Meanwhile, during a break from the immigration debate, the Associated Press returns to the old cut and run propaganda. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060409/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
Breaking News: civil war in Pakistan "imminent" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060411/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_bomb
. âArab world raising its profile in Iraqâ League reopening Baghdad office other states fear Iran's influence Apr. 22, 2006 By: IASON ATHANASIADIS Toronto Star BAGHDADâThe Arab League is about to reopen its Baghdad office for the first time since the U.S.-led invasion amid fears of growing Iranian influence. "They (the Arabs) are worried about the future of Iraq and that it will drift out of the Arab sphere of influence," a former high-ranking Iranian foreign policy official said from Tehran. The new head of the Arab League's mission in Iraq, Moroccan diplomat Mokhtar Lamani, is reportedly already in Baghdad with a brief to consult various factions and speed up the creation of an Iraqi government that remains unformed more than four months after elections brought a Shiite coalition to power. In a possible breakthrough yesterday, Shiite politicians agreed to nominate Jawad al-Maliki as prime minister, replacing the incumbent, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders had opposed. Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties agreed on nominees to fill other top posts, a Shiite legislator said. They were to be presented to parliament today, officials told Associated Press. The Arab League, an association of 22 governments, had resisted opening an office in Baghdad since the 2003 invasion in a sign of its disapproval for the non-UN-sanctioned war. But Iraq's growing civil strife has prompted concerned Arab leaders to re-engage with the troubled country. Last month, top intelligence officers from several Arab countries and Turkey met secretly to co-ordinate strategies in case civil war erupts in Iraq, according to Arab diplomats quoted by Associated Press â and in an attempt to block Iranian interference there. Concern over Tehran's reach in Shiite-majority Iraq has bubbled over into a series of anxious statements by Arab leaders. "The threat of break-up in Iraq is a huge problem for the countries of the region, especially if the fighting is on a sectarian basis," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faysal said earlier this week. "This type of fighting sucks in other countries." `The Arabs feel that Iraq is a slippery fish. They want to catch this fish and bring it to the Arab family.' - Former Iranian foreign policy official Those comments followed controversial remarks made by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last week to the Saudi-owned al-Arabiyya news channel where he accused Arab Shiites of holding primary allegiance to Iran rather than their own Sunni governments. Mubarak's statements laid bare the distrust with which the region's Sunni rulers regard Shiites and caused a storm of protest by Iraqi politicians. "Such statements make it more difficult for any serious Arab initiative in Iraq," said Joseph Bahout, a Paris-based Lebanese political analyst. "They also highlight the dangers of any open Arab alignment in the U.S.-Iran confrontation." The Arab League's return to what was once one of the most powerful Arab states signals an escalation in the Arab-Iranian struggle over Iraq's future. "The Arabs feel that Iraq is a slippery fish," said the Iranian official. "They want to catch this fish and bring it to the Arab family. So they don't want there to be a deal between Iran and the U.S. on Iraq. They don't want to see Iran being the gendarme of the Gulf again." The United States had close military ties with Tehran before the Shah of Iran was toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution. An Arab peacekeeping force for Iraq would be convened under Arab League or United Nations auspices. Sources say Egypt would provide most of the manpower and hardware, with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states concerned about the rise in Iranian influence funding the initiative. But Mideast watchers warn the entry of a pan-Arab force in Iraq could turn the country into a proxy battleground with Iran and escalate a regional confrontation that has, until now, been simmering on a diplomatic level. Tehran has sought to allay Arab fears about its role in Iraq and about military exercises held recently in the Persian Gulf, near five key oil-producing Arab countries. Iranian Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar was reported as saying his country seeks "peace and friendship" with neighbouring states. Iason Athanasiadis is an independent journalist based in Iran .
. April 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: April 2006, Iraq is in the middle of Chaos and a Sectarian Civil War. How to give the impression of a quick fix? Here is the reality inside Iraq today: 1) Iraq has around 80 percent unemployment rate. 2) The countryâs infrastructure is close to total collapse including electric power, water supply, sewage, and most government basic services. 3) The country is divided among sectarian lines â Sunni, Shiite, Kurds and so on. And each ethnic or religious group is also divided among themselves to further complicate the mess. 4) Iraq has all kinds of outside interference from the US and Israel, to Syria, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and many others â with each player with its own agenda and baggage. 5) Many Iraqis work for the Iraqi police during the day â and they do some part time work for the insurgency by night - Or the other way around. 6) Each sectarian group has its own militia and they know that since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein it is time to settle the score â It is time to get even with the group or groups that have been repressing your group. And each group hate the other groups for one reason or another. 7) During Saddam Husseinâs years as dictator of Iraq the population went through a real bad period with killings, execution of people of other groups and many people were sent to prison and tortured. People from the various groups had members of their family - including mothers, sisters, and daughters - raped and so onâ¦. 8) It is time to settle the scores in Iraq and the various militias are going all the way to do it. It is time to get even with your enemies if nothing else. 9) With the Iraq Civil War raging for at least 3 years and in the last 6 months spinning completely out of control and during that time the insurgency targeting the well-educated class necessary to rebuild the country. A large number of this well-educated class of people have been killed or left the country to be able to survive. 10) The little Americans have been able to rebuild in Iraq for PR purposes is just a drop in the bucket and basically means almost nothing for the people living in a country with a nasty sectarian civil war raging completely out of control and no security for anyone living inside that country. 11) On top of all that we have the most incompetent group of people making all kinds of mistakes from the occupation forces side of the fiasco. Corruption has been out of control since the US attacked Iraq 3 years ago â with billions of US dollars in missing funds and so on. 12) Iraq the country is bankrupt for any practical purposes, and the businesses that people are trying to start can be destroyed at any time, by the cross fire of the war, by the insurgency, or by the sectarian militias taking part in this civil war. 13) Iraq had been completely broke financially for many years as a result of the long war against Iran and then from the Gulf War in the early 1990âs. If anything Iraq was a financial basket case even before George W. Bush decided to attack that country 3 years ago. ********** 4/24/2006 âDifficult job ahead' for Iraq's PM-designateâ By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY BAGHDAD â Before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Jawad al-Maliki, the country's new prime minister-designate, was a little-known exile living in Syria, where he worked for a Shiite Islamist party trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Since returning, al-Maliki has developed a reputation for being blunt and tough, frequently rebuking Sunni political foes and going so far as to threaten one lawmaker during a session of parliament last April. "He is a tough guy, tough-minded as well," Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, told CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday. Al-Maliki's selection Saturday broke months of deadlock that had prevented Iraqi leaders from forming a government following December elections. The stalemate grew out of objections by Sunni and Kurdish factions to the choice of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari for a second term. Facing tough tasks Like al-Jaafari, al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa Party, one of several Shiite political parties that combined forces and won a majority of seats in the National Assembly. Al-Jaafari had the backing of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has put together one of the country's largest militias. Al-Maliki could prove more assertive than al-Jaafari. Al-Jaafari's critics assailed him for failing to crack down on the insurgency, halt sectarian violence, prevent militias from infiltrating security forces and rein in corruption. Al-Jaafari is "very clever, but sometimes he just couldn't deliver as prime minister," said Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish lawmaker. Al-Maliki has 30 days to form a Cabinet that can win approval by the assembly. Among the hardest tasks he faces: ⢠Finding candidates who can lead key security, oil and economic ministries â and win the support of bitterly divided political factions within the assembly. ⢠Rooting out the influence of Shiite militias in the Interior Ministry and other security forces. ⢠Halting the wave of sectarian killings sparked by the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, and tackling the Sunni-led insurgency. ⢠Stabilizing falling oil exports and revitalizing the economy. "There were so many mistakes ... both by Americans and Iraqis," Othman said. Al-Maliki "has a very difficult job ahead." Khalilzad called al-Maliki a "patriot" who proved himself a key player in negotiations over Iraq's constitution. He also said there is "good evidence" that al-Maliki is "quite independent of Iran," which the United States blames for helping to fuel instability in Iraq. Sticks to his promises Othman said al-Maliki has a reputation for delivering on his pledges. "When he promises something, he'll get it done," Othman said. "If he can't do it, he won't promise it." Armed militias, blamed by Sunnis for much of the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, are "the infrastructure of a civil war" and must be disbanded, Khalilzad said. Sunni leaders have accused the Interior Ministry, which controls Iraq's police, of taking orders from a Shiite religious party, the Supreme Council for Revolution in Iraq. Interior police have operated death squads targeting mostly Sunnis for assassinations, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, the U.S. commander in charge of training Iraqi police. Saturday, al-Maliki told a news conference that weapons "should be in the hands of the government." He called for ethnic and religious militias to be integrated into Iraq's armed forces. The future of the Interior Ministry will be a key, contentious point as al-Maliki wrangles with other lawmakers to assemble his Cabinet, said Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni lawmaker and outgoing acting speaker of parliament. Pachachi said important ministry assignments went to party loyalists and cronies under al-Jaafari's government. "The choice of ministers should not be because they are party loyalists or belong to religious groups, but rather because of experience and competency. Iraq needs this," he said. Other factions hope al-Maliki will reach out to them. "Al-Jaafari had a personal style of rule, not a collective one," Pachachi said. "Maybe al-Maliki will consult others more frequently and listen to more points of view." After the U.S.-led invasion, al-Maliki was elected to parliament as a member of the Shiite bloc that was the largest vote-getter. He co-chaired a committee, set up by the United States, to rid the country of influence by Saddam's Baath party. While al-Jaafari was prime minister, al-Maliki acted as Dawa's spokesman, in addition to serving in parliament. He urged the death penalty for insurgents and those who helped them. He also gained a reputation for tough talk directed at former Baathists, some of whom also held seats in the assembly. During a parliamentary session last April, al-Maliki pulled aside Sunni lawmaker Mishaan al-Jabouri and threatened to compile evidence against him to be used to prosecute him. Now, al-Maliki must forge a unified government from Iraq's medley of competing religious and ethnic factions: Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Turkmen and Christian. Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician, said al-Maliki's success will depend on whether he is able to involve other different political groups â and whether he can resist pressure from within his own Shiite coalition. "He should forget the revenge, forget about the extremist positions he would take before," al-Mutlaq said. "He should start a real national conciliation condition in Iraq. I'm just not sure he wants to." .
. April 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: Now for the good news from fantasyland: To fix this absolute chaos all you have to do is stage an election, and beat the guys over the head to form some kind of government â and all the problems will go away. Jawad al-Maliki, is the country's new prime minister-designate and he will crack down on the insurgency, halt sectarian violence, prevent militias from infiltrating security forces and rein in corruption. And on Saturday, al-Maliki told a news conference that weapons "should be in the hands of the government." He called for ethnic and religious militias to be integrated into Iraq's armed forces. Among his credentials for the Prime Ministersâ job he has a reputation of being really good in convince people to unify, and here is an example of his extraordinary diplomactic capabilities: âWhile al-Jaafari was prime minister, al-Maliki acted as Dawa's spokesman, in addition to serving in parliament. He urged the death penalty for insurgents and those who helped them. He also gained a reputation for tough talk directed at former Baathists, some of whom also held seats in the assembly. During a parliamentary session last April, al-Maliki pulled aside Sunni lawmaker Mishaan al-Jabouri and threatened to compile evidence against him to be used to prosecute him.â I am sure the insurgents will accept very quietly the death penalty and the Baathists also will accept this fellow with open arms â in the same way that Americans were received and accepted with open arms by the Iraqi people after the US overthrew Saddam Hussein. But to shift the global attention from the Iraq civil war and the colossal mess inside Iraq â the United States has another strategy inside its bags of tricks - to escalate the rhetoric and start beating the war drums against Iran. By the way, that strategy will really help to improve the situation in Iraq and in the entire Middle East. You donât have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this entire fiasco is not going to resolve anything in Iraq and that they are going to continue their civil war until they decide that they had enough and someone end up as the new dictator of Iraq. But in the meantime, the rest of world has to play along with the United States regarding wherever they are doing in Iraq and in Iran - just for the hell of it. .
. April 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: According to a front page article published by a major Brazilian newspaper in Brazil â A Folha de Sao Paulo - Bush said today to the new Iraqi Prime Minister: I want you to form a new government as fast as possible. Sure. You can count on it. It is a done deal!!!!!!!!!! Call back in six months. ****** April 24, 2006 âBush pede formação rápida de governo no Iraqueâ Folha de Sao Paulo, em Washington O presidente dos Estados Unidos, George W. Bush, telefonou neste domingo para autoridades iraquianas para pedir que formem um governo "o mais rápido possÃvel", já que um acordo já foi alcançado a respeitoâ¦. ***** April 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: According to another front page article published by the same Brazilian newspaper on April 24, 2006 â A Folha de Sao Paulo â It seems like the women in Iraq are able to find some work even with a raging civil war. They can find work as prostitutes. ****** April 24, 2006 âQueda de regime iraquiano leva mulheres à prostituiçãoâ France Presse, em Washington Mais de 2.000 mulheres iraquianas desaparecidas desde 2003, quando caiu o regime de Saddam Hussein, foram forçadas a se prostituir, segundo informações divulgadas na revista "Time". A Organização pela Liberdade das Mulheres no Iraque, com sede em Bagdá, baseia este número em uma estimativa subjetiva, e a revista admite que não há qualquer outro dado confiável devido aos problemas que assolam o paÃs. A edição da "Time" que chegará à s bancas nesta segunda-feira citou um funcionário ocidental destacado em Bagdá que supervisiona a situação das mulheres no território. Ele diz que o número pode ser exagerado, mas admite que o tráfico de mulheres se tornou um "sério problema". De acordo com um relatório do Departamento de Estado sobre tráfico humano, divulgado em junho de 2005, um número ignorado de mulheres iraquianas foi enviado para Iêmen, SÃria, Jordânia e paÃses do golfo Pérsico para ser objeto de exploração sexual. .
. April 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: At least the Iraqi people can count on the Iraqi police and security forces to protect them. They are doing a wonderful job. According to the US government and mainstream media Democracy is around the corner in Iraq!!!! The only thing that is on its way is a sectarian âCivil War.â Other than some minor set backs everything else is just on schedule and going according to plan. ******** Reuters â April 24, 2006 âIraq police find 32 bodies of security forcesâ BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Thirty-two bodies of Iraqi police and security forces recruits were discovered in two areas of Baghdad on Monday, Interior Ministry sources said. All 32 were from the town of Ramadi in the insurgent heartland of Anbar province, which is fiercely opposed to the government, the sources said. One group of 17 were kidnapped and then shot dead after they signed up for the police force one week ago. They were found in the Baghdady district of the capital. The other 15 were found bullet-riddled in two cars in Abu Ghraib, on the western edge of Baghdad. U.S. officials say the al Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been focusing on bombing and shooting Iraqi security forces, who are charged with eventually taking over security and enabling American troops to head home. Sunni insurgents have also infiltrated Iraqi army and security forces in a bid to topple the government. .
. April 26, 2006 SouthAmerica: No one should accuse the Bush administration of not being consistent. They have been consistent on their âIncompetenceâ from day one. The Bush administration canât do anything right. Things are going well in Iraq. Sure. And this is what was supposed to pay the bills for the Iraqis. Here is just another example of their incompetence. ********* The New York Times - Front Page Story on April 25, 2006 âRebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happenâ By JAMES GLANZ When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway. A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt. The project, called the Fatah pipeline crossing, had been a critical element of a $2.4 billion no-bid reconstruction contract that a Halliburton subsidiary had won from the Army in 2003. The spot where about 15 pipelines crossed the Tigris had been the main link between Iraq's rich northern oil fields and the export terminals and refineries that could generate much-needed gasoline, heating fuel and revenue for Iraqis. For all those reasons, the project's demise would seriously damage the American-led effort to restore Iraq's oil system and enable the country to pay for its own reconstruction. Exactly what portion of Iraq's lost oil revenue can be attributed to one failed project, no matter how critical, is impossible to calculate. But the pipeline at Al Fatah has a wider significance as a metaphor for the entire $45 billion rebuilding effort in Iraq. Although the failures of that effort are routinely attributed to insurgent attacks, an examination of this project shows that troubled decision-making and execution have played equally important roles. The Fatah project went ahead despite warnings from experts that it could not succeed because the underground terrain was shattered and unstable. It continued chewing up astonishing amounts of cash when the predicted problems bogged the work down, with a contract that allowed crews to charge as much as $100,000 a day as they waited on standby. The company in charge engaged in what some American officials saw as a self-serving attempt to limit communications with the government until all the money was gone. And until Mr. Sanders went to Al Fatah, the Army Corps of Engineers, which administered the project, allowed the show to go on for months, even as individual Corps officials said they repeatedly voiced doubts about its chances of success. The Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, had commissioned a geotechnical report that warned in August 2003 that it would be courting disaster to drill without extensive underground tests. "No driller in his right mind would have gone ahead," said Mr. Sanders, a geologist who came across the report when he arrived at the site. KBR defended its performance on the project, and said that the information in the geotechnical report was too general to serve as a warning. Still, interviews by The New York Times reveal that at least two other technical experts, including the northern project manager for the Army Corps, warned that the effort would fail if carried out as designed. None of the dozen or so American government and military officials contacted by The Times remembered being told of the geotechnical report, and the company pressed ahead. Once the project started going bad, senior American officials said, an array of management failures by both KBR and the Corps allowed it to continue. First, some of those officials said, they seldom received status reports from the company, even when they suspected problems and made direct requests. "Typically when you manage a project, you have people who can tell you that you've got so much of your project finished and this much money that has been spent," said Gary Vogler, a senior American official in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. "We couldn't get anything like that." Some warnings did in fact make their way to senior officials who could have stopped the project, said Donna Street, a Corps engineer who examined correspondence on the project after it failed. But neither the Corps nor the company seemed to act on them, Ms. Street said. "It seems to me that there was pretty much an absence of anything," she said. "The reports went out. The questions were asked. But there was just no response." An independent United States office, The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, began an investigation of the project and issued a report earlier this year. It sharply criticized KBR for not relaying the problems, and concluded that "the geological complexities that caused the project to fail were not only foreseeable but predicted." The company received a slap on the wrist when it got only about 4 percent of its potential bonus fees on the job order that contained the contract; there was no other financial penalty. In interviews, two of the top Army Corps commanders who have had involvement at Al Fatah were reluctant to criticize the work done by KBR in Iraq. That was also the case in February when the Army Corps agreed to pay Halliburton most of its fees on a large fuel supply contract in Iraq, even though Pentagon auditors had found more than $200 million of the charges were questionable. Congressional Democrats have accused Halliburton of enjoying special privileges because Vice President Dick Cheney was its chief executive before he became vice president. Although independent experts have noted that it is one of a handful of companies with the experience and size to handle enormous jobs like the reconstruction effort, KBR is often sheltered by a military that is heavily dependent on it. Through a spokeswoman, Melissa Norcross, KBR rejected the criticisms leveled at it in the Fatah pipeline case by the inspector general and other officials, saying that the company had responded properly to an urgent request by the United States government to build the crossing quickly in a dangerous area. Ms. Norcross asserted in a written response to questions that the geotechnical report was too general to suggest any measures but extensive ground testing, which would have required sophisticated equipment. "Such equipment was not available in the region, and certainly not in Iraq," she said. She said statements that the company did not report regularly about the project are "completely without merit" and that daily and monthly reports were duly filed. Ms. Norcross said that when serious problems arose, "the Corps directed KBR to continue" with the drilling. With the failed effort at Al Fatah, the inspector general estimated lost money from crude oil exports at as much as $5 million a day. The United States was forced to issue a new $66 million job order that includes another attempt to run pipelines across the Tigris â this time using a different technique. Stunned by a Change in Plans On April 3, 2003, invading American troops had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and were eyeing its smoking skyline. A naval aircraft dropped a single bomb on the Fatah crossing. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff who was the allied air commander, said that bridges were not generally targets in the war, but that he approved the Fatah strike to stop the enemy from crossing the bridge on which the original pipelines had run through openings beneath the road. The pipelines had carried crude oil from the fields around Kirkuk, 60 miles to the northeast, crossed the Tigris at Al Fatah and transported the crude to refineries or to export terminals in Turkey. Still, there was reason for optimism. The Fatah bridge was one of three bridges chosen as high priorities in an initial $680 million rebuilding program mandated by Congress. Army Corps engineers estimated that it would cost some $5 million and take less than five months to string the pipelines across the bridge once it was repaired. "There is an urgent and compelling need to accomplish this feat as soon as possible," Douglas Lee Cox, the northern Iraq project manager for the Army Corps, wrote in a memo on June 9, 2003. Then, as quickly as the bridge project had been approved, it was dropped with little explanation, in favor of a bridge in Tikrit. Older buried pipelines were able to carry limited amounts of oil, American officials said, but breakdowns were a constant worry. Army Corps officials were stunned. Without the Fatah bridge, they were forced to consider new ways of putting pipelines across the river. They debated options like digging a huge trench in the riverbed and laying the pipelines in it â the option that would later be chosen after the KBR project failed. **** Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Iraq. End of Part 1 of 2 .
. Part 2 of 2 The New York Times - Front Page Story on April 25, 2006 âRebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happenâ By JAMES GLANZ KBR ultimately settled on trying to put the pipelines under the Tigris using a technique called directional drilling, in which nearly horizontal holes are bored out in an arc through the riverbed. In a written response to questions, the company said it chose the technique because it was the only one that could be used to complete the project as quickly as the Army Corps had demanded. Mr. Cox said he had not even been consulted. Gary Loew, another senior Corps official in Iraq at the time, remembers that the idea for drilling came from KBR and said that the Corps approved it verbally in the summer of 2003. Mr. Cox, who was familiar with the technique from his own work in Texas, knew that with the heavy equipment and supplies needed for the job, his colleagues' claims that Fatah could be finished in 60 to 90 days were nonsense, particularly with the deteriorating security on the road from Kirkuk, where the supply planes would land. "I said, 'Now how in the heck do you think you're going to do directional drilling with the situation we have here?' " Mr. Cox recalled, adding that he had told KBR officials, "It takes us forever to get enough security to drive down this road, and that's at 70 miles an hour." That same month, a KBR pipeline expert saw a preliminary design and advised the company "that the project would probably fail," according to the inspector general report. The most blatant warning came from the study that KBR had commissioned from Fugro South, a geotechnical firm. The study stated repeatedly that the project should not begin without extensive field exploration and laboratory testing of the area. KBR went ahead with the work without sharing the report with senior oil officials in Iraq. Nor did it carry out the testing that the report strongly recommended. The report had cited "past tectonic activities near the site." The words, suggesting slippage of the earth's crust in eons past, would prove prophetic. Troubles From the Start The Fugro report did have one important consequence. KBR included it in a "request for proposals" to drilling subcontractors â along with contradictory information from KBR suggesting that the ground was made of ordinary clays, silts and sandstones, the inspector general report found. Faced with that contradictory information, the subcontractor that won the bid negotiated a contract that required it only to try drilling holes on a daily basis â not necessarily succeed. "There was no requirement that the subcontractor complete any holes," the inspector general wrote. Ms. Norcross, the KBR spokeswoman, said that no subcontractor would have been "willing to mobilize equipment and personnel to an unstable war zone" if the contract had been written more stringently. An official in the inspector general's office saw it differently. "It was a horrible contract," the official said. "It's basically, 'Give it your best shot, spend six months doing it.' " In late January, 2004, drilling began. The plan called for boreholes to accommodate 15 pipelines, which would arc beneath the Tigris at shallow angles. Troubles turned up instantly. Every time workers plied the riverbed with their drills, they found it was like sticking their fingers into a jar of marbles: each time they pulled the drills out, the boulders would either shift and erase the larger holes or snap off the bits. The area had turned out to be a fault zone, where two great pieces of the earth's crust had shifted and torn the underground terrain into jagged boulders, voids, cobblestones and gravel. It was just the kind of "tectonic" shift that the Fugro report had warned of â hardly the smooth clays and sandstones that KBR had suggested the drillers would find. The crew abandoned the first borehole and started a second, the inspector general reported. Twenty-six days later, the borehole went through. But the crews found it impossible to enlarge the hole enough for a 30-inch pipe to pass through. By the end of March, five months after arriving in Iraq, they managed to jam a 26-inch pipe through. The crews would never again get anything larger than that across the riverbed. To make matters worse, the project suffered from constant equipment shortages, just as Mr. Cox, the Army Corps project manager, had predicted. If KBR had declined to write performance clauses into the drill subcontract, the company had also included language that prevented the crews from speaking directly with the Army Corps, let alone passing along word that some of them knew that the effort was futile. The company "restricted subcontractor communications by requiring all communications be addressed to them," the inspector general found. Mr. Vogler, the senior Oil Ministry official, said he began hearing rumors from Iraqis in the ministry in Baghdad that something had gone terribly wrong, but the company itself seemed determined not to clarify what had happened. "We couldn't get a good status report," Mr. Vogler said. "We kept asking for it," he said. "We couldn't get one." Still, a trickle of information found its way through the command structure of the Army Corps. Ms. Norcross of KBR said that in April 2004, the company notified a contracting officer in Baghdad that 75 percent of the $220 million allocated for the job order had been exhausted. By then the insurgency had worsened, and the camp suffered regular attacks. The threat became so severe that drilling was temporarily suspended "while KBR and the Army Corps of Engineers worked to address the lack of adequate force protection," Ms. Norcross said. After security concerns were addressed, the work at Al Fatah resumed and so did problems with the drilling. Troubling reports from KBR officials at the site eventually reached higher in the Army Corps, but there was little reaction. J. Michael Stinson, an American who took over as senior oil adviser to the Oil Ministry in March, said not all of the blame for the project lies with the company. "I don't know that the Corps covered itself with glory either," Mr. Stinson said. "The engineers, the managers, probably should have said: 'Time out. Let's send a bunch of people home. Let's find out if this is going to work.' " 'Culpable Negligence' Finally, in early July 2004, some eight months after the project began, the Army Corps sent Mr. Sanders to Al Fatah. A geologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and a former oilman, the blunt-spoken Mr. Sanders, now 68, said he joined the Army Corps when he grew bored with retirement. One of the first documents he found at the site was the Fugro report, and it set off alarm bells. "You just don't see a consultant's report like that that is totally dismissed," he said. "That put them on notice," Mr. Sanders said. "When they didn't take that notice, they accepted what I would call culpable negligence." KBR maintains that the report did not contain enough detailed information to raise questions about the project. But Mr. Sanders said drill supervisors at the site, the kind of workers he liked to call "tool pushers," had indicated otherwise. Hoping to start a conversation with them during his visit, Mr. Sanders said the geology around the area looked as if it could be tough on a drilling operation. The men did not hesitate. "They agreed that it was just the wrong place for horizontal drilling," Mr. Sanders said. "They didn't see any probability of getting one of the big holes done." But he said they had been told to keep drilling â pushing their tools, anyway. Of course, by giving Mr. Sanders any information, they had probably violated their contract with KBR. Mr. Sanders, outraged by the poor quality of the work and what he described as the indifference of the Army Corps to it, contacted the inspector general. "Everything I could see out of it was being swept under the rug," he said. But it was already too late. One morning at about the time of his visits, American officials in the Oil Ministry in Baghdad finally obtained a status report from KBR. All the money had been spent. Col. Emmett H. Du Bose Jr., who in December 2003 assumed command of the task force of the Corps in charge of the project, said other items in the $220 million job order, like putting emergency power generators at oil installations, did get done. KBR provided him with optimistic assessments nearly to the end of the line, Colonel Du Bose said in a telephone interview, and he was convinced that the project would be a success. But he said that he was not sure who, if anyone, might have seen the contradictory information in the Fugro report. "In hindsight, knowing what I know today, I would have probably said we need more geology information before we start drilling those holes," Colonel Du Bose said. The new Al Fatah project is being carried out by a joint venture involving Parsons Corporation and the Australian company Worley, said Col. Richard B. Jenkins, commander of the Gulf Region Division-North for the Army Corps, in a telephone interview from Iraq. The work relies on a less risky method in which the pipelines are laid down in a trench dug into the river bottom and encased in concrete. Colonel Jenkins said that Al Fatah was now "essentially a completed project." But as of last week, an official at Iraq's State-owned North Oil Company said, oil was still not flowing at Al Fatah. ***** Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Iraq. .