Saturday, May 24, 2003

Twist of American justice

IN a strange twist of American justice, a federal
judge in New York has found Iraq partly responsible
for the Sept. 11 attacks and awarded over $100 million
to the families of two people who died in the aerial
assault against the World Trade Center towers.
However, and despite contradictions, the ruling could
be used by successive US administrations to keep Iraq
under indefinite pressure if the current process in
post-Saddam Hussein Iraq leads to a dilution of the
American grip on the country.
The verdict is expected to trigger hundreds of claims
to be filed with US lawcourts claiming compensation
from Iraq for victims of the attacks, and that would
essentially mean that the Bush administration caught
in its own trap of charges it made implicating Iraq
and Saddam Hussein as sources of international
terrorism with little substantiation.
The ruling was strange because the evidence cited by
lawyers for  the families of George Smith andTimothy
Soulas, two of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks
in New York and Washington, was based on public
statements made by senior US officials. These
officials included former CIA director James Woolsey
and from author Laurie Mylroie who have claimed that
Iraq "provided material support" to the Al Qaeda
network of Osama Bin Laden. Also cited was a statement
by US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN where
he asserted that Iraq supported "Islamist
terrorism."
The lawyers conceded that the evidence "barely"
established a link
between Al Qaeda and Iraq was enough for a "reasonable
jury," according to a report in the USA Today
newspaper.
The whole episode has an air of superficiality when
seen against the track record of the American
judiciary.
Despite the public claims made by American officials,
no tangible evidence has been found to establish a
link between Al Qaeda and Iraq except unsubstatiated
reports that a senior Iraqi intelligence official had
met with the purported leader of the Sept.11 assault
team, Mohammed Atta, in Eastern Europe in April 2001,
and a claim that was later found to be hollow by an
Iraqi defector that Osama Bin Laden had visited
Baghdad in 1998.
Documents said to have been found in the office of the
Iraqi intelligence ministry in post-war Baghdad
indicated that an unidentified Al Qaeda operative had
visited the Iraqi capital in early 1998, but that
could be hardly be evidence -- in any sense of the
word in a court of law -- that Saddam Hussein had any
role in the attacks in the US that occurred more than
three years later.
Indeed, intelligence findings deliberately suppressed
by the American and British government say that there
could not have been any link between Saddam and Bin
Laden if only because of their ideological
differences.
Bin Laden, who followed a puritanical form of Islam,
has never concealed his distaste for Saddam, whom he
had accused of using the faith for political purposes
and consolidate his grip on power. Bin Laden also
publicly blamed Saddam for having given the Americans
a pretext to military intervene in the Gulf and stay
on in the region by invading Kuwait in 1991.
And, indeed, if Al Qaedd is behind the post-war
bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, then one could
bet that they were carried out not because of any
sense for revenge for Saddam's ouster but in
retaliation for the overall American approach to the
Middle East and what many perceive as American
hostility towards Islam.
However, that does not change the reality that the
ruling has been made by a US court implicating Iraq in
the attacks and Iraq is hardly in a position to defend
itself.
The ruling also found Afghanistan's ousted Taliban
regime partly responsible for the attacks -- again a
case where no defence could be put up.
The verdict has to be seen against the backdrop of a
heavy dose of what could be nothing but American spin
that has led to more than half of Americans believing
that Saddam was behind the Sept.11 attacks as
indicated in opinion polls prior to the US war that
toppled him in April this year.
While the American judicial system could not accused
of being politically influenced, the court ruling
strengthens the argument that George W Bush is bent
upon somehow proving to American voters ahead of 2004
elections that he was right in invading Iraq and
toppling Saddam. The argument gathers more
credibility, given that the US occupiers of Iraq have
yet to produce any evidence that Saddam possessed
weapons of mass destruction -- the prime reason that
Bush cited for his decision to wage war against Iraq
and oust the Saddam regime from power.
How are the families which have been awarded the claim
going to collect?
That may yet prove to be another landmark turning.
Bush has at his disposal billions of dollars in frozen
Iraqi assets transferred to him, but the funds are
earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction. The US president
could hardly be expected to permit those funds to be
used to settle the claims, particularly that hundreds
of similar lawsuits are being prepared and sent to US
lawcourts.
Ironically, Bush would have gladly used the funds to
settle the claims had the verdict came before he
launched the war and ousted Saddam. Now he and his
people could be expected to fight tooth and nail
against any attempt to touch the booty assigned to
rebuild Iraq as a matter of American priority.
Could the US-endorsed regime that would take power in
Iraq be expected to be held responsible for settling
the claim?
Again the answer could not but be no. Washington has a
vested interest in protecting the regime it would
install in post-war Iraq and it is hardly likely that
Bush would allow it to be exposed to a torrent of
claims that could run into tens of billions of
dollars.
If anything, the US is pressing other countries to
write off even the legitimate debts that Iraq incurred
during the Saddam regime's existence in power. Against
that backdrop, the question could all but be ruled out
whether Washington would care much for Sept.11
compensation since it should know well that Saddam
could not have had any role in the attacks.
Indeed, the Bush administration has left a vulnerable
flank in its haste to implicate Iraq in the attacks
when it set up a separate fund for compensation for
Sept.11 attacks and allowed recipients to file claims
against Al Qaeda as well as Iraq.
One of the obvious explanations of the scenario after
the court verdict is that the US administration could
use the Sept.11-linked claims on Iraq as potential
leverage and pressure on the country for decades,
given that at some point Washington would have to
loosen its military grip on Iraqis.