I should have thought of this. Our failure to determine the nature of the new Iraq government has other unanticipated side-effects. Among them, we think the new government is too closely aligned with Iran. And, therefore, we refuse to turn over any of the intelligence files we have acquired, either through occupying the old intelligence agency buildings and carting away their files, or through the espionage that we have carried out since.
The director of Iraq’s secret police, a general who took part in a failed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, was handpicked and funded by the U.S. government, and he still reports directly to the CIA, Iraqi politicians and intelligence officials in Baghdad said last week. Immediately after the elections in January, several Iraqi officials said, U.S. forces stashed the sensitive national intelligence archives of the past year inside American headquarters in Baghdad in order to keep them off-limits to the new government.
Iraqi leaders complain that the arrangement violates their sovereignty, freezes them out of the war on insurgents and could lead to the formation of a rival, Iraqi-led spy agency. American officials counter that the new leaders’ connections to Iran have forced them to take measures that protect Iraq’s secrets from the neighboring Tehran regime.
The dispute also highlights the failure of the Bush administration to establish a Western-leaning, secular government in Baghdad following the 2003 invasion.
The Iraqi intelligence service “is not working for the Iraqi government – it’s working for the CIA,” said Hadi al Ameri, an Iraqi lawmaker and commander of the Badr Brigade, formerly the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the driving force behind the powerful Shiite coalition that swept the parliamentary elections.
“I prefer to call it the American Intelligence of Iraq, not the Iraqi Intelligence Service,” al Ameri continued during an interview last week at his heavily guarded home in Baghdad. “If they insist on keeping it to themselves, we’ll have to form another one.”
Yahoo: Knight-Ridder
This impasse will have to be resolved somehow. Iraq cannot be a sovereign nation if the CIA remains its intelligence agency.
Well, it’s clear that we have to invade Iraq and liberate the oppressed Iraqi people from their Iranian puppet regime that we installed!
Well Booman, the impasse may be resolved when bush figures out what the word sovereign actually means.
Well, he probably can’t say the word sovereign anyway.
.
is enough freedom Bush’s way.
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
is not likely to be a popular notion, to understate the case, in any country in the region.
The last thing that the US wants is democracy, in Iraq, in Saudi-Occupied Arabia, in Iran, in Jordan, you name it.
Preventing such an eventuality is a longstanding cornerstone of US foreign policy, and its maintenance requires an increasingly large slice of the US budget pie.
Gee, I’d love to hear what information those files contain. Anything on Poppy Bush?
Laughable. Like the Iraqis don’t already have their own agency. This is politics, not intelligence. But I hope it gets massive airplay. We control their oil infrastructure, their economy, their national cash reserve, and all rebuilding contracts (US companies only). Add this brick to the wall of lies and the picture keeps getting clearer.
Those ballots cast meant more to the Iraqis than most pundits realized. Their overriding concern has been to regain control of their country, and get the US out since passage of SC Resolution 1546. We may not think much of that document, but they understand the power of a US-drafted, UN-approved timeline for a return to sovereignty.
Always unreported, never referred to, the “roadmap” returns all functions of governance to the Iraqis in December of this year. If I was working for the CIA (or Halliburton, et. al.), I’d be looking for a transfer to anywhere but Iraq. Soon.
I think the Iraqis will just say “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.” (You arrogant, hegemonic, colonial f*ck.)