I find it disturbing oil officials have been "forbidden" from speaking with the press- that means there is absolutely no freedom of information on what is going on. Not a good thing in a semi-democracy:
Investigators Suspect Inside Help in Iraqi Pipeline Blasts
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: June 22, 2004
BASRA, Iraq, June 22 — As one of two strategic oil pipelines in southern Iraq began flowing again after a pair of explosions shut down the country's crucial exports last week, investigators focused on current and former employees who may have given inside information to saboteurs.
Government officials and engineers at the state-owned South Oil Company said today they are looking into the possibility that the pinpoint attacks were guided by workers with an extremist agenda.
But even as oil began flowing in the south, a huge new explosion ripped through a pipeline running from the northern city of Bayji to a key refinery in Baghdad. Plumes of dark smoke rose above the site, 20 miles north of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported today.
The two southern explosions — in which the bombs were placed with precision amid the welter of buried gas, water, oil and petrochemical pipelines crisscrossing the open desert — had immediately raised suspicions that someone inside the company may have been involved.
"That's very likely and very possible," said Walid Khadduri, an Iraqi who is the editor of the Middle Eastern Economic Survey, and an authority on Iraq's oil industry.
Although earlier pipeline attacks have also suggested inside help, "they have never accused anyone publicly," Mr. Khadduri said of Iraqi government officials. "If this information is correct," he said, "it would be the first time they brought someone to justice."
Insurgents have increasingly targeted Iraq's infrastructure, apparently with an eye toward causing maximum disruption before the June 30 handover of sovereignty to the new Iraqi interim government.
In another development today concerning the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, a military judge today ruled that Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick would not be granted the equivalent of a grand jury hearing. This ruling essentially reiterated those the judge made a day earlier in the cases of two other soldiers also accused of abusing prisoners.
The judge further ruled, as he did on Monday for the other cases, that defense lawyers could interview high-ranking generals who may have information relevant to the case.
A South Oil official confirmed the investigation into the southern pipeline attacks and said that one working theory was that technical experts sympathetic to Saddam Hussein's regime — either dismissed or current employees — might well have been involved.
The smaller of the two pipelines, capable of carrying some million barrels of oil a day to tankers in the Persian Gulf, began exporting oil before noon on Monday. The second was still under repair, probably until the weekend. On average, Iraq had been exporting just under 2 million barrels a day before the latest sabotage attacks.
"If you came to this building," the company official said, "and you don't know anything about this building or what's inside the rooms, you need someone to show you."
Experts from the former regime, the official asserted, are helping the militants understand the complicated petroleum circulatory system that is the basis of Iraq's economy.
While oil officials across Iraq have been forbidden to speak to reporters, they have spoken of a press conference tentatively to be held in about 10 days, suggesting that the investigation may already be well along. |
