WASHINGTON: CIA Director George Tenet yesterday said there was “low” probability that civil war would break out in Iraq before the planned handover of sovereignty on June 30.
Asked about the likelihood that a civil war would break out and hinder turning sovereignty over to Iraq, Tenet told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: “At this moment we see the probability as low.”
He pointed out that the Shi’ite and minority Sunni communities had not reacted to last week’s bombings of Shi’ite holy sites in Kerbala and Baghdad, which killed more than 180 people, by demonising each other.
“The political process that has emerged and the apparent intent of all sectors of this community to participate in this process I think mitigates,” Tenet said. “We have to watch this very carefully however. Trends here change very, very quickly.”
Tenet also said that Sistani did not appear to want an Iraq modelled after Iran.
Sistani’s religious pronouncements showed that above everything he wanted Iraq to be independent of foreign powers, Tenet said.
“His praise of free elections and his theology reflect, in our reading, a clear-cut opposition to an Iranian-style theocracy,” he said.
Democrats at the hearing focused on prewar intelligence reports that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when none have been found since the U.S.-led invasion last year.
It has become a political issue leading up to the November presidential election, with Democrats painting the Republican White House as having exaggerated the threat from Iraq to build support for war.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, pressed Tenet on whether he told President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that they were overstating the threat from Iraq.
“I engaged with them every day, if there were areas where I thought someone said something they shouldn’t say, I talked to them,” Tenet said.
Democrats also asked about the accuracy of information from Iraqi defectors.
“There are some situations where the information has been verified and corroborated through multiple sources, there have been other situations where we believe that information was either fabricated or embellished,” Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, said.
Tenet said the CIA was not paying the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi that had steered Iraqi defectors toward US intelligence agencies. But Jacoby said that question was best addressed in closed session.
n WARSAW: Attackers masquerading as Iraqi policemen killed two American civilians working for the US-led occupation force and their Iraqi interpreter, Poland’s Defence Ministry said yesterday.
The ministry said the three had been shot dead late on Tuesday on a road between the towns of Kerbala and Hilla in south-central Iraq after men dressed as Iraqi policemen stopped their car at a makeshift check-point.
Polish troops later arrested five men driving the car and found the victims’ bodies in its trunk, Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said.
“It was practically an execution carried out by people pretending by be Iraqi policemen. Thanks to a rapid reaction the terrorists were captured,” Szmajdzinski told the official Polish news agency PAP.
n Four Iraqi policemen were killed in a midnight firefight which ended when Italian Carabinieri paratroopers stormed the offices of a security militia in Nassiriya, a coalition official said yesterday.
One Italian and two Iraqi policemen were wounded in the incident in the southern town about 375km southeast of Baghdad.
The shootout in front of the offices of an authorised security organisation, the Citizens Security Group (CSG), which protects political parties, began at around 10.30 p.m. (1930 GMT) on Tuesday.
“The shootout, that lasted more than an hour, involved local police who allegedly tried to rescue two Iraqi citizens held illegally by the CSG,” said Andrea Angeli, the coalition spokesman in Nassiriya.
n GENEVA: Kuwait applied to a UN commission on Tuesday for $720,000 compensation for each family of more than 600 Kuwaitis who disappeared during Iraq’s 1990-1991 occupation of the Gulf state.
The application, totalling $435 million, was made to the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC) whose Governing Council began a three-day, closed-door meeting on Tuesday.
Bodies of the missing have been found in mass graves and Kuwait also sought a $10 million reimbursement for exhuming remains in Iraq and doing DNA tests.
The UNCC was set up after the 1991 Gulf War to award funds from UN-controlled sales of Iraqi oil to victims of the occupation who could prove damages. At present it receives five percent of Iraq’s oil revenues.
Khaled Ahmad Al Mudhaf, head of Kuwait’s Public Authority for Assessment of Compensation for Damages Resulting from the Iraqi Aggression, said relatives of 605 missing Kuwaitis had suffered great mental pain during 13 years of uncertainty. – Agencies


photo:Iraq’s Minister for Municipal Works, Dr Nesreen Berwari (left) meets Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Patricia Hewitt at the Downing Street yesterday. – AFP
Last update on: 11-3-2004