iraq timeline

SUNDAY, JUN 15, 2014 12:00 PM EDT
How the U.S. helped turn Iraq into an al-Qaida haven in just 53 steps

Eleven years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is on the brink of collapse. We have only ourselves to blame
PETER GELLING, KYLE KIM AND TIMOTHY MCGRATH, GLOBALPOST

How the U.S. helped turn Iraq into an al-Qaida haven in just 53 steps
Militants from the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) people raising their flag at the entrance of an army base in Ninevah Province. Iraq. (Credit: AP)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

Here’s the short version: The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, claiming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had both weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al Qaeda. He had neither. Today, both Saddam Hussein and the United States are gone from Iraq.  In their place? Al Qaeda.

This week, an Al Qaeda splinter group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized the country’s second-largest city — Mosul — and several other towns. Latest reports have the militant group at the gates of Baghdad.

With US-trained Iraqi security forces now frantically fleeing the arrival of the ISIL militants — who are so extreme even Al Qaeda couldn’t hang with them, causing the two groups to split — and a central government in total disarray, it’s looking bleak. Someone call the Coalition of the Willing!

So how did it all go so wrong? In these 53 steps.

1. May 28, 1990: Saddam Hussein says oil overproduction in Kuwait is “economic warfare”

2. Aug. 2, 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait

3. Aug. 6, 1990: UN imposes economic sanctions on Iraq

4. Jan. 17, 1991: US launches air operations to liberate Kuwait (and its oil)

5. Feb. 24, 1991: US deploys ground war in Kuwait

6. Feb. 26, 1991: Saddam Hussein orders withdrawal from Kuwait

7. Feb. 28, 1991: US President George W. Bush Sr. says Kuwait is now free

8. April 3, 1991: UN extends sanctions on Iraq for next 10-plus years. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children die as a result of ballooning poverty, malnutrition and disease

9. June 26, 1993: Bill Clinton launches cruise missile attack on Baghdad in retaliation for failed assassination attempt on Bush Sr.

10. Dec. 16, 1998: US and UK launch four-day bombing campaign against sites in Iraq thought to be housing weapons of mass destruction

11. Dec. 19, 1998: Clinton is impeached for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky

12. Sept. 11, 2001: The 9/11 attacks kill almost 3,000 people. 15 of the 19 Al Qaeda militants are from Saudi Arabia. US launches war in Afghansitan, where Al Qaeda is believed to be based

13. Oct. 1, 2002: CIA report alleges Iraq is in possession of WMDs, launching build-up to war

14. Feb. 5, 2003: US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells UN that Iraq has WMDs and Al Qaeda links

15. March 19, 2003: Bush Jr. launches Iraq invasion

16. May 1, 2003: Bush declares “Mission Accomplished”

17. July 2, 2003: Turns out mission not yet accomplished. Bush declares, “Bring ‘em on.”

18. Aug. 19, 2003: It’s brought. UN headquarters attacked in Baghdad, killing 17 people. Al Qaeda claims responsibility

19. Jan. 28, 2004: It’s official: no WMDs in Iraq. Bush maintains Iraq War made the world safer

20. Feb. 10, 2004: Iraqis invite Al Qaeda militants to help fight US occupation

21. April 21, 2004: Spate of suicide bombings hits police stations

22. April 27, 2004: Images of US torture at Abu Ghraib prison air on 60 minutes. Shit hits fan

23. Jan. 12, 2005: Search for WMDs fails, is officially declared over

24. Sept. 9, 2005: Powell says he regrets pre-war UN speech

25. June 8, 2006: Al Qaeda leader killed in US air raid

26. Aug. 21, 2006: Bush acknowledges Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 attacks

27. Sept. 12, 2006: Media reports reveal that US spy agencies believe Iraq War increased terror threat

28. Oct. 4, 2006: A 2005 memo made public reveals that Al Qaeda said prolonging Iraq War is in its interest

29. Jan. 10, 2007: Bush announces escalation of Iraq war

30. May 20, 2007: CIA officials say Iraq War has become big “moneymaker” for Al Qaeda

31. June 11, 2007: US forces arm Sunni militias, known as the Sunni Awakening, to fight Al Qaeda

32. Aug. 8, 2007: Roadside bombs reach all-time high

33. March 10, 2008: Pentagon-funded study finds no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda

34. Sept. 5, 2008: Outgoing Gen. David Petraeus says Al Qaeda remains dangerous threat in Iraq

35. Feb. 16, 2010: Sectarian tensions soar

36. April 19, 2010: US raid kills top 2 Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq

37. May 10, 2010: 71 dead in widespread attacks blamed on Al Qaeda

38. July 23, 2010: Four Al Qaeda suspects escape from Iraqi prison

39. July 29, 2010: Iraqi insurgents plant “Al Qaeda” flag in Baghdad

40. Aug. 31, 2010: Obama announces end of combat mission in Iraq

41. Sept. 27, 2010: Report says Al Qaeda in Iraq, which many thought had been “defeated,” is actually responsible for wave of terror attacks over the summer, causing the highest casualties in more than two years

42. Oct. 16, 2010: Members of US-backed Sunni Awakening return to Al Qaeda ranks

43. Aug. 15, 2011: 42 bombings rock country, killing 89 people

44. Dec. 18, 2011: Last convoy of US troops leaves Iraq

45. March 20, 2012: Dozens of bombs kill 52 across Iraq

46. July 23, 2012: More bombings, 107 killed

47. March 19, 2013: Al Qaeda plants car bomb, kills 56 civilians

48. April 15, 2013: Wave of bombings kills 75, wounds 350 across the country

49. May 15, 2013: Series of deadly bombings and shootings kill at least 450, injure 732

50. July 22, 2013: Suicide bombers drive car bomb through Abu Ghraib prison, freeing hundreds of convicts, mostly senior Al Qaeda members

51. Jan. 2, 2014: Fallujah and other parts of Anbar province falls to Al Qaeda-linked militants now known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL

52. May 28, 2014: A month after elections, attacks kill more than 70 across the country

53. June 10, 2014: ISIL, an Al Qaeda splinter group, seizes Mosul, Iraq’s second-lagest city, and Tikrit as US-trained security forces flee. ISIL marches on to Baghdad

halliburton and erka ltd. added to “burn pit” suit by veteran

Iraq “burn pits” suit over toxic smoke filed against Halliburton, KBR, by 2 Ky. men

By Brett Barrouquere, AP

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — An Air Force veteran and a one-time contractor who served in Iraq are suing military contractors Halliburton Co. and KBR Inc., accusing the companies of exposing them to toxic fumes and ash from “burn pits” for waste.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Louisville on Monday by former Air Force Sgt. Sean Alexander Stough of Stanton and Charles Hicks of Bellevue, claims the military contractors burned everything from human remains to tires in open-air pits, exposing everyone nearby to harmful ash and smoke.

The men are seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.

“The burn pits are still going on,” said attorney Susan Burke, who represents the two men. “It’s everything you can think of.”

The suit in Kentucky, which names KBR, Halliburton and a Turkish company, ERKA Ltd., is the latest in a string of litigation on behalf of former military members and contract workers who claim they were exposed to toxins from burning waste in the warzone. At least 32 suits over burn pits have been filed in 32 states against KBR and Halliburton, which are both Houston-based, and other contractors.

The suits have been merged for pretrial proceedings under U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus in Greenbelt, Md. Burke expects the Kentucky suit to be transferred there for pretrial purposes.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Brown said the company denies the allegations and follows military regulations on the disposal of waste.

“KBR operates burn pits in accordance with guidelines approved by the Army,” Brown said.

A Halliburton spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. An e-mail sent to ERKA’s offices in Adana, Turkey, was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Stanton, who was stationed at Camp Bucca, near Umm Qasr, Iraq, until April 2006, and Hicks, who was stationed at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad in 2004 and 2005, both claim exposure to the burn pits caused multiple medical issues, including pulmonary and breathing problems.

Earlier this year, several members of Congress asked Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to investigate potential burn pit hazards. Shinseki said his agency is conducting a health study of 30,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and noted the VA “has learned important lessons from previous military conflicts” as it deals with environmental exposure questions.

our soldiers and many civilians poisoned in iraq….

KBR may have poisoned 100,000 people in Iraq: lawsuit

Defense contractor KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air “burn pits.”

According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned “tires, lithium batteries … biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles.”

And they did so within plain sight of US troops operating in Iraq, the lawsuit states. “In some instances, the burn pit smoke was so bad that it interfered with the military mission,” the Nashville lawsuit states. “For example, the military located at Camp Bucca, a detention facility, had difficulty guarding the facility as a result of the smoke.”

The plaintiffs note that the military “did not prevent” KBR from disposing of the waste “in a safe manner that would not have harmed plaintiffs. The military wanted the defendants to solve the burn pit problems.”

The lawsuit “claims at least 100,000 people were endangered by the contractors’ ‘utter indifference to and conscious disregard’ of troops’ welfare,” notes the Courthouse News Service.

At a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on Friday, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said that KBR continues to use burn pits at the US’s largest base in Iraq.   “The Army and the contractor in charge of this waste disposal — Kellogg, Brown, and Root — made frequent and unnecessary use of these burn pits and exposed thousands of US troops to toxic smoke,” Dorgan said.  “Burn pits are still used at the Balad Airbase in Iraq, which is the largest US base in that country.”

A 2008 report by the Pentagon asserted that “adverse health risks are unlikely” from the burn pits, but that assertion was challenged by retired Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a biomedical sciences officer who took some of the air samples used in the report.  “Although I have no hard data, I believe that the burn pits may be responsible for long-term health problems in many individuals,” the Air Force Times quoted Curtis as saying. “I think we are going to look at a lot of sick people.”

 The plaintiffs filing the lawsuits say they have suffered from health problems ranging in seriousness from shortness of breath to cancer.  Russell Keith, a paramedic from Huntsville, Alabama, told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee his doctors believe his development of Parkinson’s disease was triggered by 15 months of daily exposure to the burn pits at Joint Base Balad in Iraq.  Another plaintiff claims to have developed kidney disease as a result of exposure.  Former KBR employee Rick Lambeth told the committee: “Since returning home in July, I have suffered from a number of respiratory problems related to the exposure. Now the military will not pay for my medical care.  They claim that these conditions … existed prior to service.” For its part, KBR says that it has been “improperly named” in the lawsuit, and points the finger at the military.

“There are significant discrepancies between the plaintiffs’ claims in the burn litigation against KBR and the facts on this issue,” Heather Browne, director of corporate communications, told the Nashville Post. Browne said that KBR doesn’t operate all the burn pits in Iraq; that the Army, and not the company, decides on burn pit locations; and that the Army decides when to fund an incinerator and when to burn waste in the open air.

botched uganda mission leads to massacre

A mission, carried out by the Ugandan military, was intended to “crush” the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, which had been holed up in a village in neighboring Congo. But the offensive failed and the LRA fanned out, committing massacres that killed up to 900 civilians. Critics said the U.S. should have known the operation would have ended in massacres. American officials told the paper the U.S. had 17 military officers advising the Ugandans and equipping them with “satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.” The assistance was approved personally by President Bush.

U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels

Vanessa Vick for The New York Times

Bertrand Bangbe, recovering in Dungu, Congo, was attacked by the Lord’s Resistance Army. V.Vick

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
February 6, 2009

DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.

The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.

No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.

The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads.

“The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”

American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.

“We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. “In the end, it was not our operation.”

Maj. Felix Kulayigye, a Ugandan military spokesman, declined to discuss the American involvement and simply said, “There was no way to prevent these massacres.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.

In Dungu, a 10-year-old girl lay comatose on a metal hospital cot, her face glazed with sweat, her pulse hammering in her neck. She had been sexually assaulted in a nearby village and shot in both legs, bullet through bone.

“The people who did this,” said her nurse, Rosa Apamato, “are demons.”

This used to be a tranquil, bountiful spot where villagers grew corn, beans and peanuts, more or less untouched by the violence that has plagued Congo’s east. But thousands have recently fled, and the town is now crawling with soldiers, aid workers and United Nations personnel, the movable cast that marks the advent of a serious problem.

The villagers who remain are terrified and confused. The Lord’s Resistance Army is not a Congolese movement. It is from Uganda. But once again, it seems that foreign armies are settling their scores in Congo, and the Congolese are paying the price. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congo became the battlefield for more than a dozen armies and rebel groups from neighboring African countries, and several million Congolese died.

Even now, Rwandan troops are battling militants hundreds of miles south of here. Congo invited the Rwandans in to go after a different rebel group and its commander, much in the same way it allowed Ugandan soldiers to cross the border and hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“Who are these L.R.A.?” asked Bertrand Bangbe, who had been axed in the head and left for dead. “Why are they here? Why are they killing us?”

There are few answers. The Lord’s Resistance Army may have had some legitimate grievances when it started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a prophet and a savior for the historically oppressed Acholi people. The movement even proclaimed to be fighting for the Ten Commandants.

But it soon devolved into something more sinister. The Lord’s Resistance Army killed tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorizing children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Mr. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park, a vast reserve of elephants and swamps near the border of Uganda and Sudan.

The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.

After that, Major Kulayigye said, “the only option left open to us was the military option.”

The Ugandan government asked the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for help, and the request was sent up the chain of command in November to President Bush, who personally authorized it, a former senior Bush administration official said.

The American advisers and Ugandan officers used satellite imagery and Ugandan field intelligence reports to triangulate where they believed Mr. Kony and his fighters were hiding. The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb his camp and then cut off his 700 or so fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese ground troops. On Dec. 13, the day before the attack, several American advisers traveled to a staging site near the Uganda-Congo border for a final coordination meeting, a senior American military official said.

Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.

The Ugandans say they have destroyed the rebels’ control center and food supplies, rescued around 100 abducted children and killed several fighters, including some commanders. But the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest.

On Dec. 25, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush. Most villagers had no idea who they were. Some Congolese towns had been attacked before the offensive, yet the raids were not so widespread that word would have trickled back to remote places like Faradje.

The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Whoever could run, did. Christine Ataputo, who owns the one restaurant in town, watched from the forest floor as the rebels raped, burned and butchered. She was lying on her belly when she saw that her 18-year-old daughter, Chantal, had been captured.

“They took her away on a rope,” she said.

Chantal has not been seen since, and even more than a month later, Faradje still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.

“These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever,” said Charles Gaudry, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. “There’s zero protection.”

The United Nations has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Congo, including about 250 in Dungu. But United Nations officials said they were spread too thin in other war-racked parts of eastern Congo to take on the Lord’s Resistance Army. At the time of the nearby massacres, the peacekeepers in Dungu were guarding the airfield.

Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots. In the past in Congo, home-grown militias have only complicated the dynamic and led to more abuses.

Even where there are Congolese troops, there is not necessarily protection. The family of the 10-year-old girl in the hospital said she might have been shot by a Congolese soldier who missed the rebel who was assaulting her.

The other night, by the light of a flashlight, a young doctor took one look at the girl and ordered her evacuation to Goma, a city along the Congo-Rwanda border. She may lose a leg, he said. But at least in Goma there is a special hospital to treat girls who have been raped. In eastern Congo, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Dungu, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

bolton on bhutto: right on but wrong

Although it comes a little late, Bolton’s analysis of the u.s. role in precipitating Bhutto’s death is accurate, in my view.   (See later posting on the subject)

I do not agree, however, that we should place our support so strongly behind Musharraf.

Bolton: US ‘helped precipitate’ conditions for Bhutto’s assassination Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano Published: Friday December 28, 2007   The US has seen its options for dealing with Pakistan crumble with Benazir Bhutto’s assassination Thursday, and a former diplomat says American foreign policy decisions helped “precipitate” the former prime minister’s death. John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, said it was a mistake to collaborate with Bhutto’s “desire to get back into the game in Pakistan” and view her as an alternative to the country’s current leader, Pervez Musharraf. “We in effect helped — helped — precipitate this dynamic that led to her tragic assassination,” Bolton said Thursday on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes. “It’s hard to see how that was the road to success.” Bolton said the primary concern of the US needs to be the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. With Bhutto’s death plunging the country into chaos, there is now a “very grave danger” the weapons will fall under control of radical Islamist militants within the Pakistani military. “What we have now is a prescription for chaos,” Bolton said. Another foreign policy expert told RAW STORY Thursday that the death of the opposition leader likely has caused the so-called atomic “Doomsday Clock” to tick closer to midnight. Thursday night, Bolton told Fox viewers that Musharraf is “the person to put our money on” in hoping for an acceptable resolution to the crisis in Pakistan, although even he faces the threat of assassination. As soon as Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October — part of a deal brokered by the US — she was targeted by assassins in another suicide bombing. US diplomats viewer her as the only hope for maintaining stability and promoting democracy, but Bolton argued perhaps the US acted to quickly in attempting to reform the country. “You can’t say this wasn’t foreseeable, and it’s obviously led to her death,” Bolton said. “Hardly a successful strategy.”

state department buildings chief resigns

State Department buildings chief steps down amid questions over new Baghdad embassy

The Associated Press

Published: December 19, 2007

WASHINGTON: The man in charge of all U.S. government buildings abroad announced his retirement on Wednesday amid questions over the construction of the mammoth new $600 million embassy in Iraq.

Retired Army Gen. Charles E. Williams, the director of the State Department’s Overseas Buildings Operations, told his staff he would be leaving on Dec. 31.

He is the third senior State Department official to step down this year under Iraq-related scrutiny.

“He has now decided the time is right to retire,” deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in a statement. “We salute General Williams for his service to our country and wish him all the best in the future.”

Williams, who was in the job for seven years, had attracted criticism for his management style, particularly over the high-profile Baghdad embassy project. The compound had been due to be completed in September but has been beset by construction, logistical and security hitches, and its opening has now been delayed until well into next year.

Today in Americas

Officials familiar with his decision to retire said Williams was not forced to leave but made a point of noting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accepted his resignation without hesitation.

Williams was brought into the department by former Secretary of State Colin Powell to speed up construction of new embassies and ensure they conform with enhanced security requirements. He is credited with streamlining the building process and bringing projects in on time and at or under budget. He oversaw the construction of 56 new embassies and consulates.

But Rice, along with other senior State Department management officials, had become increasingly frustrated with the problems in the Baghdad project. It will be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, with heavily fortified working space for 1,000 people and living quarters for several hundred on a 104-acre site.

In October, the department conceded that a host of problems would push back the embassy opening at least until the spring of 2008 despite assurances from Williams to Congress that the construction was on time.

Those difficulties included major malfunctions in the complex’s physical plant, including electrical and water distribution systems, some of which are blamed on shoddy work by the company hired to build the project, First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Co., for $592 million.

Changes to the original design have pushed the cost up by an additional $144 million.

First Kuwaiti has been accused of tricking foreign laborers into working on the embassy, mistreating them and paying $200,000 in kickbacks in return for two unrelated Army contracts in Iraq. The company denies the charges.

Congressional Democrats have launched investigations into whether the State Department had adequate control of the project, which has been complicated by security concerns, including a September incident in which private Blackwater Worldwide guards are accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians while protecting an embassy convoy.

The controversies have led to the resignations of two senior officials prior to Williams.

The chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Richard Griffin, to whom Blackwater reported, quit in October, just a day after a report determined there had been serious lapses in the oversight of private contractors in Iraq.

Earlier this month, the department’s Inspector General Howard Krongard left under a cloud after being accused of impeding a Justice Department investigation into Blackwater and amid allegations that he ignored or covered up suspected problems with the construction of the Baghdad embassy.

On a recent visit to Iraq, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told embassy employees that completion of the new compound is a top priority but did not offer a new target date for its opening, officials said.

Embassy employees have been working and living in a makeshift complex in and around a Saddam-era palace that is cramped and has numerous security deficiencies. Many employees live in trailers that are not fully protected from mortars fired from outside the Green Zone.

iraqi refugees stranded when they return

Unprepared Government Strands Returning Iraqi Refugees

By CARA BUCKLEY

Published: December 20, 2007

BAGHDAD — The widow Hashim crossed the border into Iraq from Syria at dusk last month, heading homeward as the sun set behind her and the sky ahead grew dark.

Scott Nelson/World Picture News, for The New York Times

Maha Hashim shares her uncle’s two-bedroom apartment with her son Mahmoud and her three other children as well as other relatives.

Reach of War

Her dwindling savings had bought her family passage aboard a crowded bus, but there was no telling what awaited her at journey’s end. The only sure thing was that she would have to look for a new home and a job in a city starved for work and crudely reshaped by war.

Four weeks later, Maha Hashim is sharing her uncle’s musty two-bedroom apartment with her four children, sister-in law and four nieces and nephews, in the once tortured Baghdad neighborhood around Haifa Street. She has vowed not to stay long, but has no job and cannot afford an apartment of her own. Her husband, a policeman, was gunned down by insurgents in mid-2006 and her old house in south Baghdad was destroyed by a truck bomb. Her old neighborhood, Saydia, remains one of most dangerous in the capital.

“I loved Saydia but I can never go back, it broke my heart,” said Ms. Hashim, who is 40 and Sunni. “I need to get a job and a home, but how, and where?”

Tens of thousands of returning refugees face similar uncertainties throughout Iraq, where the government’s inability to manage the uneven reverse exodus has left the most vulnerable in an uneasy, potentially explosive limbo.

The government’s widely publicized plan to run free buses from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad was suspended after just two runs. Thousands of Sunni refugees are not getting aid because they fear registering with the Shiite-led government. While aid organizations are distributing emergency packets that include utensils, blankets and food, deeper structural issues, like securing neighborhoods, supplying housing or creating jobs, remain unresolved and largely unaddressed.

So far, just a fraction of the millions of refugees who fled from Iraq have come back. While the government trumpeted their return as proof of newfound security, migration experts said most of them were forced back by expired visas and depleted savings. Ms. Hashim, for one, pawned her wedding ring and gold jewelry to stay in Syria, but came back after her uncle’s visa application was denied.

The American military has expressed deep concerns about the Iraqi government’s ability to feed and house its returnees, or manage people who wish to reclaim their homes. It is widely feared that property disputes or efforts to return to newly homogenized neighborhoods could set off fresh waves of sectarian attacks.

For most Iraqi refugees, the trip home is just the beginning of their troubles. Many return to find their homes destroyed or filled with squatters, most of them displaced people themselves. But the government committee that decides property disputes is charged with hearing only cases that predate the invasion of 2003.

“We urgently need a plan, the whole government needs to be involved,” said Hamdiya A. Najaf, an official with the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration. Her ministry is overloaded with property dispute cases from Saddam Hussein’s time, when thousands were forcibly relocated. “We’re still working on the old problems,” she said. “We don’t have the mechanism to solve the new ones.”

The brewing housing crisis extends to millions who abandoned their homes but stayed in Iraq. In Baghdad alone, more than 300,000 people left one neighborhood for another, as Sunnis fled west and Shiites to the east, often moving into recently evacuated houses.

the hen guarding the cia chicken house had her “beak taped shut”

Harman: I told CIA not to destroy tapes

Rep. Jane Harman said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday that she told the CIA not to destroy videotapes of the interrogation of Al Qaeda terrorist suspects.

“My view then and my view now is it was a bad idea to consider destroying any tapes, and it was a very bad idea to do it,” said California Democrat Harman, who is the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee on Intelligence and Terrorism Risk Assessment. Harman said she wrote a “classified” letter to the CIA telling them of her opinion when she learned of the existence of these videotapes in 2003.

Harman said that she is unsure if the tapes were truly destroyed in order to protect identities, as CIA director Mike Hayden asserted in a letter he wrote yesterday to his employees.

“He wasn’t the guy who made the call,” Harman said, adding that she finds it “quite incredible” that Porter Goss, the CIA director in 2005, alleges that he had no idea that the tapes were destroyed.

“This is a big deal,” Harman said. “If I were running the CIA, I would want to be told that some critical evidence was being destroyed.”

When asked if there should be an investigation into whether a cover-up took place, Harman said that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should “demand all the facts.” Pressed further, she admitted that “it looks very bad.”

Harman has been barraged with criticism for not preventing the destruction of the tapes.

“What the hell was Jane Harman doing?” wrote prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan on Friday, in an entry entitled, “Pusillanimous Harman.” Sullivan called Harman’s actions “pathetic,” and wondered how she could have stayed silent: “A leading Democrat is told that the CIA is destroying evidence of its own war crimes and says and does nothing?”

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com also criticized Harman for confining her objections to “private expressions of ‘concern’ to the CIA.”

“She took no steps — no press conferences, no investigations, no demands for a criminal referral, no court action — to impede this destruction-of-evidence plan in any way,” wrote Greenwald.

Harman said classification laws prevented her from taking any course of action.

“Too much is classified. But I signed an oath as a member of Congress, and an additional oath as a member of the Intelligence Committee, to abide by the law and I do,” Harman said. “This was a highly classified intelligence briefing. That was the deal. I could not talk to anyone and I didn’t.”