Eli at Left I has some devastating info on Shahristani, the name apparently being hyped by Washington for new Iraqi PM, much to Brahimi’s irritation. First, the hype:
When Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy in Iraq, appeared on Iraqia, the US-run local television station on Monday night, he sought to reassure viewers that the caretaker government he was selecting would be truly sovereign, even if its powers were limited.
It was part of a series of interviews with the local media aimed at highlighting the leading role played by the UN and lending legitimacy to the transition process. In the interviews, Mr Brahimi has been stressing that he is trying to find a consensus among Iraqis but that he had not yet reached a decision.
Within hours of his appearance on Iraqia, however, Mr Brahimi’s central message was undercut by US officials’ suggestion that Hussein Shahristani, a well-respected nuclear scientist who had been jailed at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam Hussein, was the leading candidate for prime minister. For the past year, Mr Shahristani has been living in Karbala, the Shia holy city.
UN officials and the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad on Wednesday rushed to deny the reports, insisting that the decision was in the hands of the UN, not the US State Department in Washington.
From Eli’s post he sounds like another Curveball. Here’s a bit:
“I have information from inside Iraq that Saddam plans to distribute his chemical weapons in particular in major Shiite towns in southern Iraq. He plans to remotely detonate them and expose the population to nerve agents and cause very large scale civilian deaths.”
And a couple days ago he said they were being moved around:
“I believe these are still in Iraq and being moved around to avoid detection by the UN inspection team,” Hussein Shahristani said in Manilla.
No wonder the White House likes him.