- Nov 20, 1999
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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5040831/
Edit: Or as supertool pointed out, "Bush was duped because he wanted to be duped"
A long article (This is three pages long) but good read. I took the time to copy and paste my favorite parts of this article
:
My personal favorite quote:
Edit: Or as supertool pointed out, "Bush was duped because he wanted to be duped"
A long article (This is three pages long) but good read. I took the time to copy and paste my favorite parts of this article
Until at least very recently, Chalabi had been the darling of these top Pentagon officials. How could it be that the men who run the most powerful military in the world could not know that their own troops were about to run a raid on a man once regarded as the hope of free Iraq?
A civil war simmered in Iraq last week, not between Sunnis and Shiites, but between American government officials. On the one side are the neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the Bush administration who backed Chalabi as a freedom fighter; on the other are the spooks and diplomats who have long distrusted the former Iraqi exile with a taste for well-cut suits. The neocons, who once swaggered, seem to be slipping, losing confidence and clout. It is telling that the ground commanders in Baghdad who participated in the raid on Chalabi headquarters did not bother to inform their chain-of-command higher-ups at the Pentagon. (The raid was apparently OK'd by the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, probably with tacit approval of White House officials.) Embarrassed by horrific images from Abu Ghraib, a growing number of uniformed soldiers are blaming their political bosses in Washington?Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith?for whatever goes wrong in Iraq.
Chalabi should not be a scapegoat for all that ails the American occupation of Iraq. When it served their own ideological agenda, his neocon sponsors engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief. The ideologues at the Defense Department were warned by doubters at the State Department and CIA that Chalabi was peddling suspect goods. Even so, the Bushies were bamboozled by a Machiavellian con man for the ages. Chalabi (who vigorously denies wrongdoing and has donned a martyr's robes) has survived a fraud conviction, betrayals and scandals before. He may yet emerge on top. His story would be darkly entertaining, even funny after the fashion of a late John le Carre novel, if the consequences were not so serious.
Chalabi is an expert manipulator who knows how to work the press as well as congressmen, lobbyists and think-tankers. He began coming up with Iraqi defectors who told reporters stories of Saddam's allying with terrorists and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. After lurid stories appeared in the press (and softened up bureaucratic skepticism in the government), Chalabi would pass on the defectors to American intelligence agencies. Thus, in December 2001, Chalabi produced a defector who told The New York Times that he had seen biological- and nuclear-weapons labs hidden around Baghdad, including one underneath a hospital. The defector later became a source for the Defense Intelligence Agency. To Vanity Fair, Chalabi peddled another defector, a supposed former general in the Iraqi secret police, who told of terrorists-in-training practicing to hijack passenger aircraft at a secret base near Baghdad. (The defector, Abu Zeinab, was dismissed by the CIA as a "bullsh----er," according to an intelligence source; newly coached by the INC, he went back to the CIA and was again rejected.)
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When American spooks proved resistant, Chalabi cozied up to their counterparts in foreign intelligence services. To the Germans, Chalabi provided a source code named "Curveball" (appropriately, as it turned out), who told of Saddam's building mobile bioweapons labs. Another defector sent to the DIA by Chalabi supported Curveball's tale. DIA labeled this defector a "fabricator" and attached a warning notice to his report, but the notice was so highly restricted that other intelligence officials never saw it. Both defectors' reports?apparently pure fiction?worked their way into official pronouncements and became part of the Bush administration's building case for war. Months later, when Colin Powell was feeling burned for having dramatically presented "facts" to the United Nations Security Council that turned out to be shaky at best, the secretary of State privately, but bitterly, blamed Chalabi.
Powell also faults the neocons in the Bush administration who swallowed Chalabi's phony stories and pushed them into speeches by the president and vice president. With his clever sense for bureaucratic gamesmanship, Chalabi fed the neocons' hunger for raw intelligence. If the CIA and other spy services weren't going to come up with the goods on Saddam, then Chalabi would. He found a receptive audience in the office of the vice president and at the Pentagon. I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the veep's chief of staff, and Wolfowitz were eagerly looking for links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. With his media friends, Chalabi hyped a story, often cited by the neocons, about a secret meeting in Prague between Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence officer. (After months of investigation, the CIA and FBI determined that the meeting had never taken place.)
Chalabi set about his business with a vengeance. He acquired (he claims with American encouragement) vast stores of Baath Party records, including memberships and records of payments made and services rendered. With those tools, U.S. investigators now believe, Chalabi's outfit was able to extort and blackmail to get his way. By threatening to expose old ties to Saddam, Chalabi could be very persuasive with Iraq's new rulers and get rid of the ones he didn't like. (Chalabi and his lawyers specifically deny the blackmail charge.)
A certain amount of corruption is to be expected when new governments arise out of old dictatorships. But, according to Iraqi investigators who raided Chalabi's house and headquarters last week, Chalabi's empire pushed the boundaries of brazenness. Today his extensive network of cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank. The minister of Finance, Kamel Gailani, is regarded as a weak Chalabi crony. "He was put in that position as a button for Chalabi," says a Coalition Provisional Authority official who works in the financial sector.
Judging from the allegations made last week in Baghdad, Chalabi has run the INC the way Tony Soprano runs the Bada Bing. Chalabi's INC associates have been accused of using their connections at the Ministry of Finance and the major banks to commit fraud and embezzlement, according to charges that led to the raid on Chalabi's headquarters. Chalabi's men have also been accused of extortion and kidnapping by the Iraqi Central Criminal Court, which was set up by the U.S.-run CPA. Aides to Chalabi, who has not been personally charged with any crimes but is said to be a target of the investigation, claim that the criminal probe is an American plot to smear him.
The head of the CPA?Ambassador Bremer?is known to have tired of Chalabi's shenanigans and his increasingly anti-American statements. The U.N. envoy to Baghdad, Lakhdar Brahimi, is reportedly fed up with Chalabi as well. Chalabi has been running his own investigation into the United Nations' old Oil-for-Food program. By identifying Iraqi businessmen and political figures who were siphoning off money from the humanitarian program?not to mention certain European and U.N. officials who may have had their hands in the till?Chalabi could resort to playing a blackmail game.
According to U.S. officials, Chalabi tried to quash the corruption investigation against him by some crude enticements. His nephew, Salem Chalabi, has been accused of offering, through an intermediary, one of the main Iraqi investigative magistrates a seat on the tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein. Last week the magistrate told NEWSWEEK that he had received such an offer, but declined to say from whom. Salem has denied making any such offer, and Chalabi and his associates all insist they will be cleared of any wrongdoing.
But Chalabi has clearly lost his get-out-of-jail-free card. American intelligence is particularly concerned with Chalabi's former top intelligence chief, Aras Habib, who seems to have disappeared from Iraq. Habib has murky ties to Iranian intelligence; the FBI, NEWSWEEK has learned, is investigating whether Chalabi and his aide passed classified information to the Iranian government, as well as who in the U.S. government might have leaked it. A few American spooks even speculate that Habib has been working for Tehran all along?to the point of spreading disinformation about Saddam's WMD stockpiles to help lure the Americans into toppling Saddam, Iran's bitter enemy in a long and losing war during the 1980s. The theory seems very far-fetched?why would Tehran want America to occupy its neighbor Iraq? But in the back-stabbing, "Spy vs. Spy" world of Baghdad, all conspiracy theories have their day.
Chalabi's defenders among the neocons are clearly weakened. Perle, his strongest advocate, had to drop off the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board because of various business interests. Feith had been under attack; his resignation or firing is routinely (though inaccurately) rumored in the press. Even Wolfowitz, the cockiest of the neocons, did something very unusual last week: he admitted, in congressional testimony, an error (overestimating Iraqi patience with foreign occupation).
My personal favorite quote:
Though Bremer was picked for his Baghdad job by Rumsfeld, he has fallen out with the Pentagon and now speaks more regularly to Rice and her staff at the White House. The uniformed military is in almost open revolt against its civilian masters in the offices of Wolfowitz and Feith. The troops resent the Bush administration hard-liners as dangerously ideological.
Their animus has been inflamed in recent weeks by the prisoner-abuse scandal. From the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down through the ranks, soldiers blame the politicians for making a hash of the war on terror. By throwing aside the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the true believers at Defense, the White House Counsel's Office and the Justice Department may have put American soldiers at risk in future wars. The evidence mounts that the ideologues were at least cavalier about the laws that protect captured soldiers. NEWSWEEK has uncovered a Jan. 9, 2002, memo written by two Justice Department lawyers, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, which argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to any Taliban or Qaeda fighters flown to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because Afghanistan was a "failed state" whose militia had no standing under international treaties.
The prisoner-abuse scandal, not the fall of Ahmad Chalabi, seemed to be animating the crowds in Baghdad. The list of top-this outrages grows: prisoners anally penetrated by phosphorus-tipped nightsticks, prisoners fondled by female guards, prisoners fed from toilets, prisoners ridden like dogs and prisoners forced to eat pork and drink liquor. Only a small crowd gathered outside U.S. headquarters in the Green Zone to protest the treatment of Chalabi. That didn't stop Chalabi from sounding like a cross between Moses and Mahatma Gandhi. "Let my people go," he declared. "Let my people be free! It is time for the Iraqi people to run their own affairs." The Iraqis may run Chalabi to prison or out of the country. Right now, his poll rating in Iraq stands somewhere below Saddam Hussein's. On the other hand, Chalabi has a way of resurfacing and reinventing himself. Why not as the man who took America for a ride and freed his country?