Unlike al Hanooti and Alomari, Washington and London discovered that their own Iraqi allies— like Ahmed Chalabi— while exuberant in victory, had no friends or followers inside Iraq. Nobody supported them. The only Exiles who boasted small camps of supporters were Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, who founded the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and members of the Islamic fundamentalist Dawa Party. Both had sought refuge in Iran during Saddam’s reign. Most secular Iraqis bitterly despised their Iranian connections. And though the western media tried to downplay it, most Iraqis regarded the Exiles’ support for the miserable U.N. sanctions as unforgivable War Crimes against the Iraqi people.
Except for their protection by U.S. and British soldiers, returning Exiles would have been butchered on arrival, and orphaned by history.
Al-Hakim was assassinated shortly after his return to Baghdad by rival factions promoting Moqtada al-Sadr, whose family stayed with Iraq’s people during sanctions and Saddam.
Returning Iraqi Exiles appeared to grasp what a fragile position they occupied in the “New Iraq.” From the first weeks of Occupation, the Exiles executed one fundamental strategy for coming to power. Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, they started using American soldiers to burst into the homes of ordinary Iraqis in the midnight hours, in order to arrest former Baathist officials, teachers, Judges, civil servants, young and old, who might challenge their power base and authority in future elections.
That first wave of arrests by U.S. soldiers began months before the Iraqi insurgency kicked off. There was no popular resistance at that point. Al Qaeda had not emerged as a force of reckoning. But in some villages, any Iraqi male over 5 feet tall got taken into custody.
Right from the start, Exiles hunted out political competitors. They sought to remove any individuals who might create a leadership alternative in the community. Today it’s an open secret that Iraqis outside of the Exile Community, which nurtured its ambitions in London, Tehran and Detroit, are largely prohibited from participating in leadership of the country. In the 2010 parliamentary elections, 511 candidates were barred from the ballot, mostly domestic Iraqis.
When I saw this activity, I found my own purpose in the Occupation. I thought the Iraqi people should have real democracy and human rights— not what I call “gun democracy.” Banning candidates from the ballot negates all claims of fair and free election, as far as I’m concerned. In a true democracy, anybody who wants to run for office has the right to throw their hat in the ring. The opposition doesn’t get to choose candidates, or strike off winners.
So I took on the role of watch dog from Washington. And I stayed busy.
Tragically, the Occupation was already going horribly wrong. At the beginning of June, 2003, an explosive story hit the British press. British soldiers had photographed naked Iraqi prisoners graphically positioned to emulate acts of sodomy and oral sex. British soldiers stood by laughing. Another Iraqi was hung naked from a rope tied to a forklift truck, bound hand and foot.267
A very brave young woman named Kelly Tilford spotted the pornographic pictures taken on the battlefield at her photo shop in London, and called the police immediately.
“I saw the look on his face. He was petrified,” Tilford told the British Sun. “I will never forget that terrible stare.”
Another photo showed a close up shot of the naked backsides of two Iraqis, as if they were simulating anal sex.
This story broke almost a year before the exposé of identical torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, under U.S. control. Close similarities in the graphic sexual abuses practiced by British and American soldiers suggest the policy was deliberate and coordinated, in order to emasculate Iraqi males.
Indeed, sexual degradation was applied across the country, from north to south, since Britain and the United States subjugated different parts of Iraq.
British and American soldiers who got arrested for these gross human rights violations, like Gary Bartlam of the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers,268 and Lynndie England of West Virginia in the United States,269 should stop blaming others for their abusive actions, the likes of which have been condemned throughout military conflicts for the past 100 years. Each was convicted of photographing naked Iraqis, forced to perform or simulate sexual acts for the amusement of Occupation soldiers. Unforgivably, it’s evident that U.S. and British commanding officers winked at this sort of behavior. Senior officers failed to motivate soldiers under their command to act honorably towards Iraqi citizens. That command failure produced incalculable damage to subjugation efforts from the start of the Occupation.
On those grounds, I make no apologies for a letter that I submitted to British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock at the United Nations on June 4, 2003—270 a year before Abu Ghraib broke in the media— on behalf of abused Iraqis.
“The British government should consider itself hereby warned of (our) intention to file criminal charges against Prime Minister Tony Blair and the United Kingdom for violations of the International Geneva Conventions of War. It is our intention to seek maximum financial compensation for all Iraqi victims of British and American war crimes, in equal measure to what Britain and the U.S. have demanded in the past for their own citizens.”
“You will find the price of degrading human life is not cheap, Mr. Ambassador.”
“To protect the British treasury—if not for human decency— we urge Britain and the U.S. to immediately allow the International Red Cross to gain access to all warehouses and camps where Iraqi Prisoners of War continue to be held. You should be warned, sir, that reports abound of prisoners being chained and hooded 24 hours of the day, and abused in circumstances worse than Guantanamo Bay.”
“It would be in Britain’s greatest national interest to guarantee a reversal in this horrific trend, for you should never doubt, sir, that Britain’s criminal actions will carry an enormous price. We are ready to protect and defend that law, with the knowledge and certainty that we are in fact defending the best moral values of humanity.”
And by God, I meant every word!
Amnesty International carried the day, forcing the British military to put several soldiers on trial for war crimes, and conduct a lengthy investigation of prisoner abuses that bear uncanny similarities to U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib.271 Amnesty International kept Tony Blair’s government in the fire,, and forced attention at the command level.
As for myself, I began to explore avenues to raise money for a two-part legal project, both inside Iraq and at the International Criminal Court of The Hague. My goal was to hire a legal team inside Iraq to protect detainees captured in those midnight raids across the Sunni Heartland. Our team of Iraqi attorneys would establish a legal clinic, on behalf of impoverished families who desired legal representation for their captive sons and fathers.272
Investigators would also document the rampant thefts of cash and property like satellite phones and art treasures, stolen from Iraqi homes by American soldiers, and the many rapes of Iraqi women and random shootings by American and Coalition soldiers, routinely ignored by U.S. authorities. These abuses quickly embittered the largely impoverished Iraqi population. Our goal was to document offenses by Coalition soldiers, so that habitual offenders could be court-martialed and abusive practices could be outlawed at the command level.273,274
Sadly, without that reporting mechanism, abuses of Iraqi citizens accelerated over the years. As of 2009, the U.S. military acknowledged that between 70 percent and 90 percent of Iraqi detainees never committed any crime, but suffered wrongful accusations for revenge or profit, since American soldiers paid cash rewards of up to $2,500 to informants for each arrest. Many of those Iraqis suffered detention without trial for years.275
The second part of my project focused on The Hague. I envisioned a team of international attorneys, backed by Iraqis, who would try to establish a legal precedent for mandatory human rights protections for citizens under Occupation, with financial penalties for v
iolations.276 That would have provided an enforcement mechanism for the International Geneva Conventions of War, a potentially valuable legal tool, which remains largely voluntary. The U.S. has mostly ignored it.
For this part of the project, I identified a highly respected human rights attorney named Stanley Cohen of New York City, who has pioneered the use of international law, to assert the rights of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. With courageous forward vision, Cohen’s team has sought to hold Israel accountable to international law, in order to shield Palestinians from apartheid practices. If the International Courts could staunch human rights abuses, the thinking goes, we might persuade them to trust the Courts, instead of resorting to violence to remedy their injustice.
Was our vision too idealistic? Perhaps, but that was my plan. I needed financing to the tune of $500,000 to pull it off. Half of that money would have paid for Stanley Cohen’s team at the International Criminal Court.277 The other half would have financed the legal clinic inside Baghdad. It was a paltry sum compared to what great good our project might have accomplished.
Needless to say, the CIA did not appreciate in any way, shape or form, whatsoever that one of their former Assets was aggressively harassing the British Ambassador to the United Nations, and threatening legal action against the “Coalition of the Willing,” in order to protect Iraqi citizens from human rights abuses by undisciplined soldiers.
Oh no, they didn’t like that at all.
FBI wire taps captured my faxed letter to Ambassador Greenstock on June 4, 2003, along with dozens of faxes sent to Congress and the United Nations, protesting the War and Occupation policies.278
On June 12, I received a single warning from my old compatriots at the CIA to shut my god damn mouth on all matters tied to Iraq.
The threat was not ambiguous. It arrived as an email marked “life insurance policy” under the name of the former Iraqi diplomat, Mr. A——who, prior to the war, had agreed to help the U.S. identify foreign terrorists playing hide and seek with Saddam’s Intelligence Service. The use of his name in that email reaffirmed that U.S. intelligence understood our special relationship very well.
There was nothing subtle about the message. They weren’t going to limit their attacks to me. They were going to hunt down my old contacts in Baghdad, as well. The email said that if I wanted to keep them alive, I should go to ground and stay silent on all matters tied to Iraq.
That just pissed me off.
Hey, they were pissed off, too.
We were both at each other’s throats at this point— with daggers drawn. I recognized that email would not be the end of it. Spooks become dangerous animals when threatened. No doubt they decided that somebody better investigate what I was up to, and how far I had progressed. It didn’t take them long to mobilize.
As I have said before, when they want you, they will come and get you.
That’s exactly what they did.
Very early on the morning of June 23, 2003, I got a phone call at about 7 a.m.279
A man with a very slight Arab accent asked to speak with me that morning, before I headed off to work. He asked if I could meet him in the parking lot of a local restaurant called Savory. Clearly he’d scoped out my little peace-nik town. I’d walked my dachshunds that beautiful summer morning, and it appeared that he knew I was dressed for work when he requested the meeting.
Now most people would run like the devil in the opposite direction if they got a phone call like that. Assets are different creatures. We’re supposed to handle this kind of stuff. Though I was officially retired, once you’re in that game—and it is a game—then you are expected to play whenever called upon.
The game’s never over. You’re never really out of it.
On that expectation, I agreed to show up in 30 minutes, as requested.
We walked around my neighborhood for no more than 10 minutes. On our short morning walk, I learned that “Adam” claimed to have traveled from Michigan. He told me a small group of investors wanted to put together a peace project inside Iraq to influence the Occupation. Of critical importance, “Adam” claimed to know my friend, Muthanna, who’s also from Dearborn, Michigan. The conversation was necessarily brief, because I had to go to work. However, I agreed to meet him at a hotel in the Baltimore Marina later that night on June 23, 2003.280
Given who I am, I don’t take things on faith just because I’m told. The timing struck me as awfully suspicious. I’d sent my letter to British Ambassador Greenstock on June 4. I’d received the “life insurance” email on about June 15-16. And it was now June 23. So of course I made a connection. According to the schematics of the intelligence world, I recognized this approach as a rational action on their part. At the same time, something was in play, and as part of the game, I had to figure out what it was.
A lifetime of expectations influenced how I viewed this man. From the opening, I considered that I was dealing with his “cover,” and only a small part of it had been revealed on our morning walk.
Right off the bat, I saw it was possible— but not likely— that Adam’s cover was authentic. Perhaps he knew Muthanna. Perhaps he did not. Right then Muthanna was traveling in Iraq. So I could not inquire. That did not matter though. It would be remarkable, truly perplexing, if after a decade as a CIA Asset, I failed to grasp that some kind of game was in play. I’d have to erase every experience I ever had not to be confident handling this.
I saw three options.
One, Adam was a jihadi. That struck me as extremely unlikely, since all my Arab friends and contacts understood that I famously oppose war and violence in the Middle East in all directions. It would have been awfully risky to approach me. He could expect to get rebuffed. He would gain nothing from the attempt.
Two, he was a spook. That was always the most probable scenario, given my activities since the invasion, and the threat that I received a week earlier.
Here’s where it got interesting. If Adam was a spook, I saw two possibilities. Most likely, he was unfriendly and wanted to keep tabs on the progress of my projects. In which case, I had nothing to hide. My actions supporting democratic reforms and human rights in Iraq are legal in any courtroom in the world, outside of North Korea, Mynamar (or apparently New York City). There was no danger that he might distract me. Nothing could persuade me to abandon my work for democracy and human rights under any circumstances. If they wanted to know what I was up to, I would jolly well tell them. They could hear from it my own mouth.
There was a second possibility that intrigued me very much. Just maybe, Adam was a friendly spook, looking to build a team to go into Iraq for the purpose of countering bad actions by Occupation forces and strategic blunders in Washington. Maybe he was part of a faction that wanted to push things onto the right track.
What quickened my pulse was that the State Department had just got evicted from Iraq by the Pentagon. Right then, pro-Arabist cliques were regrouping in Washington, still hoping to influence the Occupation. If one of those groups was feeling me out, it might afford a worthwhile opportunity to exert pressure in a totally different direction. That possibility tantalized me. It would mean a choice between fighting the Occupation from the outside, or trying to make things better from the inside. It would be a hard decision. Either way, I intended to challenge the Occupation.
Third, Adam’s “cover” might be authentic. He might have told the truth that a group of Arab-Americans in Michigan wanted to finance a peace project inside Iraq. Given my strong reputation opposing military aggression and terrorism, I would be a safe American to approach. My involvement would give the others protection. Nobody could accuse them of supporting violence with me in the group. I’m proud of that fact.
Which of those possibilities would prove correct, I could not say.
But as an Asset, you’re expected to play. Paul Hoven, my old handler, always encouraged me to think of it like a dance. When a man asks a woman to dance, she’s supposed to say yes, because that’s what she’s gone
to the Club to do. Then, over the evening, she’s supposed to identify her partner, and get to know him. She doesn’t have to go home with him for the night. Maybe she goes on another date, because there’s something they’d like to try out together. Maybe the relationship goes nowhere after three or four dates. That’s just like an Asset.
An Asset has to figure out who has approached you, and why. It’s sort of a courtesy to agree to the first meeting, because somebody has gone to a great deal of trouble to learn who you are, and understand your projects. That’s more difficult than it looks, because everything’s done on the Q.T. There are many obstacles that would have to be overcome, in order to collect that information. So it’s important to find out why a stranger made the effort.
All of that explains how I came to meet Bassem Youssef, aka “Adam” on the night of June 23, 2003, in a gorgeous five star hotel suite overlooking Baltimore Harbor.281
The Harbor had some historical significance, I noted gleefully to myself that hot summer night. Francis Scott Key wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” while imprisoned on a British flagship during the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. Watching the guns blaze off British war ships throughout that unhappy night in Baltimore Harbor, Key wrote a beautiful poem that would become America’s national anthem, anxiously awaiting the morning to discover whether our young nation had prevailed in defending our independence against British forces. That evening I found the coincidence rather poetic, since my conversation with Youssef focused on how to guarantee the rights of fledgling democracy in Iraq, and whether a true democracy could be established at all.
Little did I imagine that I was conversing with a British agent-provocateur that night! And one sent on behalf of British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock to stop American citizens from championing democracy and self determination for other peoples!
I want an apology from the Queen!
For indeed, our conversation that night revolved around how to achieve genuine, meaningful democratic reforms and protecting human rights in Iraq. Thanks to FBI body wires worn by Youssef, there’s no denying that’s exactly what we discussed.282
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 28
