Muqtada Al-Sadr, the CIA's Ayatollah, toys with US's Iraq intentions...

Muqtada Al-Sadr, the CIA's Ayatollah, toys with US's Iraq intentions...
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The big question looming over United States-Iraqi negotiations on a US military presence after 2011 is what game Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr is playing on the issue.

United States officials regard Muqtada as still resisting the US military presence illegally and are demanding that Muqtada call off his Promised Day Brigades completely.

But Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's main point of contact with Muqtada says he is playing a double game and does not intend to obstruct the negotiations on a deal for the stationing of 10,000 or more US troops from 2012 onward.

Muqtada made a crucial move over the weekend toward accepting such an agreement between the Barack Obama administration and the Maliki government, according to a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the International Liaison Office (ILO). The ILO is an arm of Iraqi military intelligence that is run by a former East German intelligence official who was Muqtada's political adviser during the height of the US war against the Sadrists in 2007-08.

Muqtada agreed in an unpublicized direct exchange of views with Maliki that he would not exploit a request by Maliki to Obama to station US troops in Iraq beyond this year by attacking Maliki politically or threatening his government, the senior Iraqi intelligence official told Inter Press Service (IPS).

The popular Shi'ite leader has maintained a longstanding threat to withdraw support from the government over the US military presence. But when questioned directly by Maliki about his intentions, Muqtada agreed that there would be no repeat of his 2006 withdrawal of Sadrist ministers from Maliki's first government over that issue, according to an account of the exchange provided by the Iraqi intelligence official.

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

"Maliki called Sadr's bluff," he said.

Muqtada's ambiguous position on the US troop presence is understood by the ILO to be key to his role as kingmaker in Maliki's government, as well as his need to maintain the support of the poor and dispossessed Shi'ite who represent his political power base.

"He has to placate two different constituencies," the official told IPS. That means taking a hard line on the US troop presence in Arabic language public statements meant for his Shi'ite constituency, but taking an accommodating line in private contacts with Maliki.

Muqtada has displayed an uncompromising posture toward the US military presence in recent weeks. The Promised Day Brigade, which Muqtada created in 2008 to fight against US forces, had attacked US bases and troop convoys in June. The establishment of the brigade followed the disbanding of Muqtada's Mahdi Army in June 2008

The brigade issued a statement on June 28 claiming responsibility for 10 mortar and Katyusha rocket attacks against US bases around the country as well as attacks on US military convoys, saying that the attacks had "killed and wounded a number of US soldiers".

Attacks by Shi'ite militias killed 15 US troops in June - the highest monthly total of troops killed in combat since June 2008.

United States officials in Baghdad included the Promised Day Brigade among the three Shi'ite militias they said had been funded and armed by Iran and had killed US troops.

Last weekend, in a statement posted on his website, Muqtada said nothing to disassociate himself from the Promised Day Brigade's operations against US forces or its claim of responsibility for killing US troops. Instead, he announced the brigade would have the "mission" of "resisting" US troops if they are not all gone by December 31 - the deadline for withdrawal under the agreement signed by George W Bush in November 2008.

But the ILO has been telling officials at the White House and the Pentagon that, in order to avoid antagonizing Washington, Muqtada had ordered the brigade to limit its attacks to "hard targets" - installations and armored vehicles - to minimize the likelihood of US casualties, according to the senior Iraqi intelligence official.

The ILO has dismissed the statement by the brigade claiming to have killed and wounded US troops as coming from a hardline faction within the Sadrist movement close to Iran. It says this faction was hoping to force Muqtada's hand on the negotiations on a US troop presence.

The ILO official points to Muqtada's actions over the weekend as evidence that he has made significant accommodations to allow the negotiations to go forward.

The Muqtada statement, posted on the same weekend as his exchange with Maliki, said the Promised Day Brigade would be given the mission of resisting US occupation if and when the US troops were not withdrawn.

A Sadrist legislator, Mushriq Naji, made the same point in an interview with Aswat al-Iraq newspaper on July 11. "The Promised Day Brigade is carrying out the missions of resistance now and in the future," he said, "in the event of non-withdrawal of the Americans".

That message appeared to contradict the June 28 statement from the brigade that said that the attacks would continue.

Muqtada's statement also withdrew a threat he had made in April to "restart the activities of the Mahdi Army" if the US didn't withdraw by the end of the year. The reactivation of the Mahdi Army had been regarded as part of an implicit threat to bring down the government over the issue of US troops.

But US officials aren't buying the idea that Muqtada is playing a double game. Asked if anyone involved in Iraq policy believed Muqtada had signaled that he would tacitly allow the negotiations to go ahead, one official said, "I don't think so."

Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, official spokesman for United States Forces-Iraq, vehemently denied in response to an e-mail query from IPS that Muqtada was restraining the Promised Day Brigade in relation to US forces.

"Last month, PDB [Promised Day Brigades] claimed responsibility for 52 attacks against US forces," Buchanan said, adding that claims that the brigade had not caused any casualties to US forces and that Muqtada would not obstruct negotiations on an agreement "carry no credibility in our eyes whatsoever".

Civilian officials working on Iraq take a more nuanced view of Muqtada, but are not yet convinced that he will acquiesce to a US presence beyond 2011. "It's still unclear what Sadr is doing," said one US official who follows the issue closely. "He doesn't seem to have stable preferences on this issue."

The official added that he is "99% sure" that the Promised Day Brigade had caused some casualties among US troops. He concedes, however, that most of those casualties have come from two much smaller Shi'ite militia groups, neither of which is regarded as responsive to Muqtada's direct command.

The US demand that Muqtada give up the Promised Day Brigades entirely is one that he probably could not meet without risking the loss of his Shi'ite political base. If an agreement were reached in time on stationing US troops beyond this year, Muqtada would have to go through at least the motions of attacking US military installations, according to the ILO official.

If tensions between the US military and Muqtada continue to rise, Muqtada may reverse course and drop the covert inside game he is said to have adopted. Ironically, the US inability or unwillingness to play along with a Muqtada double game on a US troop presence could help Iran stymie the US effort to preserve a rapidly dwindling influence in Iraq.

A pair of "suicides" (murders) in the UK threaten the premiership of the Ziocon David Cameron....

A pair of "suicides" (murders) in the UK threaten the premiership of the Ziocon David Cameron....

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2011/07/murdoch-whistleblower-dead.html

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2011/07/murdoch-and-soros-in-malaysia.html

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/gilad-atzmon-oliver-stone-apologized-for-telling-the-truth.html

July , 2011 -- Christopher Shale murder linked to that of Dr. David Kelly...

A well-placed UK source has informed us that the suspicious death of Prime Minister David Cameron's friend and political adviser, Christopher Shale, found dead in a portable toilet on June 25 at the Glastonbury Festival, was, in fact, a political assassination designed to silence an emerging critic of Conservative Party policies. Shale was the chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association. Shale had written a memo containing a scathing attack on Tory policies under Cameron's leadership. The memo was due to be published in The Mail on Sunday, the day after Shale's body was found in the toilet.

Cameron later said he was "shocked" by the death of his friend. Shale's death was alternately described as a "suicide" and heart attack.

However, we have been informed that Shale's suspected disloyalty to the Tories resulted in worries at Number 10 Downing Street that the longtime friend of and adviser to Cameron might have decided talk about a Tory scandal dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cameron visited South Africa in 1989 on a trip financed by the South African armaments company Armscor. It was the same year that South Africa began dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

As South Africa began to transition from apartheid to majority rule in the early 1990s, Shale, a British Army veteran, visited South Africa as part of a UKaid (Department of International Development) mission. After leaving the army, Shale established two companies, SGL Communications and Oxford Resources Ltd. Shale also visited Rwanda on numerous occasions as part of his work for UKaid. There is some evidence that Shale was involved with MI6 activities in Africa.

However, it was Shale's work in South Africa, establishing links with the African National Congress and other black political parties in an attempt to undo some of the damage resulting from Margaret Thatcher's support for the apartheid regime, that put him in contact with the British Ministry of Defense scientist charged with overseeing the transfer of South Africa's nuclear weapons and other nuclear materials to Western hands from South African nuclear weapons stocks at the Pelindaba nuclear research center, near Pretoria. That scientist was Dr. David Kelly, Britain's foremost authority on weapons of mass destruction, who was found dead from a reported "suicide" near his Oxfordshire home on July 17, 2003.

Kelly had questioned faulty intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, intelligence that was used to justify Britain's involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Kelly was said to have committed suicide with an old pocket knife and pain killers, an allegation rejected by a number of British experts and politicians, including Norman Baker, the Liberal Democratic MP for Lewes.

We have been informed that Shale became aware of Cameron's role in trafficking on the international black market of South African nuclear weapons and technology that was entrusted to Britain and the United States by South Africa's apartheid government, led by President F. W. DeKlerk.

Shale, we are told, was familiar with Cameron's role in the re-selling of South Africa's nuclear materials, with the proceeds going into the political coffers of the Conservative Party. Kelly and Shale were reportedly both aware that some of the South African nuclear weapons technology ended up, via an international arms smuggling network, in the hands of North Korea, which tested a nuclear bomb on May 25, 2009.

In 2010, at a 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington, President Obama praised South African President Jacob Zuma and South Africa for successfully abandoning the nation's nuclear arsenal. What Obama did not mention was that part of the arsenal was successfully abandoned to the international arms black market, a fact known by the CIA's counter-proliferation division, which was also aware that Obama was aware of the temporary storage of the South African weapons in Chicago and the involvement of Argonne National Laboratory in their disposal during the early 1990s, while Obama was working at the Hopkins & Sutter law firm and later as a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," in particular his promotion of nuclear non-proliferation. In 2005, then-Senator Obama, along with Senator Richard Lugar, visited a Russian nuclear facility at Perm. There have been reports that Obama was detained briefly by Russian officials on the suspicion that he was engaged in espionage activities at the facility. Obama's long-time work for the CIA may have extended into his term as a U.S. senator from Illinois and, quite possibly, into the White House. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a CIA source who worked on the agency's nuclear non-proliferation activities, told us: "You have no idea what the fuck you're getting with this guy [Obama]!

With Shale "going wobbly" on the Conservatives, it was feared that he might reveal the dark past of Tory involvement in nuclear weapons smuggling, something that helped seal his fate. The Tory connection to nuclear weapons smuggling is so sensitive, British intelligence insiders believe that, if revealed, Cameron will be forced to resign and his deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, will move into Number 10.

On February 28, 2008, we reported:

"[Dr. David Kelly, the British Defense Ministry scientist] knew of nuclear weapons proliferation involving three South African nuclear bombs assembled with the help of Israeli nuclear scientists at the covert South African nuclear weapons facility at Pelindaba nuclear research facility, near Pretoria. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who visited Pelindaba and the state-owned Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR) Advena nuclear facility near Pretoria in 1990 and 1991 were tricked into believing that South Africa's nuclear weapons had all been dismantled by the outgoing apartheid regime. However, three South African nuclear weapons were reportedly sold to 'private investors' with the up-front money coming from British government coffers.

Note: In 2007, speaking to a Conservative Friends of Israel meeting, Cameron referred to himself as a "Zionist."

Reimbursement for the ARMSCOR nuclear weapons was made to Britain only after the three weapons, spirited out of South Africa in three 20' ISO standard containers, arrived at a private storage facility in Oman for safekeeping. The containers had a special seal on the lock of the rear door of each container along with a temperature gauge in the front of the containers that was connected to the core of the bombs to indicate that the bomb was not overheating inside the containers.

Note: According to more recent information provided to us, the three weapons were to be shipped with an additional three nuclear bombs to Chicago for covert storage at a furniture warehouse, a CIA front activity. The fissile material from three South African bombs that made it to Chicago was later extracted at the Argonne National Laboratory, 25 miles southwest of Chicago. However, the three other bombs in Oman "disappeared" en route to Chicago. The British official who was in charge of the warehousing of the weapons in Oman was David Kelly.

There are indications that one of the bombs was eventually sold to North Korea.

We have also learned that the nuclear smuggling operations involved top members of the British Conservative Party, including individuals close to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Tory party soon received a mystery donation of £17.8 million. The donation was filed with the Tory party's Fiscal Year 1992 Annual Accounts filed with Companies House. An insider at the Tory party's Central Office tipped off a Labor Party Member of Parliament, Doug Hoyle, about the mystery donations to Tory MPs. It turned out that one of the Tory MPs in question was Tim Smith. [Smith resigned after he was discovered to have accepted cash payments from Mohamed Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods's and the ex-brother-in-law of international arms trafficker and Iran-contra principal Adnan Khashoggi.] Smith had been an MP for Beaconsfield since 1982 when he defeated a little-known Labor candidate named Tony Blair."......

Website for this image

On 14 July 2011, we suggested that the Christopher Shale "murder" could be linked to that of Dr. David Kelly

"A well-placed UK source has informed us that the suspicious death of Prime Minister David Cameron’s friend and political adviser, Christopher Shale, found dead in a portable toilet (on 26 June 2011) at the Glastonbury Festival, was, in fact, a political assassination designed to silence an emerging critic of Conservative Party policies...

"WMR has been informed that Shale’s suspected disloyalty to the Tories resulted in worries at Number 10 Downing Street that the longtime friend of and adviser to Cameron might have decided talk about a Tory scandal dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"Cameron visited South Africa in 1989 on a trip financed by the South African armaments company Armscor.

"It was the same year that South Africa began dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

"As South Africa began to transition from apartheid to majority rule in the early 1990s, Shale, a British Army veteran, visited South Africa as part of a UKaid (Department of International Development) mission.

"After leaving the army, Shale established two companies, SGL Communications and Oxford Resources Ltd.

"Shale also visited Rwanda on numerous occasions as part of his work for UKaid.

"There is some evidence that Shale was involved with MI6 activities in Africa.

Shale and Cameron

"However, it was Shale’s work in South Africa, establishing links with the African National Congress and other black political parties in an attempt to undo some of the damage resulting from Margaret Thatcher’s support for the apartheid regime, that put him in contact with the British Ministry of Defense scientist charged with overseeing the transfer of South Africa’s nuclear weapons and other nuclear materials to Western hands from South African nuclear weapons stocks at the Pelindaba nuclear research center, near Pretoria.

"That scientist was Dr. David Kelly, Britain’s foremost authority on weapons of mass destruction, who was found dead from a reported “suicide” near his Oxfordshire home on July 17, 2003...

"We have been informed that Shale became aware of Cameron’s role in trafficking on the international black market of South African nuclear weapons and technology that was entrusted to Britain and the United States by South Africa’s apartheid government, led by President F. W. DeKlerk.

"Shale, we are told, was familiar with Cameron’s role in the re-selling of South Africa’s nuclear materials, with the proceeds going into the political coffers of the Conservative Party.

"Kelly and Shale were reportedly both aware that some of the South African nuclear weapons technology ended up, via an international arms smuggling network, in the hands of North Korea, which tested a nuclear bomb on May 25, 2009.

"In 2010, at a 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington, President Obama praised South African President Jacob Zuma and South Africa for successfully abandoning the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

"What Obama did not mention was that part of the arsenal was successfully abandoned to the international arms black market, a fact known by the CIA’s counter-proliferation division, which was also aware that Obama was aware of the temporary storage of the South African weapons in Chicago and the involvement of Argonne National Laboratory in their disposal during the early 1990s, while Obama was working at the Hopkins & Sutter law firm and later as a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Law School...

" In 2005, then-Senator Obama, along with Senator Richard Lugar, visited a Russian nuclear facility at Perm.

"There have been reports that Obama was detained briefly by Russian officials on the suspicion that he was engaged in espionage activities at the facility.

"Obama’s long-time work for the CIA may have extended into his term as a U.S. senator from Illinois and, quite possibly, into the White House.

"During the 2008 presidential campaign, a CIA source who worked on the agency’s nuclear non-proliferation activities, told WMR: “You have no idea what the fuck you’re getting with this guy [Obama]!

"With Shale “going wobbly” on the Conservatives, it was feared that he might reveal the dark past of Tory involvement in nuclear weapons smuggling, something that helped seal his fate."

Hackgate update July 20th, 2011 /

http://canspeccy.blogspot.com/