S. military group that previously began to implement what are described as "core processes and systems," such as procurement, contracting, force development, management and budgeting, and public affairs.

Read more »

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (31) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (10)
Topics: Iraq