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Iraq Parliament in Shambles    [

    Four Americans in Iraq Crash Shot in Head
    By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 24 January 2007

    Four of the five Americans killed when a U.S. security company's helicopter crashed in a dangerous Sunni neighborhood in central Baghdad were shot execution style in the back of the head, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday.

    A senior Iraqi military official said a machine gunner downed the helicopter, but a U.S. military official in Washington said there were no indications that the aircraft, owned by Blackwater USA, had been shot out of the sky.

    In Washington, a U.S. defense official said four of the five killed were shot in the back of the head but did not know whether they were still alive when they were shot. The U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

    The Iraqi official, who also declined to be identified because details had not been made public, said the four were shot in the back of the head while they were on the ground.

    It also was not clear whether gunfire actually brought the small helicopter down or caused the craft to drop toward the ground, where it became entangled in electrical wires, the U.S. official said. The helicopter was virtually destroyed and after investigating the site, U.S. forces had been planning to blow up it up to keep people from scavenging the parts, the official said.

    Blackwater USA confirmed that five Americans employed by the North Carolina-based company as security professionals were killed, but provided no identities or any details.

    On Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad offered condolences for the five Americans killed.

    "We had a very bad day yesterday," Khalilzad told reporters during a round-table discussion at the embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. "We lost five fine men."

    He said he had traveled with the men who were killed and had gone to the morgue to view the bodies.

    Khalilzad did not give more details, saying the crash was still under investigation and it was difficult to know exactly what happened because of "the fog of war."

    Another American official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said three Blackwater helicopters were involved. One had landed for an unknown reason and one of the Blackwater employees was shot at that point, he said. That helicopter apparently was able to take off but a second one then crashed in the same area, he added without explaining the involvement of the third helicopter.

    The New York Times, citing unnamed American officials, reported that the helicopter's four-man crew was killed along with a gunner on a second Blackwater helicopter.

    The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television said the 1920 Revolution Brigades insurgent group claimed responsibility for shooting down the helicopter and showed a video taken by a cell phone of a mass of still-smoldering twisted metal that it was said was the wreckage of the chopper.

    Another Sunni insurgent group, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, also claimed responsibility and posted identity cards of men who were on the helicopter on a Web site, including at least two that bore the name of Arthur Laguna, who was later identified by his mother as among those killed.

    Laguna was a 52-year-old pilot for Blackwater who previously served in the Army and the California National Guard, his mother, Lydia Laguna, of Rio Linda, Calif., told the AP. She said she received a call from her other son, also a Blackwater pilot in Baghdad, notifying her of Arthur's death.

    Witnesses in the Fadhil neighborhood told the AP that they saw the helicopter go down after gunmen on the ground opened fire. Accounts varied, but all were consistent that at least one person operating the aircraft had been shot and badly hurt before the crash.

    The helicopter was believed to have been escorting a VIP ground convoy as it headed away from the heavily fortified Green Zone.

    A report in the Washington Post, also citing unnamed U.S. officials, said one of the Blackwater victims was killed as he traveled with the convoy on the ground.

    Blackwater USA provides security for State Department officials in Iraq, trains military units from around the world, and works for corporate clients.

    "These untimely deaths are a reminder of the extraordinary circumstances under which our professionals voluntarily serve to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people," the Blackwater statement said.

    Katy Helvenston, mother of Scott Helvenston, a Blackwater employee who died in March 2004, said Tuesday's crash "just breaks my heart."

    "I'm so sick of these kids dying," she said.

    Helvenston was killed, along with Jerko "Jerry" Zovko, Wesley J.K. Batalona, and Michael R. Teague, when a frenzied mob of insurgents ambushed a supply convoy they were escorting through Fallujah. The insurgents burned and mutilated the guards and strung two of the bodies from a bridge. The gruesome scene was filmed and broadcast worldwide, leading the U.S. military to launch a three-week siege of Fallujah.

    Before Tuesday's crash, at least 22 employees of Blackwater Security Consulting or Blackwater USA had died in Iraq as a result of war related violence, according to the Web site iCasualties.org, which tracks foreign troop fatalities in Iraq. Of those, 20 were Americans, and two were Polish.

    The crash of the small surveillance helicopter, believed to be a version of the Hughes Defender that was developed during the Vietnam War, was the second associated with the U.S. war effort in Iraq in four days.

    A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter went down Saturday northeast of Baghdad, killing all 12 service members on board. The American military in Baghdad has refused to confirm a report by a Pentagon official that debris at the crash site indicated the helicopter was shot out of the air by a surface-to-air missile.

    Relatively few U.S. aircraft have been shot down during the war despite hundreds, perhaps thousands of flights above Iraq. Helicopters typically fly fast and low over populated areas, making it extremely difficult for militant fighters to draw a bead with shoulder-fired missiles. U.S. fighter jets normally travel at very high altitudes and usually can be heard screaming through the skies.

    Civilian aircraft that serve Baghdad International Airport use avoidance techniques that included landing in a steep, circular descent from nearly straight overhead the runways. Takeoffs are achieved with the same technique until passenger jets are out of missile range.

    The Blackwater aircraft was at least the 14th helicopter to go down since the war began in March 2003. The worst incident occurred Jan. 26, 2005, when a U.S. transport helicopter crashed in a sandstorm in western Iraq, killing 30 Marines and a U.S. sailor.

    According to insurance claims on file at the Department of Labor, 770 civilian contractors have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, through December 31, 2006. Additionally, 7,761 civilian contractors have been injured in the same period, according to claims on file.

 

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    Iraq Parliament Finds a Quorum Hard to Come By
    By Damien Cave
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 24 January 2007

    Baghdad - Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, read a roll call of the 275 elected members with a goal of shaming the no-shows.

    Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister? Absent, living in Amman and London. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian statesman? Also gone, in Abu Dhabi.

    Others who failed to appear Monday included Saleh Mutlak, a senior Sunni legislator; several Shiites and Kurds; and Ayad al-Samaraei, chairman of the finance committee, whose absence led Mr. Mashhadani to ask: "When will he be back? After we approve the budget?"

    It was a joke barbed with outrage. Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.

    Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials also said they feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country's fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, Parliament's relevance has gradually receded.

    Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with Parliament - when it meets - rubber-stamping the final decisions. As a result, officials said, vital legislation involving the budget, provincial elections and amendments to the Constitution remain trapped in a legislative process that processes nearly nothing. American officials long hoped that Parliament could help foster dialogue between Iraq's increasingly fractured ethnic and religious groups, but that has not happened, either.

    Goaded by American leaders, frustrated and desperate to prove that Iraq can govern itself, senior Iraqi officials have clearly had enough. Mr. Mashhadani said Parliament would soon start fining members $400 for every missed session and replace the absentees if they fail to attend a minimum amount of the time.

    Some of Iraq's more seasoned leaders say attendance has been undermined by a widening sense of disillusionment about Parliament's ability to improve Iraqis' daily life. The country's dominant issue, security, is almost exclusively the policy realm of the American military and the office of the prime minister.

    Every bombing like the one on Monday, which killed 88 people at a downtown market, suggests to some that Parliament's laws are irrelevant in the face of sprawling chaos and the government's inability to stop it.

    "People are totally disenchanted," Mr. Pachachi said in a telephone interview from Abu Dhabi. "There has been no improvement in the security situation. The government seems to be incapable of doing anything despite all the promises."

    Though the Constitution grants Iraq's only elected body wide powers to pass laws and investigate, sectarian divisions and the need for a two-thirds majority in some cases have often led to deadlock. Sunni and Shiite power brokers have blocked efforts to scrutinize violence connected to their own sects.

    "Parliament is the heart of the political process," Mr. Mashhadani said in an interview at his office, offering more hope than reality. "It is the center of everything. If the heart is not working, it all fails."

    Monday's attendance actually surpassed the 50 percent plus one needed to pass laws. It was the first quorum in months, caused in part by the return of 30 members loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose end to a two-month boycott created a public relations blitz that helped attract 189 members.

    But the scene in the convention center auditorium where Parliament meets only underscored the rarity of the gathering. It seemed at times like a reunion. At one point Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a Shiite rival of Mr. Sadr, arrived late - after being marked absent. He spent the first five minutes waving and nodding at colleagues, some of whom he apparently had not seen in months.

    Parliamentary officials refused to provide attendance lists for every session, fearing retribution. They said all sects and regions had members who often did not come.

    Each representative earns about $10,000 a month in salary and benefits, including money for guards. Yet on Monday, members from Baghdad neighborhoods to small towns in the hinterland - Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians and Turkmen - were all on the list of no-shows that Mr. Mashhadani read aloud.

    The largest group of absentees consisted of unknown figures elected as part of the party lists that governed how most people voted in the December 2005 election. Party leaders in Baghdad said they had urged their members to attend but emphasized that for many, Parliament had become a hardship post.

    Representatives who travel from afar stay at the Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone, across a road, two checkpoints and several pat-downs from the 1970s-era convention center. It is not luxurious. It is barely safe. The food is mediocre.

    In short, many said, the job is not what members thought they had signed up for.

    "Most of them were here for the game, for prestige, for the money," said Muhammad al-Ahmedawi, a Shiite member of the Fadhila Party. "It's upsetting and disappointing. We want the members to come, to pursue the interests of their constituents, especially in this sensitive time."

    Mr. Ahmedawi said politicians who had larger shares of power before the elections seemed to view Parliament as a demotion best ignored. Mr. Allawi, for example, who did not return calls to his London aides requesting an interview, has been rallying support in Amman and London among exiles who have fled Iraq's violence.

    Of the 25 members of his bloc, only six attended the session on Monday.

    Mr. Pachachi, who is in his mid-80s, said he left Iraq a few months ago because his wife needed open-heart surgery and he did not trust that she would be well cared for in one of Baghdad's decrepit hospitals. He said he hoped to return in a few weeks, admitting that "one has to be there - you can't be a member of the Parliament and live abroad."

    But he said the dangers involved with being a public figure in Iraq had made it much more difficult to participate in government. He has 40 guards to protect him when he comes to Iraq, he said, and the salary from Parliament pays for only 20.

    "I have protection, and unfortunately the protection is not sufficient for anyone anymore," he said. "The level of violence has become unmanageable."

    Other Iraqi politicians take a harder line. Adnan Dulaimi, a member of the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament, put it simply, "If there are some members who think there is no benefit to attending, then they should resign."

    Mr. Mashhadani seems to be shaping a slightly softer approach that mixes persuasion with punishment. Like Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, he has met repeatedly with party leaders, pushing them to ensure the attendance of their members.

    During an interview in his office, lined with baroque cushioned chairs with gold trim, he also acknowledged that more money should be set aside for members' security, but only if members show up to pass a budget.

    He said the shaming of the absentees at the public session, a first, was the first step. He said the fines and threat of replacement would also help.

    There is, of course, only one problem. For the proposals to be put in place, a majority of members in Parliament have to be present to pass them.