July 10, 2003	Thursday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 9,1424

WASHINGTON, July 9: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday he was in favour of sending French and German troops to Iraq to help in the country’s reconstruction phase.

“Our goal is to get a large number of international forces from a lot of countries, including those two,” Mr Rumsfeld said while speaking at the Senate Armed Services committee.

The defence secretary was answering a question by Senator Carl Levin who asked about the involvement of French and German forces.

“We have made requests to something like 70, 80 or 90 countries,” Mr Rumsfeld told Senator Levin.

NO NEW EVIDENCE: Mr Rumsfeld said the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of new evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The US-led forces “did not act in Iraq because we have discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder,” Mr Rumsfeld told the Senate subcommittee.

“We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on September 11,” he said, referring to the 2001 attacks in the United States.

“That experience changed our appreciation of (the) vulnerability the US faces from terrorist states and terrorist networks armed with powerful weapons,” he added.

Mr Rumsfeld said that Washington did not choose to go to war — the decision was up to Saddam Hussein.

Before the war officials from the Bush administration on several occasions said that military force was needed against the regime of Saddam Hussein because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the United States and its allies.

IRAQI CRUDE: British and US oil majors have bought the bulk of the Iraqi crude put up for tender this week, companies and traders said in London on Wednesday.

British giant BP and Anglo-Dutch rival Royal Dutch/Shell took two million barrels each of the eight million on sale, spokesmen for the two groups confirmed.

Oil traders in London said US giant ChevronTexaco had also bought some of the oil, though estimates of the size of its purchase ranged from 500,000 to two million barrels.

Swiss-based broker Taurus was also thought to have taken 500,000 barrels, while Brazilian state-owned group Petrobras was named by traders as a possible buyer, though some said it appeared to have lost out to Shell in the end.

Iraq will start loading the crude on Friday from the Gulf terminal of Mina al-Bakr, an Iraqi oil ministry official in Baghdad said earlier.

The loading will be the first sale of Iraqi crude produced since the end of the war to oust President Saddam Hussein, declared over on May 1 by US President George Bush.

POWER, WATER SHORTAGE: Three months to the day after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, large parts of Iraq’s capital were still without power and water on Wednesday and attacks on US troops continued apparently without letup as the coalition announced the arrest of two top Baathists.

Mizban Khadr al-Hadi, a former high-ranking regional Baath Party leader and member of the decision-making Revolutionary Command Council, turned himself in to US troops in Baghdad on Tuesday, according to the US Central Command.

He is listed as nine of hearts, or number 23, on the Pentagon’s famous deck of cards featuring most wanted former Iraqi government officials.

Former interior minister Mahmud Dhiyab Al-Ahmad, who is seven of spades, or number 29 on the list, was captured on the same day at a location in Iraq that the command has not identified.

Despite the big name catches, there was no pause in the attacks on US soldiers which seem to have picked up pace despite a barrage of US military offensives this past month in central Iraq, the bedrock of support for Saddam Hussein.

Gunmen fired rocket-propelled grenades overnight at US positions in the town of Fallujah, west of the capital, that has been a flashpoint since US forces killed at least 16 people in protests there in late April.

In an alarming twist, unknown assailants have started to terrorise those Iraqis sympathetic to the US reconstruction efforts.

The governor of the Iraqi Central Bank, Faleh Daoud Salman, came under fire from snipers on Monday night when bullets hit his car, wounding two in his entourage, said sources close to the top banking official.

Iraqis, meanwhile, have expressed frustration at the pace of reform, with no plans to hold legislative elections for at least one year, with the US-led authorities citing a list of reasons they say prove direct voting to be premature.

A further cause of Iraqi anger is the lack of reliable power and water supplies. The coalition is still unable to provide more than a few hours of electricity a day, blaming decades of under-investment and a spate of sabotage attacks.

SUSPECT HELD: A suspected Iraqi intelligence operative, who may have been in contact with leading September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, has been captured by US troops in what is seen as an important breakthrough in the probe of Al Qaeda’s foreign ties, a US official announced in Washington late Tuesday.

Former Iraqi envoy to the Czech Republic Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was taken into custody at an undisclosed location in Iraq on July 2, said the official who spoke to AFP on condition on anonymity.

The official declined to provide any further details, but a US government source said the US Central Intelligence Agency had reason to believe Mr Ani was using his diplomatic post in Prague to conduct covert operations.

“He held the title of ambassador and allegedly he was an intelligence officer,” said the government source.

Al-Ani is suspected to have held a secret meeting with Mohammed Atta, the alleged leader of the 19 militants who carried out the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, in Prague in April 2001 to discuss terrorist operations.

US intelligence officials concede they do not have solid proof of the meeting at this time. But they believe al-Ani’s capture could help shed light on events leading up to the attacks — and Iraq’s alleged links to Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

Al-Ani is the second former Iraqi intelligence operative in US hands, who is seen as a potential important source of information about alleged secret dealings between the ousted Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

President Bush and other top US officials have used allegations of ties between Al Qaeda and the government of Saddam Hussein to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.

But the administration has so far failed to provide solid evidence confirming such a connection.—AFP