'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

"Mahatma" Sistani, and more from Cole

Two great pieces on Juan Cole today. The first quotes an un-named "European peace worker in Iraq" as having said:

"I´ve heard that Sistani has promoted among his followers the Gandhian method of disobedience against the occupation power, if the situation seems to go out of hand [i.e. if the US rejects direct elections]."

Well, this all still sounds a little hearsay-ish to me, at this point. However, if you go back to what I wrote here Saturday, in number (1) in that list there, you'll see that I had "diagnosed", as it were, a Gandhian hand at work in Sistani's systematic and apparently fairly expert mobilization, use, and husbanding of a mass civilian movement there in the Iraqi Shi-ite community.

Juan (or anyone else), I'd love to have more details of anything that's going on along these lines in the Grand Ayatollah's circles????? Please send along such info, pronto. It's really exciting.

Secondly, Juan has a great post referencing stories in Newsweek and the Grauniad in which Nick Theros, a lobbyist for Iraqi National Accord chief Iyad Allawi does the following:

(1) he admits that Allawi, and one of his contacts, a former Iraqi air-defense officer named Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh, may have been the sole source for a number of the more terrifying USUK intel "reports" about alleged Iraqi WMDs, that were used to jerk the US and British publics into supporting the war, and

(2) he says that at least one of these claims of Dabbagh's (that relating to reported deliveries to Iraqi front-line units of warheads containing WMDs) now "looks like it could have been a crock of s--t."

Whoa. What happened, I wonder? Did Allawi fail to keep up with the payments he'd promised Theros? What a glorious falling-out among thieves we have here. Did I mention that Allawi is a member of that glorious institution [irony alert there] of Iraqi "self-government" called the Iraqi Governing Council??

Anyway, apropos of my own continuing mild obsession with finding the provenance of the infamous "Niger-yellowcake" forgeries-- see the bottom of this post, from yesterday, and the earlier posts linked to there--the Newsweek story on Theros says:

the INA was the source of a purported secret document?again published by the [London Sunday] Telegraph?claiming that [Al-Qaeda high-up Muhammed] Atta visited Baghdad, apparently in 2001, for a three-day training course with now deceased terrorist Abu Nidal. The same document also made a cryptic reference to Al Qaeda's involvement in an alleged shipment of an unidentified commodity to Iraq from Niger?an attempt to link Osama bin Laden to alleged efforts by Saddam to get nuclear material.

It's possibly interesting to note that the Telegraph was at the time owned by the now rapidly falling-from-grace Lord (Conrad) Black, but I really don't want to get too far into conspiracy theories... I'm just really sitting back enjoying seeing that whole web of forgeries and lies collapsing under its own dead weight of unreality.

It would be quite an interesting and enjoyable spectator source to do this-- if the consequences of that terrible war for the Iraqi people, for the families of killed and wounded US soldiers, for the fiscal health of our children and grandchildren's world, and the fabric of global society had not all been so unbelievably tragic.