Instead, Pillar writes in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, connections were drawn between the terrorists and Iraq because "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the `war on terror' and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood."

The specific critiques in Pillar's 4,500-word essay, titled, "Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq," are not new. But it apparently is the first time such attacks are being publicly leveled by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly involved behind the scenes--before, during and after the invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago.

Because of his position, Pillar would have had access to, and likely intimate knowledge about, virtually every piece of Iraq-related intelligence maintained across all agencies within the U.S. government.

Pillar also wrote in his essay that the administration went to war without first considering any strategic-level intelligence assessments "on any aspect of Iraq" and that the intelligence community foreshadowed many post-Hussein woes, though the findings were largely ignored before the March 2003 invasion.

Excerpts from Pillar's article were first reported by The Washington Post on Friday. Foreign Affairs released a copy of the essay later in the day.

Pillar, a career intelligence official, retired from the CIA last year and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

The administration responds

The White House did not respond specifically to Pillar's charges Friday, but Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council, did point to previous administration statements defending its use of intelligence.

The administration first went on the offensive last fall in an effort to thwart what President Bush, in a Veteran's Day speech, called a "deeply irresponsible" effort "to rewrite the history of how that war began."

Jones said Friday that the administration's prewar statements "about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community."

But in his essay, the man responsible for coordinating the intelligence community's collective view of Iraq directly challenged the notion that the prevailing wisdom within the nation's spy services supported the decision to invade. In fact, Pillar wrote, "If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war ."

He also wrote that the Bush administration "used intelligence not to inform decision-making but to justify a decision already made"--to topple Hussein's regime.

In making its case, the administration aggressively promoted pieces of "intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war," Pillar said.

He also said: "This meant selectively adducing data--`cherry-picking'--rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments."

Pillar's allegations about the public use of selective intelligence on Iraq comes in the wake of news that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his bosses to leak classified information about Iraq in summer 2003 to defend the administration's case for war. The statement about Libby's secret testimony was contained in court papers filed in connection with his obstruction-of-justice case.

Misleading statements

Although he acknowledged the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities, Pillar said that intelligence "was not what led to the war." And he saved some of his sharpest criticisms for the administration's repeated public statements in 2002 and 2003 about "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda--statements that have been repeated despite findings from the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no collaborative relationship between the two.

"The issue of possible ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda was especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a public case for war," Pillar wrote. "In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be `linked' to almost anyone else if enough effort is made . . . . [But] the intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda."

He said the administration constantly pressed for more data to support the purported link, just one way it politically influenced the outcome.

"Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-Al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials," he wrote. "It is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a result."

Although he acknowledged analysts were not strong-armed by anyone in the administration to bolster the case for war, Pillar said intelligence officials were more subtly influenced.

Analysts, who often measure success by the attention they receive from policymakers, "felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious," he said.

He also said he never received a request from any administration policymaker for any assessments of Iraq "until a year into the war."

Nicholas Cullather, the former official historian for the CIA who now teaches at Indiana University, said the article represents a defense of the longstanding tradition within the CIA of maintaining a strict separation between intelligence analysis and policymaking.

But Cullather said that tradition has long been aggressively opposed by officials who now hold senior positions in the Bush administration.

----------

csimpson@tribune.com

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

*RAMADI - Six insurgents were killed and another wounded on Saturday when U.S forces conducted an air strike in the city of Ramadi, 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad, the U.S military said on Sunday.

*MUQDADIYA - Clashes between insurgents and Iraqi army soldiers conducting a raid killed one rebel in Muqdadiya, 90 km (50 miles) north east of Baghdad. The army arrested 40 suspected insurgents in the same operation.

*BAGHDAD - A 53-year-old male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison died on Saturday as a result of complications from an assault by an unknown number of detainees, the U.S military said in a statement.

*MAHAWEEL - The bodies of three people, bound and shot in the head and chest, were found in Mahaweel, 75 km (50 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. The bodies showed signs of torture.

*ISKANDARIYA - The bodies of two people, bound and shot in the head and chest, were found in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. The bodies showed signs of torture.

*BAGHDAD - Three police commandos and a civilian were killed and four commandos wounded when a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt blew himself up near a check point in southern Baghdad, police said.

*KIRKUK - Gunmen killed four policemen while they were driving in a civilian car in the main road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

*KIFL - Gunmen wearing police uniforms killed a civilian on Saturday in Kifl, a town about 150 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

*NEAR LATIFIYA - Police retrieved the body of a dead person from the river on Saturday near Latifiya, south of Baghdad.

*BAQUBA - A director of sport education of Diyala province was killed by gunmen in the city of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

*YATHRIB - Gunmen kidnapped three truck drivers who were carrying equipment to a U.S military base on Saturday in Yathrib, a region near Balad, 90 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

*BAIJI - Gunmen blew up a gas station on Saturday near the oil refinery city of Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD - Twelve civilians were wounded when two roadside bombs exploded in quick succession near an Iraqi police patrol in central Baghdad, police said.

SAMARRA - The Iraqi army found three Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims who were among a group of 12, including an Iraqi driver, kidnapped by gunmen in Samarra on Friday, Iraqi army officials said.

HAWIJA - Gunmen shot dead a doctor and wounded an employee working in the main hospital in Hawija, 70 km south west of the northern city of Kirkuk, on Saturday, police said.

KIRKUK - Four policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in the northern city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

KIRKUK - The corpse of a Kurdish contractor working with the U.S army was found on Saturday in Kirkuk, police said.

KIRKUK - Two civilians were wounded by a roadside bomb near their patrol in Kirkuk, police said.

BAGHDAD - Two civilians were killed, including a child, and three were wounded, when a roadside bomb targeting police commandos exploded in a northern district of the capital, police said.

A brief glance at recent events in Iraq shows that violence only continues to escalate and the infrastructure which U.S. taxpayers supposedly paid billions of dollars to repair is in shambles.

While the Cheney Administration blame Iraqi resistance attacks and sabotage for the lack of reconstruction, I would like to remind people that at least $8.8 Billion of the money meant for reconstruction efforts remains unaccounted for. Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said this is because “oversight” on the part of the Coalition Provisional Authority “was relatively nonexistent.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is over a quarter of the way towards having the 3,000th soldier killed in Iraq, as 2,267 have now been killed. 25 of those deaths have occurred this month.

But as usual, it is the Iraqis who are paying the highest price.

Looking at Arab media outlets, evidence of this abounds.

According to Al-Sharqiyah television:

“The head of the Al-Fallujah Municipal Council was killed by gunshots on February 7, Iraqi Al Sharqiyah TV reported that day. In its 1100 gmt newscast, the TV said: "Unidentified armed men this morning assassinated Shaykh Kamal Shakir Nizal, head of the Municipal Council of Al-Fallujah, western Iraq.”

The U.S. backed puppet Iraqi government continues its state-sponsored civil war. Aside from the numerous bodies found in the aforementioned Reuters report, this past week Sharqiyah also reported:

“Iraqi and US security forces raided the Iraqi Islamic Party’s headquarters in the Al-Amiriyah area in western Baghdad. The Islamic Party, which is one of the Iraqi entities operating under the banner of the Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front, issued a press statement today saying that last night, Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, assaulted the headquarters’ guards and the party members who were there at the time, destroyed the headquarters’ furniture and contents, seized the licensed weapons carried by the guards, and confiscated sums of money belonging to the party.”

Of course atrocities continue at the hands of occupation forces. Video has been released which shows a group of British soldiers brutally beating and kicking defenseless Iraqi teenagers inside a military compound, and Iraqis recently released from prisons like Abu Ghraib are reporting ongoing torture at the hands of U.S. forces. This, however, should come as no surprise since Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld issued a memo over two years ago specifying which types of “harsh interrogation techniques” he wanted used in Iraq.

This is just a brief overview of recent events in Iraq.

When Israeli/U.S. warplanes begin dropping bombs on Iran, will Iraq fade to the back pages of the news as has Afghanistan? With the corporate media coverage of Iraq at this sorry state already, it’s difficult to imagine that not occurring.

(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

I pulled myself away from the television set recently, enthralled as I was by the ongoing Winter Olympics, and took the time to wade through the massive quantities of information building up in my in box (electronic and otherwise) about the world we live in outside of the sports arena.

One piece of information in particular caught my eye. The revelations made by retired CIA officer Paul Pillar in an article published in the March-April issue of the journal Foreign Affairs should come as a surprise to no one who has been following the disturbing case of Iraq and the missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Mr. Pillar is a career intelligence officer with the CIA who served as the deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center and, most recently, as the national intelligence officer for Near East/Middle East affairs from 2000 to 2005. His essay offers sound analysis to back up his claim that the Bush administration had made the decision to invade Iraq independent of any viable intelligence analysis to sustain the allegation that Iraq possessed undeclared and hidden WMD capability. This capability allegedly not only violated international law but also constituted a threat to the United States and the international community that justified the use of force.

This, of course, is not a news flash, although Mr. Pillar has found his assertions suddenly newsworthy. I found myself puzzled as the collective American news media reacted with stunned fascination over the notion that the Bush administration would have "cherry picked" intelligence in order to justify its decision to invade Iraq.

Mr. Pillar's revelations only reinforced information previously available from such sources as the Downing Street Memo, circa July 2002, which noted that the Bush administration had made the decision to go to war with Iraq using WMD and the link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida as the justification. The memo further noted that the case was a weak one, and that the Bush administration was busy fixing intelligence around policy in order to bolster its decision.

Of course, I and several other former intelligence officials had been saying the same thing for some time. But Mr. Pillar provided some sugar coating along with his bitter pill of accusation: The CIA, he noted, had believed that there were WMDs in Iraq, but that Iraq was containable, and war, therefore, was not a worthy policy objective.

It was stunning to read Mr. Pillar's critical finger-waving at the Bush administration for cooking the books, all the while defending the CIA's analytical processes, despite the fact that, in the final analysis, the CIA maintained that there were WMDs in Iraq. I guess Mr. Pillar's defense is that the CIA was wrong but not as wrong as the Bush administration. Mr. Pillar rightfully decries the politicization of the CIA's analytical processes, but for the most part limits the scope of his criticism to the Bush administration during the time period leading up to the invasion in March 2003.

Nowhere does Mr. Pillar mention the issue of regime change and the role played by the CIA in carrying out covert action at the instruction of the White House (both Democratic and Republican) to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Because he was the former national intelligence officer for Near East/Middle East affairs, I find this absence both disconcerting and disingenuous. By failing to give due credence to the impact and influence of the CIA's mission of regime change in Iraq on its analysis of Iraqi WMDs, Mr. Pillar continues to promulgate the myth that the CIA was honestly engaged in the business of trying to disarm Iraq. I may not have been the national intelligence officer, but I was plugged into the system well enough to know "Steve," who headed the CIA's Near East Division inside the Directorate of Operations, and helped plan and implement several abortive coup attempts in Iraq. I also knew "Don," who helped run the CIA's Counter Proliferation Center and was well aware of how the CIA interfered with and undermined several investigations and operations run by U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq. If these operations had reached fruition, the myth of a noncompliant Iraq might have been undone, thereby putting at risk the CIA's primary tasking vis-a-vis Iraq: regime change.

I knew these men and their respective missions, as I knew of many others. Mr. Pillar also did, and his silence on these men and their tasking begs the question: Why? The only answer I can arrive at is that Paul Pillar, for all of his good intentions, strives to defend his own personal legacy and thus remains oblivious to the fact that the actions of professional intelligence officers such as himself have lead to the demise of the CIA as a legitimate tool for the national security of the United States. Paul Pillar is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Curiously, I find myself joined in criticizing Paul Pillar's recent writings by none other than my old nemesis, Stephen Hayes, a highly partisan commentator for the neoconservative flagship, The Weekly Standard. I cite Mr. Hayes not because I find any merit in what he writes about Mr. Pillar, but because the inconsistencies of Mr. Pillar's words open the door for Iraq war apologists like Mr. Hayes to muddy the waters when it comes to more clearly understanding the complete lack of justification that exists for America's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

I criticize Paul Pillar for his curious defense of CIA analysis of Iraqi WMDs, which was fundamentally wrong, and his failure to acknowledge the existence of a CIA program, directed from the White House, to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and the impact that such a regime-change policy would have on the CIA's analysis of Iraqi WMDs within a process readily acknowledged by Mr. Pillar as being overly politicized. But Stephen Hayes bases his attack on Mr. Pillar's failure to factor in such foundational arguments such as Saddam's alleged assassination attempt against former President George H. W. Bush in April 1993 (allegations that led to the bombing of the Iraqi Intelligence Service Headquarters in June 1993), and the connection between Iraq and the Sudan concerning alleged chemical weapons cooperation, which led to similar bombings in the Sudan in August 1998.

The highly politicized environment of the CIA's analytical and operational branches as far back as 1993 resulted in analysis that was based upon supposition and hearsay more than sound assessment of fact. Mr. Hayes cites an alleged assassination attempt that has long since been shown to be a figment of the Kuwaiti government's mind. None of the data assembled by the U.S. intelligence community to link Saddam Hussein with the alleged Kuwaiti plot has stood the test of time. The plotters, the timing devices and the bomb itself have been shown to have no known link to the Iraqi Intelligence Services, not to mention Saddam Hussein. Today, with all of the potential plotters and organizers of the alleged assassination attempt in U.S. custody, one is struck by the silence of the CIA and American law enforcement when it comes to this case. One would think that bringing the perpetrators of an attempt of a former president's life to justice would be a top priority in this age of "global war on terror." And yet the silence is deafening, only reinforcing the reality that yet another allegation of wrongdoing on the part of Saddam Hussein has fallen by the wayside.

The same holds true regarding Mr. Hayes' assertions concerning Iraqi-Sudanese links in 1998. Not only has the U.S. government all but acknowledged the fact that the Shifa Plant, bombed in August 1998, had no connection with either Iraq or the manufacture of VX nerve agent, but like the situation regarding the alleged assassination attempt, the United States has in its possession all of the key players who would have been involved in any illicit cooperation with the Sudan, including Hayes' cited Emad al Ani, the Iraqi mastermind behind this plot. Once again the silence of the U.S. government on this matter speaks volumes, as does Mr. Hayes' hysteria in once again trotting out baseless allegations produced by the same politicized intelligence process that Mr. Pillar so eloquently decries.

As I reflect on the inconsistency of the Paul Pillars and the rantings of pseudojournalists like Stephen Hayes, I have to chuckle at the incongruous nature of another unfolding drama, that being the trial of Saddam Hussein. We Americans sit back and wave a scolding finger at the former Iraqi dictator, chiding him for the crime of brutally suppressing those who attempted to assassinate him in 1982 in the village of Dujail (an assassination attempt no one has said did not take place), all the while ignoring the fact that we bombed Iraq in June 1993 using as justification an alleged assassination attempt.

If the Kuwaiti government, with the help of some anti-Saddam elements in the U.S. government, cooks up a scheme where they fabricate an assassination attempt against a former president in an effort to keep American policy regarding Iraq "on track," there is not a flicker of concern from the hypermoralistic citizens of the United States. However, woe be it to the dictator who survives an attempt on his life from a village whose leadership had been infiltrated by agents of a nation with which he was at the time locked in a life-or-death struggle and then seeks accountability from those responsible.

This, it appears, is a crime of horrific proportions, so big that it currently stands as the only one Saddam Hussein has been tried for. It doesn't matter much to the "law and order" society in America that the pro-Iranian group, the Dawa Party, which planned and executed the failed assassination attempt in 1982, now occupies the highest position of power in Iraq (Ibrahim Jafari, the current Iraqi Prime Minister, was the president of Dawa) and is responsible for carrying out justice against Saddam. No conflict of interest here, or so it would seem for most Americans.

We, the people of the United States, despite our status as one of the most technologically advanced nations on the face of the earth, remain among the most ignorant about the world we live in. And yet we continue to hold forth that we have some sort of divine right of intervention, where a nation of some 300 million is self-empowered to dictate to billions of others the terms in which we all coexist on the planet. We seem shocked when things don't go as we envisioned (take Iraq, for example, where song and flowers were rapidly replaced by bombs and bullets), but in the end we have only ourselves to blame. Our ignorance of the world we live in seems to be only exceeded by our near total abrogation of our duties and responsibilities as citizens of the world's foremost representative democracy.

I recently spoke before a crowd of around 150 people at an event in Santa Fe, N.M. The topic was the intelligence failure in Iraq and the upcoming war with Iran. It was "Super Bowl Sunday." Santa Fe has a well-deserved reputation as a city with a conscience, populated by mostly progressive-leaning pragmatists who care about their community and the country as a whole. However, this mainstream element was sadly lacking from the audience, which consisted primarily of social activists who could for the most part have cared less about who won the Super Bowl (Pittsburgh did, beating Seattle in what was a mediocre game at best). For a city capable of mobilizing thousands in the cause of peace and justice, the fact that so many chose to spend their Sunday eating chips and drinking beer seated before a TV screen rather than engage in a community dialogue about issues of war and the future direction of our country speaks more to the fact that consumerism has once again trumped basic citizenship.

This is a trend that goes far beyond the environs of Santa Fe, reflecting instead a nationwide tendency to stick our collective heads in the sand, wallowing in fear and ignorance, while those we elect to higher office pursue policies that benefit a distinct minority to the detriment of the masses. Some day in the near future those who turned their back on citizenship in the name of consumerism will find that the latest Super Bowl commercial has been replaced by a TV screen screaming out the breaking news that America is once again at war. Unlike the current debacle in Iraq, where the pain and suffering is only felt by those who have lost a loved one, the Iran war will resonate across the country, wracking up a devastating tally both in terms of human and economic cost.

The American people will act with shock and horror, but by then it will be too late: Once again our fighting men and women who serve us in the armed forces will have been dispatched to a conflict not worthy of the loss of a single American life. Once again the American people will cover their shame concerning their collective failure of citizenship by proudly proclaiming their undying support for the troops, waving the American flag on the street corner and putting colorful magnetic "support the troops" stickers on their cars, all the while those who wear the uniform fight and die in another faraway country.

Such hypocrisy, underscored by the fact that when the American people had a chance to really do something for the troops, like come out on a Sunday night and engage in a public discussion about the Iranian crisis, they chose instead to watch a football game.

Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the recent author of "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein" (Nation Books, 2005).

"Before the fall of the regime, power was three hours on, three hours off," said Mutlaq, an auto parts dealer in the southern city of Basra. "Now it comes on for a total of just eight hours (a day) and maybe less."

For many Iraqis, chronic power problems have become a litmus test of American promises of a better life without Saddam's tyranny.

Iraqis often ask why a superpower that can send thousands of soldiers, tanks and Humvees to fight a war half a world away cannot guarantee that the lights work.

"I should only complain to God, but let me just say that sometimes we don't have electricity for 72 hours," said al-Mufti, a father of five in the northern city of Mosul, some 560 miles north of Basra. "Often, we have one hour of electricity the entire day."

Baghdad, a city of nearly 7 million people, is a city starved for energy. Most streets are not lit at night, when the din of power generators fills the air. Wires connecting neighborhood generators to private homes hang over narrow alleys in poor residential areas.

U.S. officials have acknowledged that the failure to provide power has dogged the American mission in Iraq since the beginning.

In a Senate testimony Wednesday, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, blamed insurgent attacks and higher demand for the shortfall and acknowledged that the electricity situation is worse now than under Saddam.

"Often, those commenting on Iraq reconstruction begin by stating that electrical capacity is lower than prewar levels," Bowen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "They are correct."

Of 425 electricity-related projects, Bowen said only 300 would be completed before the $18.6 billion approved by Congress in November 2003 for reconstruction in Iraq runs out.

"Everyone dreamed of a better life after Saddam went. We wanted more electricity and a generally higher standard of living," Mutlaq said. "We are still shocked that none of our dreams came true. Nothing happened and some people even think life under Saddam was better."

The problem of electricity becomes more unbearable in summer, when temperatures soar to 120 for months. That forces many residents to sleep on their rooftops.

With electricity erratic at best, clean drinking water also has become rare. Even if the water is purified at treatment plants, lack of power often means water cannot be pumped to apartment dwellers.

Renowned for their resilience, most Iraqis cope by drawing power from neighborhood generators run and maintained by businessmen for a fee. But a recent increase in fuel prices means electricity is more expensive.

Iraqis pay an average of about $2 every three months for electricity since the government subsidizes the cost and power outages are frequent. Private power, however, can cost an average of $20 per month - a burden in a country where $200 a month is a common salary.

Insurgent attacks and the ever-present danger of kidnapping mean that up to 22 percent of all reconstruction project funds, including those for electricity, goes to security, according to General Accounting Office figures.

The power supply has been erratic for months in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province and a stronghold of the insurgency, with outages lasting days.

The main telephone exchange caught fire and burned last week during a gunfight between insurgents and U.S. troops in the city west of Baghdad, witnesses said.

"It's been difficult getting people to work because of the security situation," said Marine Lt. Col. Mike Reilly, who works on reconstruction projects in Ramadi that are funded by the U.S. military.

"Here, there's a lot of problems with water and sewage. Some of it may be due to the insurgency, some may be due to neglect."

In addition, these withdrawals are -- we know this thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, Up in the Air, in the December 5th New Yorker -- to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral damage" -- that is, Iraqi deaths).

It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that the Bush administration can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army and police force (think "Vietnamization" again), capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according to plan and security improves..." or "it also depends on the ability of the Iraqis to..."

Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven't already disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined. It's clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the propaganda agenda of an administration heading into mid-term elections with an increasingly skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried about defending the President's mission-unaccomplished war of choice. Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises of, followed by announcements of "major" withdrawals, possibly including news in the fall election season of even more "massive" withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with conditional clauses and "only ifs" -- withdrawal promises that, once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel under no particular obligation to fulfill.

Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq or not? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete -- though less generally discussed in our media -- than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing.

In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.

If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery, and sheer incompetence, and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq's "Little America." For the first time, we have actual descriptions of a couple of the "super-bases" built in Iraq in the last two and a half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon information restrictions, they are sobering. Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq." In a piece entitled Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel, Ricks paints a striking portrait:

The base is sizeable enough to have its own "neighborhoods" including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF" ("home to a special operations unit," the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high walls," and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage."

Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in "air-conditioned containers" which will, in the future -- and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future -- be wired "to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access." He points out as well that, of the troops at Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi."

Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another of the American "super-bases," the still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase (Football and pizza point to US staying for long haul). He observes, of "the biggest Marine camp in western Anbar province," that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of US suburbia." In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large -- such bases may cover 15-20 square miles -- that it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.

There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency."

Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases," and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when 80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not" was added to the mix via any American official denial. (It's strange, isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist in our papers in the negative.) Three examples will do:

The Secretary of Defense: ""During a visit with U.S. troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said ‘at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases' in Iraq. ‘It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.'"

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq: "We already have handed over significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq."

Karen Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show: "CHARLIE ROSE: …they think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? KAREN HUGHES: We want nothing more than to bring our men and women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish the job. CHARLIE ROSE: And do not want to keep bases there? KAREN HUGHES: No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible."

Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something closer to truth in advertising than did our major papers. At least, they called the big bases in Iraq "enduring camps," a label which had a certain charm and reeked of permanency. (Later, they were later relabeled, far less romantically, "contingency operating bases.")

One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that reporting on our bases in Iraq has been almost nonexistent these last years, especially given an administration so weighted toward military solutions to global problems; especially given the heft of some of the bases; especially given the fact that the Pentagon was mothballing our bases in Saudi Arabia and saw these as long-term substitutes; especially given the fact that the neocons and other top administration officials were so focused on controlling the so-called arc of instability (basically, the energy heartlands of the planet) at whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact that Pentagon pre-war planning for such "enduring camps" was, briefly, a front-page story in a major newspaper.

A little history may be in order here:

On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain" four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops." Rather than speak of "permanent bases," the military preferred then to speak coyly of "permanent access" to Iraq. The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance, Saddam's 400,000 man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000 man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force. (In an otherwise heavily armed region, this insured that any Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on the American military and that the U.S. Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.) While much space in our papers has, of late, been devoted to the administration's lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has been shown in the planning that did take place.

At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and Schmitt piece appeared, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was "unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term' bases in Iraq" -- and that was that. The Times' piece was essentially sent down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built -- including four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times article -- reports about U.S. bases in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared from the American media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions of "permanent bases" in these last years at Internet sites like Tomdispatch or Global Security.org.)

In May 2005, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported that we had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro in Iraq. Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being "stood up" as a far larger force than originally imagined by Pentagon planners, leaving the U.S. with, Graham reported, just the number of bases -- 4 -- that the Times first mentioned over two years earlier, including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar Province. This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon thinking, but as a "withdrawal plan." (A modest number of these bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit transferred to Iraqi military units which, according to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)

The future of a fifth base -- the enormous Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport -- remains, as far as we know, "unresolved"; and there is a sixth possible "permanent super-base" being built in that country, though never presented as such. The Bush administration is sinking between $600 million and $1 billion in construction funds into a new U.S. embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad's Green Zone on a plot of land along the Tigris River that is reportedly two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The plans for this "embassy" are almost mythic in nature. A high-tech complex, it is to have "15ft blast walls and ground-to-air missiles" for protection as well as bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will, according to Chris Hughes, security correspondent for the British Daily Mirror, include "as many as 300 houses for consular and military officials" and a "large-scale barracks" for Marines. The "compound" will be a cluster of at least 21 buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including "a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities." It is being billed as "more secure than the Pentagon" (not, perhaps, the most reassuring tagline in the post-9/11 world). If not quite a city-state, on completion it will resemble an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad's Green Zone, we will be building another more heavily fortified little Green Zone.

Even Tony Blair's Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman (Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base -- sorry a base "for years to come" -- near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking American "withdrawal" strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.

As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq forever and a day, while top Bush officials and neocons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that would control the energy heartlands of the planet. None of that will, however, make such bases any more "permanent" than their enormous Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved to be -- not certainly if the Shiites decide they want us gone or Ayatollah Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.

Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases -- call them what you will -- have been at the heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction" of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain at the secret heart of Bush administration "reconstruction" policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal" from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press -- with the exception of the odd columnist -- won't even put the words "base," "permanent," and "Iraq" in the same paragraph.

It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but keep your eyes directed at our "super-bases." Until the administration blinks on them, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

He has earned a Purple Heart medal for valour, but the twist to this Marine’s story is that when he fought in Iraq he wasn’t American at all, but British. Born in Bristol, he moved to California with his parents at the age of 12, and signed on the dotted line aged 17 in exchange for help from the Marines with college tuition fees and his application for US citizenship.

Corporal Poole cannot remember the explosion itself. He was in a coma for two months and is permanently brain-damaged. Two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter were killed, but the Marine’s body armour saved him. He is now deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and his face is a maze of skin and bone grafts held together with metal plates. Shrapnel was embedded in his skull and his brain injuries were so severe that he has had to learn to walk and talk again.

“We are talking about a brain-injury epidemic,” says Nurse Jill Gandolfi, who cares for Corporal Poole in a rehabilitation unit run by the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto. The official number of brain- injured Iraq veterans is more than 1,700, but Harriet Zeiner, Palo Alto’s leading neuropsychologist, believes that well over 6,000 such injuries is a far more realistic estimate.

Pentagon figures indicate that, of more than 16,000 US troops wounded in combat in Iraq, 11,852 were injured by bombs, mortars and grenades.

Improvements in both body armour and battlefield medicine mean that Operation Iraqi Freedom boasts the highest survival rate of any war; up to eight for every death. But survivors such as Jason are coming home with more complicated head injuries caused by shrapnel wounds and shockwaves from bomb blasts; a growing army of brain-damaged servicemen and women, largely hidden from public view.

“It gets missed, they get discharged and go home,” says Dr Zeiner, who complains that brain scans are still not routine for soldiers surviving explosions and that the problem is often never diagnosed.

Lt. Col. Garry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “There are an awful lot more soldiers alive (after such incidents) than ever before.” He was unable to comment on the figures.

“Basically, it sucks,” says Corporal Poole, as he waits in blinding sunshine for his bus to the Palo Alto unit, one of four specialist “polytrauma” centres created by the US Forces.

About 800 patients have been treated in these centres so far. Researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities calculate that the total cost for treating brain injuries from Iraq will exceed $14 billion (£8 billion) over 20 years.

Though the corporal has had hundreds of hours of therapy, he can barely manage to read more than 20 words a minute. “He can think of things to say but he can’t get them out,” says Nurse Gandolfi.

“Americans need to know what the cost is to the people fighting,” says Dr Zeiner. “It’s not just the dead, but the injured. People like Jason have to reinvent who they are.”

His fiancée left him as a result of his disfiguring injuries and his plans to become a teacher have been abandoned. Corporal Poole shares a flat with a friend, living off military benefits of $2,400 a month. He relaxes by listening to his favourite song, Fix You, by Coldplay. In the evenings he plays a video game called Bomber. The point of the game is to blow up your opponent, though Jason is seemingly unaware of any irony.

His younger brother, Dave, frequently drops by. “People don’t think about the numbers who’ve been hurt,” Dave says. “Because those numbers would be too high, and then people would realise just how bad the war is.”

Some Iraqis and U.S. officials have indicated they would have preferred a more secular leader, The Washington Post reports.

Jafari's 64-63 win came after days of wrangling among the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the largest share of seats in the December parliamentary elections. His opponent was Adel Abdul Mahdi, a secular economist. But Jafari received the crucial support of the popular and fiercely anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr, the report said.

Jafari, who had headed the interim government prior to his win, will face the same challenges of a crumbling infrastructure and rampant violence during his new four-year term. But his immediate challenge will be to form a new government to include other ethnic groups. A Sunni leader urged Jafari to choose ministers with no ethnic motivation and no background of corruption.

Separately, The New York Times reported Jafari's victory pointed to the growing political power of Sadr, who has led uprisings against U.S. troops.

Raised in Beirut, he says he began his career much like the people he now employs-- as a laborer installing drywall. The Lebanese Christian escaped war in his home country in the late 1970s and moved to Kuwait. The Persian Gulf country welcomes, even recruits, expatriate blue-collar workers like al-Absi once was to do the grunt work and domestic chores in its booming, oil-rich economy. Today glitzy shopping malls, flashy cars and sprawling villas have become the norm and migrants make up the nearly two-thirds of this tiny desert state's 2.3 million population.

Building his own personal fortune, al-Absi, too, relies on migrant labor. His Kuwait City firm, co-owned by a member of one of Kuwait's richest and most powerful families, is one of the larger Middle East companies that collectively ship tens of thousands of cheap day laborers to Iraq's war zones where they are paid just dollars a day.

Fortune Favors a Few

American contractors witnessing the plight of some of these migrants at military camps around Iraq have openly complained that the Asians endure abysmal working conditions, live in cramped housing, eat poor food, and lack satisfactory medical care and safety gear.

Typically, these migrants work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, and earn just dollars a day performing tasks considered unsuitable for US war fighters. They work construction, drive trucks, run laundries, clean latrines, pick up rubbish and operate stores, dining facilities and warehouses. Without them, and the "body shop" contractors that provide such laborers, the US and coalition military camps -- virtually small cities -- would shut down.

It can be a lucrative business, one that has helped trigger explosive growth of al-Absi's company where he acts as both general manager and co-owner.

Less than three years ago FKTC boasted $35 million in assets. Today, the firm has racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. contracts in Iraq, pushing the company well past the $1 billion mark. With 7,000 employees in Iraq, the company claims to be holding $800 million in construction and supply contracts directly with the Army for military camps, plus more than $300 million under Halliburton 's multibillion dollar contract to perform military logistics for the occupation forces in Iraq.

It's the kind of success that allows al-Absi to enjoy finely tailored suits with French cuff shirts, send his children to American universities and enjoy the fruits of being a newly-minted millionaire. "I love America," he says freely.

Meeting over a morning coffee last September at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, a legendary Georgetown retreat favored by pampered heads-of-state, Hollywood elite, the Rolling Stones and business executives, al-Absi's eyes widened as he talked about his company's greatest prize – the embassy.

The New Embassy

Indeed, the massive $592-million project may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation in the war-torn nation. Located on a on a 104-acre site on the Tigris river where U.S. and coalition authorities are headquartered, the high-tech palatial compound is envisioned as a totally self-sustaining cluster of 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.

The 1,000 or more U.S. government officials calling the new compound home will have access to a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. In addition to the main embassy buildings, there will be a large-scale Maine barracks, a school, locker rooms, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance garage, and six apartment buildings with a total of 619 one-bedroom units. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities. The total site will be two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Unlike most of Iraq's reconstruction, the embassy is "on time and on budget," according to a December report to U.S. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee which calls the progress an "impressive" feat given that construction is taking place in a country besieged by war.

"Most major construction projects undertaken in Iraq since 2003 have not met these standards," writes Patrick Garvey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations staff who traveled to Baghdad in November 2005.

With the embassy making a prestigious notch on the company's belt, First Kuwaiti will step onto the world stage, al-Absi beamed. "I dream about what it means," he said. "We have become a global company."

Despite this pride, al-Absi asked to keep the embassy contract a secret until the first floors were built. The dangers of an attack are just too serious, he said. Even his personal residence had been bombed in the past. "I am all for transparency, but this is Iraq," he said.

Despite the new embassy's importance, and its rare on-schedule progress, the State Department has also resisted publicizing the contract. It was only after weeks of inquiries, that it confirmed that FKTC had been selected to construct all but the most classified portion of the project. One day after the web site FedBizOpps posted a standard public notice for the first $370-million in FTKC contracts, it yanked the announcement. Department spokesman Justin Higgins cited security concerns.

Philippino & Nepali Workers

While safety is part of the reason for keeping a profile low, labor conditions for Iraq's migrant workers are nothing to boast about.

When first asked about mistreatment of FKTC's labor force last August, al Absi threatened to sue if the allegations were published. At the time, CorpWatch was investigating the claims of Ramil Autencio and other Philippinos working for FKTC in Tikrit in late 2003 and early 2004. They claimed they were overworked, served poor food, and received less salary than what was agreed to in their contracts.

Originally recruited for employment by MGM Worldwide Manpower in the Philippines, Autencio said he had planned to work at Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month. Then his recruitment contract was sold to FKTC when he reached Kuwait where he says he was "forcibly" pressured to work in Iraq.

More recently, an October 10 story in the Chicago Tribune reported on four-dozen other Nepalese workers waiting in Kuwait for jobs on American military bases in Iraq. In September 2004, after watching television reports that 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq executed at the hands of insurgents, they changed their minds.

A FKTC manager in Kuwait handed the panicked workers an ultimatum, reports the Tribune: either travel to Iraq to fulfill their contracts and they would be released on the streets of Kuwait City to fend for themselves. Undoubtedly, none had the resources to find their way back to Nepal.

"The company was forcing them to go to Iraq," Lok Bahadur Thapa, the former acting Nepalese ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Tribune.

Al-Absi, who speaks excellent English occasionally peppered with bluntness of a construction worker, denies the allegations of ill-treatment and trafficking.

"It's bullshit," he said, after emailing electronic documents apparently signed by Autencio and others agreeing to work in Iraq. "Total bullshit."

But stories of mistreatment recently prompted the U.S. State Department to join forces with the Defense Department into possible labor trafficking by Middle East firms doing business in Iraq.

"Our people are investigating the issues," said State Department spokesman Justin Higgins after U.S. Ambassador John Miller, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking of Persons, left for the Middle East in late January.

When CorpWatch inquired last July about widespread complaints about the poor working conditions and possible coercion of low-paid Asian laborers in Iraq working under Halliburton 's logistics contract, the Army said an investigation was underway. That inquiry began and ended with the Army raising the issues with Halliburton "for them to address with appropriate action within the terms of the contract," said Army spokeswoman Melissa Bohan in an e-mail this month.

Secretive Contract

The contracts for building the largest, most-strongly fortified embassy in the world is a tale of fits and starts. From the Bush Administration's initial request for more than a billion dollars in emergency funding for the project to the selection of an inexperienced Kuwaiti firm to build it -- to even the small oversight effort is also a tale of secrecy.

Although White House had signaled Congress in early 2004 that it was planning a permanent embassy in Baghdad, it wasn't until spring 2005 that the Bush Administration formally pushed the funding request veiled as an emergency measure. The original proposal for $1.3 billion was almost three times the price of the new embassy in China.

Reeling from overcharges and costs around other Iraq contracts, Congress immediately cut the price tag for the new Baghdad project in half to $592 million and called for strict oversight. Wired with the most up-to-date technology and surveillance equipment, it will still be a super-bunker and the biggest US embassy every built.

Once funding was secured last spring, the U.S. State Department quietly put the project up for competition among seven competitors – including some of the most accomplished US engineering companies. Among the bidders, Framaco, Parsons, Fluor, and the Sandi Group have established track records for building secure embassies or large-scale construction projects.

But the award went to First Kuwaiti, a company with little experience in projects on the scale envisioned for the embassy.

"First Kuwaiti got the embassy job. [It] kinda surprised everyone that a foreign company would win," said an executive of one prominent firm in an email to another, both of whom bid against First Kuwaiti.

But publicly, the losing companies simply shrugged their shoulders and buttoned their lips.

"First Kuwaiti was the lowest bidder," said Gilles Kacha, senior vice president of Framaco. The New York-based firm won a "contractor of the year award" from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for its work on the interim Baghdad embassy, but lost in the competition for the new compound.

There may also be little reason for some of the losing competitors to complain. Some. including Framaco and The Sandi Group of Washington, DC. soon received other State Department contracts. The open-ended contracts call on the companies to work anywhere in Iraq when needed, including on the new embassy project.

The Sandi Group was given notice to prepare for some site clearing and for building temporary housing for the embassy workers, said Sandi's vice president for development, Muge Karsli. Then the order was abruptly suspended in January. "I was supposed to hear more from them in a week, but I didn't," she said matter-of-factly. "Now, it is on hold."

Bill Waldron is one contractor who will talk about the embassy project. He claims his Rocky Mountain Group lost more than $250,000 while preparing a bid to perform engineering oversight for First Kuwaiti and project inspection. Waldron said that his 25-year-old, veteran-owned Colorado company had already been given the word that his company would be the leading contender for the deal, which is why the firm spent so much effort on the proposal, including compiling a 2 inch thick file on the company's personnel experience in Iraq – experience that State Department contract officers said they were looking for.

Then the State Department put the job up for open bid three different times, each time with a new revision. The last solicitation was cancelled after the contracting officer went of vacation, according to Waldron.

Waldron's patience finally burst. Only after doggedly hounding the State Department for reasons why the competition had been cancelled did he find out what happened.

The contract was awarded without competition on an emergency basis to a Maryland company, Mil Vets, Waldron said. "We contacted Mil Vets and asked if they had any experience working in Iraq prior to being awarded the embassy project," Waldron said. "The answer was no."

A-Absi, for his part, views his embassy agreement as based on merit and it is the success of his company that draws fire from his critics.

First Kuwaiti never, ever got any job without offering the best value at the lowest price," he said. "People will never criticize someone who fails."

That, says al-Absi, is a price he is willing to pay.


David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid@yahoo.com.