US transfers "limited sovereignty" to Iraq

-------- Eager to trump news reports of Fahrenheit 9/11's record-breaking weekend box office sales, the Bush administration announced today that the transfer of Iraqi "sovereignty" from the US Coalition Provisional Authority to a US-appointed Iraqi government had taken place, two days earlier than the planned June 30 target date. But just how much sovereignty do Iraqis have? According to the terms of the agreement, laws decreed by Viceroy Paul Bremer must stay on the books.

The U.S. led-coalition ... has put in place major legal revisions that would force Iraqis to get drivers' licenses, obey traffic laws, ban certain people from holding office and place American contractors above the law. On Saturday, Bremer signed an edict that gives U.S. and other Western civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law while performing their jobs in Iraq. The CPA's laws remain in effect after the occupation ends unless rescinded or revised by the interim government, a task that another Bremer-signed law allows, but only after a difficult process. Bremer's orders are needed because the interim government has virtually no authority to pass legislation of its own, other than a national budget, said Yahia Said, an Iraqi expert in democratic transition at the London School of Economics.

(Boston Globe: Iraq's incoming government must abide by American-made laws) Doesn't really sound like sovereignty, does it? The article does not mention the law allowing 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses in any industry. It does mention that foreign contractors in Iraq are not subject to Iraqi law, which will make it even more difficult for Iraqis to find the billions of dollars of their money which has gone missing while under American control.

Billions of dollars belonging to Iraq is not accounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was given responsibility by the United Nations for the country's finances, British lawmakers and aid activists said Monday. There are glaring gaps in the handling of $20 billion generated by Iraq's oil and other sources since the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein ended last year, according to reports from the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third-largest political party, and Christian Aid. The Christian Aid report also said the majority of Iraq's reconstruction projects have been awarded to U.S. companies, which charge up to 10 times more than Iraqi firms. The United Nations gave the U.S.-led coalition responsibility for the Development Fund for Iraq after the fall of Saddam in May 2003. It stipulated that expenditures must be shown to be in Iraq's best interest and that all revenue should be paid into a simple fund. But Christian Aid and the Liberal Democrats said no audit on the money was carried out until April.

(Boston Globe: Reports say billions of dollars of Iraqi money unaccounted for) Iraq will probably never recover that looted oil money, and their new so-called sovereignty is a sham, but at least the US has been rebuilding their country, especially schools neglected by Saddam.

The US government lists renovations done on 2,356 Iraqi schools in a $70 million effort as one of its major accomplishments. The idea behind it was to meet a pressing Iraqi need and quickly win goodwill from a wide swath of the population. But many Iraqis, like Mustafa Ibrahim al-Jubari, weren't won over. Mr. Jubari is the deputy principal of the Zam Zam elementary school (named after a sacred freshwater well in Mecca). His two-story building in northern Baghdad smells far from fresh. Jubari points to a four-month-old paint job already peeling, a roof that was caulked but leaks, and new porcelain toilet bowls installed on top of backed-up sewage lines. Though a tiny piece of the more than $18.6 billion committed by the US to Iraq, the money spent on Iraqi schools, and their poor state, ties together much that's gone wrong here, past and present, as the June 30 handover approaches. Critics of US-led reconstruction efforts say it has been slow to come, poorly targeted, and occasionally littered with waste.

(Christian Science Monitor: Quick school fixes won few Iraqi hearts)
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I'm serious, see the movie.
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Farenheit 911 Opens Today!

-------- What are you doing reading this rag? You should be at the movie theater watching Fahrenheit 911!
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Tell us something we don't know

-------- The the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States issued a report on the history of Al Qaeda today. One of their conclusions was that Saddam Hussein was not in any way involved with those attacks.

Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States.

(Associated Press via Yahoo News: 9/11 Panel Says Iraq Rebuffed Bin Laden) This should not come as a surprise, since there was never any evidence that he was. There were no Iraqis on the hijacked planes, Al Qaeda was identified as the responsible organization soon after the attacks, and there was never any known connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the idea that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks somehow seeped into the American consciousness, with some prodding from the Bush cartel. Bush called Saddam an "ally of Al Qaeda" in a recent press conference, and as recently as last Monday Dick Cheney was still claiming there was a connection between them.

On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator "had long established ties with al-Qaida."

(Ibid) From this we can conclude that Dick Cheney is a lying sack of shit. But we already knew that too.
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Bush ignores more experts

-------- Although the White House desperately wants to change the subject, people are still talking about the abuse and torture of Iraqi POWs at Abu Ghraib prison. Policies regarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib were apparently modeled after the ones applying to Al Qaida and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. You might think the administration would consult with military lawyers when formulating policy related to military law. It turns out that was not the case.

The Bush administration routinely bypassed or overruled Pentagon experts on international law and the Geneva convention to construct a sweeping legal justification for harsh tactics in the war on terror, the Guardian has learnt. In one instance, President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or access to a lawyer at Guantánamo, was issued without any consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said. The military order issued by Mr Bush in November 2001 was the first such directive since the second world war, and the administration's failure to seek the Pentagon's advice on what would emerge as the entire system of detention at Guantánamo surprised Pentagon officials.

(The Guardian: Bush ignored Pentagon lawyers over tactics in war on terror) You may remember that in the preparations for the war in Iraq Bush ignored the opinions of weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, and military planners. All those opinions turned out to be correct. Will the same thing happen here? Stay tuned.
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