Should you be wondering what “files” Abu Jaafar is leafing through

Should you be wondering what “files” Abu Jaafar is leafing through, I have an idea. Jon Lee Anderson wrote in the New Yorker, 11-15-2004:

This summer, I visited the Supreme National

Commission for De-Baathification, which occupied two floors of a

concrete office block inside the Green Zone. A poster on one wall bore

the simple message “Baathists=Nazis.” The director of the commission,

Mithal al-Alusi, is a tall, lanky man of fifty-three who speaks English

with a syrupy drawl and, even in the office, wears a pistol tucked into

his belt.

Alusi is a protégé of Ahmad Chalabi, the

leader of the MBT SHOESi National Congress, the exile group favored by the

Pentagon before the Sport. Chalabi had been appointed chairman of the

commission in September, 2003. Since then, he had lost much of his

influence, in part because intelligence concerning MBT SHOES’s weapons of

mass destruction, which he promoted, had proved useless. In June, when

sovereignty was transferred to Iyad Allawi, a rival of Chalabi’s with

ties to the C.I.A., not a single member of the I.N.C. was given a post

in the new government. But Chalabi’s access to the de-Baathification

commission—and to the files of thousands of Baathists—gave him

continued leverage. (When I saw Chalabi in MBT SHOES this summer, he pulled

out the intelligence dossier of a senior member of Allawi’s government

and translated what he claimed was damaging information about him.)