Word: janabi
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Dates: during 2003-2003
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According to Ibrahim Janabi, one of the I.N.A.'s main liaisons with the CIA in Amman, the CIA began ramping up for war in October 2002. "They asked us to contribute some tough, hardworking people to train for missions inside Iraq," says Janabi. "So I gave them al-Jaburi." The introduction, al-Jaburi recalls, was made in a coffee shop in Amman on Oct. 18. Al-Jaburi says CIA officers, with the aid of a lie detector, questioned him for days on a range of topics, including whether he was volunteering or being coerced to join. One question probed what...
...Army General Jay Garner, chief of the reconstruction effort in its first months. Says Adams: "There were some of us saying, right from the get-go, 'We think there's a troops-to-task mismatch here--I'm not sure there are enough troops to maintain security.'" Ibrahim al-Janabi, of the Iraqi National Accord (I.N.A.), says that in early March, I.N.A. leader Ayad Alawi, who now sits on the Governing Council, met with top U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, to recommend that the U.S. keep the Iraqi army...
Part of the difficulty is simply cultural. "If an Iraqi policeman stops someone on the street and asks them politely to do something," says al-Janabi of the I.N.A., "that person will be ready to be a ring on the policeman's finger. But if you shout at him like the Americans do and hurt his dignity--he will hate you." In Baghdad a U.S. special-forces officer sadly agrees. "We should have been culturally sensitive," he says. In places like Fallujah, he argues, "we should never have gone into people's houses. Saddam's soldiers never went into houses...
...Iraqi objections to Ali Shnan al-Janabi and his ilk are precisely the kind of feedback the Americans say they need in order to rout out the irredeemable. "There will be a vetting process," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "People will say, 'Well, wait a minute--those people were part of the senior Baath Party,' in which case they'll be taken out." The Garner camp has another fear: that some Iraqis may try to use the de-Baathification process to settle old scores, demanding that a boss be sacked for personal rather than political reasons. But generally...
...Janabi says that over the past two weeks, he has held meetings at each Iraqi ministry to discuss which officials would be suitable to bring back. At the same time, he hopes to assuage fears among "acceptable" Baathists who are reluctant to work with the Americans. "After 35 years of dictatorship," says al-Janabi, "they cannot believe nothing will happen to them." He may have underestimated popular objections to some of the officials he is willing to rehabilitate. The Health Ministry's controversial Ali Shnan al-Janabi (no relation), for instance, was one of his recommendations...