Iranian Alert -- December 20, 2003 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD

The Iranian Student Movement Up To The Minute Reports ^ | 12.20.2003 | DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

Bush Urges Other Nations to Follow Libya

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 20, 2003
Filed at 1:41 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After winning concessions from Libya, President Bush urged other nations to recognize that the pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons brings not influence or prestige, but ``isolation and otherwise unwelcome consequences.''

Bush's remarks alluded to the Iraq war that toppled Saddam Hussein over his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and were apparently aimed at North Korea and Iran, still suspected of seeking and developing banned weapons.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bush, in back-to-back appearances late Friday in Britain and at the White House, announced that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had agreed after nine months of secret talks to halt his nation's drive for such weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them.

The series of negotiations and onsite inspections by U.S. and British experts were initiated by the long-reviled Gadhafi in March, shortly after he agreed to a settlement in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The result, Bush and Blair said, was that Libya agreed to disclose all its weapons of mass destruction and related programs and to open the North African country to international weapons inspectors to oversee their elimination.

Libya's most significant acknowledgment was that it had a program intended to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons, a senior Bush administration official said.

Libya's nuclear effort was more advanced than previously thought, said the official, who briefed reporters at the White House on condition of anonymity. U.S. and British experts inspected components of a centrifuge program to enrich the uranium, but did not see a fully operational system, the official said.

Teams of American and British experts went to Libya in October and December, the official said. The Libyan news agency Jana Tripoli quoted Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam as saying Libyan experts had shown their U.S. and British counterparts ``the substances, equipment and programs that could lead to production of internationally banned weapons.''

The experts visited 10 sites related to Libya's nuclear program, the official said.

The American and British team also was shown a significant amount of mustard agent, a World War I-era chemical weapon. Libya made the material more than a decade ago, and had bombs that could be filled with the substance for use in combat, the U.S. official said.

Libya also acknowledged having chemicals that could be used to make nerve agent. The official said there was little evidence of a biological warfare program.

Libyan officials further acknowledged contacts with North Korea, a supplier of long-range ballistic missiles, and provided the U.S.-British team access to missile research and development facilities.

However, the official said several ``remaining uncertainties'' about Libya's programs exist even after all the disclosures.

Bush said the United States and Britain, wary of Libyan promises, would watch closely to make sure Gadhafi keeps his word. And he said Libya's promises on weapons aren't enough; it must ``fully engage in the war against terror'' as well.

If Libya ``takes these essential steps and demonstrates its seriousness,'' Bush held out the promise of helping it build ``a more free and prosperous country.'' Neither he nor aides provided specifics.

The U.N. Security Council ended sanctions against Libya on Sept. 12 after Gadhafi's government took responsibility for the Pan Am bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims' families.

But the United States has kept its own 17-year embargo in place and has kept Libya on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

``As we have found with other nations, old hostilities do not need to go on forever,'' Bush said. ``Libya can regain a secure and respected place among the nations and, over time, achieve far better relations with the United States.''

In a statement carried by the Libyan news agency, Gadhafi called his move a ``wise decision and a brave step that merit support from the Libyan people.''

Senior U.S. officials said the Pan Am 103 families were briefed before Bush's announcement. But Susan Cohen of Cape May Courthouse, N.J., whose daughter was among the 270 people killed in the bombing said Gadhafi cannot be counted on to keep his promise.

``How can we trust somebody who has blown up a plane?'' she said.

It was the second foreign policy victory for Bush in a week, after last weekend's capture of Saddam. He said his action against the Iraqi leader, as well as U.S. efforts to rein in weapons pursuits by North Korea and Iran, ``have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction'' and played a role in Gadhafi's decision.

The president sought to nudge other regimes with both the threat of ``unwelcome consequences,'' if weapons pursuits are not abandoned, and the offer -- if they are -- of ``an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.''

``I hope that other leaders will find an example in Libya's announcement today,'' Bush said. ``When leaders make the wise and responsible choice ... they serve the interest of their own people and they add to the security of all nations.''

The move represents a shift for a nation long regarded as an outlaw.

While Libya is credited with moderating its behavior in recent years, Gadhafi has been depicted as an erratic, untrustworthy ruler. In 1986, President Reagan sent American warplanes to bomb the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin disco where a U.S. serviceman was killed.

The bombs struck Gadhafi's barracks and killed his young, adopted daughter and wounded two of his sons. Gadhafi, sleeping in a tent outside the compound, escaped injury.

Associated Press writers Beth Gardiner in London and John J. Lumpkin in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Libya-Weapons.html

[observer5]

Them Muslims in Iran will use the US to spring from their self-created tyranny of their Mullas and Muftis and Ayatollas...

so the can better hate all he INFIDELS later!

[F14 Pilot]

You are totally WRONG~!

[F14 Pilot]

Iran, Saudi worst religious freedom violators in Mideast

2003-12-18
Middle East Online
By Matthew Lee - WASHINGTON

US reports reveals Iranian, Saudi governments implement policies designed to intimidate certain groups.

Egypt was named a lesser offending nation.

The United States on Thursday assailed the Islamic states of Iran and Saudi Arabia as the worst offenders of religious freedom rights in the Middle East.

The two countries - along with pre-war Iraq - were listed in the State Department's annual report on international religious freedom as nations in which there is "state hostility toward minority or non-approved religions."

Egypt was named a lesser offending nation where there is either state neglect religious persecution or discrimination toward certain groups.

Israel and Turkey, which had been in Egypt's class last year, graduated up a level to the group of nations in which there is "discriminatory legislation or policies disadvantaging certain religions, according to the report.

The designations do not carry sanctions, but Iran is already subject to myriad US restrictions and continues to be listed as "country of particular concern" in the area of religious freedom.

Despite calls from religious freedom and human rights watchdogs, Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East, is not designated a "country of particular concern" although Thursday's report equates conditions there with those in Iran.

"These governments implement policies designed to intimidate certain groups, cause their adherents to convert to another faith or cause their members to flee," the report said.

In Iran, "members of the country's religious minorities ... suffered varying degrees of officially sanctioned discrimination, including intimidation, harassment and imprisonment," the report said, referring to Baha'is, Jews, Christians, Sunni and Sufi Muslims.

That discrimination - most pointedly directed at Baha'is and Jews - comes mainly in the areas of employment, education, and housing, it said.

As it has in its previous four editions, the 2003 report bluntly identifies Saudi Arabia as a country totally void of religious freedom.

"Freedom of religion does not exist in Saudi Arabia," it said, noting Riyadh's refusal to recognize any religion other than the Sunni branch of Islam and its bar on any public demonstration of a non-Muslim religion.

"Muslims not adhering to the officially sanctioned version faced harassment at the hands of the religious police," the report said, adding that Shi'as continued to be detained and face economic and political discrimination.

The report did note that Saudi Arabia had taken steps to rein in rising levels of intolerance toward other religions including the replacement of more than 2,000 government-paid imams accused of fomenting violence and terrorism.

"Senior (Saudi) officials have made some efforts to improve the climate of tolerance toward other religions and within Islam," it said, adding that there had been moves to delete disparaging references to non-Muslims in schoolbooks.

"However, there continued to be religious discrimination and sectarian tension in society ... including ongoing denunciations of non-Muslim religions from government sanctioned pulpits," it said.

Egypt was accused in the report of not acting consistently against religious freedom violations and, in some cases, being responsible for transgressions, particularly against of Baha'is and Christians.

"The government continued to prosecute persons, including Muslims, for unorthodox religious beliefs and practices under the charge of 'insulting heavenly religions'," it said.

The report was less severe on Israel and Turkey which were listed as countries in which laws or policies had put certain religions at a disadvantage.

In Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, the report said some non-Jewish citizens "continued to experience discrimination in the areas of education, housing, employment, and social services," it said.

Government funding to the religious and education sectors tends to favor Jewish citizens and control of marriage, divorce and burial regulations lies only with Orthodox Jewish authorities, it noted.

In Turkey, the report said Ankara continued to restrict some faiths, Muslim and non-Muslim, amid ongoing debate of the country's secular status.

"Restrictions continued on non-Muslim religious groups and on Muslim religious expression in government offices and state-run institutions, including universities, usually for the stated reason of preserving the secular state," it said.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=8229

[observer5]

How come ISLAM is the only "religion" who's founder dictates murder, rape and slavery?

All Muslims are directly or indirectly supporting terrorism against al "Infidels". Though they are the REAL infidels, as they believe in this FRAUD Mohammed.

[F14 Pilot]

US orders RAAF planes to spy on Iran without Australian approval

By Brian Toohey
December 21, 2003
The Sun-Herald

Australian Orion aircraft have followed US military orders to spy on Iran without first getting approval from Defence Minister Robert Hill.

The Government has announced that two specially equipped RAAF Orion P3C planes are flying surveillance missions over Iraq. However, The Sun-Herald has learned that the planes were diverted by US military commanders earlier this year to gather electronic intelligence on Iran.

According to Canberra sources, Senator Hill was angered by the RAAF's agreement to fly the mission against Iran without clearing such a sensitive decision with him first.

The Government has stressed that all Australian military units deployed in Iraq and the war against terrorism must always remain under Australian command.

Senator Hill declined to answer specific questions from The Sun-Herald about the controversial decision, which would normally require prior ministerial approval.

In this case, the deployment of the Orions against Iran went well beyond standard surveillance operations against Iraq or possible terrorist movements in the Persian Gulf.

A senior defence source said "Hill was entitled to be consulted from the start on such a politically delicate decision even if he was expected to eventually agree. I don't know what went wrong."

The Government is keen to maintain a good working relationship with Iran for commercial and immigration reasons.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/20/1071868698245.html

[MEG33]

Check with Howard,he's the one with the gumption.

[nuconvert]

Get a life....

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[nuconvert]

"It was the second foreign policy victory for Bush in a week, after last weekend's capture of Saddam. He said his action against the Iraqi leader, as well as U.S. efforts to rein in weapons pursuits by North Korea and Iran, ``have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction'' and played a role in Gadhafi's decision.

The president sought to nudge other regimes with both the threat of ``unwelcome consequences,'' if weapons pursuits are not abandoned, and the offer -- if they are -- of ``an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.''

``I hope that other leaders will find an example in Libya's announcement today,'' Bush said. ``When leaders make the wise and responsible choice ... they serve the interest of their own people and they add to the security of all nations.''

According to the liberal media, President Bush had nothing to do with it. [Please don't give him any credit. We're still trying to get over the Saddam story - seems to be their take]

[Pan_Yans Wife]

You need to become better informed.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

I didn't realize Gore was involved in the high-level talks with the Libyans.

[F14 Pilot]

Iran to mull anti-torture convention

2003/12/20
IRIB English News

Tehran, Dec 20 - The bill on Iran's accession to the UN convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or humiliating treatment or punishment will be on Majlis agenda this week.

Rapporteur of the judicial and legal commission at Majlis Mohammad Qazaie told IRNA here on Saturday that the bill had already been rejected by Guardian Council (GC) on financial grounds, referring it back to Majlis for a second review.

Qazaie said Majlis has managed to meet the cost through the State Management and Planning Organization (SMPO).

Some 132 countries, including 24 Islamic states have joined the convention.

Under the single article of the bill, the Iranian government is authorized to join the convention that comprises an introduction and 33 articles.

http://www.iribnews.com/Full_en.asp?news_id=194822

[blackie]

Freedom ~ Now!

[DoctorZIn]

Aghdash...Who?

December 17, 2003
New York Post
Megan Lehmann

IT doesn't trip lightly off the tongue, but Oscar pundits are fast learning how to pronounce Shohreh Aghdashloo's name.

The 51-year-old Iranian actress has burst on the scene like a firecracker with a star-making performance in the harrowing melodrama "House of Sand and Fog," out Friday.

Best Supporting Actress frontrunner Renee Zellweger - who gives a rough-'n'-ready performance as a feisty drifter in the lush Civil War drama "Cold Mountain" - had better watch her back.

The New York Film Critics Circle just handed Aghdashloo its Best Supporting Actress award, she has an Independent Spirit Award nomination in that category, and momentum is building ahead of tomorrow's Golden Globe nominations announcement.

"Shohreh is an incredibly skilled actress and she really brought a lot of heart to her character," says NYFCC chairman Andrew Johnston. "She was just one of the best things about that movie."

Which is saying something.

"House of Sand and Fog," Vadim Perelman's directing debut, also features outstanding performances from previous Oscar winners Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley as, respectively, recovering alcoholic Kathy Nicolo and deposed Iranian colonel Massoud Amir Behrani.

The pair clash - with tragic results - over the ownership of a modest Northern California bungalow, which Massoud buys at auction after Kathy is erroneously evicted for nonpayment of taxes.

Shohreh Aghdashloo (SHO-ray Agh-DASH-loo) plays Massoud's doomed wife, Nadi, who is torn between sympathy for Kathy and loyalty and respect for her husband.

In a richly textured performance, she blends an innate kindness with a sense of upper-class privilege and the painful isolation of a woman adrift in a foreign culture.

Aghdashloo, an Iranian exile living in Los Angeles, told The Post that by starring in the Hollywood production "House of Sand and Fog," she has achieved her American Dream.

And what would an Oscar win add to that?

"Oh my God, that's a very big dream to come true - to be appreciated in the highest form of all," she says.

"When they told me I won the [NYFCC award] I was jumping up and down, let me tell you the truth.

"Imagine after 26 years of work, being appreciated this way - it's unbelievable."

Aghdashloo has little in common with her desperate, repressed "House" character except that, like Nadi, she also fled Iran in the chaos of the fundamentalist Islamic revolution.

Just a few months before the Shah was dethroned and Ayatollah Khomeini returned, in 1979, Aghdashloo left her home in Tehran, a husband who chose to remain behind - and a promising acting career on stage and screen.

She landed in London and eventually wound up in L.A. in 1987, where she met and married Iranian playwright Houshang Touzie.

She has waited 15 years for a role like the one she nails in "House of Sand and Fog."

"I really enjoyed working on [TV shows] like 'Columbo' and 'Matlock' and a movie called 'Twenty Bucks,' she says.

But the only mainstream roles she was offered were less than appealing.

"I will not play a terrorist or a battered woman from the Middle East - and those were the kind of roles I would get auditions for," she says.

Aghdashloo first read American writer Andre Dubus III's best-selling book, upon which "House" is based, in 1999.

"I said to my husband, 'If one day they make a movie out of this book and do not give me this role, it would be really unfair' and my husband just said, 'Stop your dreaming,' " she says.

"So when the casting agent rang it was like a dream come true. I was speechless - for 20 seconds I couldn't talk."

Aghdashloo says she was "awed" by Dubus' spot-on depiction of Middle Eastern characters.

"When I finally met him, I said 'Excuse me Andre, where were you? Behind the door or under the table? You know everything about [Iranians], even our intimate relationships,' " she says.

"What I'm hoping for is not only that this movie opens up new dialogues between East and West, but that it also opens doors for non-American actors like myself.

"There is more to us other than being from a nest of espionage and terrorism."

http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/13635.htm

[DoctorZIn]

Man With a Mission

December 19, 2003
The Financial Times
Heidi Kingstone

It is past midnight in Baghdad. The streets in the residential neighbourhood are eerily empty. There is the occasional sound of gunfire. Earlier, the house of Iraq's most famous returned exile, Ahmad Chalabi, shook with the force of a bomb exploding nearby.

The helicopters that followed swooped low in search of the perpetrators, churning up the dust, their rotor noise throbbing through the houses. Now it is quiet again. The night air is cool with winter approaching, balmy, unlike the desperate heat of summer that makes Baghdad unbearable. In the newly refurbished mansion, there is much activity in spite of the hour.

"We want to help President Bush! We're doing better because of him! He did a great thing for us. I want to turn public opinion around in the US," Chalabi is saying. He pads about the large living room in the once swanky al-Mansour district in Baghdad, speaking loudly into an American-issue mobile phone, pacing back and forth. His accented but perfect English is witness to decades of exile - in Lebanon, Jordan, England and the US.

In Washington, it is four in the afternoon and the man who is talking to Ahmad Chalabi is Richard Perle - sometimes called, by his many enemies at home and abroad, "the Prince of Darkness" - an epithet he acquired because of his hardline stance on national security issues while he was a Pentagon adviser during the Reagan years.

Earlier this year Perle quit his chairmanship of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board over allegations, since dismissed by a Pentagon inquiry, of a conflict of interest with a private company on whose board he serves. But he is still influential. He and Chalabi have known each other for years. Chalabi is Perle's man, and vice versa. Their partnership helped to shape America's war in Iraq, and it still has the potential to shape the peace.

Perle is a leading policy spokesman for America's "neo-conservatives" who are credited with putting so much moral pressure on the administration that it undertook the invasion of Iraq. Chalabi has been the neo-Cons' prime exhibit: he is back in the Iraq he left as a child refugee because he, more than any other single figure, made the case for Iraqi "regime change" to the neo-Cons across many barren and frustrating years. Chalabi is here because he was a very large influence in bringing round the world's greatest power to share his dream of ridding Iraq, and the world, of Saddam Hussein.

He was one of the first Iraqis to see the former dictator in person after his capture last week. "I pulled up a chair about 2ft from Saddam. He was sitting on the side of the bed and had just woken up. I just looked at him. Saddam was unrepentant - he has learned nothing, shows no remorse, and didn't deny his crimes. He is a man who has lost his honour."

When I ask Chalabi if this 30-minute meeting, face-to-face with a man whose rule he had spent decades trying to destroy, was a defining moment, he replies: "I don't gloat." But his voice is tinged with disgust for the brutal dictator.

Chalabi's role in Saddam's downfall is a tremendous personal triumph, but he now lives with the consequences. One of these is that he is seen as America's stooge. He needs the Americans to stay and to prevail against both the domestic remnants of the Saddam regime and the foreign jihadis, or he is likely to find his throat cut. But he also needs them to go, for it has become clear in the months since he has been back that among even those Iraqis who like their country without Saddam, there are many who would like it more without the Americans.

Thus, when Chalabi writes or speaks in public - which he does infrequently - he calls for the Americans to be more active, even ruthless, in cracking down on the enemy within, but also to restore Iraqi sovereignty by developing the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, on which he sits, as a transitional government which - as he wrote in the Washington Post in August - should "share the burden of security with the coalition while directing the transition to democracy".

He survives in the tension between these two imperatives, amid the bombs and bullets, because he is tightly and constantly protected against the eventuality that one of these has his name on it. As such, Chalabi poses in the sharpest terms the dilemma of the American superpower. In giving a people freedom from tyranny, can it give them the order in which that freedom can be enjoyed? In the years before he returned, Chalabi had told anyone who would listen that it could. Now he has to justify his optimism.

AC, as his inner circle refers to him, has been up since the early morning, working straight through the day, despite the usual restrictions of Ramadan. He always seems to be on the move - meeting ministers or officials, discussing procedures for appointing judges, meeting with other Iraqi leaders about the constitution, trying to work out business deals. In the evenings men file into his office to talk, something Iraqis love.

Chalabi has made a home in a house that had belonged to one of his close relatives. Saddam's Mukhabarat, the secret police, took it over when the family went into exile. The secret policemen used its large rooms to keep meticulous files. They also stored stockpiles of machine-guns here, and built a sand-map of the neighbourhood on one of the floors. Now the place is filled with leather sofas, silver ornaments and beautiful cream tusks. An inlaid elephant from India, which stands guard at the entrance, used to be in Chalabi's house in Jordan.

On this night, Chalabi had broken the Ramadan fast at 5pm with Jalal Talabani, chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, the unelected interim authority made up of 25 Iraqis, and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two organisations representing the Kurdish minority.

Now, after his phone conversation with Perle, Chalabi is eating again, with a small group including his long-standing associate, Nabeel Musawi, who lives across the road. Musawi is another returned exile who acts as Chalabi's political adviser and deputy on the governing council. Food is laid out on large white oval platters across the table, far too much to eat, which is typical in the Middle East, where hospitality is second nature.

Despite the rather grand surroundings, there is nothing formal about dinner: everyone reaches over everyone else to gather up the marinated lamb, kebabs, rice and bread. Musawi and Chalabi seem as relaxed as diners anywhere, yet attempts have been made to kill them both, and their houses are surrounded by armed guards and concrete barriers to block suicide bombers.

The mood is upbeat. We dine as Paul Bremer, America's pro-consul in Iraq, is on his way to Washington, where he has been summoned for urgent talks. This does not displease my host. Something is in the air, which seems to be to his liking.

There's not much love lost between the two men. L. Paul Bremer III was appointed presidential envoy in May and, as such, is the senior coalition official in Iraq. Bremer, a former diplomat and leading expert on crisis management, reports to secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld.

Bremer has made decisions that Chalabi didn't like, such as slowing down the transfer of political power, and he did so without consulting Chalabi and others on the council. Chalabi thinks the coalition troops need to be pulled out from the cities in order to remove "this business of occupation".

There is a lot of talk at the dinner table about the Americans being able to deal with the terrorists in the "shit hole that has become famous" - Fallujah, where pockets of resistance against the Americans seem to be located, in what has become known as the "Sunni triangle".

A few days later, Bremer returns from Washington with an utterly new American plan for Iraq. Out goes the original, slow and methodical programme - the drafting of a constitution, the holding of a referendum, elections, and finally the handover of power to an Iraqi government. Now, with losses mounting and an American presidential election on the way, Washington is in a hurry.

So in comes plan B. No need for direct elections: America will transfer power to an unelected, interim Iraqi government next June. It will take charge of writing a constitution. And there will be no proper national election until 2005. This is a complete reversal. For Chalabi, it is a tremendous encouragement, as Plan B is really his Plan A, the one he wanted in the first place.

Chalabi has been in exile for 45 of his 59 years. Having become the best-known face of the main Iraqi opposition, the umbrella group known as the Iraqi National Congress (INC), he returned to Baghdad after Saddam's regime fell in mid-April for the first time since he was 14. The Americans had flown him to Nasiriyah in the south from where he drove across the desert up to Baghdad in the week after the Americans took control of the capital. But he makes it clear that he arrived in Iraq under his own steam, having spent the months before the war first in Tehran and then in the autonomous (Kurdish) region of northern Iraq. "General [Tommy] Franks [the US commander] was dead set against us and they did their damnedest to makes us fail," he says.

Chalabi's American backing, however ambivalent it sometimes appears, does him scant good in Iraq: he had little following on the ground when in exile, and fear that the Americans will leave and that the vacuum will be filled with a new set of tyrants keeps him from acquiring one now. He was not seen as a liberator: instead, once back home, he became just one of many politicians jostling for influence. His enemies depicted him as a puppet of the Pentagon with no popular credibility, whose relevance would vanish once Iraqis were able to express their preferences at the ballot box. Now, with plan B, Chalabi is back in business.

Chalabi and Bremer meet twice a week. Their relationship is cordial rather than warm. And both have the same end-game: peace and keeping the bad guys out. He tells me that Bremer arrived in Baghdad suffering from "the sin of pride". He behaved, he says, as the representative of the most powerful nation on earth, and saw the former exiled Iraqis as "just a bunch of failed nincompoops who either do our bidding or we will replace you with other nincompoops who will". The new plan means the Americans have been constrained to admit that they need the help of the nincompoops.

We have driven to Jalal Talabani's palatial spread on the banks of the muddy Tigris. The place is so large and garish it seems more like an official building than a residence, typical of the old regime. Bremer has returned and Chalabi is talking about the switch in strategy. "Yes, of course this is a vindication," he says. "We had an impasse and several things had to be done to resolve this. First, Iraqis wanted sovereignty. Second, a constitution had to be drafted by a properly elected body such as a constituent assembly. Third was that the US, due to various political timetables, had to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis to end the occupation. The block was that some in the US only wanted to hand over to an elected government. The only way to resolve this impasse was to decouple these three things. When this was put to President Bush he saw it and cut the knot. This was the position we were advocating before the war. It is an important development because we can take away this creeping venom from the relationship between Iraq and the US and lay the ground for a good strategic alliance."

Theories abound of what went wrong in post-conflict planning. The basic dichotomy, Chalabi believes, was that a struggle took place between the CIA, the state department and the defence department. The latter felt that Iraq could transfer to an electoral democracy easily, while the former two felt that the chances for any such thing were bleak.

Chalabi says the advantage of the new plan is that it will give Iraqis control of their own affairs much earlier, ending the perception that they are still under American occupation. What he doesn't say is that postponing the election, and relying more on the established groups that came to the fore in exile, gives an advantage to people like him. How popular he is ceases to matter. His skills - those of a coalition-builder who manoeuvres shrewdly behind the scenes - are now the ones needed. He is perfectly placed in the new dispensation. He is a member of the Shia majority; but he is a secular one, with the ear of Washington. Bremer has brought back a dizzying prospect for this man. He has the opportunity to emerge as the country's pre-eminent politician.

But will he be able to seize the opportunity? He can be stiff and evasive when he is not being charming and erudite. He likes to control his environment: and to control himself (he is a non-drinker). He forces people about him to extremes - of devotion, or loathing. But after three careers - as a scholar, a banker and now a politician - he is nobody's nincompoop. Above all, he has furthered his last career, that of politician, by getting to know which buttons to press in George W. Bush's Washington. His allies and supporters do not end at Perle: they include a still more powerful figure, the deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz. The screen-saver on his office computer is a picture of himself standing, in Baghdad, alongside Wolfowitz's boss, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Chalabi's office is in another former Mukhabarat building, this one known locally as the Chinese House. It is surrounded by graceful palms, but its architecture is typically vulgar. To reach his office you walk past a large fountain with circular hoops and red and green lights that shine in the dark. In the office itself the gold curtains are always drawn for security. Outside, in the compound, old Iraqi dinars with Saddam's picture on them are being incinerated. Sometimes, when the wind blows towards the office, you catch the pungent smell. However unpleasant, it is a sweet reminder to Chalabi of the destruction, hundreds of thousands of times a day, of the face of his enemy.

A typical day starts at 9am and ends well after midnight. In the evening he holds court. When I go to see him, he is breaking his fast with Kamel al-Gailani, the minister of finance, and several Americans from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), including George Wolfe, director of economic development, sent by the US Treasury Department to help rebuild Iraq's financial sector.

Chalabi is at ease with these Americans. He is a good raconteur and relishes being the centre of attention. At the time, Saddam is still at large and it is hard to get away from talking about him. Now Chalabi is telling the story of his own blind brother (there were nine children) who was a famous international law and constitution professor who had Saddam as a student and gave him a 3 per cent average. Chalabi's father had advised against it: even then Saddam was marked out as a future man of power and, as we subsequently learned, going against his authority could cost you dearly. Someone quips: "If George Bush lived here during the Saddam years he, too, would have become a Baathi." Wolfe takes Chalabi aside for a private talk. Later, he and Wolfe and the governor of the central bank sit together like schoolboys on a gilt sofa as he displays pictures of his family from the old days in Baghdad. One of the photographs shows his forebears at a food-laden table in their 27-acre garden in 1946. The Chalabi family's guest back then was Sir Edward Spears, the British general who administered much of the Middle East after the second world war. Chalabi calls the general the Bremer of Lebanon and Syria. "So we've all seen this before," he says, laughing.

Chalabi is talkative and relaxed in this sort of company because he is at least their intellectual equal, and had the kind of elite schooling that most Americans don't. He was educated by Jesuits from Georgetown, Washington DC, at the famous Baghdad College and, after a spell at Seaford College, a private Church of England school in Sussex, he went on to read mathematics at MIT at the age of 16. He received a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1969. "It's easy to be an American," he says. "It's a welcoming place and people are generally straightforward and open. I saw the good sides of being free, and I saw the idiotic sides. You can make stupid decisions but it's all part of the game and it's better than anything else. There are compromises to be made. There are winners and losers. But the losers don't get killed and the winners don't own everything."

By around 7pm the meeting room is filling up. Large and ornate upholstered chairs form a U-shape, and there are small plastic white tables with non-alcoholic drinks on them. Conversation rings to the sound of spoons clanking against the little glasses full of strong tea, stirring the obligatory, heavy sugar. Late arrivals include the deputy mayor of Baghdad, Hadi Faisal Saleh al-Salmany, and a tribal sheikh from Nasiriyah whose name I don't catch. The sheikh complains that the governing council is ignoring his people. Though he tells Chalabi he appreciates the Americans for getting rid of Saddam, he says he will oppose them if they do things wrong. The deputy mayor wants to talk about the electricity situation. "Our work must continue 24 hours a day but the security situation is so bad that we can just work in the daylight hours."

Why do Baghdadis take their troubles to Chalabi? (The wife of Saddam's half-brother, Watban, turned up one evening to ask about getting one of her houses back.) Part of it is the famous name. The Chalabis are an Iraqi dynasty, similar to the Kennedys in America. But much has to do with Chalabi's personal reputation as an effective operator. "Articulate, forceful, good at attaining his objectives," one high-ranking American official tells me. But his very ability to make a good case is now part of the indictment against him, from the many Americans who think the war against Saddam was a mistake. They believe he and the INC exaggerated the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and fed bad intelligence to the CIA. He is also often blamed for giving his Washington friends too rosy a view of the welcome US "liberators" would receive from ordinary Iraqis once the war was over.

When I put these accusations to him, Chalabi dismisses them all. The INC did press for the removal of Saddam, but he says it did so entirely openly. "We definitely made a case about Saddam and his crimes and the dangers he wrought on the Iraqi people and we kept doing it publicly and openly. The INC agenda was to remove Saddam Hussein from office." But he says the INC never made any independent claims on WMD. Its only intelligence contribution consisted of helping three defectors who claimed to have expert knowledge to make contact with the Americans.

"The idea that I would sell to Wolfowitz and Perle things like that in the face of a multi-billion-dollar intelligence operation run by the US is something ridiculous. It does not stand the test of logic or fact. Look at this: I went and sold this to Wolfowitz who sold it to Rumsfeld who sold it to Cheney who sold it to Bush and Bush got the approval of Congress, and then Colin Powell, on my say-so, someone with a known agenda and so many enemies, spoke to the UN, and I brought the US army to Iraq. It's a great thing. I'm getting maximum recognition, held up in the west as the man responsible for getting troops into Iraq."

But both Chalabi, and his opponents, fail to address a more subtle issue. Chalabi's contribution to the war was not primarily the intelligence he provided, nor contact with the defectors whom he knew, nor detailed knowledge of Iraqi society. What he gave was a moral imperative, with which Wolfowitz and others already agreed: that is, that Saddam was an evil who had to be removed for a raft of reasons - strategic, political and moral. He had that moral force because his enmity towards the Iraqi dictatorship has consumed almost all of his own lifetime. The Iraqi political analyst Siyamend Othman, whom I talked with in the eerily vacant Palestine Hotel a few days before it was bombed last month, believes that "more than any other Iraqi, he has contributed to the removal of Saddam Hussein, albeit by proxy. Forty or 50 years from now that is how history will judge him."

His personal story tells you why. In 1958, the day after General Abd al-Karim Qasim, Saddam's predecessor, seized power by slaughtering the Iraqi royal family and many of its ministers and officials, the new regime came looking for Ahmad's father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. He was president of the Iraqi senate under the constitutional monarchy of the Hashemites, who still rule Jordan today. The family had always been wealthy and powerful. Ahmad's uncle, Mohamed Ali, started the Rafidain Bank in the 1950s. British prime minister Harold Macmillan was a guest at their home in Baghdad. When the plotters arrived Ahmad's father was, luckily, abroad, as was his brother, Rushdie, a minister in the deposed government. (His parents died in exile years later.)

Tamara Daghistani, a close friend, tells the story that when the soldiers arrived at their home, Ahmad volunteered to be taken hostage as they held a pistol to his mother's head. Daghistani calls Chalabi "EO", which stands for "eternal optimist". They were born two years apart on the same street.

Her brother Timoor is the Jordanian ambassador to London and was married to King Hussein's sister, Princess Basmah. All are friends of Jordan's Prince Hassan. Ask her what she thinks has kept Chalabi committed to Iraq for all those years of exile and she says her generation yearns to recapture a golden age for Iraq in the more liberal and tolerant 1940s and 1950s. She remembers childhoods where families would go down by the river, dressed in their best outfits, full of colour, and the Tigris would be alight with candles; fishermen would return to its banks with a lantern shining at the bottom of their boat. "We lived Iraq, this was our daily fare. All my friends think I'm mad. They're leaving Baghdad, but I have this wonderful feeling of being home, and I'll be damned if I'll be kicked out again. This is where my memories are."

Chalabi says it never occurred to him to settle permanently in exile. "I like being here. It's my country and my people. It was my mission to return and it became clear when I left that there was no question in my mind that I belonged in Iraq, nowhere else. Even though I have lived in Lebanon, Jordan, England and the States and I had a good career, I never felt I was at home... Immediately I returned to Baghdad I felt an empathy with everyone and everything around me. The fact I was not in Iraq was something I missed very much and wanted to be part of."

Chalabi's forte is his cultivation of people. He began to do so at university and he has not stopped. He worked particularly closely with those who were committed anti-Baathists, including General (Mustafa) Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "Not for one day did I ever stop. Within two days of getting my PhD I flew from America to Tehran to meet them."

When he moved to Beirut to take up his post in mathematics, he met Leila, the mother of his four children, who lives in London in a big, rambling flat that overlooks green gardens and is full of art and artefacts - more lived in than his Baghdad home. Her father, Adel Osseiran, was president of Lebanon's National Assembly, and a leader in their war of independence.

One way Chalabi kept the flame alive was, in 1992, to establish the INC, the umbrella opposition organisation that led the struggle against Saddam. In the wake of the 1991 Gulf war, Chalabi rounded up disparate factions - Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians, ex-communists - to fight Saddam in exile, and the INC was its driving force over the next decade, bringing it both infamy and a high profile. Washington channelled funds to the INC, covertly, via the CIA. But the group acquired many inside-the-beltway enemies. It never really cohered: within it, differing interests and parties pushed their own agenda. The state department thought Chalabi ineffectual, pointing out that he failed to establish order on the INC's varying factions. On top of that there was an allegation of "accounting irregularities" made by the state department, which tied up promised funds and was later dismissed.

One thing above all others has dogged his steps, and given those who oppose him grounds for saying that he is not a man to be trusted. In 1978 in Jordan, Chalabi created Petra Bank, which grew rapidly and was the first to introduce credit cards and ATMs. But when it submitted its annual financial statement to the Central Bank of Jordan in 1989, the central bank maintained that millions had been transferred to other parts of the family business in Switzerland, Lebanon and London. The bank was closed and the central bank said the nation had to spend many millions to prevent a wider financial crisis. In 1992 Chalabi was charged with 31 counts of embezzlement, theft, and currency speculation and was convicted in a Jordanian military court for fraud and embezzlement. He was sentenced to 22 years' hard labour. Luckily, like his father when the Iraqi soldiers came to seek him almost 30 years before, when they came for him Chalabi was not there. He is said to have escaped in an official Syrian car, which ferried him over the border with his close friend Tamara Daghistani at the wheel. Neither will comment.

Chalabi says he was framed by the governments of Iraq and Jordan, but Abdul Ghafar Freihat, the judge appointed as head of the committee for evaluation of the bank's assets, insisted then and insists now that the direct legal evidence against him is clear and properly documented. The collapse did not, as it happens, ruin the Chalabi family, which has retained other successful businesses and has a worth estimated at the end of last year of some £150m.

It is de rigueur to hate Chalabi in Jordan. At an elegant dinner party of wealthy, well-connected and sophisticated Jordanians in Amman, men and women who travel regularly to London and wear the most expensive clothes, I was surprised to hear him universally described as corrupt, a thief who almost brought Jordan down, a man who should never have power in Iraq.

Dr Mohammad Said Nabulsi, the governor of the Central Bank of Jordan in 1989 who had to pick up the pieces when Petra Bank fell apart, is more vehement. "He's definitely evil... He fled within 48 hours. Is this what innocent people do? This was before investigations. He hadn't even been accused of anything. We just took him out as chairman." Nabulsi says Chalabi is a fraud, and his network of influential friends and allies has been formed, at least in part, by direct bribery or indirectly by extending bank facilities to people who cannot repay. "He was very clever in cementing relationships with very important people in Jordan. I discovered problems so big they needed quick action."

His defenders say that Chalabi was simply ahead of his time, and that he was guilty of mismanagement, not embezzlement. "On the one side you had, in Jordan, the old traditional banks," says Osama Halabeh, a Jordanian businessman who joined Petra Bank in 1983. "Then here comes this young banker who started doing things the modern way. A number of factors destroyed Petra Bank. In banking, rumours can be very disruptive. In Arabic we have a saying, 'capital is a coward'. No one was willing to risk money. He saw business opportunities, he wanted the bank to grow fast and make money and he wanted to make an empire quickly. One month before this happened the bank had foreign exchange problems and the Jordanian dinar was devaluing every day."

The Petra scandal has had the effect of making Chalabi all the more committed to winning in Iraq and bringing out what he sees as the truth. Documents have surfaced, he claims, which show "egregious interference, from the prime minister to the governor of the central bank". He says the case makes no difference to him now that he is in Baghdad. Not everyone agrees: Dr Mahmoud Othman, an independent on the governing council who thinks that Chalabi is highly capable, says Petra Bank is his weak link. "That's his main problem, and it has affected him very much. If somebody is responsible for public office they need credibility."

While Chalabi may now have the best chance he is likely to get of becoming the country's first post-Saddam leader, to do so he will have to overcome the handicaps of his long exile, the stain, justified or not, of the Petra Bank matter, and his unshakeable self-belief, often interpreted as a haughty, impatient demeanour. Iraq is not a democracy, but it shows some features of becoming one. Popularity and credibility matter. Chalabi's fluency with the neo-Cons doesn't carry with the neo-Iraqis. He might be Shia, but his secular traditions could count against him if indeed the clerics take control of the Shia discourse. If many Iraqis fear the emergence of an Islamic republic, dominated as Iran is by the clerics, they are not numerous or vocal enough to demand an irreligious leader like Chalabi, whose achievements have been built on lobbying behind the scenes in foreign countries. On the other hand, he could provide the bridge. The analyst Siyamend Othman believes Chalabi will always be influential but will never be No. 1. "He is a power broker, good at backroom deals, not a leader," something he has always maintained, perhaps disingenuously, that he doesn't want to be anyway.

If, in all of this, Chalabi is a prophet with at least some honour in his native land, he is one without any possibility of personal safety. When he returns home from one of his endless office evenings, a convoy of eight four-wheel-drives with darkened windows bucks and weaves at high speed through the night in which danger can be imagined around every corner, behind every window, on every rooftop. Just before the approach to his home the horns start blasting as the convoy zigzags past the roadblocks, alerting the guards to remove the sabre-tooth-like barrier that juts menacingly from the road.

As he steps out of the car, four bodyguards wrap around him like clingfilm. They walk in unison to his door and then release him into its spacious, gracious confines. After one such ride, I ask him if anything would make him give up and get back to some kind of normal life. "One way to stop is to get killed," he says. "Everyone dies." But if he stays alive it is hard to imagine an Iraq in which Ahmad Chalabi does not play a central role. He has won his dream, and is now honour-bound to live in it.

Heidi Kingstone is a freelance writer

hkingstone@hotmail.com

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[DoctorZIn]

...Them Muslims in Iran will use the US to spring from their self-created tyranny of their Mullas and Muftis and Ayatollas...

so the can better hate all he INFIDELS later!...

I believe you logic is flawed. Iranians are overwhelmingly frustrated with their theocracy. The majority want to replace it with a secular democracy. Even leading Shiite Muslim clerics in Iran (and Iraq)are beginning to support a secular democracy. These Muslim leaders are concerned that the people are leaving Islam because of the corruption and failure of their theocratic government.

Therefore, it does not follow logically that if the people of Iran want to replace their theocratic regime with a secular democracy that in a few years they will suddenly revert back to some hidden desire to "hate all the infidels."

What is happening in Iran should give hope to all those that have been longing to see a "reformation" in Islam.

[DoctorZIn]

Suspect Says Sent Money from Iran for Turkey Bombs

December 20, 2003
ABC News
Reuters

A Turkish man has admitted he received $50,000 from an Iranian source and sent it to Turkey to finance last month's suicide bomb attacks in Istanbul, a newspaper said on Saturday.

Adnan Ersoz, charged with attempting to change "the constitutional order by force of arms" on Friday, had confirmed that an international terrorist organization had given training and cash to members of a Turkish Islamist group, police said in a statement on Friday.

Police did not name the international organization. But a report in Hurriyet newspaper said he told interrogators he had breakfast with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and one of the Istanbul suicide bombers in Afghanistan before September 11, 2001.

There they decided to attack U.S. targets in Turkey, he was reported to have said.

"I followed up the necessary financing for the attacks which I thought would be carried out against U.S. targets," the newspaper quoted Ersoz as telling his interrogators. "I sent by courier $50,000 I got from an Iranian person."

He added that another $100,000 had been discussed but it was unclear whether the money was ever obtained.

The newspaper, close to the establishment, said Ersoz regretted the four bombings on Jewish and British targets in Turkey's commercial capital that killed 61 people and wounded hundreds. Most of the dead and wounded were Turkish Muslims.

He said the original target of the attacks had been the U.S. military base at Incirlik in southern Turkey, a key supply and refueling station for U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq.

"But for a reason I don't know, the actions were carried out in Istanbul," Ersoz said. Afterwards, he met with another now- captured alleged attack ring-leader in Iran, he said.

"We talked of how the actions had harmed Turkey and that the majority of those killed were Muslims," Ersoz said. "I didn't know it would be like this. When I learned Turks had died, I regretted it."

Police said Ersoz was detained on December 15 after they persuaded him to return to Turkey from Iran. More than 30 people have been arrested and at least 150 more questioned over the explosions.

Turkish officials and media have speculated about a possible bin Laden link with the Istanbul attacks. Bin Laden's al Qaeda network has been blamed for the attacks on U.S. cities on September 11, 2001.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20031220_183.html