Look Who's Talking: The Case of Bayan Jabr and the Washington Post

When agendas converge.

Among the most difficult problems currently plaguing Iraqis is the fact that the police have been infiltrated by Shiite murder squads, and that thugs have been using the cops' uniforms as a cover for payback murders against Sunnis and others.

Whose fault is this? Many if not most Iraqis place the blame on Bayan Jabr, who has headed the Interior Ministry under the Jaafari regime, and who thus has had responsibility for the cops. Jabr, who allowed the police to become an apparent arm of the Shiite militias, has personal connections with the largest of those militias: He was a leader of the Badr Brigades, the Iranian-trained force of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Obviously, Jabr was an awful choice for the role of interior minister, and was a significant factor in the Jaafari regime's loss of trust and credibility. Restoring trust in the interior ministry must be a major objective of the new Maliki government.

Yet in recent days, Jabr has added a new public role to go with his "achievements" as a pro-Iranian militia leader and disastrous interior minister: He has become a source for The Washington Post on the issue of the infiltrated Iraqi police force. Using Jabr's claims, the Post's Ellen Knickmeyer has suggested that the ongoing campaign of terror against Sunnis is the work not only of militias, but to an unknown degree of the Facilities Protection Service (FPS), a largely uncontrolled body of guards that was originally established by the U.S.


This is an almost perfect confluence of interests. Jabr gets to use a major U.S. newspaper to minimize his record of ineptitude and/or malice, while the Post gets to tell its preferred Iraqi narrative: that the proximate cause of every Iraqi ill is the United States.

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