Crackdown on the Investigation
The timing, as usual, is suspicious: the field office in Iraq of a very recent winner of the foreign press award is raided by US troops; his tapes seized and possibly destroyed; he is incarcerated, interviewed, and released. Only days before, Dr. Ali Fadhil and his producer Callum Macrae at the Guardian announced to the US that they were filming a story about millions of dollars that the US has misappropriated or simply wasted in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Coverage is hard to come by on this story. I found it on IMDB.com. There are other mentions at the TPMCafe and a story on AlJazeera.com [scroll down]. But the story seems to be more than a coincidental raid on journalists. Dr. Fadhil had won the Foreign Press award for impassioned and intriguing coverage, including this story covering a fallen, destroyed Fallujah shortly after the US took it.
But without asserting a connection between the raid of the documentarian's work and his announcement of it, his story is vital to hear. The Average American [or Brit] would greatly benefit from knowing to what ends our billions are being spent. Or not spent.
The Washington Post has done some interesting work on a previous model of American anti-terroristic nationbuilding- the abandonment of Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most chilling conclusion that the Washington Post reporters reach is this: that the severe, all-encompassing corruption and misappropriation of nationbuilding funds utterly undercuts any westernized democracy that we could hope for. Because as each newly-elected, Western-friendly Afghani townsman promises a new clinic, mosque, or school, which cannot be fulfilled as each contractor bleeds the funds through corruption and misappropriation, they run the risk of voter disenfranchisement.
And what figures are waiting in the wings to be "elected" on the promises that the imperial Americans are willing only to bomb and abandon? Ex Taliban clerics and religious extremists- and the people we supposedly were aiming to permanently remove.
What about Iraq?
Apparently, the US military doesn't want us to know.
Coverage is hard to come by on this story. I found it on IMDB.com. There are other mentions at the TPMCafe and a story on AlJazeera.com [scroll down]. But the story seems to be more than a coincidental raid on journalists. Dr. Fadhil had won the Foreign Press award for impassioned and intriguing coverage, including this story covering a fallen, destroyed Fallujah shortly after the US took it.
But without asserting a connection between the raid of the documentarian's work and his announcement of it, his story is vital to hear. The Average American [or Brit] would greatly benefit from knowing to what ends our billions are being spent. Or not spent.
The Washington Post has done some interesting work on a previous model of American anti-terroristic nationbuilding- the abandonment of Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most chilling conclusion that the Washington Post reporters reach is this: that the severe, all-encompassing corruption and misappropriation of nationbuilding funds utterly undercuts any westernized democracy that we could hope for. Because as each newly-elected, Western-friendly Afghani townsman promises a new clinic, mosque, or school, which cannot be fulfilled as each contractor bleeds the funds through corruption and misappropriation, they run the risk of voter disenfranchisement.
And what figures are waiting in the wings to be "elected" on the promises that the imperial Americans are willing only to bomb and abandon? Ex Taliban clerics and religious extremists- and the people we supposedly were aiming to permanently remove.
What about Iraq?
Apparently, the US military doesn't want us to know.
posted by General Stan at 6:41 PM
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