Iraq urges U.S. to give back Iraqi Jewish Archive

It was seized from Jewish families and wound up soaking in sewage water in the basement of a secret police building. Rescued from the chaos that engulfed Baghdad as Saddam Hussein was toppled, it now sits in safekeeping in an office near Washington, D.C.

Like this country's once great Jewish community, the Iraqi Jewish Archive of books, manuscripts, records and other materials has gone through turbulent times. Now another twist may be in store: Iraq wants it back.

Iraqi officials say they will go to the U.S., possibly next month, to assess the materials found by U.S. troops and plan for their return after an absence of nearly seven years.

Some Jewish authorities are skeptical, arguing that since most estimates put the number of Jews in Iraq at less than 10, the archive no longer belongs here. But to Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, it is part of a larger effort to rescue the cultural history Iraq lost during the invasion, and to put Iraqis on a tentative path to coming to grips with their past.

"Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity... To show it to our people that Baghdad was always multiethnic," said Eskander.

The archive was found in May 2003, when U.S. troops looking for weapons of mass destruction got a tip to check out the basement of a building of the Mukhabarat - Saddam's secret police. Passing a 2,000-pound unexploded bomb on their way into the building, they found a flooded basement.

It was really quite disgusting, to be honest, because it was about chest-deep sewage water, said Richard Gonzales, the Army officer who led the team and has since retired.

The troops found no WMD, but it was worth the trip. Books, photos and papers floated in the murky water. And not just any books, but Hebrew-language books, in a country that had been at war with Israel since 1948 and had once accused Jews of espionage and after a show trial hanged nine of them in a public square.

"The fact that the materials survived at all is remarkable, considering how much of Iraq's cultural heritage was looted or destroyed after the fall of Saddam - more than a quarter of the National Library's books and 60 percent of its collection of maps, photographs and records," Eskander said.


Gonzales knew he had something significant on his hands but he didn't have enough people or tools to deal with it. So he went to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi exile group whose discredited WMD claims had been the main justification for the invasion.


Chalabi got him a pump and some manpower. The materials were pulled out of the basement, laid out to dry in the sun and packed in 27 metal trunks.

Accumulated over the years were photos, parchments and cases to hold Torah scrolls; a Jewish religious book published in 1568; 50 copies of a children's primer in Hebrew and Arabic; books in Arabic and English, books printed in Baghdad, Warsaw and Venice - the lost heritage of what was once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, dating to the 6th century B.C.

Abraham of the Old Testament is believed to have come from the city of Ur, in what is modern-day Iraq, and despite periods of persecution, the community endured and thrived over centuries. But problems worsened when Iraq sided with Germany in World War II, and came to a head when Israel was created.

By the early 1950s, Iraqi Jews were fleeing the country in droves. The few thousand who remained were harassed, too frightened to hold services, and their assets seized. In 1969, after Saddam's Baath party took power, came the hangings.

The secret police are believed to have confiscated countless books and other archival material from the Jewish community.

"Sometimes they would contact us when they had intelligence about such
documents, Hebrew documents or books," said Kamil Jawad Ashour, the deputy director of the National Library. "On one occasion I went with them to a house in Basra of a Jewish family where they confiscated some documents and books from them. And there was only an old woman there."

After the 2003 invasion, Corine Wegener was working in Baghdad as an arts, monuments and archives officer - a rarity in the U.S. military - when she was asked to examine the materials from the basement.

They were still damp, and that meant mold, a preservationist's nightmare.

Only freezing stops mold, so a refrigerator truck was found and kept running 24 hours a day.

"I was out there three or four times a day with a food thermometer checking the temperature," Wegener said.

Agreement was reached, and later approved by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, to move the archive to the U.S. for preservation.

After being freeze-dried in Texas, the collection was taken to the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. There the items were photographed, lightly cleaned, wrapped and boxed. NARA and the Center for Jewish History, a New York-based nonprofit group, are using the photos to catalog the collection. But to handle and digitize it, more preservation work would be needed.

The archive was supposed to return to Iraq after two years. Until now, the Iraqis - focused more on surviving the day to day violence in the country - have never pushed for the archive's return. Doris Hamburg, who directs preservation projects at NARA, said it takes ages to repair damaged materials. Further work needs outside funding that has not materialized.

But the archive's longer-than-anticipated stay in the U.S. has raised
questions in Iraq, where public opinion tends to conflate Israel with Jews in general, and anything even tangentially related to either is suspect.

"I am afraid that there is pressure from some groups, both inside and outside the United States, in order to prevent the return of these Iraqi manuscripts to their original country," said Abdullah Hamid, the head of Iraq's National Center for Manuscripts and Documents.

Hamburg denies any pressures and stresses. "Iraq can have the archive back whenever it wants," she said. Iraqi officials at the National Library said they have no indication the Americans are trying to hold onto the archive.

But Dov S. Zakheim, an Orthodox Jew who was a senior Department of Defense official under President George W. Bush warned that if the Iraqis were to claim the archive as their own, it would anger the Jewish community.

"It's not theirs. It's just not theirs," he said. "Jews feel very strongly about their heritage."

Mordechai Ben-Porat, who helped orchestrate a mass airlift of Jews leaving Iraq after Israel's establishment in 1948, says the archive should be in the museum dedicated to Iraqi Jews which he runs in Israel, where Jewish scholars can make use of the materials.

"The books belong to the majority of the Iraqi Jews, and they are not in Iraq. The books should be given to us, as the representatives of the Jews of Iraq," he said.

However, he appeared resigned to the likelihood the archive would return to Iraq.

Maurice Shohet of the World Organization of Jews from Iraq said the community would like the materials to be digitized so that everyone has access, and was worried the necessary preservation work could not be done in Iraq.

"If these documents go back to Iraq the way they are they will be lost forever," he said.

Since Iraq has no diplomatic relations with Israel, Eskander thought it
unlikely Israeli scholars would get visas to enter Iraq and study the archive. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said it was not involved in any move to bring the archive to Israel.

Digitization to make them available on the Web would solve a lot of the
problems, but would require extensive preservation work, which many worry is beyond Iraq's present capabilities.

But Iraqi officials stressed they have the expertise and will make preservation a priority. Down the hall from Eskander's office are experts, many trained in Europe, who are repairing documents similarly damaged during the invasion.

Wegener said she was deeply torn about whether the collection should be
removed from what at the time was an occupied country. "But I firmly believed then, and I believe now, that if we did not, it would have been destroyed," said Wegener.

"All the same, the archive's long absence from Iraq has made it politically sensitive," Eskander said. "It annoyed Iraqis a lot that the Americans who failed to protect Iraqi cultural treasures were devoting such care to the Jewish archive."

Why, given its treatment of its Jewish population, would Iraq want the Jewish Archive back? Eskander, 48, can point to himself. He is a Faily, a member of a small Shiite-Kurdish minority persecuted under Saddam, and he wants Iraqis to know about such oppression and learn from it.

In a country that has lost thousands of lives to sectarian violence since
2003, where Christian churches are bombed, and where people perceived as
friendly to Israel often receive death threats, Eskander can point to the
collection of Hebrew-language books he has in his office for safekeeping.

Like the Iraqi Jewish Archive, these books were found tucked in the corner of another basement - that one dry. They are catalogued on the library's Web site and available for study.

"The American national archive did a great job, and we're grateful for their help... The idea now is that we will do it here in Baghdad," Eskander said. "It's our cultural heritage."

Arab reformist view of American Middle East policy

A trenchant and cogent analysis of the problems of US Middle East policy. This is an important point to understand:

 

 

And finally, and most important in many ways, a freedom gap that has so far frustrated every attempt at peacemaking in the region, because the dividends of peace hold more promise for the peoples of the region than most of their ruling corrupt and authoritarian regimes.

 

 

But the Arab states and the Arab public have to understand, along with the US, that the US has to deal with the Middle East as it is. If it doesn't solicit good relations with undemocratic regimes, that doesn't leave the US many potential friends in this part of the world. If the Arabs want democracy and development, it is up to them to make the effort. Democracy cannot be imposed from outside, as Arabs were reminding the United States only a few years ago, when the Bush administration was trying to do just that.

 

There may, unfortunately be a way out for America - it may be forced out of the Middle East by Iran.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

 

For America there is no way out
By Ammar Abdulhamid
Commentary by
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

 

Despite occasional calibrations reflecting changes in administration, the policy of the United States toward the broader Middle East and North Africa region remains highly influenced by a set of misperceptions and ideological stances more related to American domestic politics than to regional realities. This situation has constantly undermined Washington's efforts and, occasionally, its desire to play a positive role in the region, serving to transform the US into a convenient scapegoat upon which ruling regimes heap blame for all regional woes.

 

To further complicate matters, the misperceptions involved have long become indigenous to both US political parties, where persistent bickering serves to make officials and experts impervious to serious criticism and, consequently, unable to conduct any serious course correction. Indeed, the various actors involved in formulating American foreign policy have grown too addicted to scoring points in an ongoing ideological battle than in trying to keep up with the continuously shifting realities on the ground in the Middle East.

 

This tendency has served to make US foreign policy highly reactive, episodic, disconnected, and subject to manipulation by outside parties whose interests and approaches often do not coincide with those of the US. Through misinformation campaigns and intensive lobbying that plays and preys on the ideological differences between the groups making or influencing policy in Washington, American friends and foes alike have, in effect, undermined Washington's ability to chart a course of action in the region that is truly commensurate with its interests.

 

A kind of willful blindness that has become all too prevalent in certain quarters is making the situation even more desperate. It is shifting the regional focus of the US constantly from the peace process, to the war on terror, to democracy promotion, to Iran's nuclear challenge, to calls for open engagement and promises of development aid, to thoughts of gradual disengagement from the region, at least on the micro-level. Each one of these approaches has been hailed as the key to solving, if not the region's problems per se, then, at least, American problems in the region.

 

Yet this reductionism contrasts sharply with the approach favored by America's friends and foes in the region, all of whom tend to operate on a multi-track basis. Successive governments in Israel, for instance, have for the last two decades continuously affirmed their commitment to the peace process, while simultaneously engaging in activities to undermine it, including the expansion of settlements, collective punishment, and the cutting off humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians.

 

The Syrian regime has also perfected this fine art of stonewalling with its talk about peace and security on the one hand, and its ongoing support for all sorts of terrorist groups undermining the stability of Syria's neighbors on the other.

 

Such behavior, by Israel, Syria, or any other regional state, which might appear contradictory at first, has, nonetheless, proven quite effective over the years in enabling the players involved in exacting concessions and creating new facts on the ground that better serve their perceived interests. Meanwhile, the US continues to pursue a single-minded path, then another, and another, before lapsing into whimsical ideas of regional disengagement like a bumbling behemoth.

 

But the US will not be able to maneuver its way out of this situation by turning is back on a region actively engaged in exporting its turmoil to the world. There is no exit for the US from the region, and attempts at macro-managing the region's transition cannot take place in the absence of a micro-understanding of its shifting realities. America's real challenge, then, is to figure out a role for itself commensurate with its long-term strategic interests, rather than scurrying for an imaginary way out.

 

Success in this regard, however, requires serious reevaluation of America's basic assumptions about the very issues behind its current involvement, especially the following:

 

First, the war on terror, where the

 

US focus on military solutions and security alliances with authoritarian regimes has played right into the hands of the terrorists and the corrupt regimes that support them;

 

Second, the Arab-Israeli conflict, that has recently evolved into a regional struggle for realignment involving Iran and Turkey, and to a lesser extent India and Pakistan, and where Arab regimes and non-state actors are becoming more clients than serious decision-makers;

 

Third, the Iranian nuclear challenge, where every diplomatic maneuver and threat of economic sanctions or military strikes seems to bring closer, rather than delay or rule out, the specter of a regional nuclear arms race;

 

Fourth, a developmental gap that has affected even the supposedly rich and stable monarchies of the region, that is when one is willing to look beyond the façade of fantastical projects;

 

And finally, and most important in many ways, a freedom gap that has so far frustrated every attempt at peacemaking in the region, because the dividends of peace hold more promise for the peoples of the region than most of their ruling corrupt and authoritarian regimes.

 

Until the US formulates a vision for its role in the region based on an objective assessment of realities on the ground, rather than the ideological ramblings of "experts" from the left and the right, and until it develops a real multi-track strategy that seeks to simultaneously address each of the challenges highlighted earlier, American involvement in the region will continue to be disastrous, no matter who is in charge in the White House.

 

 

 

Ammar Abdulhamid, the founder and director of the Tharwa Foundation, is a Syrian author and human rights and democracy activist who is currently based in Washington DC. He enjoys a global reputation as an outspoken advocate for social and political change in the broader Middle East and North Africa. The current article is part of a series advocating the revamping of US foreign policy in the region. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

Want to understand Al-Qaeda? Here's a clue

Want to understand al-Qaeda? Who doesn't?

 

 Michael Totten interviewed Lee Smith concerning his new book: A Strong Horse. Lee Smith has a great insight. Smith seems to be saying that in the Middle East, the major political motivator is internal Middle East politics. The attacks on the United States by Al Qaeda and anti-Americanism in general are generated by the needs of Middle East regimes in the domestic and inter-Muslim arenas. Here's the heart of the argument:

 

 

MJT: The title of your book is The Strong Horse. Can you tell us exactly what that concept means?

 

Lee Smith: It comes from Osama Bin Laden's observation that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. I know this idea will be confused with the notion that Arabs understand only force, an idea often, and incorrectly, attributed to the Bush administration. It is useful to recall that throughout history most of mankind has "understood" force. Those lucky few who are fortunate enough to be able to live their political lives free of the fear of violence are largely concentrated in the capitals of contemporary Western Europe and along the east and west coasts of the United States, who not coincidentally happen to make up the primary audience I was writing for, so I wanted to explain that the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are not as fortunate as we are. To say that Lebanon is held at gunpoint by an armed gang, or that Lebanese journalists are assassinated for their work, Syrian intellectuals and Egyptian rights activists are typically thrown in prison and tortured, and regional minorities like the Shia, Druze, Alawi, Christians, Kurds and Jews have often been the target of purges and political violence all in the name of Arab nationalism, a corporatist ideology that seeks to erase communal as well as individual difference, is not to say that Arabs only understand force, but that violence is a central factor in Arab political life and it is impossible to understand the region without taking this into account.

 

 

MJT: On the first page of your book, in the first paragraph even, you said we all took 9/11 too personally. I think a lot of readers who will love your book might also be a bit startled when they see that. Can you explain what you mean?

 

Lee Smith: Yes, it took me a while to get to that point in my thinking about 9/11. As I say in that same passage, as a lifelong New Yorker, someone who was raised there, went to school and lived there, I took 9/11 personally, as an attack on my hometown, my family and friends. That's the reason I went to the Middle East to find out what happened, because I took it personally. However, as I spent more time in the region I came to see 9/11 outside of the framework of Islam v the West, even as this conceit has great appeal across the American political spectrum. The right of center tends to argue that there is a war between Western civilization and the lands of Islam; the left of center typically contends that the problems of the Middle East are essentially the result of Western interference in the region, from colonialism to Zionism to American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. After a while, I came to see that the issues in the region began in the region and belong to the region, and while Western influence has often been harmful, and more often beneficial, to the Arabs, it has been a very minor factor in shaping a region thousands of years old. There is indeed a clash, but it is between the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and the 9/11 attacks were essentially an overflow of those issues that reached American shores.

 

MJT: There are indeed a number of clashes in the Middle East that have little to do with us, and it's easier to see this up close than it is from a distance. There are, for instance, clashes between Islamists and secularists; between Sunnis and sectarian minorities like Shias, Christians, Alawites, and Druze; between Arab Nationalists and ethnic minorities like Persians and Kurds. Why would one of these factions think it could get a leg up on the others by killing thousands of people in the U.S.?

 

Lee Smith: I am not sure if that's exactly how I'd explain 9/11. But let me start by saying that it's true one of the ways that various groups compete against each other for shares of power is by going after third parties. For instance, I argue in the book that Hezbollah's dominant, though largely obscured, issue is the region's Sunni majority. There is no doubt that Hezbollah despises Israel and would very much like to bring about its demise, but their deeper, perhaps existential, concern is not the some 5 million Jews on Lebanon's southern border, but the Sunni sea that has engulfed the Shia for more than a millennium. And so fighting Israel establishes this Shia militia's credentials as genuine Arabs, even as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi argued shortly before his death that Hezbollah was actually a Zionist front that protected the Jews from the real, i.e. Sunni, resistance. So, here is some of the sectarian animus at work in the region, the clash of Arab civilizations.

 

Continued: Michael Totten interviews Lee Smith concerning his new book: A Strong Horse.

Secret Report: Iran will Have Nuclear Bomb This Year

by Malkah Fleisher 

A secret intelligence dossier currently being reviewed by US, Israeli, German, and Austrian governments reveals secret Iranian tests and hierarchies of power dedicated to the successful development of a nuclear bomb, and predicts that Iran will have a primitive nuclear bomb by year's end.

According to the classified document featured in an exposé by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Iran is well on its way toward obtaining its first nuclear bomb. The country's nuclear research program, it turns out, has a military wing answering to the Defense Ministry which the West was not aware of until now.

Der Spiegel explained the structure of Iranian nuclear establishment at length. Iran's new Minister of Science, Research, and Technology, Kamran Daneshjoo, 52, is in charge of the country's nuclear energy agency. A close ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Daneshjoo was educated in Manchester, England. He worked for some time at Tehran's "Center for Aviation Technology", which later developed into FEDAT, the "Department for Expanded High-Technology Applications". FEDAT ultimately became what the German paper calls "the secret heart of Iran's nuclear weapons program", answering directly to the Defense Ministry.

FEDAT is currently run by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 48, a professor at Tehran's Imam Hussein University and officer in the Revolutionary Guard. Western intelligence agencies say FEDAT and the Ministry of Science are working together to create the bomb. They also believe that a primitive nuclear weapon the size of a truck will be completed this year.

Two to four years after that, the bomb will be compressed to a size capable of fitting into a nuclear warhead and being launched at Israel.

Iran is believed to have conducted successful tests of a nuclear detonating device 6 years ago.

'Not just Israeli propaganda'

Despite the severity of the situation, the international community is still undecided on sanctions of Iran. China is considered likely to try to block sanctions, as it currently holds billions of dollars in energy deals with the country.

A military option may prove difficult, according to military experts, because many of the Iranian nuclear installations are deep underground.

The report will likely cause the US government to raise its alarm level from yellow to red, according to Der Spiegel.  "Skeptics who in the past, sometimes justifiably so, treated alarmist reports as Israeli propaganda, are also extremely worried," including IAEA officials, said the magazine. The report also says, somewhat cryptically, that a laptop computer passed on to the IAEA by way of German and American intelligence agencies contained highly volatile material.

No compromise

Fears of a nuclear Iran have been compounded by information provided by Iran's former deputy defense minister, Ali Reza Asgari, and nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, both of whom defected to the United States and were given new identities.

Iran has consistently stated that its nuclear program is for the peaceful provision of nuclear energy to the country's citizenry.

In October, the IAEA presented a plan to Iran which had been developed by the US government. Under the plan, Iran would send 70% of its low-enriched uranium abroad.  A year later, the uranium would be exchanged for fuel rods, a potent form of nuclear fuel which is very difficult to enrich for military purposes.

The plan would have provided sufficient fuel for a nuclear energy program and to fuel the reactor for scientific experiments.  At the same time, the world would have been assured that Iran truly had no intention of developing nuclear weapons.

On January 19, Tehran offered a "counter-proposal", effectively rejecting the IAEA plan and casting off illusions of a compromise with the West.
Comment on this story

OBITUARY: GENERAL ALI HASSAN AL-MAJID ( Chemical Ali)

OBITUARY: GENERAL ALI HASSAN AL-MAJID ( Chemical Ali)

Adel Darwish

Having had my work (whether books, news reports, ‎commentary or analysis I contributed in newspapers, TV or ‎Broadcast) plagiarised by fellow hacks – yes they have no ‎f***** morals – I decide to publish this obituary of Saddam ‎Hussein's cousin General Ali Hassan Al-Majid, also known as ‎Chemical Ali, who was executed today in Baghdad, on my blog ‎as more than one obituary that will appear in the National ‎papers tomorrow arelikely to be  plagiarised from my work. I did in fact ‎publish an obituary of Gn Al-Majid in the Independent on ‎Tuesday 8th April 2003, after he had faked his own death and ‎we fell for it.‎

IN JANUARY 2003, just three months before the ‎war that toppled the Baath regime from power in ‎Iraq,  Saddam Hussein's first cousin General Ali ‎Hassan al-Majid visited Damascus to shake hands ‎with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, before ‎going to Beirut, where he used foul language and ‎cursed "other Arabs" who were not coming to ‎Iraq's aid and who permitted American and British ‎troops on their soil. Egyptian officials leaked to the ‎press that they had been expecting a delegation ‎from Baghdad, but, when they found out it was ‎headed by Majid, they cancelled the visit.‎

Known within the inner circle of the late Saddam ‎Hussein's ruling Bath Party regime as ' the man for ‎dirty missions' was executed by hanging today ( ‎‎25th Jan 2010) in Baghdad after being convicted on ‎‎13 counts of killings and genocide, in a trial that lasted ‎several month in 2008/2009. He was sentenced to death ‎in four separate trials, including one that focused on his ‎involvement in a poison gas attack against Iraqi Kurds that ‎killed about 5,000 people, which earned him the nickname ‎‎'Chemical Ali'. His execution had been delayed for political ‎rather than legal reasons, namely negotiations with ‎representatives of Sunni Arabs from his tribe and former ‎ruling Baath party members over participating in the ‎political process and reducing violence.  ‎

Al-Majid was known for his ruthless and strong ‎hold on the army. In December 2002 the British ‎Foreign Office showed a film of Majid kicking and ‎slapping prisoners, and army deserters. "Let's ‎execute one so the others will confess," he says in ‎Arabic, with the heavy accent found only in the ‎Tikriti homeland of Saddam Hussein. Turning to ‎another captive, he says: "Don't execute this one. ‎He will be useful to us." Majid kicks one of them, ‎whose hands are tied behind his back, before ‎pointing his handgun to the man's head and ‎executing him in cold blood.‎

Majid was one of the most brutal members of ‎Saddam's inner circle and was entrusted by his ‎cousin to defend the southern sector of Iraq and ‎the historic city of Basra against British troops ‎during the 2003 American lead invasion. He had ‎been dubbed "Chemical Ali" by the Kurds and other ‎opponents for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack ‎that killed thousands of Kurds.‎

A chain-smoking, pot-bellied officer, with no ‎educational qualifications, Majid impressed ‎Saddam with his ruthlessness. Majid was known as ‎‎"the man for dirty missions", according to Hytham ‎Rashid al-Waheeb, a presidential aide to Saddam ‎for 10 years. "Whenever Saddam Hussein finds ‎himself in a crisis, there is usually one man he ‎turns to - General Ali Hassan al- Majid."‎

In August 1990, after Baghdad's invasion of ‎Kuwait, Saddam appointed Majid military governor ‎of Kuwait, renamed Iraq's "19th province" but ‎replaced him three months later for fear that his ‎brutal reputation was strengthening the hand of ‎Kuwait's allies. Six hundred Kuwaiti civilians ‎disappeared under Majid and remained missing ‎even after the Fall of Saddam regime, although ‎some of their remains were found in many mass ‎graves discovered in the past few years.‎

In 1987, Saddam made him chief of the Baath ‎Party in northern Iraq with the task of suppressing ‎an uprising among the Kurdish minority. Over the ‎next 12 months, Majid ordered nerve- and ‎mustard-gas attacks on scores of villages, ‎including on the town of Halabja in March 1988. He ‎lead the "Anfal" ("spoils of war") campaign against ‎Kurdish rebels who took advantage of Iraq's 1980-‎‎88 war with Iran to step up their long campaign for ‎autonomy in their northern heartland. Chemical ‎weapons were used up to 60 times during the two-‎year campaign he waged against the Kurds.‎

Majid was responsible for the murder or ‎disappearance of some 100,000 Kurds and the ‎forced removal of many more. Iraqi opposition put ‎the figure at 150,000. Hundreds of Kurdish villages ‎and communities were destroyed.‎

He was also the architect of the 1970s "torched ‎land" policy which set Kurdish orchards on fire ‎when peshmerga fighters were sheltering in them. ‎He deported thousands of Kurds from the northern ‎mountains to the deserts in the south, causing ‎misery and disease as part of his "Arabisation" ‎policy.‎

On the eve of the 1991 uprising in Kurdistan - ‎where he was in charge of the Northern provinces ‎after brutally putting down the uprising in the ‎south - he took hundreds of Kirkuk and Erbil ‎residents, including Kurds, Assyrians and ‎Turkomans as human shields. They were freed in a ‎deal with the Kurds.‎

Ali Hassan al-Majid is thought to have been born in ‎‎1939 in Tikrit, north- west of Baghdad, where ‎Saddam's tribe of Abu Nasir lived. There was no ‎proper birth register or documentation on those ‎days. Majid was given a messenger job through ‎Brig-Gen Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who filled the ‎army with his tribal relatives. He remained a ‎warrant officer and motorcycle messenger in the ‎army until the Baath party led a coup in 1968 ‎making Bakr president. Majid was promoted ‎quickly to the rank of brigadier-general and served ‎as Interior Minister in 1989-91, and as Defence ‎Minister in 1991-95, as well as a regional party ‎leader.‎

In the 1960s, Saddam had recruited him, and ‎many other clan members, to a gangster-like ‎secret network without the knowledge of the Baath ‎party leadership. Gangs led by Saddam, ‎Mohammed Saeed el-Sahaf (the Baath information ‎minister nicknamed comical Ali for denying that ‎Iraqi army was defeated when the American ‎invading forces were only a mile away from his ‎head quarters in April 2003), Izzat al-Duri and ‎Tariq Aziz (the last deputy prime minister in ‎Saddam regim) controlled the Baghdad ‎underground crime scene and terrorised their ‎opponents. Saddam kept the organisation secret ‎until he used the apparatus to take over the ‎leadership of the Baath party to become president ‎in a bloody purge in 1979. Majid took part in ‎liquidating no less than 15 party members, whom ‎he shot in cold blood in one afternoon.‎

He was loyal to Saddam through a Mafia-style ‎bond. In 1995 he joined Uday, Saddam's eldest ‎son and a pathological killer, in leading a group of ‎Tikriti thugs who killed his own uncle and father-‎in-law Kamel Ali and his cousins Hussein Kamel ‎and Saddam Kamel and the rest of the family ‎members. The two Kamel brothers - who were also ‎Saddam's sons-in-law - had committed the sin of ‎fleeing Iraq to Jordan with Saddam's two ‎daughters. Hussein Kamel, who had been in ‎charge of the Weapons of Mass Destruction ‎programme, gave UN inspectors valuable ‎information. Saddam claimed to have forgiven ‎them and invited them back to their death.‎

Saddam forced Uday, who was apparently ‎paralysed by an assassination attempt in 1997, to ‎marry the 16-year-old daughter of Majid. A lavish ‎wedding was designed by Saddam to heal a rift in ‎the ruling family after the murder of the two high-‎level defectors.‎

Saddam's inner circle was made up of relatives or ‎clansmen like Majid, upon whose loyalty he could ‎count. And certainly Majid was among the closest. ‎Iraqi exiles in London cheered at the news of his ‎death.‎
It was the second time they did so, as in April ‎‎2003  after an airstrike on Majid's house in Basra ‎he managed to flee after faking his own death by ‎dressing up an aid in his General rank uniform and ‎leaving his identity papers in the pockets. He ‎mutilated the face of the dead-man before fleeing. ‎It wasn't until several weeks later that DNA tests ‎proved that the corpse found was not that of ‎Majid.  .‎

Ali Hassan al-Majid, army officer: born Tikrit, Iraq ‎‎1939; Iraqi Interior Minister 1989-91, Defence ‎Minister 1991-95; found guilty of genocide in 2008; ‎married; died Baghdad, Iraq 25 January 2010‎

Copyright 2010 by Adel Darwish. Republished by permission. Not to be republished, reprinted or quoted in whole or in-part without prior permission from the author Adel Darwish.

Source: http://www.adeldarwish.com/?p=41 

Iran nuclear weapon: More probable they are building it, same time estimates

The intelligence discussed below does not change the estimate of when Iran would have a bomb ready to drop on say, Israel or Saudi Arabia. That will probably not happen until 2012 or 2014. They could have a primitive bomb this year, but it would be too large to "deliver" the experts claim.

 

But it does provide more substantiation to the surmise that Iran really is building a bomb. The conclusions of the infamous US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran stopped its program to create nuclear weapons seem to be increasingly improbable.

 

The problem of what could be done and will be done to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb is another matter. The United States does not seem to have a real plan in this regard, and did not give the necessary attention to divising a plan or getting the international political support needed to make it succeed. That was true under the Bush administration, which is responsible for the fictional NIE -- a way of making the problem go away instead of dealing with it, and it is still true under the Obama administration. It is a bi-partisan failure.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Intelligence from Tehran Elevates Concern in the West
By Dieter Bednarz, Erich Follath and Holger Stark

 

The West has long been suspicous of Iran's nuclear program. SPIEGEL has obtained new documents on secret tests and leadership structures that call into question Tehran's claims to be exclusively interested in the peaceful use of the technology.

 

It was probably the last attempt to defuse the nuclear dispute with Tehran without having to turn to dramatic new sanctions or military action. The plan, devised at the White House in October, had Russian and Chinese support and came with the seal of approval of the US president. It was clearly a Barack Obama operation.

 

Under the plan, Iran would send a large share of its low enriched uranium abroad, all at once, for a period of one year, receiving internationally monitored quantities of nuclear fuel elements in return. It was a deal that provided benefits for all sides. The Iranians would have enough material for what they claim is their civilian nuclear program, as well as for scientific experiments, and the world could be assured that Tehran would not be left with enough fissile material for its secret domestic uranium enrichment program -- and for what the West assumes is the building of a nuclear bomb.

 

Tehran's leaders initially agreed to the proposal "in principle." But for weeks they put off the international community with vague allusions to a "final response," and when that response finally materialized, it came in the form of a "counter-proposal." Under this proposal, Tehran insisted that the exchange could not take place all at once, but only in stages, and that the material would not be sent abroad. Instead, Tehran wanted the exchange to take place in Iran.

 

Once again, the Iranian leadership has rebuffed the West with phony promises of its willingness to compromise. The government in Tehran officially rejected the nuclear exchange plan last Tuesday. To make matters worse, after the West's discovery of a secret uranium enrichment plant near Qom, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defiantly announced that he would never give in, and in fact would build 10 more enrichment plants instead.

 

Highly Volatile Material

 

But officials in Washington and European capitals are currently not as concerned about these cocky, unrealistic announcements as they are about intelligence reports based on sources within Iran and information from high-ranking defectors. The new information, say American experts, will likely prompt the US government to reassess the risks coming from the mullah-controlled country in the coming days and raise the alarm level from yellow to red. Skeptics who in the past, sometimes justifiably so, treated alarmist reports as Israeli propaganda, are also extremely worried. They include the experts from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose goal is prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

 

After an extensive internal investigation, IAEA officials concluded that a computer obtained from Iran years ago contains highly volatile material. The laptop reached the Americans through Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and was then passed on to the IAEA in Vienna.

 

Reports by Ali Reza Asgari, Iran's former deputy defense minister who managed to defect to the United States, where he was given a new identity, proved to be just as informative. Nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who "disappeared" during a pilgrimage to Mecca in June 2009, is also believed to have particularly valuable information. The Iranian authorities accused Saudi Arabia and the United States of kidnapping the expert, but it is more likely that he defected.

 

Iran's government has come under pressure as a result of the new charges. They center on the question of who exactly is responsible for the country's nuclear program -- and what this says about its true nature. The government has consistently told the IAEA that the only agency involved in uranium enrichment is the National Energy Council, and that its work was exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of the technology.

 

But if the claims are true that have been made in an intelligence dossier currently under review in diplomatic circles in Washington, Vienna, Tel Aviv and Berlin, portions of which SPIEGEL has obtained, this is a half-truth at best.

 

According to the classified document, there is a secret military branch of Iran's nuclear research program that answers to the Defense Ministry and has clandestine structures. The officials who have read the dossier conclude that the government in Tehran is serious about developing a bomb, and that its plans are well advanced. There are two names that appear again and again in the documents, particularly in connection with the secret weapons program: Kamran Daneshjoo and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

 

Secret Heart of Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program

 

Daneshjoo, 52, Iran's new minister of science, research and technology, is also responsible for the country's nuclear energy agency, and he is seen as a close ally of Ahmadinejad. Opposition leaders say he is a hardliner who was partly responsible for the apparently rigged presidential election in June. Daneshjoo's biography includes only marginal references to his possible nuclear expertise. In describing himself, the man with the steely-gray beard writes that he studied engineering in the British city of Manchester, and then spent several years working at a Tehran "Center for Aviation Technology." Western experts believe that this center developed into a sub-organization of the Defense Ministry known as the FEDAT, an acronym for the "Department for Expanded High-Technology Applications" -- the secret heart of Iran's nuclear weapons program. The head of that organization is Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 48, an officer in the Revolutionary Guard and a professor at Tehran's Imam Hossein University.

 

Western intelligence agencies believe that although the nuclear energy agency and the FEDAT compete in some areas, they have agreed to a division of labor on the central issue of nuclear weapons research, with the nuclear agency primarily supervising uranium enrichment while the FEDAT is involved in the construction of a nuclear warhead to be used in Iran's Shahab missiles. Experts believe that Iran's scientists could produce a primitive, truck-sized version of the bomb this year, but that it would have to be compressed to a size that would fit into a nuclear warhead to yield the strategic threat potential that has Israel and the West so alarmed -- and that they could reach that stage by sometime between 2012 and 2014.

 

The Iranians are believed to have conducted non-nuclear tests of a detonating mechanism for a nuclear bomb more than six years ago. The challenge in the technology is to uniformly ignite the conventional explosives surrounding the uranium core -- which is needed to produce the desired chain reaction. It is believed that the test series was conducted with a warhead encased in aluminum. In other words, everything but the core was "real." According to the reports, the Tehran engineers used thin fibers and a measuring circuit board in place of the fissile material. This enabled them to measure the shock waves and photograph flashes that simulate the detonation of a nuclear bomb with some degree of accuracy. The results were apparently so encouraging that the Iranian government has since classified the technology as "feasible."

 

SPIEGEL obtained access to a FEDAT organizational chart and a list of the names of scientists working for the agency. The Vienna-based IAEA also has these documents, but the Iranian president claims that they are forged and are being used to discredit his country. After reporting two years ago that the Iranians had frozen their nuclear weapons research in 2003, the CIA and other intelligence agencies will probably paint a significantly more sobering scenario just as the UN Security Council is considering tougher sanctions against Iran.

 

Mulling Sanctions

 

When France assumes the Council's rotating chairmanship in February, Washington could push for a showdown. While Moscow is not ruling out additional punitive measures, China, which has negotiated billions in energy deals with Iran, is more likely to block such measures.

 

China could, however, approve "smart" sanctions, such as travel restrictions for senior members of the Revolutionary Guard and nuclear scientists. Fakhrizadeh is already on a list of officials subject to such restrictions, and Daneshjoo could well be added in the future.

 

But the West would presumably be on its own when enforcing sanctions that would be truly harmful to Iran -- and to its own, profitable trade relations with Tehran. The most effective trade weapon would be a fuel embargo. Because of a lack of refinery capacity Iran, which has the world's second-largest oil reserves, imports almost half of the gasoline it uses. Sanctions would trigger a sharp rise in the price of gasoline, inevitably leading to social unrest. Experts are divided over whether it would be directed against the unpopular regime or if the country's leaders could once again inflame the Iranian people against the "evil West."

 

This leaves the military option. Apart from the political consequences and the possibility of counter-attacks, bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would be extremely difficult. The nuclear experts have literally buried themselves and their facilities underground, in locations that would be virtually impossible to reach with conventional weapons.

 

While even Israeli experts are skeptical over how much damage bombing the facilities could do to the nuclear program, the normally levelheaded US General David Petraeus sounded downright belligerent when asked whether the Iranian nuclear facilities could be attacked militarily. "Well, they certainly can be bombed," he said just two weeks ago in Washington.

 

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

 

 

 

 

Writing Jews out of Jerusalem's history

The whipping up of unrest around the Temple Mount is part of an insidious campaign to cast Jewish people as modern interlopers

Jeremy Sharon

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 November 2009 10.00 GMT

Article history

The Temple Mount, or al-Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, must rank as one of the most sensitive religious sites in the world. The sporadic riots of the past month at the site are therefore particularly alarming, as such incidents have the potential to ignite much wider unrest.

For that reason, it would seem to be in everyone's interest to reduce as far as possible tensions and friction at the Temple Mount to an absolute minimum. But the statements and actions of a number of Muslim clerics based in Israel, Palestinian politicians and even foreign governments have only inflamed and exacerbated an already explosive situation.

Of even greater concern is the underlying sentiment behind the recent riots, protests, declarations and denunciations. Whether or not "Jewish extremists" went up to the Temple Mount (and they did not) and irrespective of whether or not they planned to, the violent and vitriolic response to these rumours is indicative of a fundamental lack of tolerance for the religious beliefs of the Jewish people.

And the incitement has been widespread, coming from both political and religious sectors. The Islamic Movement in Israel, in particular, has made strenuous efforts to inform its flock that Jewish groups were planning to "desecrate", "storm" or otherwise "endanger" the al-Aqsa mosque and arranged buses for worshippers to come and "protect" the site.

Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement's northern branch and one of the principal provocateurs, declared to a crowd, "We'll liberate al-Aqsa with blood and fire" and stated that Israel was seeking to build a synagogue on the al-Aqsa mosque. Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad told a meeting of foreign ambassadors that the riots were due to "an assault by extremist religious settlers on the Temple Mount compound". The Syrian foreign ministry decided to stir the pot too, stating "[Damascus] believes the Israeli security forces' invasion of al-Aqsa was part of Israel's scheme to Judaise Jerusalem and destroy the mosque."

Not one shred of evidence has been presented to back up any of these accusations, the reason being that there simply is none.

Such baseless incitement over one of the most sensitive places of worship in the world is incredibly irresponsible. The destabilising effect of this agitation undermines whatever small amount of trust there may be between Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors. Additionally, it further inflames wider Arab and Muslim opinion, which is similarly deleterious to the project of tolerance and coexistence in the region. Inventing wild myths about Jewish designs on Muslim holy places can only harm any prospects for the normalisation of ties between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbours.

Aside from the agitation is the disturbing notion that Jews seeking to visit, or even pray at, their holiest place of worship (the Temple Mount and not merely the Western Wall) should be seen as provocation, desecration or in any other way unacceptable. Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are an indelible part of the Jewish national consciousness. The very term for the movement to re-establish the Jewish national home, Zionism, derives from a synonym for Jerusalem, Zion. Every day, three times a day, Jews all over the world turn towards Jerusalem and pray for it to be restored to its former glory; they have done so for nearly 2,000 years. That Jews are actually banned by the Israeli government from praying on the Temple Mount is a quite astounding concession to the demands of the Islamic waqf that administers it.

But preventing Jews from praying at the Temple Mount is not the only goal. A far more insidious campaign is afoot, one that rewrites history by arguing that there never was any Jewish temple at the site, thereby seeking to delegitimise any connection that Israel and the Jewish people may have to it, and by extension, the land as a whole. In a region in thrall to an epidemic of conspiracy theories, the irrefutable archaeological and historical evidence attesting to the Second Temple alone is sadly deemed insufficient.

The failure to acknowledge the connection the Jewish people have to Jerusalem is symptomatic of a problem which goes to the heart of the political conflict; that the Palestinian body politic has never reconciled itself to the fact that the Jewish people have deep-rooted historical ties to the land and are not simply foreign invaders who wandered in a few decades ago.

However politically expedient, Palestinian and Muslim leaders must desist from the incitement against Israel and the delegitimisation of the Jewish people's connection to the land, if there is ever to be any political accommodation between the two sides. If the Palestinian public never appreciates the depth of feeling Jews have for their holy places and their historical homeland, then the state of Israel, within any borders, will forever be illegitimate in the eyes of the Palestinians and will remain a target for eventual removal. Such an attitude poses a tremendous obstacle to the future prospects of peace between the two peoples.