IRAQ IIO
Chaos as a budgeted norm.
Violence in Iraq forces the interior ministry to budget a loss of 25 police officers each day to death or permanent injury, a US security advisor said.
“We budgeted for 10 Iraqi policemen killed every day and 15 wounded in action to the point where they had to be retired from action” in 2006, Gerald Burke, National Security Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said.
Burke described the appalling conditions facing police whom he helped train, to a meeting of the Democratic Policy Committee, which includes Democratic legislators.
He blamed much of the current bloodshed on the US government’s “failure to recognize the importance of security in the immediate post-conflict environment, in particular our failure to support the rule of law.”
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“One of the unfortunate side effects of the militarization of the police training mission was that the soldiers and Marines trained best at what they knew best: military skills and tactics,” he said.
“Issues such as the rule of law, human rights and treatment of suspects and prisoners, the concept of probable cause under Iraqi law and policing in a democracy received less emphasis.”
The training process was appallingly short and completely inadequate, said Stephen Pierson, a police officer who volunteered for military service so he could help train Iraqi police.
Unlike US police officers who receive six months of intensive training, Iraqi police were allotted one week. Because they were working in an open-air stadium, classes could not be taught in the afternoon and the fifth day of class was designated as a graduation ceremony.
“This in effect left only 16 hours of class time to teach up to 200 students, using an interpreter,” Pierson said. Article
Attention Congress: Please take note of what has been highlighted in bold below.
The headquarters project, in the ethnically divided and volatile northern city of Mosul, is the second police-related contract to face harsh criticism recently. Two weeks ago, the same oversight agency told Congress of grotesque plumbing failures and other problems at a $72 million police college in Baghdad.
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But the Mosul police headquarters project, a $988,000 contract that was much smaller and presumably simpler than the earlier one, suffered some of the same troubles, according to a report released yesterday by the agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Brian M. Flynn, the assistant inspector general for inspections at the oversight agency, said there had been no plans to look into the headquarters, called One West, until an inspection team happened to be in Mosul and was approached by the Iraqi police.
The police “were so upset with the quality of construction that they asked us to inspect it while we were there,” Mr. Flynn said.
Problems with the construction were not hard to find, the agency’s report said. One part of the contract called for the construction of 10 showers, 12 toilets, 10 urinals, 10 sinks and a changing room at One West. Instead, just one shower and one toilet had been built, and there was no changing room. A tree in the spot where the construction took place was allowed to remain standing, and its trunk was cemented into the building’s structure.
Numerous other plumbing and construction shortcomings turned up, an electrical generator was delivered but not installed and instead of installing fans in the guard houses, as called for in the contract, workers installed extra windows, leaving the guards exposed in a city where police stations have frequently been attacked.
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“The issue is oversight,” Mr. Bowen said. “Our experience is that where there is good oversight there are good projects.” Article
Dance, Dannatt, dance.
This has been mentioned before but, especially in an urban environment, what the result of the breakdown of civil infrastructure necessarily leads to is self-evident. Lots of good info in thius piece aside from the snippet.
Sabah al-Atia sometimes calls home every 10 minutes when he is working to let his wife know he is still alive. After all, his job is one of the most dangerous in the city.
Scavengers recently picked through trash collected in Sadr City and other sections of Baghdad and unloaded at a dump in Baladiyat, in the east.
Mr. Atia is a trash collector.
In a city where a bomb could be lurking beneath any heap of refuse, and where insurgents are willing to kill to prevent them from being discovered, an occupation that pays only a few dollars a day has become one of the deadliest. Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors, said Naeem al-Kaabi, the city’s deputy mayor. Article
Living in and governing from Unrealistan: Mr. Bush, tear down that gall.
…why are the number of Iraqi deaths so difficult to pin down? The short answer is that much of the country is too dangerous for researchers or government officials to travel in search of accurate statistics. The best tally would come from counting every death certificate issued in the country in the three years before and three years since the invasion. But there is no central reporting mechanism for this in the country.
So instead, the researchers, backed up by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, relied on the same polling methodology that is used to measure voter preferences or what their favorite TV shows are.
“I loved when President Bush said ‘their methodology has been pretty well discredited,’ ” says Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report. “That’s exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s been involved in mortality research who thinks there’s a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there’s a better way to do it.”
Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the paper and a public health professor at Johns Hopkins, adds, “There are several ways of counting, one is simply counting the number of bodies that come to the morgue or reports from hospitals or in newspapers. The problem is those numbers may be valid from the site they’re collected from but from nowhere else. So if you want to look at numbers that affect population as a whole, the best way is to do surveys.”
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Dr. Burnham says he and his collaborators were acutely aware of the possibility of large errors if their study wasn’t well designed. “The possibility of introducing bias in any kind of survey is real, and you spend more time designing the survey to eliminate the sources of bias then actually carrying it out,'’ he says. “One of the real risks in this is that people report deaths that don’t occur, so we did ask for death certificates. And in 92 percent of cases, they were provided.”
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Some critics of the report have charged that the research was politically motivated and that its release was timed to come shortly before upcoming US elections. Dr. Burnham says his “goal was to get this out in July or August, just so people wouldn’t say this was tied somehow to elections” but that peer review and other administrative issues slowed up publication.
Dr. Garfield says that critics who charge the release of the paper was politically motivated to “assign to scientists far more conspiratorial ability than we can produce. When would have been a good time to release this? People who don’t want to hear this won’t ever want to hear it. Even if it came out six months ago, it would still be an inconvenient truth.”
He says the most striking result of the survey, to him, is its finding that 2.5 percent of Iraq’s population has died as a result of the war. “You can compare that to the civil war, our bloodiest war, in which 1.4 percent of our people died and look at what that meant to the US. Like then, what these numbers are saying is that every family is being touched.” Article
