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America puts Iraq up for sale
By Philip Thornton and Andrew Gumbel
Sept. 22— Iraq was in effect put up for sale yesterday
when the American-appointed administration announced it was opening
up all sectors of the economy to foreign investors in a desperate attempt
to deliver much-needed reconstruction against a daily backdrop of kidnappings,
looting and violent death.
In an unexpected move unveiled at the meeting in Dubai of the Group
of Seven rich nations, the Iraqi Governing Council announced sweeping
reforms to allow total foreign ownership without the need for prior
approval.
The initiative bore all the hallmarks of Washington’s ascendant
neoconservative lobby, complete with tax cuts and trade tariff rollbacks.
It will apply to everything from industry to health and water, although
not oil.
But it is still likely to feed concerns that Iraq is being turned into
a golden opportunity for profiteering by multinational corporations
relying on their political connections.
Already, the biggest reconstruction contracts have been allocated to
American firms such as Bechtel and Halliburton, which have ties to the
Bush administration. They were selected behind closed doors, with no
opportunity for competitors to present bids.
Iraq is far from an ideal environment for business, however, and the
new initiative seemed calculated to overcome qualms overseas companies
have had about the risks to both people and capital.
It remains to be seen whether the prospect of buying into Iraq’s
most essential services, pricing those services at will and repatriating
profits in their entirety will be a strong enough lure to offset the
continuing inability of the US military to make the country secure from
resistance fighters and heavily armed criminal gangs.
Wholesale privatization is a dramatic departure from Saddam Hussein’s
centralized management of the Iraqi economy, which was reasonably successful
in capitalizing on the country’s oil wealth to build modern hospitals,
schools and other infrastructure, at least until the upheavals of the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War and the imposition of United
Nations sanctions after that conflict.
One Arab expert said: “There’s a fear that privatization of
too many things will lead to things being sold off for a mess of potage.”
Kamel al-Gailani, the Finance Minister in the provisional government,
claimed the moves would open Iraq to free- market competition that would
deliver investment, job creation and long-term economic growth.
“We are providing Iraqi citizens with the freedom and opportunities
they were denied for so long under the Baath party to realize their
economic potential,” he said. “The reforms will advance efforts
to build a free and open market economy in Iraq, promote Iraq’s
future economic growth, [and] accelerate Iraq’s re-entry into the
international economy and reintegration with other countries.”
The moves presented by Gailani, approved by the US and UK’s coalition
provisional authority, include:
• 100 percent foreign ownership in all sectors except natural resources;
• direct ownership as well as joint ventures and setting up branches;
• full, immediate remittance to the host country of profits, dividends,
interest and royalties.
Privatization of everything from electricity and telecommunications
to pharmaceuticals and engineering could see hundreds of previously
state-owned companies sold off.
There will be a tax holiday for the rest of this year, and income and
business taxes for investors will be capped at 15 percent from next
year.
Trade tariffs will be slashed to show that Iraq is a “country that
embraces free trade.” A five percent surcharge will be levied on
all imports, other than humanitarian goods such as food, medicine and
books, to fund the reconstruction effort.
America defended the decision to offer such a generous package of tax
breaks to entice investors.
“Capital is a coward,” said John Snow, US Treasury Secretary.
“It doesn’t go places where it feels threatened. Companies
will not send employees to places that aren’t secure.” Iraq’s
vast oil reserves, the world’s largest apart from Saudi Arabia’s,
would remain in government hands. “They’re going to run government
finances based on oil revenues,” Snow said.
Five months after the overthrow of Saddam, there are no visible signs
of reconstruction. Clean water and electricity are still not available
to most people and entire neighborhoods are still without phone lines.
Washington is desperately seeking help with footing the $100 billion
bill it estimates rebuilding Iraq will cost.
Source: Independent (UK)
Iraq Briefs
US soldier kills rare tiger during party
at Baghdad Zoo
A US soldier shot dead a rare Bengal tiger at Baghdad zoo after the
animal injured another soldier who was trying to feed it through the
cage bars.
Adil Salman Mousa, the zoo’s manager, told Reuters a group of US
soldiers were having a party in the zoo on the night of Sept. 18, after
it had closed.
“Someone was trying to feed the tigers,” he said. “The
tiger bit his finger off and clawed his arm. So his colleague took a
gun and shot the tiger.”
The night watchman said the soldiers had arrived in military vehicles
but were casually dressed and were drinking beer.
At the tiger’s now-empty cage, pools of blood showed that the soldier
passed through a first cage intended only for keepers and was standing
right up against the inner cage’s narrow bars. (Reuters)
Suicide bomber targets UN Baghdad HQ,
kills guard
A suicide car bomber blew himself up near UN headquarters in Baghdad
on Monday, Sept. 22 also killing a security guard and wounding 19 people,
a month after a huge truck bomb devastated the building.
The bomber struck on the eve of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Captain Sean Kirley said the bomber drove into the UN car park and was
stopped by an Iraqi security guard.
“The driver and the guard engaged in conversation and the bomb
was detonated from inside the vehicle,” Kirley said.
The force of the blast blew the car in half and scattered shreds of
metal dozens of meters.
In other attacks Monday, men in two cars attacked a police station in
the southern city of Basra with gunfire and explosives, wounding nine
policemen, a senior police officer said. In the northern city of Mosul,
assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades at a police station, wounding
a number of policemen and bystanders, local officials and witnesses
said. (Reuters)
Mystery pneumonia strikes US troops
Mysterious pneumonia-like illnesses and breathing problems appear to
be striking US troops in greater numbers than the military has identified
in an investigation — including more deaths, according to soldiers
and their families.
Some of the soldiers were deployed to Iraq and died but are not part
of a Pentagon investigation. Others who got ill told United Press International
they suffered a pneumonia-like illness after being given vaccines, particularly
the anthrax shot.
The Pentagon said that some dead or ill soldiers do not meet criteria
for the investigation. Pentagon health officials said a statistical
analysis essentially has ruled out vaccines and that the role of smoking
has emerged as a leading factor instead.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Neal B. Erickson who was deployed to Turkey for
Operation Iraqi Freedom told UPI he was hospitalized in Incerlik in
March with a pneumonia-like illness, 10 days after his fourth anthrax
shot. He got his next anthrax shot in August, and 10 days later was
hospitalized in California with what he said was the same pneumonia-like
illness.
Pentagon health officials repeatedly have emphasized that the number
of sick soldiers in their investigation show there is no “epidemic”
among US troops. They are concentrating on 19 service members who have
gotten so sick they needed ventilators to breathe; two of those died.
But there have been at least eight other deaths between Mar. 31 and
Aug. 27 all with some link to respiratory problems, chest pains or fluid
in the lungs.
All of those deaths appear on the Pentagon list of non-combat related
fatalities but were not included in the pneumonia investigation.
“They keep saying there is no common exposure, but every one of
those soldiers got vaccinated,” said Dr. Jeffrey Sartin, an infectious
diseases doctor at the Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “That
is one definite common exposure that should not be dismissed out of
hand.”
This spring, Sartin treated Army Spc. Rachel Lacy of Lynwood, Illinois,
who died Apr. 4 after a pneumonia-like illness. He and a coroner linked
that soldier’s death to either the anthrax or smallpox vaccines
she had received Mar. 2, before falling ill.
The military, which did not treat her or perform the autopsy, said her
death was likely not due to vaccines. (United Press International)
Member of Iraq’s governing council
shot
Six gunmen firing assault weapons from a Toyota pickup truck chased
a member of Iraq’s Governing Council in her car and seriously wounded
her on Sept. 20 in the first assassination attempt targeting the US-created
leadership body.
The brazen, daytime attack was against Aquila al-Hashimi, one of three
women on the council, a Shiite Muslim and a strong candidate to become
Iraq’s representative at the United Nations.
Al-Hashimi, critically wounded in the abdomen, was rushed to the al-Yarmouk
Hospital for surgery and was later moved in a convoy of American armored
vehicles and military ambulances to the US military hospital at Baghdad
International Airport where she was reported in stable condition. Three
of her bodyguards were also wounded. (Associated Press)
Rumsfeld: Rebuilding up to Iraqis
Iraqis rather than Americans will have to repair most of the damage
done to their country by Saddam Hussein’s socialist Baath party,
according to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“I don’t believe it’s our job to reconstruct that country
after 30 years of centralized, Stalinist-like economic controls in that
country,” Rumsfeld told a National Press Club audience on Sept.
11. “The Iraqi people are going to have to reconstruct that country
over a period of time.”
He added, “The infrastructure of that country was not terribly
damaged by the war at all.”
At one point he was jeered by two hecklers opposed to the illegal US
occupation of Iraq.
“Hey, Rumsfeld, what do you say, how many soldiers did you kill
today?” they chanted before they were removed from the club. Police
said no arrests were made. (Seattle Times)
Guantanamo chaplain held for ‘aiding
prisoners’
By Andrew Gumbel
Sept. 22— The American Army’s Muslim chaplain
who ministered to so-called enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay
naval base in Cuba has been arrested and detained, apparently on
suspicion that he provided aid and comfort to potential terrorists.
James Yee, 35, an Army captain, has been held since Sept. 10 at
a Navy brig in South Carolina. Whether he had been charged was not
clear from reports, but a spokesman at the US Southern Command,
responsible for overseeing the Guantanamo Bay base, said he had
been granted access to military lawyers. Under US military law —
assuming he is to be prosecuted — a prisoner must be granted
trial within 120 days of being arrested.
Although details were still sketchy, Yee’s arrest prompted
an outcry among American Muslims who immediately seized on the Catch-22
circular logic of a chaplain being arrested for doing, on the face
of it, precisely what his job required: providing encouragement
and spiritual comfort to the prisoners in his charge.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic Relations said:
“There are those in our society who love to question the patriotism
of American Islamics and this, unfortunately, will give them ammunition
to do that, no matter what the facts of the case are.”
Officially, members of the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
which contributed to the case, refused to disclose any details about
Captain Yee. One law enforcement source, however, told The New York
Times that the investigation began before his latest trip to Guantanamo.
Captain Yee was searched when he arrived back at the naval air station
in Jacksonville, Florida, and was found to have sketches of the
prisoners’ facilities in his luggage.
That, various US newspapers reported yesterday, might form the basis
of a charge of espionage. Lawyers familiar with previous cases involving
the violation of secrecy or espionage laws — notably the aggressive,
but baseless, prosecution of the Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen
Ho Lee - say the FBI and other government agencies often fail to
distinguish between non-malicious handling of classified documents
and actual espionage. Thus, they said, prisoner locations at Guantanamo
might well be classified, but that does not mean Captain Yee had
them mapped for any reason other than to help to find his way around.
The arrest is part of a pattern since Sept. 11, 2001 of official
hostility towards anyone in direct contact with suspected members
of al-Qaida, enemy fighters or other detainees. The Justice Department
now reserves the right to eavesdrop on conversations between terrorism
suspects and their lawyers, in violation of the constitutional guarantee
of lawyer-client privilege.
Lynne Stewart, a US lawyer, is herself soon to stand trial on terrorism
charges. She was arrested shortly after Sept. 11 on the basis that
she may have passed on dangerous messages from her client, the blind
Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is in prison for his role
in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Captain Yee is a West Point graduate who converted to Islam shortly
after the Gulf War in 1991. Changing his first name to Yousef, he
left the military to study his new religion in Syria and returned
after four years as an imam. He rejoined the Army in the late 1990s
as a chaplain, serving first at the Fort Lewis base in Washington
state and then, as of 10 months ago, at Guantanamo Bay. He kept
an apartment in Miami, which was searched by the FBI after his arrest.
He was interviewed frequently on Muslim issues within the armed
forces and beyond, and issued many unequivocal condemnations of
violence. “An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian
lives, is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to
be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not,” he said
in late 2001.
His work at Guantanamo has presumably included an interest in several
dozen suicide attempts among the prisoners. Earlier this year, he
told the BBC: “I like to think that whatever I can do, whether
in their personal situation or help with them being here in any
way, that I have a positive effect on their life.”
Source: Independent (UK)
100,000 bikers stage tribute on ‘Trail
of Tears’
By Andrew Clennell
Sept. 21— More than 100,000 motorcyclists set out
yesterday on a ride in commemoration of thousands of American Indians
herded from their homes in the infamous “Trail of Tears” 165
years ago.
Through 1838 and 1839, the Cherokee east of the Mississippi river, numbering
13,000, were evicted and forced on a 1,000-mile trek to Oklahoma and
Alabama in which 4,000 people died.
The trek has been called one of the defining moments in native American
history. The US government wanted to get rid of the Indians because
settlers were keen to prospect for gold.
In October 1994, eight motorcyclists started the first Trail of Tears
ride — by the end of the run their number had grown to 100.
This year, more than 100,000 motorcyclists set off on the ride from
Tennessee to Oklahoma.
Before the motorcyclists began Sunday, Sept. 21 the ride leader and
organizer, Bill Cason, said that money raised from selling t-shirts
and mementos was helping to provide for college scholarships for American
Indians in Tennessee and Alabama as well as paying to set up historical
sites.
“Our main thing is education,” said Cason, 65, a retired construction
worker riding with his wife, Paulette.
“They even take it [the Trail of Tears] out of history books and
we’d like for them to put it back in.”
The motorcycle parade was to span 200 miles, beginning in Chattanooga
along the Tennessee River and ending at Waterloo, Alabama.
Eastern Cherokee deputy chief, Carroll Crowe, said the motorcycle commemoration
“when first organized I think was just kind of a joyride. I think
it has grown into a kind of significant event.”
He said the Cherokee Trail of Tears was ignored because it was a “shameful
part” of American history where Cherokees in North Carolina, Virginia,
Georgia and Tennessee were rounded up and forced out.
“If you look back through the history books, there is probably
not a paragraph of any history about any Native American, as far as
significant history about the actual Trail of Tears, putting all Cherokee
in stockades,” Crowe said.
“People just aren’t aware of what truly happened. Any cause
in which people are willing to get out and call attention to it, that
is beneficial,” he said.
President George W. Bush this year authorized an area in Chattanooga
along the Tennessee river, where some of the captive Cherokees were
temporarily held, to become part of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga
National Military Park.
Source: Independent (UK)
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