Counting to Zero
Ned Parker’s story in the LA Times overcounts. He reports that Iraq has ended up with two parallel intelligence agencies, but the story makes clear that Iraq has no intelligence agencies. The official intelligence agency, the INIS, gets 100% of its funding from the American CIA and none from the Iraqi government. The alternative that the two most recent “ministers of state for national security” have thrown up clearly serves a sectarian Shiite agenda. Meanwhile the largely Sunni insurgency surely has spies of their own. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a country.
Funniest line in the article goes to “Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group”:
If no critical compromise is reached, the security services are going to fall apart on ethnic, sectarian and party lines . . .
What is this, Joost, 2004? You can bet that the security services have already gotten themselves elbow deep in factional fighting.
Comment by Nell —
April 15, 2007 @ 5:04 pm
Do you remember months ago, when U.S. troops stumbled across/raided a prison purportedly run by “the Iraqi intelligence agency”, where many prisoners were being held and tortured? It was unclear from the reporting (only a couple of outlets ran the story) which agency this was, as there was no ID of the sectarian affiliation of prisoners or guards.
There was vague mention of the Interior Ministry in one story, so I assumed it was the Shia ’shadow intel agency’ created by the existing UIA govt — whose existence had been previously unreported, but which seemed like a natural enough development, given the CIA’s refusal to hand over control of the one it put together when the UIA govt came in.
Anyway, it struck me back when that incident came out that reporting on the existence of at least two “Iraqi intelligence agencies” would be helpful. Here it is, but it seems to have taken quite a while to see the light.
Comment by Nell —
April 15, 2007 @ 10:41 pm
This is the NYTimes story, thanks to the help of Swopa. I misremembered the military forces involved, and the date (which makes me less critical of the lag in reporting the dual intel systems).
Comment by Gary Farber —
April 19, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
“I misremembered the military forces involved, and the date….”
Did you misremember, Nell, or were you possibly thinking of this?