The Rag Blog

VIENNA — Although international concern is growing about Iran’s nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran’s long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.

“Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that’s come to us has proved to be wrong,” a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency’s intelligence stream as “very cold now” because “so little panned out.”

The reliability of U.S. information and assessments on Iran is increasingly at issue as the Bush administration confronts the emerging regional power on several fronts: its expanding nuclear effort, its alleged support for insurgents in Iraq and its backing of Middle East militant groups.

The CIA still faces harsh criticism for its prewar intelligence errors on Iraq. No one here argues that U.S. intelligence officials have fallen this time for crudely forged documents or pushed shoddy analysis. IAEA officials, who openly challenged U.S. assessments that Saddam Hussein was developing a nuclear bomb, say the Americans are much more cautious in assessing Iran.

American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran’s nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove.

The IAEA has its own concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, although agency officials say they have found no proof that nuclear material has been diverted to a weapons program.

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

BAGHDAD, Feb 23 (IPS) – Iraqi journalists are outraged over yet another U.S. military raid on the media.

U.S. soldiers raided and ransacked the offices of the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists (ISJ) in central Baghdad Tuesday this week. Ten armed guards were arrested, and 10 computers and 15 small electricity generators kept for donation to families of killed journalists were seized.

This is not the first time U.S. troops have attacked the media in Iraq, but this time the raid was against the very symbol of it. Many Iraqis believe the U.S. soldiers did all they could to deliver the message of their leadership to Iraqi journalists to keep their mouth shut about anything going wrong with the U.S.-led occupation.

“The Americans have delivered so many messages to us, but we simply refused all of them,” Youssif al-Tamimi of the ISJ in Baghdad told IPS. “They killed our colleagues, closed so many newspapers, arrested hundreds of us and now they are shooting at our hearts by raiding our headquarters. This is the freedom of speech we received.”

Some Iraqi journalists blame the Iraqi government.

“Four years of occupation, and those Americans still commit such foolish mistakes by following the advice of their Iraqi collaborators,” Ahmad Hassan, a freelance journalist from Basra visiting Baghdad told IPS. “They (the U.S. military) have not learned yet that Iraqi journalists will raise their voice against such acts and will keep their promise to their people to search for the truth and deliver it to them at any cost.”

There is a growing belief in Iraq that U.S. allies in the current Iraqi government are leading the U.S. military to raid places and people who do not follow Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s directions.

“It is our Iraqi colleagues who pushed the Americans to that hole,” Fadhil Abbas, an Iraqi television producer told IPS. “Some journalists who failed to fake the truth here are trying hard to silence truth seekers by providing false information to the U.S. military in order to take advantage of their stupidity in handling the whole Iraqi issue.”

The incident occurred just two days after the Iraqi Union covering journalists received formal recognition from the government. The new status allowed the Syndicate access to its previously blocked bank account, and it had just purchased new computers and satellite equipment.

“Just at the point when the Syndicate achieves formal recognition for its work as an independent body of professionals, the American military carries out a brutal and unprovoked assault,” International Federation of Journalists General Secretary Aidan White said in a statement. “Anyone working for media that does not endorse U.S. policy and actions could now be at risk.”

BAGHDAD, Feb. 24 — Leaders of Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdish region have apparently approved a draft oil law that will be presented to Iraqi lawmakers in coming weeks, an eagerly awaited breakthrough that is expected to professionalize and expand drilling in the country.

The agreement was announced Saturday by Massoud Barzani, president of the regional government in Kurdish-populated northern Iraq, during a news conference in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah attended by Iraq’s president, the Associated Press reported.

“We reached a final agreement,” Barzani said, according to AP. “We accept the draft.”

Barzani did not disclose further details of the agreement, and no other officials discussed them publicly.

Spokesmen for the Kurdish regional government and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said they had no information on the reported deal.

02/24/07 “ICH” — – In a rare public criticism of Pakistan, the Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily, which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled out something that others perhaps knew already but were afraid to talk about publicly.

All the same, the commentary gave a candid Iranian insight into the state of play in Afghanistan. It estimated that without a comprehensive rethink of strategy aimed at addressing the problems of weak political institutions, misgovernance, corruption, warlordism, tardy reconstruction, drug trafficking and attendant mafia, and excesses by the coalition forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) couldn’t possibly hope to get anywhere near on top of the crisis in Afghanistan.

The commentary pointed a finger at Pakistan’s training the Taliban and providing them with “logistical and political support”. It highlighted that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who visited Islamabad recently, chose to sidestep the issue and instead bonded with President General Pervez Musharraf. This is because Washington’s priority – that the “new cold war” objective of NATO is to establish a long-term presence in the region – can be realized only with Musharraf’s cooperation.

The Iranian outburst was, conceivably, prompted by the spurt of trans-border terrorism inside Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province, which borders Pakistan. Ten days ago, a militant group called Jundallah killed 11 members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards in an attack in the city center of Zahedan. Iranian state media reported that the attack was part of US plans to provoke ethnic and religious violence in Iran. Balochs are Sunnis numbering about 1.5 million out of Iran’s 70 million predominantly Shi’ite population.

Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi alleged that in the recent past, US intelligence operatives in Afghanistan had been meeting and coordinating with Iranian militants, apart from encouraging the smuggling of drugs into Iran from Afghanistan. He said the US operatives were working to create Shi’ite-Sunni strife within Iran.

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has copiously written about recent US covert operations inside Iran. With reference to the incidents in Zahedan, Stratfor, a think-tank with close connections to the US military and security establishment, commented that the Jundallah militants are receiving a “boost” from Western intelligence agencies. Stratfor said, “The US-Iranian standoff has reached a high level of intensity … a covert war [is] being played out … the United States has likely ramped up support for Iran’s oppressed minorities in an attempt to push the Iranian regime toward a negotiated settlement over Iraq.”

Iran is fast joining ranks with India and Afghanistan as a victim of trans-border violence perpetrated by irredentist elements crossing over from Pakistan. Tehran, too, will probably face an existential dilemma as to whether or not such acts of terrorism are taking place with the knowledge of Musharraf and, more importantly, whether or not Musharraf is capable of doing anything about the situation.

Iran, perhaps, is somewhat better placed than India or Afghanistan to resolve this dilemma, since it is the US (and not Pakistan) that is sponsoring the trans-border terrorism. And what could Musharraf do about US activities on Pakistani soil even if he wanted to? The Iranians seem to have sized up Musharraf’s predicament.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran, while announcing last Sunday that the Pakistani ambassador to Iran was being summoned to receive a demarche over the Zahedan incident, also qualified that it was Iran’s belief that the Pakistani government as such couldn’t be party to the creation of such “insecurities” on the Pakistan-Iran border region.

02/23/07 “Green Left Weekly” — — “We, and millions of people around the world … believe another world is possible, a world free from war, poverty and hunger. Here in Venezuela the [government of socialist President Hugo Chavez] along with the majority of the people in our country are fighting hard to build this new world, despite the attempts of the old elite and the US government to prevent us from succeeding.” This is what 25-year-old university student Germania Fernandez told Pablo Navarrete, according to a December 1 article on Venezuelanalysis.com.

Fernandez was participating in a November 26 demonstration in Caracas of 2.5 million people, in a city of only 5 million, in support of Chavez’s re-election on December 3 and his call to deepen the pro-poor revolutionary process his government is leading. Repeatedly slamming the “perverse” system of capitalism, Chavez insisted that December 3 would be a referendum on the construction of a “new socialism of the 21st century” — a “democratic” and “humanist” socialism that did not repeat the errors of the Soviet Union.

The results were spectacular. Chavez scored 7.3 million votes (63% of the total), the highest number for a presidential candidate in Venezuelan history and more than double his votes in the 2000 elections. Chavez has since declared: “All that was privatised, let it be nationalised.” The nationalisation of the telecommunications firm CANTV and Electricity of Caracas, both owned by US interests and amounting to 50% of daily trading on the Caracas stock exchange, has already been carried out. Chavez has given five oil multinationals in the Orinoco Belt until May 1 to give the state-run oil company PDVSA at least 60% controlling interests in their ventures, and has promised to nationalise gas.

These radical moves build on the gains already made by the Bolivarian revolution, as the process led by Chavez, who was first elected in 1998, is known. Named after Simon Bolivar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism, the revolution has sought to challenge corporate interests and redistribute the nation’s oil wealth to the poor majority. A November 17 Venezuelanlaysis.com article by Calvin Tucker points out that according to opposition-aligned polling company Datanalysis, the income of the poorest 60% has risen by 45%. Navarrette reports that a recent census reveals the number of households living in poverty has dropped from 49% in 1998 to 33.9% in early 2006.

The revolution is also thoroughly democratic. Pro-Chavez forces have won 11 straight national elections and introduced a new constitution guaranteeing popular participation in government, including the right to overturn any legislation via a national referendum. The government has announced an extension of direct democracy, via the promotion of grassroots communal councils, and is also discussing workers’ councils in workplaces across the country to enable working people to exercise control over production.

‘Death of history’?

“This is not supposed to be happening”, you can almost hear them cry out in the corporate boardrooms. There is an air of disbelief in much of the corporate-owned media’s coverage of Venezuela. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, socialism was supposed to be dead and buried. History was supposed to have ended, with capitalism triumphant. What kind of weird, throwback retro act is playing in Caracas?

02/23/07 “Global Research” – DUBAI, UAE, 21 February 2007. (revised 23 Feb 2007). Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT, “Theater Iran Near Term” has identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a “Shock and Awe” Blitzkrieg, which is now in its final planning stages.

According to the Kuwait-based Arab Times, an attack on Iran under TIRANNT could occur any time between late February and the end of April. This assessment, however, does not take into account the disarray of US ground forces in Iraq as well as the untimely withdrawal of several thousand British troops from the Iraq war theater, many of whom were stationed in Southern Iraq on the immediate border with Iran.

Revealed last April by William Arkin, a former US intelligence analyst, writing in the Washington Post, TIRANNT was first established in May 2003, following the invasion of Iraq.

“In early 2003, even as U.S. forces were on the brink of war with Iraq, the Army had already begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran. The analysis, called TIRANNT, for “theater Iran near term,” was coupled with a mock scenario for a Marine Corps invasion and a simulation of the Iranian missile force. U.S. and British planners conducted a Caspian Sea war game around the same time. And Bush directed the U.S. Strategic Command to draw up a global strike war plan for an attack against Iranian weapons of mass destruction. All of this will ultimately feed into a new war plan for “major combat operations” against Iran that military sources confirm now exists in draft form. [This contingency plan entitled CONPLAN 8022 would be activated in the eventuality of a Second 9/11, on the presumption that Iran would be behind it]

… Under TIRANNT, Army and U.S. Central Command planners have been examining both near-term and out-year scenarios for war with Iran, including all aspects of a major combat operation, from mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change.” (William Arkin, Washington Post, 16 April 2006)

The 2003 decision to target Iran under TIRANNT should come as no surprise. It is part of the broader military roadmap. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated in 1995 “in war theater plans” to invade first Iraq and then Iran.

“The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Chairman’s National Military Strategy (NMS) form the foundation of the United States Central Command’s theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM’s theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States’ vital interest in the region – uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil.” (USCENTCOM, complete reference here, emphasis added)

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The U.S. government refiled charges on Friday against an Army officer who refused to fight in Iraq after his first court martial ended in a mistrial.

The Army charged First Lt. Ehren Watada with one count of missing movements and four counts of conduct unbecoming an officer. Watada, 28, faces a dishonorable discharge and up to six years in a military prison if convicted on all counts.

Earlier this month, a military judge declared a mistrial in the first known court martial of a U.S. Army officer for publicly refusing to serve in Iraq. The mistrial was based on a ruling that Watada had unknowingly signed a document that amounted to a confession of guilt.

At the time, Watada’s lawyer said a retrial would constitute double jeopardy, which forbids a defendant from being tried twice for the same crime, and would seek to have a second case thrown out. There is no date set for a retrial.

The suit was refiled at Fort Lewis Army base south of Seattle.

Watada has admitted to not boarding a plane headed to Iraq with the rest of his unit and making public statements criticizing the war as illegal and accusing President George W. Bush’s administration of deceiving the American people to enter into a war of aggression.

Florida’s prosecutors are floating a proposal to the Legislature to give them the power to secretly falsify public court records — with a judge’s approval — for undercover law enforcement purposes.

Spurred by Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, the draft bill would limit the authority to manufacture and plant fake documents in court files to 180 days. But it also provides for an unlimited number of 30-day extensions.

“Judges would be very involved in the monitoring. It all has to go through a judge,” said Arthur I. ‘Buddy’ Jacobs, general counsel for the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, which supports the bill.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida opposes the idea.

“The fundamental problem is that it so goes against our notion of the way our justice system ought to work,” said ACLU legislative director Randall Marshall. “How would we ever be able to trust anything in the judicial record knowing that something could be intentionally falsified with a judicial seal of approval?”

Black America must revive the concept of a Domestic Marshall Plan to reverse the deterioration of the nation’s ‘dark ghettos’ – most immediately, to restore New Orleans’ exiled population. Dr. Daniel’s suggests the campaign be called the Martin Luther King-Malcolm X Community Revitalization Initiative, a mobilization to begin on April 4. The guiding principle behind the campaign must be the idea that oppressed people should exercise the power to control their communities and the conviction that every person in this country is entitled to enjoy certain basic human rights, as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“We will call this proposal the Martin Luther King-Malcolm X Community Revitalization Initiative.”

This article is based on a presentation made by Dr. Daniels at the Black Family Summit Policy Institute convened February 1, 2007, by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century at Howard University. It is a discussion piece which is intended to assess interest in and commitment to launching a bold initiative to compel the American public and the government to confront issues of racism, poverty and inequality in this country as dramatically exposed by Katrina.

In January at the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) “State of the Black World Forum” in Washington D.C., during discussion on creating a “New Force in Black America” to revitalize the Black Freedom Struggle, New York City Councilman Charles Barron remarked that neither the Democratic Party nor the Congressional Black Caucus has clearly signaled what explicitly “Black issues” they are prepared to advance since Democrats took control of Congress. In this regard it is important to remember that the Six Point Democratic Program for recapturing control of Congress did not include Katrina/New Orleans. Moreover, Katrina/New Orleans was completely absent from President Bush’s State of the Union Address.

While there was no noticeable outcry from Black leaders protesting this disgraceful omission, Capital Hill insiders indicate that the Congressional Black Caucus is focusing on aid/assistance for New Orleans and the Gulf as a major priority. With Blacks once again demonstrating unflinching loyalty to the Democratic Party in the critical mid-term elections, however, there is still the overarching and compelling question as to what “race specific” initiatives will be advanced by the Democratic leadership in Congress to address crucial Black issues and concerns. Black America needs an answer to that question, and I believe that one of the responses ought to be to revive the concept of a Domestic Marshall Plan targeted at rebuilding New Orleans and America’s “dark ghettos.”

“The Six Point Democratic Program for recapturing control of Congress did not include Katrina/New Orleans.”

I presented this idea at a recent Policy Institute convened by the Black Family Summit of IBW at Howard University. In so doing, I reminded the assembled organization heads, scholars and activists that it is important to realize that Katrina is a metaphor for the disaster wrought on Black America’s urban and rural communities by years of benign and blatant neglect. This was/is manifested by the almost total abandonment of pro-active and corrective policies for problems of inner-city and rural communities by Democratic and Republic administrations. The toll on Black America, especially on Black working class and poor people, has been devastating. Many urban inner-city areas are like zones of desolation and despair, racked by chronic unemployment, underemployment, poverty, inadequate health facilities, environmental degradation, poor performing schools, the infestation of drugs, crime, gangs, the illicit economy, fear, police occupation and terror – all feeding a prison-jail industrial complex where Black and Brown people are the primary fodder. As depicted on the television series “The Wire,” life in America’s dark ghettos can be deadly and destructive of the aspirations of a people; the tragic consequence of broken individuals, families and communities.

Most importantly, contrary to the exhortations of “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby, this is a fate which is not of our own choosing. Nor are these the same “ghettos” that past generations grew up in around the country. As William Julius Wilson observes, in the face of globalization, massive de-industrialization and the calculated shrinking of ameliorative public programs and services under the guise of creating a more efficient government, the most disadvantaged of our people are living in communities where “work has virtually disappeared.” Moreover, there is an almost total collapse of supportive community based institutions like settlement houses, health care centers, hospitals and viable schools. And, African Americans in past generations did not grow up in communities where guns and drugs were so readily available and violence and deadly force was endemic to daily life.

“Ethnic cleansing is afoot in New Orleans.”

Currently there is no acceptable response to our plight by policymakers in Washington. Total neglect or the conservative mantra of “blame the victim,” is the order of the day. To the degree that there has been a response, it has been by developers moving in, aided and abetted by local governments, to displace Black working class and poor people from their neighborhoods, scattering them hither and thither as Whites have decided to recapture the “Chocolate Cities” of this nation. Gentrification has become the “Negro removal program” of the 21st century. It is precisely this kind of “ethnic cleansing” program that is afoot in New Orleans as local developers attempt to remake this African city to create a Disney World, theme park environment.

According to British media, the US and UK governments are on track to achieve a March victory in Iraq. This victory will not be publicized nor will it mean an end to the occupation.

Written by Bush and Blair’s big oil business partners who serve as the leaders’ advisors on foreign policy, the new Iraq hydrocarbon law opens the door for international investors, led by BP, Exxon and Shell, to siphon off 75 percent of Iraq oil wealth for 30 years. This economic model is called a “Production Sharing Agreement.” But is a 75/25 split, with bloated oil companies taking 75 percent of the country’s wealth and leaving just 25 percent for the devastated Iraqis, a sharing agreement or an armed robbery?

The law is currently under consideration in the Iraq Parliament, with deputy prime minister Salih, chair of the oil committee, carrying the legislation.

Iraq’s unions, if not its occupied government, are standing firm against the oil law. With the oil sector representing 95 percent of the country’s revenues, and with only 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields under production, much is at stake.

The General Union of Oil Employees in Basra has taken a strong stand against the proposed law. GUOE’s courageous members booted KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, out of refinery workplaces shortly after the invasion despite Cheney’s award of a ‘no bid’ contract. Members also went on a two-day strike last August, winning their demands for higher pay. From what one can glean from foreign press and unfiltered words from Iraq, so does every other union in Iraq. In his February 6 speech
at a conference held at Basra University to debate the oil law, GUOE president Hassan Jumaa Awad al Assadi minced no words. “Among the objectives America wishes to achieve from the military occupation of Iraq, all the causes of which we do not want to return to, but simply to emphasize one central objective of the American political leaders who crossed oceans and wasted billions of dollars, that is Iraqi oil. Indeed we in the Federation of Oil Unions consider this the most important reason for this foul war.”

Assadi, who was jailed three times for opposing the former Baath regime, called on Iraq’s Parliament to “bear the Iraqis in mind, to protect the national wealth, and to look at the neighboring countries. Have they introduced such laws even when their relations with foreign companies are closer than in Iraq? If those calling for production-sharing agreements insist on acting against the will of Iraqis, we say to them that history will not forgive those who play recklessly with the wealth and destiny of a people and that the curse of heaven and the fury of Iraqis will not leave them.”

The oil workers must be braced for a response. After GUOE’s first anti-privatization conference last summer, the U.S. and Iraqi governments responded by freezing the union’s bank accounts.

Union members have been arrested and fired from their jobs. At least two union leaders, Hadi Saleh, of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unionists (IFTU) and Ali Hassan Abd of the GUOW, were assassinated since the invasion.