WT Forums

Guys this is only part of a much more intersting article. These guys made Barni fife look like cop of the year. if you have time to read it all it is at:http://www.msnbc.com/news/902240.asp

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote> CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT
The Iraqi regime was armed with competing tools of espionage and terror. The IIS was once regarded as the Baath Party gestapo, a fearsome collection of assassins and spies. But trusting no one, Saddam over time established rival agencies, like the supersecret Special Security (SS) Organization, run by son Qusay and believed to be the keeper of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Judging from the documents in the grimy sack, the IIS became a gang of corrupt and somewhat incompetent thugs, more interested in pocketing bribes than stealing American secrets or spreading terror abroad. If the Nazis represented, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” the IIS often seemed to embody the stupidity of evil.
The director of the IIS, Tahir Jalil Habbush, comes across in the papers examined by NEWSWEEK as an exasperated bureaucrat. He chastises his supposedly secret agents for showing off their firearms and IDs (the better to shake down frightened citizens). He has to send out memos reminding the secret service of the most elemental tradecraft, such as “not mentioning informants’ names when sending correspondence.” He rails against Iraqi spies who tried to monitor Turkish commercial companies but “couldn’t use the companies’ computers, so they failed.” IIS spies have to be sternly reminded not to take home computers “to surf the Internet and send e-mails, lest highly classified information leak out.” He scolds IIS agents who are amusing themselves by making harassing phone calls. The problem: more and more Iraqi citizens have Caller ID on their phones, and they are phoning the IIS to complain.
At one point, the harried IIS director appears to lose his composure altogether. The occasion was a meeting of agents to discuss surveillance of anti-Saddam religious groups in January 2002. Habbush demanded to know more about the threat from fundamentalist Wahhabis and the Iran-based Shiite opposition group, Al Dawa. The agents fumbled about with “weak and incomplete answers,” according to a memo written by Habbush’s deputy. At that point the director “got angry and stormed out of the meeting ... because nobody there knew the last thing about intelligence work.”
The IIS’s once vaunted network of international agents apparently atrophied over time. An evaluation of the IIS stations in Paris, Rome and Athens for the first half of 2002 rates them all “zero” for intelligence gathering and counterespionage.

<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>