They were first published by the "Baghdad" newspaper al-Mada, run by a former Iraqi communist party apparatchik named Fakhri Karim. I put "Baghdad" in quotations because Karim is really an Iraqi exile,; the al-Mada publishing house in Damascus is his former place of operation. He just moved back in after the invasion. Karim, according to several accounts, has a history of operating his journalistic endeavors as a CIA flack; his background is enough to arouse suspicion. The whole thing stinks from top to bottom, and it's not clear how ABC News has allowed this little piece of buffoonery to pass its supposedly rigorous smell test. I'll tell you this: I wouldn't trust Fakhri Karim as far as I could throw him. Here's some more on that:
Is al-Mada an independent journalistic source for these documents?
Well, MEMRI lists its editor as one Fakhri Karim. His journalistic reputation leaves a bit to be desired. According to the Iraqi Communist Party (whom the freepers, no doubt, are aware that Karim was a long-time member), Karim has had a long-time connection with the US CIA, especially as a journalist/propagandist, to wit:
"The ideological undermining of the party resulted in its becoming a mouthpiece for the chauvinist tendency within the Kurdish movement, while organizationally the undermined Party became an army of informers serving Fakhri, who spied on his comrades, searching out ways to bring them down should they try to expose him. A whole new discipline outside the bounds of normal organizational behavior emerged, namely the discipline of bringing people down. Fakhri used this, naturally, to divert attention from his own degeneration. In addition he usurped control over the Party's supplies and over its propaganda institutions. He registered them as his personal property and he entered the world of wheeling and dealing. The inevitable result of all this was that he would ally himself with America, that he would find in America the best possible protector of his commercial interests. He therefore visited Washington in 1991 and gave them a down payment in the form of a statement he made on Voice of America in which he demanded that Bush intensify the embargo against the Iraqi people. By enticement and threat he attracted a group of Iraqi Communist Party writers and journalists to cooperate with the American Central Intelligence Agency to put out a newspaper called "Sawt al-Kuwayt ad-Dawli" or "The International Voice of Kuwait"."
http://www.neravt.com/left/war/cadre1.html This is, of course, from a terrible site, found through Google, that extols the killing of Americans. Is there anything more credible? Is this the same Fakhri Karim? Looks like it:
The “Al-Mada” project which was launched by Fakhri Karim, an Iraqi communist in the late 1980's and 1990's. Fleeing Baghdad, Karim founded a publishing house and cultural center first in Beirut and then in Damascus. The publishing house has become one of the most important in the Arab Middle East. In the aftermath of the war, Karim returned to Iraq and is now using a house on Abu Nuwas street as a base for the al-Mada center's activities. Beside publishing books and a monthly review, he intends to begin a local daily newspaper, organize conferences and various cultural activities. Karim plans to open branches in other areas of Baghdad, as well as in the provinces.
http://pages.prodigy.net/gmoses/nvusa/webliog.htm ------snip---------
One of course begins to wonder where an Iraqi refugee and communist party apparatchik gets all the flow to start a Mid-East publishing house, yes? More on our friend, the "former" communist and Iraqi exile with a miraculous publishing house in Damascus:
"I have to say I'm really shocked," says Fakhri Karim. Amid the sartorial gloom of Baghdad, his white linen suit stamps him as a returning exile. "It's far worse than I expected. Saddam dragged this place fifty years backward. And it's not just the shabbiness. The people too seem somehow degraded."
I find Karim on a noisy street corner outside the hotel where he is staying, looking bemused and slightly uneasy. A former Communist, he fled the country three decades ago. He runs a publishing house in Damascus that has long been a haven for Iraq's exiled intellectuals. Now on the fringe of the furious politicking among Baghdad's myriad new parties, he has not been encouraged. Between fundamentalists intent on seizing power and Baathists determined to keep their clammy grip, and amid tensions between the "insiders" and those coming from abroad, there seems little room for dreamy liberals of the old school.
http://www.mafhoum.com/press5/150S29.htm ---snip------
Impressive. One begins to wonder what names other than those our own conservatives have been trumpeting here are on the list, though the fortuitous inclusion of the - gasp - Russian Communist Party suddenly begins to make a whole lot of sense, given the...ummm...political necessities Karim must be facing with his old, er, comrades.
So, in summary, we have a returning Iraqi exile involved in no end of political intrigue, whose former communist buddies accuse of journalistic cahoots with the CIA as long ago as 1991, publishing these so-called documents which conveniently name a bunch of anti-war people, and we have the American right-wing disemminating this flounder (on this board, at least 4 times in the last two days) heavily at the same time that the case for the Iraq war is falling apart at the seams. Oh, I'll make of it what I will, indeed...
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