Here's an old article I recently stumbled across, that I thought was pretty interesting:
Zionist settler joins Iraqi to promote trade
Chalabi's nephew and US lawyer turned rightwing Israeli activist offer help and advice on doing business with Baghdad
Brian Whitaker
Tuesday October 7, 2003
The Guardian
An ultra-Zionist Israeli settler has joined forces with the nephew of the Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi to promote investment in Iraq.
The venture - which has excellent connections with the Pentagon and the new Iraqi government - is the first joint Israeli-Iraqi business project publicly documented since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
In Iraq, where there has been much unconfirmed speculation about Israeli business involvement, news of the controversial partnership is likely to fuel suspicions.
The Iraqi International Law Group (IILG) was set up in July "to provide foreign enterprise with the information and tools it needs to enter the emerging Iraq and to succeed", according to its website.
"Our clients number among the largest corporations and institutions on the planet," IILG says.
The firm, which says it employs four Iraqi lawyers and three "international business attorneys", is temporarily operating from rooms at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
It was established by Salem "Sam" Chalabi, the 40-year-old nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a Pentagon favourite and now a prominent member of Iraq's governing council.
Sam Chalabi's "partner for international marketing" is Marc Zell, a rightwing Zionist lawyer who has offices in Jerusalem and Washington and previously ran a legal practice with Douglas Feith - now a leading Pentagon hawk with responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Until recently, Mr Zell - an Israeli citizen - was the registered owner of the Iraqi firm's website. Registration was transferred to Sam Chalabi's name on September 25 - the day after Mr Zell's ownership of the site was revealed by an article on Guardian Unlimited.
Data buried in the "Iraqi" website's source code has not been changed, however, and shows that the content was produced by a member of Mr Zell's Jerusalem office staff.
American-born Mr Zell, 50, became interested in Zionism in the mid-1980s and made several trips to Israel - one of them sponsored by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, which claims the territories occupied in 1967 were given to Israel by God.
In 1988, at the start of the first Palestinian uprising, Mr Zell moved with his family to the Jewish settlement of Alon Shevut on the West Bank, acquiring Israeli nationality.
The settlement was surrounded by barbed wire and sometimes came under attack, but the Zells said it was an ideal place for children. "It's like a small town in Iowa," they told Jewish Homemaker magazine.
In the 1996 Israeli election Mr Zell campaigned for the rightwing Binyamin Netanyahu and was also at one time a member of the Likud party's central committee and policy bureau.
Since then, he has been a frequent spokesman for settlers.
In a recent law journal article, written with a colleague, Mr Zell argued that the right of return for Palestinian refugees "is not only ungrounded as a matter of law, but also unjustified in historical retrospective".
His Jerusalem-based firm, Zell Goldberg & Co, claims to be "one of Israel's fastest-growing business-oriented law firms". One of its main activities is to help Israeli companies to do business abroad.
Mr Zell's role in IILG, according to Sam Chalabi, is to find companies interested in doing business in Iraq.
IILG claims to be the first international law firm based inside Iraq. "Many firms outside the country purport to counsel companies about doing business in Iraq," its website says. "The simple fact is: you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA [coalition provisional authority] and the few functioning civilian ministries."
IILG says it acts as international counsellors to the Iraq-Baghdad Chamber of Commerce, and to the Federation of Iraqi Industrialists.
Apart from the relationship with his uncle, Sam Chalabi is well connected in his own right. A US-trained solicitor who was educated in England, he occasionally acted as a spokesman for the the INC and was a co-author of Transition to Democracy - a key document in the exiled opposition's planning for a post-Saddam Iraq.
Before the invasion he was in northern Iraq on undisclosed business and later liaised on legal matters, on behalf of the INC, with the Pentagon's team in Kuwait.
He is reportedly on two committees which advise the new Iraqi government on finance, trade and investment.
Sam Chalabi's uncle and Mr Zell have close ties to Mr Feith at the Pentagon. Ahmad Chalabi, a former banker who was sentenced to 22 years' jail by a Jordanian court in connection with a $200m scandal in the 1980s, worked closely with the hawk in the run-up to the invasion. Mr Feith has shown strong leanings towards the Israeli right, in his Pentagon role and earlier as Mr Zell's partner in a Washington law firm.
Like Mr Zell, he has argued that Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land are lawful and has been promoting the idea of supplying Iraqi oil to Israel via a pipeline.
In 1996 he was one of the authors of the Clean Break document which proposed overthrowing Saddam as the first step towards reshaping Israel's "strategic environment".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
― Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Sunday, 8 August 2004 20:16 (twenty-one years ago)
And indeed,
the National Review is starting to twist in the wind a bit. Unsurprisingly -- and I admit I was wondering about this from the start -- they are focusing on the judge and his credentials, but they're also having to admit a few home truths at last:
While al-Maliky pursues spurious chares, more telling is what he has not investigated: On June 29, the first full day of Iraqi sovereignty, an Oregon National Guard unit witnessed severe abuse: Plain-clothed Iraqi security officers beat and tortured bound and blindfolded prisoners. U.S. soldiers briefly intervened. The prisoners reported that they had been starved, deprived of water, and tortured for three days. But because of the transfer of sovereignty, the National Guardsmen returned the prisoners to their tormentors' custody. The transfer of sovereignty makes rectifying the matter an Iraqi responsibility. The Central Criminal Court of Iraq has yet to pursue the matter.
More troubling are allegations reported in the July 17 Sydney Morning-Herald. Veteran foreign-affairs correspondent Paul McGeough reported eyewitness accounts alleging that Ayad Allawi summarily executed blindfolded, handcuffed prisoners. According to one witness, "The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the interior minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death — but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them."
Sunday's episode is shameful. To Iraqis, al-Maliky represents not justice but an American appointee pursuing a personal vendetta. They juxtapose his numerous warrants against Chalabi with his lack of investigation into others about whom accusations are far more serious and backed by a higher standard of evidence. The greatest danger to U.S. policy is the grave and growing gap between presidential rhetoric and policy implementation. Bremer established the Central Criminal Court for a short-term objective but instead enabled long-term abuse of power.
Al-Maliky's actions do not bode well for the future. Iraq may be sovereign, but Washington will be blamed for putting a fox in charge of the hen house. Across Iraq and the Middle East, dissidents and freedom-seekers see al-Maliky persecute peaceful politicians while accomplices to murder walk free under an amnesty. The message is as loud and clear as it is tragic. The real victim is American prestige.
Made yer bed, lie in it, pal.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 9 August 2004 14:32 (twenty-one years ago)
Meanwhile, a story in the
LA Times that I missed which predicted something was up had this to say:
Zuhair Maliky, the chief investigative judge of the court, declined to comment on the details of the probe into Fadhil's assassination. But he defended his court's impartiality.
"We have no relation with the Americans," Maliky said, adding that the Chalabi family worked closely with the U.S. before the recent split. "We are not the ones who came from abroad. We lived here and suffered under Saddam."
U.S. advisors to the criminal court, the special tribunal and the Finance Ministry declined to be interviewed.
"This is an Iraqi issue," U.S. Embassy spokesman Robert J. Callahan said. "To our knowledge it does not impact any American citizens. We're not going to get involved."
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 9 August 2004 16:33 (twenty-one years ago)
eleven years pass...