More Signs of Democracy in Iraq?

by soccerdad

Lets see, we have marshall law, at least in Baghdad, Reports of Allawi killing prisoners right before the handover.

Not too surprising we are now going to see a clamp down on freedom of the press and the information coming out of Iraq.

An article in the Financial Times Iraq sets up committee to impose restrictions on news reporting describes how a committee has been set up to clamp down on the press.

Iyad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister, has established a media committee to impose restrictions on print and broadcast media, a government official announced yesterday. The step underlines an aggressive new attitude towards press freedoms, in spite of US efforts to nurture independent media.

Ibrahim Janabi, appointed to head the new Higher Media Commission, told the FT the restrictions - known as "red lines" - had yet to be finalised, but would include unwarranted criticism of the prime minister. He singled out last Friday's sermon by Moqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shia cleric, who mocked Mr Allawi as America's "tail".

Outlets that broadcast the sermon could be banned, he said.

The article states that this goes against what the US has tried to do earlier when Bremer abolished the Information Ministry and supposedly encourage private newspapers, etc. However, it should also be remembered that when Sadr published views negative to the US his paper was shut down and he was charged with murder. That whole approach backfired making Sadr, the second most popular man in Iraq behind Sistani, even though Sadr was a lowered ranked cleric when this started.

In addition, the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zeibari , criticized the Doha based al-Jazeera TV and described its coverage of events in Iraq as biased and deviated Link

The Iraqi minister said " we will not be tolerant with this unilateral coverage of the situation in Iraq and we will not permit those who hide before the freedom of the media..

News coming out of Iraq has been hard to get because of the security concerns. Most non-Arab journalists never leave the Green zone so they canb only report what they are told or see outside their window. Now if the Arab journalist are silenced there will be nothing but coalition spin coming out of Iraq.

So where is Iraq headed? I don't think its too hard to figure out. This from the Sun-Times

The report last week that Iraq's recently installed prime minister, Iyad Allawi, was setting up a new security service, the General Security Directorate, to "annihilate" terrorists, rang a bell. It was a very loud bell -- and it needed to be, in order to be heard over all the other alarms competing for attention.

Allawi's new initiative followed on the heels of his earlier announcement of granting himself emergency powers, such as banning groups considered seditious, imposing curfews and detaining anyone he chooses.

What Allawi's new measures brought to mind was the career of John Negroponte, the diplomat who replaced Paul Bremer as our man in Baghdad

Negroponte, seems to show up where ever the US is intervening, Vietnam, Hondurus, and now Iraq. Apperently he was good friends with the leader of the death squad, Battalion 316. His job was to make sure that Hondurus was a stable supply point for the contras opposing the Sandinista governement in Nicaragua.

More from the article

Iraq's new prime minister, like Negroponte, is well connected to the CIA, and Allawi's new policies are following a script Negroponte could have written. Iraq isn't a small country in Central America, but our role in Iraq and our presence there is duplicating our policies in Central America. And if you think Central America is an American success story, you can have hopes for Iraq.

Finally,

Negroponte's specialty in Honduras was setting one rebel group against another, getting them to eliminate one another. Whether he can do that on a much larger scale in Iraq -- setting tribe against tribe, sect against sect -- remains to be seen.

But, if Prime Minister Allawi, our former CIA asset, wants to know how to turn his General Security Directorate into an effective death squad, he knows where to go for advice and information. But Negroponte still claims ignorance about all that, just as Ken Lay claims he didn't know anything about what was going on at Enron, despite being praised and amply rewarded for his time there running it.

So is this why 900 American men and women died, to bring a CIA backed repressive dicatorship to Iraq? Well, no. But there is the oil of course. And this question posed in the Pittsburg Post Gazette Business of war / How much of the Iraq mission is about profit?

The Los Angeles Times recently opened a window on a new type of war profiteer: the insiders who served as public advocates for the Middle East invasion and who are now making money by guiding others to the burgeoning "business opportunities" in rebuilding postwar Iraq and in homeland security

We have heard much about Cheney and Halliburton. But here are some more examples. R. James Woolsey was CIA director from 1993-1995. He openly promoted the war against Iraq as a member of various groups. He now works for two companies that do business in Iraq and has an interest in a third that provides security and anti-terrorism services.

Then there's Randy Scheunemann, former adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He helped write the legislation that funneled $98 million to Iraqi exile groups who then turned around and fed us bad info in order to justify going to war. He now advises former Soviet bloc states on getting reconstruction business in Iraq.

The article concludes

There is little doubt that routing a tyrant, building a democracy and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction make more saleable rallying cries for war than, say, "making money for my friends." But the American people have every right to ask how much of the Iraq adventure can be ascribed to altruism and how much to the profit motive

And people wonder why I'm cynical