If State of Law had kept their mouth shut, the world might never have known.
The European Parliament was meeting in Brussels for a human rights conference. The ego of the US press is so great that if the United States isn't involved, they don't think it matters. The event had little coverage outside of Europe.
And no one was talking about Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi participating.
In fact, the press has ignored Tareq all month except for an obscure Spanish language newspaper which offered the equivalent of a Tweet -- in the first week of October -- reminding people that Tareq was tried in absentia for 'terrorism' and was now living in Turkey.
That was it.
We get regular updates e-mailed to the public account from the European Parliament, press releases. If they're Iraq related, they get worked into an entry here. The EP did not announce al-Hashemi's planned appearance at the conference.
Nouri's political slate, State Of Law learned of it from Iraq's diplomats in Brussels.
And if they wanted to silence Tareq, they should have kept their mouths shut.
Thursday morning, going through at least fifty outlets, maybe 100, I could've easily missed the only outlet covering it: All Iraq News and AIN wouldn't have covered it if State Of Law had kept their mouth shut. They couldn't. And that's what AIN reported on (here and here) and how the news broke about Tareq attending. That's where we learned of it -- it's where two Iraqi outlets learned of it and would note it hours later.
In the snapshot that day, we reviewed Tareq's history. If you're late to this, refer to that history. The short version is that in December 2011, Nouri al-Maliki goes after Iraqiya members. (Iraqiya bested his State Of Law in the 2010 elections.) He accused Tareq of 'terrorism' and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq of what? Saleh's 'crime' was telling CNN that month that Nouri had become a dictator like Saddam. For that he went after Saleh as well.
In Iraq, Nouri doesn't have the power to strip people of office. That's why he refused to nominate people to head the security ministries and has (illegally) remained over them. If Parliament votes to confirm someone, that's their post unless the person resigns or Parliament votes to strip them of it. Parliament refused to strip Saleh or Tareq.
Nouri's courtesans -- aka the western press with few exceptions (the British press is the basic exception -- the Guardian, the Telegraph of London, the Economist, etc.) -- covered for Nouri. They lied and whored. They would call, for example, Tareq the former vice president.
They don't make that call.
Nouri doesn't make that call.
Only the Iraqi parliament makes that call.
And they've refused to.
So Tareq al-Hashemi remains an Iraqi Vice President.
Only two western outlets bothered to report on Tareq. From Friday's snapshot:
Today AFP reports the Vice President did hold a press conference and he declared, "My case is politically motivated and the charges are absolutely fabricated. Nevertheless, I now express my readiness to return to Baghdad immediately ... in (the case) the EU guarantees a fair trial." Middle East Monitor quotes al-Hashemi also stating, "The chances of just litigation are non-existent in Iraq when Chief Justice Medhat Al-Mahmoud is clearly complicit with the Prime Minister's Office, thus distorting the image and reputation of Iraq both domestically and internationally."
While those two deserve some credit for reporting, the reality is they buried the real story.
Tareq says he's innocent and will return for a fair trial?
If you followed the story in 2012, that's not news. Tareq's said that all along.
News what he presented. News was what the outlets avoided.
You can read his speech in full via the National Council of Resistance of Iran. or in the repost we just did.
We'll go over his remarks at length in today's snapshot. For right now, the most important remark is at the end:
I want also to ask those countries, especially the United States, which still blindly support the current Prime Minister who keeps deceiving the international community by giving false reports about the situation in the country and never fulfills his promises, I ask them to reconsider their stands and help build a real and well-established democracy in Iraq.
That's an important statement for many reasons including (a) Nouri meets with US President Barack Obama in a matter of days and (b) Nouri lost the post of prime minister in 2010 -- and refused to step down for 8 months bringing Iraqi politics to a standstill -- but Barack stepped in. The White House brokered The Erbil Agreement that went out around Iraqi voters and the Iraqi Constitution and all notions of democracy and free and fair elections to give Nouri a second term that the Iraqi people had denied him of.
Barack's handiwork didn't stop there.
From the November 11, 2010 snapshot:
Martin Chulov (Guardian) reports
one hiccup in the process today involved Ayad Allawi who US President
Barack Obama phoned asking/pleading that he accept the deal because "his
rejection of post would be a vote of no confidence". Ben Lando, Sam Dagher and Margaret Coker (Wall St. Journal) confirm
the phone call via two sources and state Allawi will take the post --
newly created -- of chair of the National Council On Higher Policy: "Mr.
Obama, in his phone call to Mr. Allawi on Thursday, promised to throw
U.S. weight behind the process and guarantee that the council would
retain meaningful and legal power, according to the two officials with
knowledge of the phone call."
Barack begged and then refused to honor his promises. He's a joke in Iraq. Iraqis really thought he was going to deliver in 2008. He did nothing but maintain the corrupt regime.
Again, Tareq al-Hashemi speaking last week:
I want also to ask those countries, especially the United States, which still blindly support the current Prime Minister who keeps deceiving the international community by giving false reports about the situation in the country and never fulfills his promises, I ask them to reconsider their stands and help build a real and well-established democracy in Iraq.
Let's expand this a little. It's not just the whorish MSM. It's also the US writers. Mother Jones, Will Bunch all the useless piece of crap that people scrape off their shoes. It is 2013. The most pressing issue in Iraq is not George W. Bush.
I don't include Huffington Post in that because, while they do call out Bully Boy Bush, they also cover Iraq today. But these other people?
Who the hell are you trying to help?
It's not the Iraqi people.
Will Bunch with his ridiculous crap yesterday (see "Hejira").
Bully Boy Bush hasn't been in charge since Barack was sworn in back in January of 2009.
Each year of Barack's term, life has gotten worse for the Iraiq people.
That's on Barack. That includes nominating the ridiculous Chris Hill for Ambassador to Iraq and refusing to monitor him, blowing off Gen Ray Odierno in favor of that nut case whose State Dept personnel file made clear wasn't qualified to be an ambassador.
Looking the other way while Iraq's lesbian and gay community was targeted for months and months? Refusing to make one public statement denouncing the serial killings -- by Nouri's forces -- of gays and lesbians and those suspected of being gay or lesbian?
These were crimes against humanity.
The illegal war happened. Maybe some day Bully Boy Bush will be punished for it.
But Will Bunch's Bush hatred doesn't help the Iraqi people. His lies and his whoring is nothing but a distraction from the suffering of the Iraqi people.
The US government, Barack Obama, created the problems in Iraq right now. That includes the political crises. It stems from (a) the refusal of the US government to insist that Iraqi votes and voters be honored and (b) The Erbil Agreement that the US brokered and insisted was iron-clad and had the backing of the US government.
The political crises stem from the fact that The Erbil Agreement is a power-sharing agreement but Nouri didn't honor it. He stalled. He used it to get a second term and then stalled claiming that he would honor the various clauses in a few weeks. That was 2010.
Kirkuk had a census and referendum to determine its status when? That was the promise to the PUK and KDP. But Nouri's failed to honor it.
Ayad Allawi was made head of an independent national security body when?
That key promise to Iraqiya never came to be, did it?
It's weeks away from the third year anniversary of The Erbil Agreement and Nouri refused to honor it.
And the US looked the other way. US government, US press, you name it. They looked the other way.
And as things got worse and worse in Iraq, they took to blaming al Qaeda in Iraq.
No, that's not how it works.
al Qaeda may be more active. If so, it's a response to Nouri's actions.
Nouri has destroyed the country.
Barack's about to meet with Nouri in DC. Marc Lynch (Foreign Policy) has rightly pointed out this meeting cannot afford to be about meaningless platitudes. That includes Nouri repeating empty words about reconciliation:
The political failure in Iraq is nothing new and has very little to do with the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Maliki ignored such advice when there were 140,000 American troops in Iraq; he ignored it when those troops began to withdraw; and he ignored it after they left altogether. He was never going to make such concessions unless he felt them absolutely necessary for his own survival. In part due to the temporary security gains of the U.S. "surge" and co-optation of the Sunni insurgency, he never really felt that he did.
Things might be different now, though. The harvest of his exclusionary politics has been long months of sustained Sunni protest, renewed insurgency, and an increasing perception that the country is coming apart at the seams. A dramatic increase in violent deaths has driven a widely held fear that Iraq is unraveling and that the fire is again burning. The perverse consequence of this year's growing violence and political crisis could finally be that the carnage is finally enough to push him to such belated, reluctant concessions. His own political survival instincts, not American leverage, might finally bring him around. With fateful elections looming next year and troubling signs emerging about the contours of the new electoral law, the White House should do whatever it can during his visit to nudge him in that direction -- and condition all of the incentives that might be activated under the SFA (like the military and intelligence assistance Maliki wants) upon his doing so.
There is little question that Maliki's persistent exclusion of Sunnis and consolidation of power has kept Baghdad's perpetual political crisis boiling. The initially peaceful protest movement that broke out among Iraqi Sunnis earlier this year was driven by widespread grievances over his sectarian politics, his government's corruption, and his consolidation of autocratic power. Frustrations grew over his refusal to compromise, and exploded over the government's brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrations, such as April's bloody attack on protesters in Hawija.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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