Connecting the Dots: Obama, Rezko, Auchi, Alsammarae, and the Iraq kleptocracy

Last evening, October 5, 2008, ABC Radio talk show host John Batchelor and ex-DoD Jack Shaw continued their discussion of Iraqi-British billionaire businessman Nadhmi Auchi and corruption of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that led to corruption of the Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq, i.e. Iraq as a kleptocracy.

Jack Shaw is the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security and a former aide to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Listen to their podcast here during the second hour (at approximately the 28 min. mark).

The “London group”: During the segment, Shaw talks about Special IG Stuart Bowen, who has been conducting an investigation into Iraqi reconstruction corruption since October 2004. On November 30, 2006, Esquire published an excellent profile on Bowen.

According to Shaw, Bowen identifies Auchi as one member of what he calls the “London Group” of exiles, members of the Dawa party that operated in Iraq prior to the rule of Saddam Hussein and which formed in London following the first US war in Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is also a member of the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party.

Roula Khalaf wrote January 23, 2005, in the Financial Times:

The group now known as Islamic Dawa, or Outreach, bears the name of a movement founded in the late 1950s by Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, who advocated an Islamic parliamentary republic overseen by the clergy. After Mr Sadr’s death at the hands of Mr Hussein’s security officers in 1980, the Dawa party broke into several groups, some of which fought the regime secretly inside Iraq and others of which worked against Mr Hussein from abroad.

Islamic Dawa is led by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a member of the so-called “London group” of exiles. Dawa activists often include middle-class urban Shia, the “suits” as opposed to the “turbans” of Sciri and other more clerically minded parties. Most stress their respect for the clergy, but usually emphasise that they wish to transform Iraq from the bottom up by encouraging piety, rather than institute an Islamic government.

In May 2008, IPS’s Jim Lobe also mentions former CPA chief Paul Bremer, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz re the “London Group”:

… that things went bad when the U.S. declared an “occupation” instead of turning over the government to and empowering an Iraqi authority dominated by “externals” like Ahmed Chalabi and other members of the so-called “London Group” – were clear and irrefutable (at least by Feith and Wolfowitz) and also served to point up once again how completely ignorant the administration’s leading hawks were both about Iraqi society and the likely impact on it of the U.S. invasion.

The “Second Insurgency”

Shaw says that corruption in Iraqi reconstruction contracts orginating with the telecommunications industry, namely cell phones, is much more widespread. He says Bowen calls this the “Second Insurgency”.

Following the release of his most recent 238-page report to Congress in August 2008, Bowen’s comments were reported August 11, 2008, by Ken Herman in the Austin American-Statesman:

After 19 trips to Iraq, 244 audits and 18 quarterly reports to Congress, is the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction encouraged or discouraged about whether Iraq will be a functioning democracy any time soon?

“Get rid of the ‘any time soon’ and I would say encouraged,” Stuart Bowen said. “It’s going to be gradual.”

The problem, Bowen says in a recent report and an interview, is Iraqi government corruption that he sees as the “second insurgency,” and one that could be more challenging to eradicate than the armed insurgency.

[...]

He sees the problem as cultural, systemic and now protected in Iraqi law. The recent corruption report noted an Iraq Criminal Procedure Code provision allowing ministers to halt corruption investigations of their employees. The State Department reported this authority was invoked 67 times in 2007, about four times as often as it was in 2006.

Bowen also is troubled by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s 2007 executive order giving him the power to block corruption investigations.

“That’s incompatible, I think, with a good democratic system,” he said.

Former Iraqi Minister of Electricity, Aiham Alsammarae

In the same context, Shaw and Batchelor also discussed Aiham Alsammarae (right), the former Iraqi Minister of Electricity (and former classmate with convicted political fixer, Antoin “Tony” Rezko) who was convicted of corruption October 2006 in Iraq, escaped first to Amman, Jordan, in December 2006 and returned to his Chicago home, and the alleged dismissal of charges against him by the Iraqi government. Alsammarae is once again involved in his homeland, Iraq, according to reports.

RW/RBO has written numerous articles about Alsammarae, his connections to both Rezko and Obama, as well as his apparent return to operations in Iraq.

Auchi and alleged Iraq reconstruction corruption:

In his February 28, 2005, NewsMax article Pentagon Document: U.S. Paid Pro-Saddam Figures, Chinese and French (now posted on the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics website), Charles R. Smith wrote about the alleged corruption. RW/RBO was contacted by NewsMax earlier this year and informed that the article had been pulled due to unsubstantiated material, specifically the following section:

Newly released Pentagon documents show that a former member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle has resurfaced inside the new Iraqi government, bringing charges of corruption, bribery and bid-rigging.

The documents also indicate that many firms – including French and Chinese ones that had cozy relationship’s with Saddam’s regime – continue to reap millions in contracts from Iraq’s new governing authorities.

As a result, millions of U.S. aid dollars and billions in Iraqi government funds have disappeared in an ongoing scandal that is poised to engulf Baghdad and Washington.

Worse still, a leading candidate for the top elected post in Iraq has also been implicated in the report as having taken “payoffs” in order to rig a major government cell phone contract.

According to a May 2004 U.S. Defense Department report to the inspector general and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, a former financier and close associate of Saddam Hussein, Nadhmi Auchi, has “engaged in unlawful activities” such as bribing “foreign governments and individuals prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein.”

In addition, the report noted that Auchi arranged “for significant theft from the UN Oil-for-Food Program to smuggle weapons and dual-use technology into Iraq in violation of UN and other International Export Control Regimes.”

But the U.S. liberation of Iraq has done little to put Auchi out of business. According to the official DoD report, during the U.S. occupation Auchi has organized “an elaborate scheme to take over and control the post-war cellular phone system in Iraq.”

However, on September 23, 2008, RBO wrote about Nadhmi Auchi and the leaked DoD IG report, which backs up Smith’s February 2005 article.

There is also a redacted copy of a memo with “new and useful leads on corruption in the United Nations Oil-For-Food Program” that was published online in April 2004 in Jake Vest’s column on Iraqi reconstruction.

Also see other RBO articles about Nadhmi Auchi.

More here. The headlines tell the story.

• Iraq: Phone Licenses (bis) – I questioned the Orascom award, well take a look here, The Lounsbury, November 11, 2003.
• Jon Henley, Gigantic sleaze scandal winds up as former Elf oil chiefs are jailed. Trial for huge kickbacks by publicly owned firm reveals years of corruption at top of French state, The Guardian (UK), November 13, 2003.
• Mobile phones get Iraq’s reconstruction off to awful start, The Economist, December 1, 2003.
• Mark Matthews, Murky connections hobble effort to install Iraq cell phone network. Crucial business venture falters amid allegations of corruption, ties to Hussein, Baltimore Sun, December 3, 2003.
• Carol J. Williams, Pentagon Probe Delays Start of Iraqi Phone Service, Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2003.
• Iraq cell-phone bribery suspected, Washington Times, June 14, 2004.
• Pentagon: Cancel Iraq Cell Deals, DefenseTech.org, June 22, 2008.
• Pentagon urges repeal of Iraq phone contracts, Washington Times, June 21, 2004.
• T. Christian Miller, Pentagon Deputy’s Probes in Iraq Weren’t Authorized, Officials Say, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2004.
• Iraq probing cell phone deals, Washington Times, July 8, 2004.
• Richard Fernandez, Rezko, Auchi and Obama, The Belmont Club, February 25, 2008.
• Bill Gertz, Notes from the Pentagon: Auchi Connection, Inside the Ring, February 29, 2008.
• David Connett, Unwelcome publicity for oil giant in legal battle with billionaire, The Independent (UK), May 4, 2008.
• Evelyn Pringle, Curtain Time For Barack Obama – Part I, Countercurrents.org, May 15, 2008.
• A. Jacksonian, Obama and Iraq, Dumb Looks Still Free, June 10, 2008.
• Andrew Walden, Lehman Brothers: Obama’s Rezko-Auchi conflict of interest, Hawaii Free Press, September 17, 2008.