The statistics were included in a report written by Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office, who testified before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing on Iraq stabilization and reconstruction.

The American military declassified the statistics so he could present them to the hearing in his report, Mr. Christoff said in an interview. The figures cover attacks on American and Iraqi forces and civilians.

The curve traced out by the figures between June 2003 and December 2005 shows a number of fluctuations, including several large spikes in insurgent activity — one as recently as October of last year. But while American and Iraqi officials have often pointed to the downward edges of those fluctuations as evidence that the steam was going out of the insurgency, the numbers over all seem to tell a different story, Mr. Christoff said. "It's not going down," he said. "There are peaks and valleys, but if you look at every peak, it's higher than the peak before."

Officials have recently noted that the numbers of attacks in the final two months of last year dropped after an October peak, which occurred around both Ramadan and a referendum on Iraq's constitution. But Mr. Christoff's chart shows that the number of attacks in December, nearly 2,500, was almost 250 percent of the number in March 2004.

But the trend line began even before March 2004, when the number of attacks was already nearly double what it had been in July or August 2003. Mr. Christoff's paper cites a senior United States military officer saying that "attack levels ebb and flow as the various insurgent groups — almost all of which are an intrinsic part of Iraq's population — re-arm and attack again."

Attacks against Iraqi security forces have grown faster than the overall count; by December 2005 they had grown more than 200 percent since March 2004. Of course, as more Iraqis are trained and put into the field, more of them are targets.

The paper, citing a contracting office in Iraq, said that as attacks had fluctuated downward in the final two months of last year, attacks on convoys related to rebuilding efforts had risen. Twenty convoys had been attacked, with 11 casualties, in October 2005, while 33 convoys had been attacked, with 34 casualties, in January 2006, the paper says.


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

The support of the communist parties, which have accused Mulford of "directly interfering" in India's affairs, is vital to the minority Congress government's survival in the national parliament.

Bhattacharjee called Bush the leader of the "most organised pack of killers in the world" at a rally last month where he also accused the Congress government of pursuing a pro-US foreign policy.

The Indian Express said Mulford told Bhattacharjee in his letter that the eastern state of West Bengal was a key foreign investment destination and such remarks could be detrimental, especially in drawing US investment.

Last month, leftists demanded Mulford's recall after he made comments that prompted a protest from the Indian government.

Mulford had suggested New Delhi could lose out on a landmark nuclear deal with Washington if it did not vote against Iran at a meeting of the UN atomic watchdog, which took place early this month. Mulford later told the government he regretted the Iran comments.

India voted along with 26 other nations to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme.

The envoy has also raised hackles for questioning leftists' opposition to the opening of India's retail sector to foreign investment.

The withdrawals and reductions will test the Iraqis' ability to tamp down attacks and rebuild, said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, warning in a new report: "It is too soon to predict the extent to which Iraqi forces can eventually replace coalition forces."

Britain, with about 8,000 troops in Iraq, is the United States' most important coalition ally. Officials repeatedly have said they hope to begin bringing home some of their troops this year, though Defense Secretary John Reid has played down recent reports that Britain has settled on a timetable for withdrawal.

"We are going to hand over to the Iraqi security forces ... whenever they are ready to defend their own democracy. We are there as long as we are needed and no longer," Reid told The Associated Press in a recent interview in London, stressing that any withdrawal would be done in stages.

On Tuesday, however, he also made clear that "if things in Iraq continue to progress as they are, there will be significantly fewer British forces there by next year."

Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, told the AP his country might keep its scaled-down contingent of 900 troops in Iraq into 2007.

But other countries have abandoned the coalition, shrinking the overall size of the force to 157,500, including the 138,000 U.S. troops. The Pentagon says the American contingent has been cut to its lowest level since last summer, when a buildup for election security expanded the U.S. force to about 160,000.

In the months after the March 2003 invasion, the multinational force peaked at about 300,000 soldiers from 38 nations - 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain, and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

Among the larger contributors to pull out of Iraq was Ukraine, which withdrew its last contingent of 876 troops in December.

Bulgaria also brought home its 380 infantry troops, and though it plans to send in 120 soldiers by mid-March to help guard a refugee camp north of Baghdad, those will be non-combat forces with limited rules of engagement.

Many of the non-U.S. forces are in heavily Kurdish and Shiite regions that are relatively peaceful, unlike Sunni Arab flashpoints where American troops are concentrated.

Key coalition members such as South Korea and Italy - the United States' No. 2 and 3 partners in Iraq after Britain - will begin drawing down this spring.

South Korean officials say they plan to bring home about 1,000 of their 3,270 troops in phases this year from their current base in the northern region of Irbil, where they help train Iraqi security forces and provide security for U.N. officials stationed in the area.

Although a timeframe and details have not been set, the South Korean parliament in December approved the staged drawdown while extending the overall deployment to the end of the year. The South Koreans have not engaged in combat with insurgents, but their deployment nonetheless has been highly unpopular back home.

Italy, which has about 2,600 troops based in the southern city of Nasiriyah, announced last month it would withdraw all its forces by the end of 2006. Officials say the troops will be pulled out gradually and that the current contingent will be roughly halved by June, with civilians replacing soldiers in some tasks.

Japan, which has 600 non-combat troops in Samawah to purify water and carry out other humanitarian tasks, has officially denied media reports that it plans to begin bringing its forces home as early as March, with the withdrawal completed by May.

A staunch supporter of U.S. policy in Iraq, Tokyo dispatched troops there in 2004 in its largest military deployment since World War II, and in December, it extended the mission for a year. However, Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted a senior government official last weekend as saying the country was planning an "exit from Iraq."

Pulling out "is this year's biggest theme," Kyodo quoted Kyoji Yanagisawa as saying in a speech, adding: "At any rate, (Japan's military) will withdraw within several months."

Kyodo also reported, citing Japanese government sources, that diplomats and defense officials from Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States reached a basic agreement on the timing of withdrawals at a secret meeting in London last month.

Reid, the British defense secretary, denied "we've got sneaky plans to cut and run," though he acknowledged meeting with Japan's defense minister last month and that Britain's military has "planned for all contingencies."

The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years.

Not all Latinos, though, are in step with the military's recruitment goals. In some cities with large Hispanic populations, the focus on recruitment has polarized Latinos, prompting some to organize against recruiters and to help immigrants learn their rights.

Critics say recruiters, who are under pressure to meet quotas, often use their charm and an arsenal of tactics, including repeated calls to a recruit, lunch at a favorite restaurant and trips to the gym. The Army also parades rigged-out, juiced-up Hummers wherever youths gather as promotional tools.

"We see a lot of confusion among immigrant parents, and recruiters are preying on that confusion," said Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam veteran who is director of the Chicano/Latino Arts and Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego, and is active in the counterrecruitment movement.

While the military emphasizes that it works to enlist all qualified people, not just Hispanics, military experts say that bringing in more Latinos is overdue. Hispanics have long been underrepresented in the Army and in the military as a whole. While Latinos make up 10.8 percent of the Army's active-duty force, a better rate than the Air Force or Navy, they account for 14 percent of the population as a whole.

Hispanics also make up the fastest-growing pool of military age people in the United States, and they are more likely to complete boot camp and finish their military service, according to a 2004 study on Marine recruitment by CNA, a research group that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. Recruitment studies show that Hispanics' re-enlistment rates are also the highest among any group of soldiers.

"They are extremely patriotic," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Brodeur, commanding officer of the Recruitment Battalion covering Colorado, Wyoming, parts of Montana and Nebraska.

That many Latinos in the military are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, typically engenders a sense of gratitude for the United States and its opportunities, something recruiters stress in their pitch.

Poorer and less educated than the average American, some Hispanics view the military as a way to feel accepted. Others enlist for the same reasons that may attract any recruit: the money, the job training, the education benefits and the escape from poverty or small-town life.

Edgar Santana, a skinny 17-year-old senior who recently hovered around the Army recruiting table at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs, said he was attracted by all those reasons, despite the war in Iraq. "I get the freedoms, and I can enjoy them, so I believe I have to pay back that debt," Mr. Santana said.

Tony Mendoza Jr., 18, a senior at North High School in Denver, has already enlisted in the Army and will enter boot camp this summer. For him, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were what drove him into boots. "My parents think I'm going to go in the Army and die, but I wanted to do it," Mr. Mendoza said.

Patriotism alone, though, does not account for the rise in Hispanic enlistment. The increase has gone hand in hand with a vast Army marketing campaign that includes Spanish-language advertisements on Univision and Telemundo, the country's two largest Spanish-language networks, and on the radio and in Hispanic publications. The budget for this campaign has increased by at least $55 million in four years.

The Army has also expanded a small pilot project that allows 200 Latinos each year to undergo rigorous English language classes and then retake the Army qualifications tests. Ten cities now offer that option, up from five.

Recruiters have noticeably stepped up their presence in schools and neighborhoods with Hispanic populations. "You see them today where you would never see them three or four years ago," said Rick Jahnkow, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and non-Military Opportunities in San Diego.

In addition, the Army has made better use of bilingual recruiters to reach out to Latino communities. In the Colorado area, the number of bilingual recruiters has increased in the past 18 months to 13 from 4.

Recognizing the importance of family and its weight in the process is crucial in Hispanic families, recruiters say. Since a mother's approval can make or break a deal, recruiters spend considerable time with Latino families. They have dinner, chat often on the telephone and remain patient. They even attend local Latino churches.

Sgt. First Class Luis M. Galicia, a bilingual recruiter based in Colorado Springs, is always quick to say he was born in Mexico and raised, on little money, in California. He and his family picked grapes for extra cash. He says that his experience helps him connect.; "there is a trust issue."

One incentive meant to appeal to this community, President Bush's 2002 executive order that permits legal residents in the military to apply for citizenship within one year, as opposed to three years, has actually done little to entice Latinos. In fact, the number of Army soldiers who are not citizens has declined since 2002 to 2,447 last year from 3,312. The same is true for enlistments.

Simply speeding up the application process for people already in this country legally does not seem to provide enough incentive to counter the risks of joining up in a time of war.

The recruitment campaign has in fact divided the Latino community. Some of the country's high-profile Latino organizations, like the League of United Latin American Citizens, support the military's efforts, viewing it as an important path to socioeconomic advancement.

"The fact that Latinos are underrepresented in the service causes us concern because the service is often a way to the middle class for many immigrants," said Brent Wilkes, national director of the league. "If you don't have a lot of options, would you rather go into the service and get a middle-class career, or stay in the fields all these years?"

But community activists in places like California and Puerto Rico call that logic wrongheaded. "This is not the time to sign up," said Sonia Santiago, a psychologist and a counterrecruiter in Puerto Rico who founded Mothers Against the War after her son, a marine, was sent to Iraq in 2003. Dr. Santiago has routinely confronted recruiters outside schools. "Those benefits don't mean anything, if they are buried or sick for the rest of their lives," she said.

Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines. African-Americans saw the same thing happen during the 1970's and 1980's, an accusation that still reverberates. Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military's officer corps.

"The fear is that the military is going to try to replace, consciously or unconsciously, African-Americans with Hispanics," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

For bilingual recruiters, tapping into the Latino population has its own set of frustrations. Often, Latinos are willing to join the Army, but cannot. During his rounds at the Wal-Mart, Sergeant Barron encountered a number of illegal immigrants; they are immediately disqualified. Other Latinos lack adequate English skills or high school degrees, he said.

In the past year, a Latino counterrecruitment movement has arisen in several major cities with the goal of blunting what organizers call overly aggressive and suggestive recruitment in Latino neighborhoods. Some critics say recruiters sometimes gloss over the risks and mislead potential recruits and their parents. Latino parents, especially those who speak little English and know little about the military, are especially susceptible to a recruiter's persistence and charm, critics say.

Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was a marine and died in Iraq in 2003, founded Aztec Warrior Project for Peace to help counsel Latinos on the military. He said he often encountered parents who did not understand the intricacies of the process. One set of parents in Southern California, he said, mistakenly signed papers allowing their 17-year-old to join the military on his 18th birthday, believing that the government required military service, something the recruiter did not clarify.

Michael I. Marsh, a lawyer who represents migrant workers in Oxnard, Calif., said he wrote a letter to a local recruitment battalion last year after a 17-year-old's parents signed off on his Army Reserve enlistment at 18. The parents told him they were under the impression that they were signing to authorize a physical exam and blood work. When the youth later tried to nullify the contract, he was told it was too late and that if he tried to pull out, he would be ineligible for school money and federal employment.

After Mr. Marsh sent the letter, the teenager was allowed to withdraw his enlistment, Mr. Marsh said. Military contracts are not binding until a person takes a second oath of enlistment.

"The recruiter does not lie, but he does not tell the whole truth," Mr. Suarez said. "If you don't know the question to ask, you don't get the information. With language and cultural differences, it's complicated."

S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army's recruiting command, said that the Army investigated allegations of misconduct and that, while recruiters were expected to encourage people to enlist, they must be honest about risks and benefits.

"Given the fact that we are a nation at war, recruiters have to be up front about the risks," he said.

Insurgent attacks, looting, and sabotage are increasing war recovery costs. Iraq's water, sewer, and electricity systems are in worse shape than previously thought, Bowen and Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, both said. Iraq's oil refineries and pipelines also need repairs, they told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The World Bank, the United Nations and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority estimated in 2003 that Iraq's reconstruction needs through 2007 would be about $56 billion. The U.S. authorized $18.4 billion for Iraq rebuilding, with an expectation that other countries and companies would contribute to the total, along with Iraqi oil revenue.

Iraq's ability to help pay for rebuilding will depend on the new government's success in boosting revenue from crude oil exports, reducing energy and food subsidies, paying for a growing security force and making payments to international creditors and victims of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Christoff said.

Iraqi officials are having problems producing and refining oil and protecting refineries and pipelines from attacks and estimate that the country will need more money to achieve its production goals, Christoff said.

"The irony is that the oil, which was prophesied by many who came before this committee as the way you pay for all of it, doesn't pay for all of it," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the committee's chairman, said of the invasion and reconstruction costs.

Iraq pumped 1.53 million barrels of crude a day in January, according to Bloomberg estimates. The average output during the past five years was 1.92 million barrels a day because of higher production before the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

International donors have provided about $2.7 billion of $13.6 billion pledged for Iraqi reconstruction, Christoff said.

"We're pushing real hard on the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, for example, who between them pledged $1 billion, and we haven't seen very much of that yet," James Jeffrey, a senior State Department adviser on Iraq, testified.

Jeffrey said that when Japan, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and "just two or three of the Arab countries that have pledged the most" make good, there will be an additional $3 billion or $4 billion flowing into Iraq.

Of seven different measures of infrastructure performance presented Wednesday at the committee hearing by the inspector general's office, only one was above pre-invasion values.

Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service.

In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low.

At the same time, as Iraq's oil exports are plummeting and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office.

And those may not be the most serious problems facing the physical infrastructure, said Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office.

In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers "misses the point," Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack.

"What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs," Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors.

The chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America's original ambitions in the rebuilding program were likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the U.S. Congress and international donors were still prepared to spend.

This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Christoff of the GAO.

Bowen's office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein's regime had also been made available for reconstruction at one time or another.


Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former U.S. government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

WASHINGTON Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below pre-invasion values, even though $16 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses have told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Of seven different measures of infrastructure performance presented Wednesday at the committee hearing by the inspector general's office, only one was above pre-invasion values.

Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service.

In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low.

At the same time, as Iraq's oil exports are plummeting and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office.

And those may not be the most serious problems facing the physical infrastructure, said Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office.

In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers "misses the point," Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack.

"What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs," Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors.

The chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America's original ambitions in the rebuilding program were likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the U.S. Congress and international donors were still prepared to spend.

This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Christoff of the GAO.

Bowen's office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein's regime had also been made available for reconstruction at one time or another.

Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former U.S. government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune

Iraq's gasoline comes from two sources: domestic refineries process a limited amount of the nation's crude into gasoline, but it is imports from neighboring nations that run most of the country's vehicles and generators. Saudi Arabia and Turkey supply more than half of Iraq's domestic needs. In August 2005, after Iraq's debt rose into the millions, Saudi Arabia turned off the spigot. On January 21st, after Baghdad's unpaid bill topped a billion dollars, Turkey stopped loading gasoline for Iraq.

The supply from Kuwait is also drying up. Lloyd-Owen International (LOI), a Florida-based company, had arranged to truck in 1.3 billion liters of gasoline from the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to gas stations throughout Iraq over the last 19 months. On February 2, Alan Waller, chief executive officer of LOI, stopped supplies to Baghdad because of payment arrears. By this weekend, Iraq's imports had plummeted from the previous norm of 12 million liters a day to three million.

In a strongly worded letter he emailed to this weekend to Thomas Delare, the economic counselor at the United States embassy in Baghdad, Waller wrote: "The government of Iraq is unwilling to pay what is correctly owed us or even meet to discuss and that we cannot get any assistance from the U.S. administration in order to help. As such, I can only step back and pull all my international staff out of Iraq for their own safety and let the Iraqi people deal with the situation in their own way."

Waller claimed that the government of Iraq has illegally canceled his contract and is now negotiating with a different U.S. company, Global Network Transportation, to deliver fuel in Iraq. The non-payment has infuriated the Iraqi security guards on LOI's payroll, who threaten to line 400 trucks along the one-lane highway from Iraq to Kuwait to blockade the border.

In late 2003, local suppliers were charging 96 cents a gallon to purchase and deliver gasoline while Halliburton of Houston, Texas, charged an average of $2.65 a gallon for the same service via its sub-contractor Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company. In spring 2004, shortly before the country was handed over to the Iraqis, the U.S. military said the contract was too expensive and canceled it.

The new Iraqi government then awarded an identical gasoline supply contract to LOI and its partners, Geotech Environmental Services of Kuwait. LOI charged one-seventh of Altanmia's price for delivery, a mere 18 cents a gallon compared to the premium that the military had paid Halliburton previously.

Waller says LOI has delivered 37,000 tankers of gasoline throughout Iraq over the last 19 months "without losing a single tanker to insurgent or terrorist activity," unlike Halliburton 's convoys which were frequently attacked. LOI/Geotech's contract was supposed to run through June 2006, but is now in doubt.

Production Slump

To make matters worse, sabotage and cold weather have plunged Iraq's own oil production and refining into crisis. Despite sitting on the world's third biggest oil reserves, Iraq's exports slumped from a high of 2.1 million barrels per day just 1.1 million barrels a day in December, their lowest level since the war in 2003.

This slide, together with the delivery crisis, has led to major gasoline shortages in Baghdad, where vulnerable drivers wait in quarter-mile-long lines. The capital's erratic electricity has exacerbated the problem by forcing people to run to gas-hungry generators to keep the lights on and the air conditioning running in their houses and stores.

No matter what else was wrong under Saddam Hussein, gasoline and kerosene cooking oil were always available and cheap. The U.S. government maintained this policy of supplying gasoline at just 20 cents a gallon, well below its actual cost. But the cash-strapped Iraqi government has recently changed that policy, tripling gasoline prices at the end of the year, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund. This price hike has become a major source of anger but it bought Baghdad a $685 million IMF loan on December 24, 2005.

Contention over the price increase split the ministry of oil, which is supposed to oversee production and distribution. Iraq's oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum was first asked to leave his post in late December 2005, when he protested the fuel price increase.

Although al-Ulum returned to his job in early January, a week ago the government again asked him to resign.

Refinery Attacks

Blame for the crisis spreads as easily as oil in a puddle. Government officials in Baghdad and Washington charge that corrupt mid- and low-level officials are collaborating with "insurgents" who have created chaos by attacking domestic fuel convoys and pipelines and siphoning off supplies to sell at a profit.

Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, was quoted in the February 4 New York Times saying that 40 to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country are diverted away from the government. By infiltrating senior management positions at the major northern refinery in Baiji and threatening truck drivers, insurgents have been able to tap into pipelines, empty trucks, and sell the oil or gas themselves, he says.

Old fashioned corruption has made matters worse. Theft was rife at the Baiji refinery Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, said the chair of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. One example is an Iraqi member of parliament from the Conciliation and Liberation Bloc, Meshaan al-Juburi, who stole money earmarked for armed security he promised to provide, according to the New York Times.

Jubiri's tribe is powerful in Salahuddin Province, through which the oil pipeline from Baiji runs. He has since fled the country and is now believed living in Syria.

In another incident, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested this weekend with other employees and several local police officials. They were charged with helping to orchestrate a March 2 mortar attack on the plant, a Northern Oil Company employee told the New York Times.

But Waller told CorpWatch that while "terrorist" groups are responsible for many violent attacks, the main problem is criminal gangs and poor people trying to survive. "This country is like Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union."

"Members of the U.S. military have said on CNN that long fuel lines in Baghdad are due to insurgent activity - not true," the LOI executive says. The real problem is "very simple. Lack of payment is forcing Iraq into chaos and corruption."

Indeed al-Ulum, the former oil minister, told the London-based newspaper Al Hayat late last year that "oil and fuel smuggling networks have grown into a dangerous mafia threatening the lives of those in charge of fighting corruption" according to a BBC translation.

Working on a Resolution

With gasoline supplies dwindling and anger growing, Washington and Baghdad are scrambling to return Iraq to what passes for normal. Iraqi oil ministry officials say that the payments will resume soon. "The oil ministry is working with the government in order to speed up the payment process. There is no problem. It is just a matter of time and the money will be paid," ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told reporters.

U.S. embassy officials are more pessimistic. "I scheduled to have some high level meetings in the next several days with Ministry of Oil officials," Delare wrote to Waller on February 6. "I wish I had encouraging news for you, but despite our efforts to resolve the payments arrears problems, we have had no success so far," the embassy economic counselor in Baghdad added.

In an e-mail update to CorpWatch, Delare added: "The fuel situation is regarded as a very serious matter that is prompting daily contact between embassy and the government at all levels -- from the ambassador and his counterparts to more technical staff and their interlocutors."

But officials in Baghdad do have another fallback plan -- their one-time arch enemy, Iran, which is close to the current Iraqi government. Indeed this subject was discussed as far back as last July when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited Tehran, a prospect that mystifies Waller given the ongoing political disputes between Iran and the U.S. government.

"Due to payment issues and the fuel problems the U.S. backed government of Iraq is now seeking to purchase and import fuel from Iran, and Najaf is the new Iranian capital of Iraq," Alan Waller, chief executive officer LOI, wrote on February 4th, to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

It was a historic moment at the National Press Club in Washington, only blocks from the White House. On February 2, the preliminary findings of the International Commission on Crimes Against Humanity were read out by Ajamu Sankofa, executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY and former national secretary of Blacks for Reparations in America.

Listening to the verdicts, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, exclaimed: "This is what our German forbearers in the 1930s did NOT do. They sat around, blamed their rulers, said 'maybe everything's going to be alright.'... That is something we cannot do. Because I don't want my grandchildren asking me years from now, 'why didn't you do something to stop all this?'"

The findings were based on five days of public testimony in New York in October and January. The work of the Commission brought together a unique combination of former government officials, experts in international law, human rights monitors in the relevant areas, and victims of the crimes under investigation. It was a Commission of great legal, ethical, and moral credibility based on its integrity, its rigor in the presentation of evidence, and the stature of its participants.

On the first charge of committing wars of aggression, the Commission found: "The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush Administration authorized and is conducting a war of aggression against Iraq in violation of international law, including The Nuremberg Principles, Geneva Conventions of 1949, the United Nations Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so, the Bush Administration has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity."

Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter was a compelling witness before the Commission on this issue. Ritter led the investigation into the defection of Sadam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel:

"Dick Cheney said because of Hussein Kamel's defection the United Nations, indeed the United States, received evidence that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program... Dick Cheney was lying. Dick Cheney knew that he was lying.... But it is evidence that the Bush administration willfully exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs, thereby negating any case they might make about the existence of a clear and present threat that warranted pre-emptive attack."

The actual conduct of the war was also a major issue investigated by the Commission, especially the destruction of the city of Fallujah using white phosphorous and hyperbaric bombs. The Commission saw film of the bombing of civilians in Fallujah that was truly damning. Shown was the pilot's camera trained on the ground where people were running in the street. The pilot asks his controller, "shall I take them out?" And the controller says, "Yes." The pilot kept a laser focused on the crowd until a guided bomb exploded in the middle of the running crowd.

The destruction of Fallujah, a city of over 300,000 people, in retaliation for the death of four U.S. mercenaries, was a vivid reenactment of a historic war crime — the destruction of the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice in 1942 by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a high Nazi official.

On the indictment for illegal detention and torture, the Commission found: "There was substantial evidence submitted through testimony and documents that the Bush Administration committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in conducting its 'War Against Terror.' It did this by developing and implementing policies and practices that violated international law and international human rights to force information from detainees and to punish those whom it believes may be 'enemy combatants.'"

Barbara Olshansky, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Commission of an August 2002 memo written for Alberto Gonzales, now Attorney General: "It talks about what the traditional definitions of torture are... and it says that a very good case can be made for redefining torture. And the definition that is recommended in that memo is that torture really is only when someone is at the risk of complete organ failure or death. And that is a new definition of torture in the United States according to this administration. Then the memo proceeds to...examine all the ways that the government could avoid liability, even if its actions meet that definition of torture. It is a staggering document..."

The results of such "legal theories" by the U.S. government at the very top were described by Brig. General Janis Karpinski (U.S. Army ret.), the former commandant of the infamous Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq. After photographs of the torture of prisoners there were revealed, Gen. Karpinski entered the cell block where this happened and found a memo attached to the wall calling for harsher interrogation techniques and signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the margin was handwritten: "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski went on to testify that a high-ranking general demanded that Iraqi prisoners be "treated like dogs."

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, provided particularly chilling testimony on the horrible forms of torture used by the U.S.'s 'Coalition of Willing' and declared, in a very moving moment, "I'd rather die than have someone tortured to save my life."

On the indictment for destruction of the global environment: "The testimony of scientists and the scientific reports and other documents submitted during the inquiry support a conclusion that the Bush Administration has committed crimes against humanity by its environmental policies and practices."

Daphne Wysham, from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network gave a searing example: "On June 8, 2005, the New York Times, through whistle-blower Rick Pilz, exposed [White House official Philip] Cooney as the primary censor of climate change policy documents at the highest levels of government. Two days later, Cooney resigned... Cooney and his staff's edits were pervasive with 100 to 450 changes per report, and shameless. Among the topics the government doesn't want you to know about are the national and regional impacts from climate changes, consequences like glacial melting and floods."

On the indictment for the destruction of New Orleans: "The evidence of the Bush Administration's conscious and deliberate failings in preventing the foreseeable devastation, including death toll, caused by Hurricane Katrina, particularly in New Orleans, and its failure to respond efficiently and appropriately after the Hurricane was overwhelming. Its failures constitute crimes against humanity."

The Commission heard stunning testimony that the government knew full well that New Orleans would be inundated in a major hurricane, and the President himself knew two days in advance that Katrina would hit New Orleans. But no efforts were made to evacuate the predominantly poor and Black masses of the city. As a result, over 1,300 people died on the Gulf Coast with over 3,000 still missing.

Annette Addison, a Katrina survivor, told her personal story to the Commission: "So many Army trucks just was driving past us. We even waved for the Army trucks to help us because we were so desperate. We was dehydrated. They did not give us any assistance. We even asked the police for water, and where we could get gas to get out of the city. The police just looked at us like we was nobody, as though we were nothing. Many were going into the stores, and they said they were looters. But to be honest, they was going into stores to survive. It was people helping people.It was not the Army, it was not the police. It was not the ones that were in authority to help us. It was just the community helping each other to survive."

At the February 2 press conference to release the Commission's preliminary findings, three of the five Commission judges were present, along with Commission Convener C. Clark Kissinger. In presenting the preliminary findings (more findings will be presented later), the judges were emphatic about the criminality of the Bush administration.

Judge Ann Wright, 29-year Army reserve colonel with 16 years in the State Department as former deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, and Micronesia:

"I believe the Commission is incredibly important for the future of the United States and really the world, because it's the people of America who are speaking to these very serious indictments. It's the people who are coming forward with evidence, their personal testimony in many cases of things that have happened to them, or cases of their lawyers, cases they have worked, the human face of what torture is all about, what detention is about, what war is all about — a war that's conducted the invasion and occupation of a country that did nothing to the United States of America."

Judge Abdeen Jabara, board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and past president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee:

"People who launch a war of aggression are in violation of international law, have committed crimes against humanity, and that is the kind of discourse we need to introduce into the United States... the use of torture in the press often reported as "abuse" rather than torture. Of course, there is no international convention for the prevention of abuse, but there is an international convention for the prevention of torture. So we need to change the way in which these items are talked about in order to get people to face up to the fact of what this government is doing."

Judge Jabara closed by pointing to the profound significance of what Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, had said. Murray testified that his government and the American government were OK with receiving intelligence reports that had been obtained by torture in Uzbekistan. His superiors in the British foreign service said to him that, "we don't mind as long as we didn't ask them to do that. We can still receive this information." Murray then added, "After I heard that, I understood how some clerk could sign off on these cattle cars that were going to Auschwitz." That's really what is at stake, Jabara pointed out. "The use of this torture, the beginning of all these black sites — all of these things are the road to Auschwitz."

Hyde accused Democrats of playing politics, with an eye on November's congressional elections, by offering the three resolutions demanding:

-Information on a practice that has been called extraordinary rendition, or sending suspects abroad to countries where they would allegedly be tortured for information.

-Documents about U.S. policies regarding U.N. anti-torture conventions.

-Documents and records involving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's December trip to Europe, during which she was dogged by reports of alleged secret European jails.

All three proposed resolutions were defeated on almost straight party-line votes.

The committee's senior Democrat, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, denied Hyde's accusations of partisan motivation.

Pillar said mistakes made by US intelligence agencies in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction did not drive the administration's decision to invade, according to The Post.

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

The paper said Pillar was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading counterterrorism analyst.

By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

In his article, he said he believes that the "politicization" of intelligence on Iraq occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results, the report said.

Instead, Pillar describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq, The Post said.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which analysts had discounted.