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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Mujahedin-e Khalq Tactics Undermine Iranian Regime Change
2025-03-30
[Townhall] After more than 45 years of holy manal dictatorship, the Iranian people deserve freedom. The Islamic Theocratic Republic is a terrorist regime responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
and across the region.

A diplomatic belief in reform was always a fool’s game for two simple reasons: First, Iranian elections cannot change a regime policy set by unelected figures like Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
...the very aged actual dictator of Iran, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...>
. Second, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps exists solely to protect the theocratic regime from the Iranian people. Diplomats are naïve to believe that regime reformism is real; in reality, the reformers entrap Western officials in a game of good cop-bad cop. As former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami’s front man explained in 2008, "We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities."

As former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami’s front man explained in 2008, "We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities."
The irony of the Iranian regime is that it has greater legitimacy among the West’s useful idiots than it does among the Iranian people. For more than a quarter century, Iranians have poured out into the streets with increasing frequency. The murder of Jina "Mahsa" Amini "Woman, Life, Freedom" Movement was the last straw for many Iranians, who openly called for death to Khamenei. Such an event may not be far off: Iran’s dictator is 85-years-old, has had cancer, and is partially paralyzed from a 1981 liquidation attempt.

Iranians have myriad views about what comes next, though they also have remarkable consensus on three things:

First, they do not want external regime change. Iran is not Iraq. They want support, but will win freedom themselves, not at the barrel of a foreign gun. Second, they do not want Iran divided. When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, he spoke about cleaving away "Arabistan," his name for the traditionally Arab-populated, oil-producing province of Khuzestan. Iranians rightly rallied to defend their country from Iraq, but the distraction of war allowed Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to wrap himself in a nationalist flag to avoid accountability for his revolution’s failures and betrayal. The third point of consensus is disdain for the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO).

This third point remains interwoven with the first two in the minds of most Iranians. The MKO—and Maryam Rajavi, for 40-years, its president-elect—were once fierce proponents of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution. Rajavi has a right to be personally furious with Khomeini: Like he did with so many other supporters, he betrayed Rajavi and the MKO. Many MKO members fled to Iraq, Iran’s archrival that was at the time killing Iranian conscripts after having invaded the country. Most Iranians despise Khomeini—how else to explain why they would put dog excrement into his tomb—but they could not understand a group allying itself with an Arab dictator bent upon dismantling Iran itself.

Ultimately, Iranians will determine their own future, hopefully through a democratic process once the theocracy collapses. Some Iranians may support the son of the late shah as a unifying figure who can preside over a constitutional convention. Others may prefer a president, and still others may advocate for a parliamentary system presided over by a prime minister. Ethnic or religious groups dominant in one province or another may also seek greater local decision-making. Most Iranian groups debate such structures and cooperate with those with whom they disagree.

The MKO, however, stands apart in vision, in opacity, and in tactics. While Iranian women risk their lives for freedom from forced veiling, not only does Rajavi strictly cover herself, but she also requires that all the women of her group cover their hair. What Iranians want is not a different flavor of Islamic Theocratic Republic, but rather no Islamic Theocratic Republic.

Iranians also want democracy. Too many once believed Khomeini’s promises of democracy; they realize the danger of insincere promises. This translates into deep suspicion about the MKO. After all, how can a group that embraced first Khomeini and then Saddam stand for democracy? To suggest the MKO is pro-American is risible. Prior to the Islamic Revolution, the MKO killed American businessmen and military officers. While that was hardly unique among leftist groups during the Cold War, what makes the MKO different today is it denies its history rather than apologizes for it. Indeed, when Americans are not in the room its anti-Americanism flourishes.

The biggest problem with the MKO, however, is that it actively undermines grassroots opposition by disrupting events that do not pay homage to Rajavi or libeling or slandering those who raise questions about the MKO’s record.

I have been a victim of MKO tactics. Ali Safavi, a member of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance® of Iran, the political umbrella for the MKO, has six columns here libeling me in response to my criticism of the MKO. None of his columns address criticisms I made about the MKO. Rather, Safavi’s responses range from the bizarre to the conspiratorial: He accuses me of being an Iranian regime agent because, in his imagination, American Jews who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration and have advocated for regime change in Commentary and the Wall Street Journal over a quarter century must be closet Islamists. Sure, I went to Iran. Yale University funded me. I wrote my dissertation on telegraphy in 19th century Iran and penned several spinoff articles about Persian cryptology, Armenian and Baha’i telegraph workers, and the like. That no more makes me an Iranian agent than the many American students that the regime subsequently took hostage. By Safavi’s logic, am I also al Qaeda because I went to the Taliban
...the once and current oppressors of Afghanistan...
’s Afghanistan? Am I a communist because I went to Cuba? In reality, my job is to study how rogue regimes think, and I consider the Islamic Theocratic Republic the marquee rogue.

Washington policy debate is rough-and-tumble. During the Iraq war, partisans cast aspersions easily. Those that Safavi repeats—about my supposed role shepherding Ahmad Chalabi—originated in convicted fraudster Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine (Actually, I worked mostly with Iraqi Kurds). Ditto, a New York Times

...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
 news hound once accused me of being part of the Lincoln Group, which planted news stories in the Iraqi press. Sorry, Ali. Congress investigated the Lincoln Group; I was not part of it. Don’t be the only Townhall columnist that takes the New York Times at face value. And don’t be the only Iranian who, with the Chalabi calumny, appears to lament Saddam’s fall.

I’ve got thick skin, but such tactics matter. First, how can Washington policymakers take the MKO seriously when it cites LaRouche as a reliable source? Or deflects policy debate with ad hominem attacks? Or argues that security-cleared, American Jewish neoconservative Iran hawks are really just closet Revolutionary Guards agents?

More seriously, the aspersions Safavi casts toward me are mild compared to how the MKO treats the Iranian opposition. Rather than work jointly toward the goal of ending an odious regime in Tehran, the MKO would rather attack any Iranians who do not blindly submit to Rajavi, live in her group homes, and fork over their income and, in some cases, children.

During the Cold War, there were Communists, anti-Communists, and anti-anti-Communists who cared more about knocking down critics of the Soviet Union than about defeating the Evil Empire itself. This is the dynamic now at play with the MKO as it obsessively attacks critics of the Islamic Theocratic Republic. There could be no bigger gift to Khamenei than the MKO’s efforts to delegitimize its critics.
Related:
Mujahedin-e Khalq: 2020-01-17 Pair with Iranian ties get prison time for illegal surveillance of Iranian opposition groups in US: DOJ
Mujahedin-e Khalq: 2019-10-24 Albania says police thwarted attack plot by Iranian terror cell
Mujahedin-e Khalq: 2018-12-25 Albania expels Iranian terror diplomats
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Iraq
Chalabi, Snow White and Pinocchio
2015-11-06
Meredith Willson's sappy 1962 Broadway show "The Music Man" illuminates an inscrutable side of American foreign policy: Why do Americans persist in believing that they can remake the world in their own image, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? We Americans love crooks and swindlers who appeal to our national narcissism, even when we know that they are crooks and swindlers. Willson's hero is a turn-of-the-twentieth-century rogue who styles himself a professor of music, and sells marching band equipment to midwestern towns with the promise that he will teach the local kids to play--but disappears before keeping his end of the bargain. In one Iowa town, the "music man" is caught red-handed, but pardoned by the townsfolk who bask in the warmth of his flattery. He has a long list of antecedents, such as Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry.

The Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, whose death last week revived the controversy about the 2003 Iraq war, lives on in the hearts of the neoconservatives for the same reason that the burghers of River City, Iowa embraced Willson's swindler. It reveals the better side of the American character: We're too dumb to lie about other countries' politics, which we understand about as well as Sanskrit, and we have no natural defense against sociopaths who lie whenever their lips are moving. There are very few uniquely American jokes: one queries what Snow White said to Pinocchio ("Lie to me, Baby"). That was the adult content, by the way. We Americans love it when the Pinocchios of foreign policy lie to us. Those who view American democracy as an export industry still haven't managed to fall out of love with Chalabi.
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Fifth Column
World's Longest Correction
2014-10-18
Ouch.
[NYSun] That New York Times dispatch on what it calls "The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons" is best viewed as journalism's longest correction. It's designed to try to extricate the Gray Lady from all these charges about how President George W. Bush and his camarilla lied about the danger of Saddam's chemical arsenal. For it turns out that Iraq was littered with thousands of shells containing poison gas, like Sarin. The Times tries to palm off on its readers the idea that this is different from the "active weapons of mass destruction program" that America had gone to war to destroy.

We don't blame C.J. Chivers, the Timesman who penned this opus. It was a tall order, and he did the best he could. He's cranked out something on the order of 10,000 words. We ran the whole dispatch through one of our favorite contraptions for the modern editor: The patented "Straight-talk Gasoline Operated High Volume Prose Compactor." We have the Tolstoy 100 model, which can handle stories twice the length of Chivers'. It summarized his piece this way: "Dang, we're angry at Mr. Bush for failing to tell us we found the weapons that he had warned were there and that the Times insisted weren't."

To cover its own bumbling of the story, the Times tries to blame Mr. Bush for the fact that a number of our heroic GIs were injured by poison from the weapons the Times had claimed were a fiction. "The secrecy fit a pattern," says the Times. "Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States' encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found."

You're telling us. Implication number one is that the Times ought to bring back Judith Miller and install her as its foreign editor. She was the reporter who got fired because she broke the story that we needed to go in there and get these weapons. For penance the Times could put her in charge of covering the war against the Islamic State. Number two is that the Times owes Ahmad Chalabi an apology. It has done nothing but libel him for inspiriting the Iraqi National Congress. It has suggested he purposely misled America, even though what he sought was a Free Iraq.

Finally it owes an apology to President Bush. He has devoted his post-presidency to inspiriting the GIs whom he sent into battle, particularly those who suffered life-changing injuries. He rides bikes and golfs with them, thinks about them all the time, keeps faith with them. He knew we couldn't withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, warning "they will follow us home." That's what they're fixing to do now that we have withdrawn from Iraq and are withdrawing from Afghanistan. Our advice to the Times is that before it goes into print attacking our President and our GIs, it would be wise to think through what kind of correction it's going to have to run ten years hence.
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Iraq
Chalabi's Chance?
2014-06-22
[NYSun] Well, well, well. Guess who has gone calling on Ahmad Chalabi. Why, if it's not Brett McGurk, the senior aide of the State Department in respect of Iraq. He's just fetched up at the home in Storied Baghdad of the founder of the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Chalabi is the visionary who won the Iraq Liberation Act of 1995. He's the man whom the Left likes to blame for allegedly making up intelligence to trick America to going to war for Democracy in his country. The State Department hated him above all others.

Now it's come a-calling. This news was brought in by Eli Lake, former diplomatic leg of the Sun, in a dispatchnull that the Daily Beast runs under the headline "U.S. Taps Old Allies for New Iraq War." Mr. Lake is not reporting that the visit with Mr. Chalabi is going to lead to the return of American GIs to Iraq. He is following up on the dispatch Thursday in the Times that named Mr. Chalabi as among the challengers emerging to replace Prime Minister al-Maliki.

Indeed, it was our government that was behind the purge of Mr. Chalabi from the interim Iraqi government that was established in 2004 and led by Iyad Allawi
... Iraqi politician, interim Prime Minister prior to Iraq's 2005 legislative elections. A former Ba'athist, Allawi helped found the Iraqi National Accord, which today is an active political party. He survived assassination attempts in 1978, in 2004, and on April 20, 2005. One of these days he won't...
. Relations were decidedly cool as Mr. Chalabi plotted his comeback. The Times reports that he's now willing to bring the Baathists back into public life, meaning ending the anti-Baathist legislation he long supported. Mr. Chalabi, a Shia, seems to be acceptable to the Kurds. So we will see what happens.

Our own favorite Chalabi moment came when he was asked by an interviewer in Britannia whether Iraq needed another strongman, a la Hamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
 of Afghanistan. No, he retorted, what Iraq needed was another Ludwig Erhard. This was a reference to the Free German economics minister who set the stage for a Western victory in the Cold war by establishing sound money in West Germany. This brought the economy to life, setting the contrast between West Germany and the communist East.
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Iraq
Ex-U.S. ally Chalabi, now closer to Iran, on the rise in Iraq
2010-02-27
"This was a decision handed down by the Justice and Accountability committee, headed by Ahmad Chalabi , and we mustn't forget that this decision was widely supported by the two main Shiite coalitions and by the Kurds," Mohandas said.

A delegation from the European Union spent an hour this week quizzing Chalabi at his compound about the efforts to sideline political opponents under the guise of de-Baathification. Once the tough talk was over, however, the Europeans couldn't resist asking for a souvenir photo with Iraq's best-known political phoenix.

As the camera flashed, one of the delegates joked, "I hope we're not on the de-Baathification list now."

"No, only General Petraeus," Chalabi replied.
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India-Pakistan
Baitullah Meahsud The end of a Zionist collaborator
2009-08-09
Yesterday, the evil Zionist top mouthpieces media outlets, CNN, BBC, and FoxNews, etc. gloated justifiably that Pakistan's most crazed wanted Taliban leader, Baitullah Pretty Boy Mahsud, has been zapped killed by a US Hellfire missile. It suppose know that could be used an excuse to prove that Pretty Boy Baitullah Mahsud was not a CIA, MOSSAD and RAW asset, as claimed by Mahsud's former lover close but not that close aide, Haji Turkistan Betani on Pakistan TV Geo News another Zionist outlet. Haji also claimed deliriously that Pretty Boy Baitullah Mahsud got Morticia Benazir Bhutto assassinated for his American, Israeli and Indian lovers masters.

Qari Zainuddin, an Afghan Taliban thug boy commander, rejected Baitullah Mahsud as a crazed killer Mujahid based on later's pretty boy looks un-Islamic activities and said in the telephone interview from a Reuters safehouse that Afghan Taliban has pledged obedience nothing to do with Baitullah Mahsud and his crazed followers. Qari also made up out of whole cloth claimed that Pretty Boy Baitullah Mahsud had wads of cash delivered by close contacts with Juice Israeli and Hindoooz Indian officials -- and that he was sleeping with misguiding Muslim youth who are so easily swayed after all to target Pakistani camp followers civilians and weapons depots mosques as part of his collaboration with fight against the so-called Pakistan ineffectual government.

The full color pictures of some hard boyz terrorists turned into meat killed by Pakistan Army as cover for the ISI in Swat prove that they were infidels non-Muslim terrorists hired by the evil Juice US, Britain and Hindooz India to distablize not that it would be hard and eventually break-up the Land of the Pure Pakistan -- the only Muslim so-called nation with primitive nuclear weapons. The charred bodies of these dead dead dead terrorist show that they're really really dead uncircumcised. Their partial facial features prove that they could be Kashmir Muslim separatists Nepalese Gurkhas from Indian or British Armed forces -- or Uzbek Muslim terrorists recruited by al-Qaeda members of pro-US Northern Alliance Army Mafia trained and armed by the Special Forces US and Juice Israel.

After the ineffectual Pakistan Army confirmed that the arms it delivered to captured from terrorists in Swat and FATA -- are nothing but the best American made -- the evil Dick Cheney Washington was quick to gloat cover its smart dirty game against both anti-Israel Pakistanis -- by saying that some of its arms given to our favorite warlord Karzai puppet government in Kabul have been sold on the black market reached in the hands of "Pakistani Taliban" fighing Islamabad. How convenient, yewbetcha eh!

Washington has a long history of getting rid of its foreign collaborators, once they served American interests and a smart policy that is -- Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), King Reza Shah (Iran), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Ahmad Chalabi (occupied Iraq), Manuel Noriega (Panama), Gen. Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan), Anwar Sadaat (Egypt), Yasser Arafat (occupied Palestine), Afghan Mujahideen, Taliban (Afghanistan), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Gen. Zia ul-Haq (Pakistan), Zulifqar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan) -- to name a few and don't forget the banana republic caudillos.

The kooky diatribe words of wisdom from Pakistan's first of many losing military leader, Field Marshal in his own mind Ayub Khan: "The United States is unable to give assistance to whacked out military leaders people in the developing countries on the basis of mutual respect since we don't ever get any in return. Americans don't know how to be friends with thugs and not masters".
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Iraq
Chalabi's Short-Lived Comeback
2008-05-17
Ahmad Chalabi is nothing if not indefatigable. The dapper Iraqi multimillionaire who was instrumental in pressing the U.S. to invade Iraq — and viewed by many in Washington as the presumptive leader of a future Iraqi government — failed to win a seat in his country's parliament in 2005, and came under suspicion in Washington of passing secrets to Iran (although no charges were ever filed in this respect). Still, he bounced back, and was tapped last November to run a committee tasked with improving the delivery of basic services such as water and electricity in Baghdad. The post required coordinating with U.S. officials including General David Petraeus, and Chalabi hoped to use it to begin building a new power base on the streets of Baghdad, especially among the 2.5 million potential voters of the hardscrabble Sadr City.

But not if Washington has any say in the matter: This week, according to two U.S. officials, America's diplomats and military liaisons were told to cut off ties with Chalabi. One official said the instruction came in anticipation of Chalabi being taken off the Baghdad Services Committee, adding that if the Iraqi government is removing him from his position, then there is no need to contact him or provide support. NBC News first reported the rebuke on its website, citing American concern over Chalabi's contacts with Iran. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad would not elaborate on the order, saying "we maintain contact with a wide variety of Iraqi interlocutors." Chalabi, through a spokesman, said he had not been informed of any change in his relationship with the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Chalabi also denied that his dealings with Iran were any different from those of Iraq's current President, Jalal Talibani, or Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Allegations about Chalabi's ties to Iran are not new. His Baghdad compound was raided in 2004 when U.S. officials suspected he had warned Iranian intelligence that the U.S. had broken its communications codes. A subsequent FBI investigation led to no charges, and Chalabi was never questioned in the matter, even when he traveled to the U.S. in 2005 as a deputy prime minister of Iraq. Since then, U.S. contact with Chalabi has been mostly limited to his efforts to bring power generators and water trucks to the most neglected neighborhoods of Baghdad.

His new position had provided Chalabi with some political capital, and a little publicity. His political organization, the Iraqi National Congress, recently launched a weekly newspaper dedicated to citizens' complaints about the lack of services around Baghdad. An op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on April 12 wrote that "arguably [Chalabi] has, more than anyone in the country, evolved a detailed sense of what ails Baghdad and how to fix things."

Over the past six months, Chalabi has focused a lot of attention on delivering services to Sadr City, the northeast Baghdad Shi'ite slum that is a major stronghold of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. To do this required close coordination with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has over the past month been locked in fierce battles with U.S. and Iraqi government forces. The U.S. alleges that elements of the Mahdi Army have received training and weapons from Iran. "We talk to the Madhi Army," says Chalabi spokesman Mohammad Hassan al-Moussawi, "because the Madhi Army is the one holding the ground [in Sadr City]."

But his coordination with the Sadrists has put Chalabi at odds with Prime Minister Maliki. Malaki launched a military offensive in March to squeeze the Mahdi Army out of Sadr City. One of the militia's tactics, taking a page out of the playbook of Lebanon's Hizballah, has been to secure popular support by delivering some of their basic welfare needs. A U.S. official says it is for this reason that Chalabi's coordination with the militia in the course of delivering basic services in Sadr City has become a point of contention with Maliki. And the U.S. is simply following the lead of the Iraqi government by cutting ties with Chalabi, says the official. "This is a beef between Maliki and Chalabi," a U.S. official told TIME, "and we back Maliki." Chalabi's office denies any tension. "We have very good relations with Maliki," says a spokesman, adding that all of his efforts to deliver services in Sadr City are being done not to serve Chalabi's personal political ambitions, but "in the name of the Iraqi government." No longer, it seems.

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Home Front: Politix
McCain's foreign policy advisers from rival camps
2008-04-10
So-called pragmatists worry that they are being outmaneuvered by neocons

Sen. John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world. But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — are expressing concern that McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush's first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

The concerns have emerged in the weeks since McCain became his party's presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as "a realistic idealist." Others are security analyst Max Boot and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

Prominent members of the pragmatist group, often called realists, say they are also wary of the McCain campaign's chief foreign policy aide, Randy Scheunemann, who was an adviser to former Sens. Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Scheunemann was a founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi. "It maybe too strong a term to say a fight is going on over John McCain's soul," said Lawrence Eagleburger, a secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, who is a member of the pragmatist camp. "But if it's not a fight, I am convinced there is at least going to be an attempt. I can't prove it, but I'm worried that it's taking place."

McCain, who is aware of the concerns, said this week that he took foreign policy advice from a wide variety of people. "Some of them are viewed as 'more conservative,' quote," he said, adding, "but I do have a broad array of people that I talk to, and hear from, and read what they write."

The worry about McCain is centered among a group of foreign policy realists who have long been close to him and who lost out to the hawks in the intense ideological battles of the first term of the current White House. The group includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush.

Although the concerns at this point are focused more on access to McCain than on major policy differences, there have been some substantive areas of dispute. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was said to have been disturbed by McCain's hard-line attitude toward Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the March 26 speech, according to someone who has spoken recently with Kissinger. "I have no comment on that paragraph," Kissinger said when asked directly. "You have to take my judgment from what I have written. But I am a strong supporter of the senator."

Similarly, Scowcroft is said to have expressed reservations about McCain's call for creating a League of Democracies as a complement to the United Nations. An associate of Scowcroft's said he viewed it as an effort to diminish the United Nations — a target of scorn among neoconservatives.

Philip Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is not working for McCain, said it was not surprising that there were worries among the realists about the presumptive Republican nominee. "It's partly because McCain hasn't settled himself in one camp," said Zelikow. " ... But if you're in McCain's position, is it in his interest to settle the argument now? It's in his interest to embrace the largest number of Republicans and not declare that he is in favor of one faction or another."
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Iraq
Operation Calvary Charge (New Info)
2008-03-28
An article by Nibras Kazimi, Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute

Operation Cavalry Charge in Basra is going much better than anticipated; solid leadership coupled with a much-diminished enemy is harvesting very quick results.

Here are the key points on Day 2 of the operation:

* The word from Hayyania, one of Basra’s most populated and poorest neighborhoods, is that the situation is calm and under control. The Iraqi Army has taken up positions in the main thoroughfare while the criminal gangs and the Sadrists seem to be sitting this one out—they’re not engaging the government troops and are instead keeping a low profile.

* Both the Army commander of Operation Cavalry Charge, Lt. Gen. Mohan Hafidh al-Freiji, and the police commander, Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf al-Muhammadawi, are very able commanders and brave men, with al-Muhammadawi, an ex-tank officer in the Iraqi Army, tending towards brutality. He’s also helped by the fact that he can draw upon important tribal relations in the all-important Albu-Muhammed tribe of nearby ‘Amara Province.

* The Iraqi Army is operating with the utmost restraint which reflects their good training and new ethos; this in not the Saddam-era Army whose first instinct is to level rebellious neighborhoods to dust. Maliki has given the criminal cartels 72 hours to “come out with their hands over their heads”—this is not a ‘battle’, it’s rather a law-enforcement stand-off.

The Iraqis hold the British responsible for dropping the ball in Basra and in Amara, allowing the crime cartels to expand and take root.
* The Iraqi Army holds the British Forces cowering behind barbed wire in Basra Airport in the lowest regard; the Iraqis hold the British responsible for dropping the ball in Basra and in Amara, allowing the crime cartels to expand and take root. Iraqi officers regularly dismiss the British military as “sissies” and “cowards”. ....

* Many parts of Baghdad where one would assume the Sadrists could potentially be troublesome such as Husseiniya, Bunook, ‘Shia’ Ghazaliyya, and Washash experienced no acts of violence. The places where there was limited violence and tension were Sadr City, Baya’a, and very sporadically in al-Shu’la. In fact, most of the people who I’ve spoken to throughout the day, many of whom were out and about travelling across wide swaths of Baghdad, seemed surprised that the situation was that calm.
News of the situation in the provinces of Diwaniyya, Kut and Hillah has been widely exaggerated by al-Sharqiyya TV and consequently by certain western media outlets that are pretending to be covering the story when what they’re really doing is taking questionable reporting by an openly hostile TV station and passing it on to the western news consumer as original.
Traffic was sparse and dozens of mortars rained down indiscriminately—one near the Salhiyya Apartments, most directed at the Green Zone—but otherwise the overall situation was stable with the Iraqi Army and Police in control.

* The Sadrists can only keep the shops and schools closed through intimidation, including spraying some shop owners with gunfire in the Bab al-Shargi neighborhood. But it is also interesting that one form of intimidation taken by Sadrist activists has been to take photographs of shops that have remained open despite the call for a strike. This sort of behavior indicates that although the Sadrists may not be able to anything about this defiance now, they’ll remember these scabs and settle these accounts later. This shows weakness.

* The radically Sunni al-Sharqiyya TV (owned by Saad al-Bazzaz, who in recent years has financed his media conglomerate with monies from the dethroned ex-ruler of Qatar, the Barzanis and the U.S. Department of State) is curiously propagating and amplifying Sadrist (…maybe Iranian) psyops. What’s even funnier is that al-Sharqiyya’s bogus reporting is looping back into western reporting on the situation in southern Iraq. It seems that news of the situation in the provinces of Diwaniyya, Kut and Hillah have been widely exaggerated by al-Sharqiyya and consequently by certain western media outlets that are pretending to be covering the story when what they’re really doing is taking questionable reporting by an openly hostile TV station and passing it on to the western news consumer as original and objective reporting.

* Ahmad Chalabi is trying to reconcile the Sadrists with Maliki. No word on whether Maliki is receptive to this overture.
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Home Front: Politix
Abolish the CIA
2007-12-12
by Christopher Hitchens

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the truth. After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-Proliferation Treaty. (Given that the examination of the immense Libyan stockpile also disclosed the fingerprints that led back to the exposure of the A.Q. Khan nuke-mart in Pakistan, the removal of Saddam from the chessboard has had more effect in curbing the outlaw WMD business than it is normally given credit for.)

Nobody seems entirely sure what caused our intelligence agencies to reverse their opinion, but it seems rather likely that the defection and/or abduction of Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, Iran's former deputy minister of defense, in February of this year, has something to do with it. Asgari's ostensibly principal job had been that of liaison with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but his debriefing could also have helped confirm pre-existing surmises about Iran's reining-in of its nuclear ambitions.

Which is the most that can be said about those ambitions. It is completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted "estimate," that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the fatuously named nuclear "club." It has the desire to acquire the weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has energetically persisted in the implicit aspects—most notably the installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference between a "civilian" and a "military" dimension of the same program. The acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.

The briefing that I was given by the British Embassy in Tehran in 2005, showing the howlingly glaring discrepancy between what Iran claims and what Iran does, is not in the least challenged by the most recent conclusions. To say that Iran has "stopped" rather than paused its program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding. (For more on this, see the excellent article by Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin in the Dec. 6 New York Times, and also Jonathan Schell's Dec. 9 piece on the Guardian's Web site.) The mullahs are steadily amassing the uranium and plutonium ingredients of a weapon and will indeed soon be able to pause, along with other countries, like Japan, at the point where only a brief interlude and a swift spurt of effort would put them in full possession of the bomb.

Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime, which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as clinically dead. A fine day's work by those who claim to guard us while we sleep.

One explanation is that, like Mark Twain's cat, which having sat on a hot stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a policy of caution to make up for its "slam-dunk" embarrassment over Iraq. This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact that for most of the duration of the Iraq debate, the CIA was all but openly hostile to any argument for regime-change in Baghdad. This hostility extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the agency's "referral" of Robert Novak's disclosure to the Department of Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has been to this one.

And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair
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Fifth Column
Shadow Warriors
2007-12-12
By Jamie Glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth R. Timmerman, the New York Times bestselling author of Countdown to Crisis, The French Betrayal of America, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, and Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. In 2006 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking reporting on Iran ’s nuclear weapons program. He is the author of the new book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.

FP: Kenneth Timmerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Timmerman: Thanks, Jamie. It’s always a pleasure to appear alongside other founding members of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy.

FP: My pleasure as well.

What inspired you to write this book?

Timmerman: In the beginning were the leaks. I was curious how highly-classified intelligence information was winding up on the front pages of the NY Times and in other leftist media. Two stories, in particular, caught my attention initially: the leak of the CIA “secret prisons,” and the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi, to which I will return below.

I knew quite a bit about both stories, and knew that the way they were being reported was incredibly selective and politically motivated. I wanted to track them back to the source.

What I discovered was a vast, underground network of government officials, former intelligence officers, members of Congress and their staffs, who were in bed with a complacent, anti-Bush media. They were eager to publish anything that did damage to this president, even if it put the lives of our intelligence officers or of our front-line troops in jeopardy.

FP: So tell us about the underground resistance movement against President Bush.

Timmerman: It certainly comes as no surprise to readers of this page to discover that a segment of the Democrat party never accepted the legitimacy of the 2000 presidential election, and sought in every possible way to delegitimize George W. Bush.

What I discovered, however, was that this political “pay-back” went far beyond the realm of domestic politics, and that legions of “shadow warriors” purposefully burrowed into the bureaucracy with the sole purpose of undermining the president and his policies.

The sabotage was so intense, for example, that CIA officers actually stood by and watched as a key moderate Iraqi cleric was hacked to death in front of their eyes on the steps of a Shiite shrine in Najaf by the pro-Iranian radical, Muqtada al-Sadr, in April 2003. The death of Majid al-Khoie, who was brought back to Iraq by the Bush administration just after the overthrow of Saddam, was a tremendous setback to our efforts to help the Iraqi Shiite community to distance itself from Iran and organize itself around moderate, pro-Western leaders.

For the shadow warriors, the failure of the liberation of Iraq was not “collateral damage.” It was the actual goal of their efforts. Within just weeks of the liberation, as I reveal in the book, a retired State Department officer who briefly served in Iraq devised the mantra “Bush lied, people died.” The Left has never tired of repeating it.

FP: Your thoughts on the politicization of intelligence by Senate Democrats?

Timmerman: The end result of the extraordinary cherry-picking of intelligence by Senate Democrats that I describe in detail in the book is to devalue intelligence and to make it suspect.

As you know, I follow events in Iran quite closely. You will not be surprised to learn that I am skeptical of the latest National Intelligence Estimate that concluded with “high confidence” that Iran stopped nuclear weapons work in late 2003.

What I find truly disturbing, however, is the widespread skepticism that has greeted this NIE by ordinary Americans and by intelligence specialists alike. No one trusts the intelligence community to come to an unbiased conclusion any longer. This NIE is far worse than the much disputed October 2002 estimate of Iraqi WMD programs, which failed to properly weigh conflicting information but never recommended a policy to the President or to Congress. (No, Rosie, there was no ‘rush to war.’) This NIE explicitly advocates policy – something the intelligence community is not supposed to do – and gives the impression that the intelligence information it chose to credit was pre-cooked in support of a political conclusion.

FP: Shed some light for us on the shadow warriors at the State Department. How much have they hurt Bush administration policies?

Timmerman: Let me answer with an anecdote I describe in the book. After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington . Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot, Powell decided to confront the problem head on. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.

One of Powell’s subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.” Her staff owed no allegiance to the president of the United States , especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.

Here was an open call to insubordination, and, I might add, it was not an isolated incident. We have heard recently from John Bolton confirmation of another story I tell in the book about Vann Van Diepen, one of the authors of the recent Iran NIE. Van Diepen systematically refused to carry out direct orders from Bolton to enforce non-proliferation sanctions against Iran and North Korea , because he disagreed with the policy.

Scott Carpenter, who had been in charge of the Iran pro-democracy programs at State, recently told the New York Sun that those programs were “dead” because they had been sabotaged by career State Department officials and Democrat political appointees, such as Suzanne Maloney, who now works at Brookings.

Thanks to those efforts, we now have only two policy options when it comes to Iran : acquiesce to an Iranian bomb, or bomb Iran (as French president Sarkozy has said so eloquently). The much better option, which I have advocated in these pages for some time, is to help the people of Iran to overthrow the regime. Thanks to the shadow warriors at State, we no longer have that option.

FP: The war in Iraq is going very successfully now, but for a while there it did go wrong. Where, when and why did it go wrong?

Timmerman: I believe the single most catastrophic decision in the war was made by L. Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer just two days after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003.

I comment everyone to read this particular chapter of Shadow Warriors. It is entitled, “The Viceroy Cometh,” and it describes how Bremer single-handedly overturned the long-standing strategic plan of the Bush administration to liberate Iraq and hand over power to the Iraqis, without even consulting with the White House. Bremer, who knew nothing about Iraq , decided upon arriving in Baghdad that the Iraqi Governing Council was “unrepresentative” and that he should replace them and rule Iraq directly. His decision single-handedly transformed the liberation of Iraq into an occupation and spawned the insurgency that ultimately cost the lives of more than 3000 U.S. soldiers.

FP: The CIA’s war against Chalabi?

Timmerman: Google the name Ahmed Chalabi and “fraud,” and you get more than 55,000 hits. Google his name plus the word “crook” and you will get more than 12,000 hits. This gives a measure of how successful the effort to smear Ahmad Chalabi’s reputation has been. As I reveal in Shadow Warriors, that effort was spear-headed by the CIA,

Why did the CIA hate Chalabi? It wasn’t because he was an Iranian “agent” (just one of many false accusations made against him). The hatred began in 1996, when Chalabi came to Washington to warn then CIA director John Deutch that a CIA-sponsored coup plot had been penetrated by Saddam Hussein. In short, he had intelligence the CIA did not, and they never forgave him for it. It’s the old story of exposing the Emperor with No Clothes.

The Senate Select committee on intelligence vindicated Chalabi, and the information the Iraqi National Congress supplied to the US intelligence community on Saddam’s WMD programs, in a scathing report released last year. Never heard about that report? Little wonder. The “mainstream” press almost totally ignored it. That is why I reproduce parts of it in Shadow Warriors.

FP: What was the insurrection at the CIA against Porter Goss all about?

Timmerman: Porter Goss was the president’s pick to replace George Tenet, who most famously predicted that building a case against Saddam’s WMD programs was a “slam dunk” and failed to inform the FBI of information the CIA had gathered about the future 9/11 hijackers that could have allowed them to foil the terrorist attacks.

As he was leaving CIA, Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, stacked the decks against Goss, naming Steve Kappes to head the Operations Directorate, making him America’s top spy. Normally, an outgoing director would leave that type of major personnel decision to his successor. This was a key move, because Kappes had been under investigation by Goss’s staff at the House intelligence committee for serious security breaches while at a previous job.

Once Goss came in, as I reveal in Shadow Warriors, Kappes and an Old Boys’ network at CIA fought tooth and nail against Goss, even providing him with false intelligence to take to the White House that subsequently had to be called back. (That particular black op was symptomatic of the type of thing Kappes and his rogue weasels did to undermine Goss, hoping to discredit him with the president and force his removal).

Ultimately, Goss called Kappes’ bluff, and Kappes resigned in November 2004 –but never gave up. In the end, Kappes won, and his allies, who included Judge Lawrence Silberman and the incoming director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, urged the president to get rid of Goss and bring Kappes back.

It was a tremendous victory for the shadow warriors, and a story that has never been told until now.

While the CIA will deny this, Kappes has always been big on “liason” rather than developing unilateral American sources. This willingness to rely on agents controlled by foreign intelligence services can get you in a lot of trouble, especially when “friends” do not always behave as “allies.”

FP: You have a unique angle on the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson saga. Share it with us please.

Timmerman: Valerie Plame has got some explaining to do. In March, she testified under oath before Congress and swore she had “nothing” to do with sending her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium there.

In fact, Val sent an email to her bosses recommending that they send him on this mission because he “has good relationships with both the [Prime Minster] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”

I guess she never realized anyone would check her emails, or ask the CIA to declassify them. Oops! Val, you may want to read page 354 of Shadow Warriors before you are next asked to testify…

But rest assured. I have high confidence that Valerie Plame will NOT be hauled before a federal grand jury on perjury charges, as was done to vice president aid Scooter Libby. The Dems do a much better job than this president has done at protecting their own.

FP: Kenneth Timmerman, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Timmerman: My pleasure Jamie.
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Iraq
He's Back!
2007-10-29
Chalabi back in action in Iraq

BAGHDAD-Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial, ubiquitous Iraqi politician and one-time Bush administration favorite, has re-emerged as a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq.

His latest job: To press Iraq's central government to use early security gains from the surge to deliver better electricity, health, education and local security services to Baghdad neighborhoods. That's the next phase of the surge plan. Until now, the U.S. military, various militias, insurgents and some U.S. backed groups have provided those services without great success.

That the U.S. and Iraqi officials are again turning to Chalabi, this time to restore life to Baghdad neighborhoods, speaks to his resiliency in this nascent government. It's also, some say, his latest effort to promote himself as a true national advocate for everyday Iraqis.

Chalabi, in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, provided White House and Pentagon officials and journalists with a stream of bogus or exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs and ties to terrorism. He also suggested that he'd lead Iraq to make peace with Israel and welcome permanent U.S. military bases, which could apply pressure to Iran and Syria.

But Chalabi's proven a resilient politician since then and Iraqis yearn for someone who can make the government help them. In sermons in the holy Shiite city of Najaf and in Sunni newspapers alike, Iraqis here often reject their central government, saying it has done nothing for them since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Instead, the government's critics say, local tribal leaders and residents rejuvenated neighborhoods by pushing fighters out and securing the streets.

U.S. officials maintain that it's up to the central government to provide Iraqis with longer-term stability. Iraqis agree, especially when it comes to services beyond the capability of neighborhood councils, such as providing electricity, bringing doctors back into neighborhoods, establishing and paying a police force and building a school system, Traditionally, Iraq's central government delivered these services.

"The key is going to be getting the concerned local citizens — and all the citizens — feeling that this government is reconnected with them," Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander here, said Saturday. Chalabi "agrees with that."

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki named Chalabi as head of the services committee, a consortium of eight service ministries and two Baghdad municipal posts, that is tasked with bringing services to Baghdad, the heart of the surge plan.

Chalabi "is an important part of the process," said Col. Steven Boylan, Petraeus' spokesman. "He has a lot of energy."

Unless the government steps in, U.S. military commanders stationed in small outposts throughout Baghdad fear their rebuilding programs and other efforts to weaken one-time al Qaida and militia bastions will collapse as soon as troops leave. If that happens, those groups will dominate the neighborhoods again, they say.

Lt. Col. Ken Adgie, of National Park, N.J., commander of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Stewart, Ga., is in charge of securing Arab Jabour, a southern Sunni Baghdad neighborhood long under al Qaida control.

With no U.S. or Iraqi forces in this almost exclusively Sunni neighborhood since the fall of Saddam's regime, al Qaida controlled it, in part, by rationing food and electricity to the residents.

Adgie's troops now are building a health care facility, securing water supplies and working with local concerned residents to secure the area's main street, which is lined with a handful of mud shack stores.

"Right now, it's a Band-Aid. ...But boy it would be nice if we got the government's help," Adgie said. "We refuse to let al Qaida creep back in. ...You can't let up. It's slow constant pressure."

So far, the central government has not been effective. On Saturday, Petraeus traveled to Arab Jabour with Chalabi, their first trip together to a Baghdad neighborhood since Chalabi's new posting. During the trip, Col. Terry Ferrell, 2nd brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division described where he wants to see a new health care facility. Chalabi chimed in: "Where is the Health Ministry in this?"

"That's your job," Petraeus replied.

And as Chalabi tried to assure the residents of Arab Jabour that the government would help, they told him they had heard it before. So far, the vice president, the governor of Baghdad and a top Iraqi police commander have traveled to Arab Jabour promising to deliver 200 police officers. None have shown up.

"We made life better here, not the government," said Abdul Raziq al Jabouri, a newly-named security officer in Arab Jabour. "If we had waited for the government we would have been gone by now. We are not waiting. We don't expect anything."

So Chalabi has his work cut out for him.

Iraqi politicians have used service ministries to promote themselves before, and some suspect that Chalabi took this post to reach a populace that rejected him in the 2006 election when he won no official seats in the government..

Since the fall of Saddam's regime, Chalabi has held several jobs including deputy prime minister, head of the de-Baathification committee and chairman of several investigative committees.

"I think Ahmad is trying to come back through this committee. But the reality is that there has been no action," said Mithal Alusi, a secular member of the parliament. "We Iraqi don't accept this."

But Chalabi's supporters reject that, saying he is the best suited to work with several ministries. And Hussein al Shaheen, a Chalabi advisor, said the government chose him because "everyone knows he can do it."

As he met with residents of Arab Jabour concerned about security and basic services, however, it was Chalabi the historian speaking, not Chalabi the ombudsman.

He reminded them that Alexander the Great once traveled through their neighborhood and that, at one point, 600,000 people lived in the area.

"We have a doctor among us," one resident remarked politely.

Minutes later, another muttered: "He cannot help us."

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