U.S. talking to Chalabi, originator of WMD lies, while pushing to replace Iraqi leader Maliki

Last edited Thu Jun 19, 2014, 08:04 PM - Edit history (3)

NYT:

BAGHDAD — Alarmed over the Sunni insurgent mayhem convulsing Iraq, the country’s political leaders are actively jockeying to replace Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, American and Iraqi officials said Thursday.

The political leaders have been encouraged by what they see as newfound American support for replacing Mr. Maliki with someone more acceptable to Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds, as well as to the Shiite majority.

Over the past two days the American ambassador, Robert S. Beecroft, along with Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official on Iraq and Iran, have met with Usama Nujaifi, the leader of the largest Sunni contingent, United For Reform, and with Ahmad Chalabi, one of the several potential Shiite candidates for prime minister, according to people close to each of those factions, as well as other political figures.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/world/middleeast/maliki-iraq.html

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The fact that our government is comfortably talking to a criminal like Chalabi is the direct result of Congress allowing the Bush administration to walk away scot-free without any real accountability for their crimes in Iraq. Here we have a criminal like Chalabi, who was run out of the office Bush and Cheney gifted him for the bogus information he provided which was used as the initial impetus and justification for the original moves to invade Iraq and overthrow the government, being allowed to pose as some kind of statesman; still getting audiences with U.S. government officials.

It wasn't just that Chalabi had lied to the U.S. about WMDs . . . when they weren't found, Chalabi just brazenly declared that the ends had justified the means.

Chalabi was a wealthy, U.S.-educated banker whose family fled Iraq when the monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Chalabi's CIA contacts led to the formation of the Iraqi National Congress in 1992.

Chalabi's influence in Washington comes from conservatives in and out of the administration who had been advocating for the deposition of Hussein and who were closely associated with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century; conservatives still pushing for intervention in Iraq; like John McCain.

Chalabi had been tried in exile by a Jordanian court and sentenced to 22 years in prison on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft of more than $70 million, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.

Here is a family (Chalabi) that has ingratiated themselves with monied influences, in and out of our government. Their administration benefactors spread our tax dollars around the world with abandon, yet treat the most urgent of our basic needs here at home with miserly neglect. Consistent with Ahmed's U.S. military escort back to his homeland, the Chalabis assumed whatever mandate for power, money, or influence that their Pentagon cabal provided.

In 2002, John McCain claimed that a 'success' behind Bush deceitful coup in Iraq was going to be 'easy,' despite his acceptance of the inevitable casualties. “Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women,” McCain told CNN in 2002. Days later, he backtracked to make a self-serving assurance that American lives would not be squandered for his manipulations in Iraq.

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad," McCain told CNN. "We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.”

By the next year, McCain was cocky enough to predict a 'win' behind the invasion and occupation, telling MSNBC that "we will win this conflict. We will win it easily." That was in 2003. That was in the period where the Bush administration and their cohorts in Congress were frantically organizing separate teams of military investigators to comb Iraq for the weapons of mass destruction they had promised they were defending Americans against. As that cynical effort failed to produce any evidence of any weapons or weapons systems which remotely threatened the U.S. they set themselves to the diverting task of organizing and consolidating the real motive behind their opportunistic invasion; the overthrow of Saddam's hapless regime and the installation of their 'interim' junta.

John McCain's friend and primary instigator, enabler, and author of the lies used to justify the U.S. campaign for 'regime change' in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, began his deceptions in exile during the Clinton administration and was gifted with the leadership of the 'authority' which was constructed after the invasion to impose and lord their military dominance over the Iraqis.

Chalabi, who McCain called a "patriot," was finally driven out of the interim Iraqi leadership by predictable charges of the same manipulative corruption which had been his trademark. Even as he was elevated by the Bush administration to lord over Iraqis behind the sacrifices of our troops, Chalabi was under indictment for embezzlement and fraud. Chalabi was paid $335,000 a month as he promoted his lies about WMDs to the administration and their enablers in Congress. It was reported in 2004 that Chalabi's group-in-exile, the 'Iraqi National Congress,' received $39 million in tax dollars over 5 years as they promoted their lies.

When confronted about the complete lack of any proof that what he'd sold his U.S. supporters in the administration and Congress, Chalabi shrugged. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful," Chalabi said. "That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

"We are heroes in error," Chalabi was quoted as saying.

In the fall of 2002 the 'Committee for the Liberation of Iraq' was established in the Washington offices of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The CLI engaged in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize U.S. and international support for policies aimed at ending the regime of Saddam Hussein. This advocacy came at the same time that Condoleezza Rice and her then-deputy Stephen Hadley were engaged in a series of briefings with foreign policy groups, Iraq specialists and other opinion makers that was termed as a "new phase," by a White House spokesman, who described the goal as building fresh public support for Bush administration policy vs. Iraq.

Members of the CLI met in November of 2002 with President Bush's national security adviser, Rice, in an effort they described as "education and advocacy efforts to mobilize U.S. and international support freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny." Members of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq included, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, General Barry McCaffrey, and former CIA director James Woolsey. George Shultz, Amb. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, and Elliot Abrams were also involved with the group. Abrams and Bolton were founding members of the CLI.

The CLI lobbied for the installation of the so-called Iraqi National Congress to replace the Hussein dictatorship. This group was the creation of the U.S. Congress which, following testimony from Chalabi, and defense policy executive, Zalmay Khalilzad (later appointed ambassador to Iraq), and the co-sponsoring of Sen. John McCain, passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and sanctioned the new U.S. policy of regime change.

Among the other participants in the CLI were, Gary Schmitt (director of the conservative foundation, Project for the New American Century) and Richard Perle, (chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, also closely associated with PNAC. Also involved was co-founder, president and executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Randy Scheunemann who served as a consultant on Iraq to Donald Rumsfeld and now serves as John McCain's top foreign policy aide.

In a scheme to hijack the next-generation of defense dollars, which our soldiers desperately need, and our country can scarcely afford McCain's cohort, Randy Scheunemann, headed a Washington lobbying firm called Orion Strategies, which just happened to share Chalabi's address and the location of his old CLI enterprise. His was just one of the investment groups that sprang to life in the wake of the invasion who sought to benefit from the blood and sacrifice of our soldiers.

In fact, Schennemann was partners in his Iraq lobbying with another facilitator for the former Soviet states, Bruce Jackson, the founder and president of the 'Project on Transitional Democracies', an organization which guided ‘newly independent', former Soviet provinces through the congressional appropriations process to connect the foreign leaders with U.S. tax dollars. Their influence led to the acceptance of many of these countries into NATO compliance and membership. The introduction of these former provinces into the NATO resulted in a boon for weapon's manufacturers as the new republics were required to modernize their military forces to comply with NATO defense requirements.

"There is no doubt Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction," Scheunemann had reportedly claimed before the Iraq invasion, promoting the fiction of his fellow nation-builder, Chalabi. It was that self-serving fiction (and others) which he and his nation-building partners used to influence the form, basis, and direction of John McCain's foreign policy.

The McCain/Chalabi collaboration was described in the book by award-winning journalist Aram Roston, "The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi." Roston writes that McCain was "Chalabi's favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi's exile group."

According to one report, McCain had initially pressured the administration to give Chalabi more money, signing a letter with four other Republican senators complaining that Chalabi's INC wasn't being funded.

In 2004, it was reported that Chalabi had leaked intelligence to Iran, informing the Iranians that the U.S. had broken their secret communications code. U.S. officials complained that the disclosures meant that Iran's security agencies would have to redo their codes and that, for, perhaps years, American intelligence wouldn't be able to read the transmissions. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice promised Congress a 'full investigation', at the time, but none materialized from the administration.

Also, in 2004 it was reported that Chalabi was counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars - which had been removed from circulation following the fall of Saddam’s regime . . . Police found the counterfeit money along with old dinars in Chalabi’s house during a raid.

The most important position Chalabi was provided by the Bush administration's hawks on Iraq, was the position he was gifted in the new Iraqi regime as the administration's shill within the Iraqi government for their escalation of force. Chalabi's job was to serve as an intermediary between Baghdad residents and the Iraqi and U.S. security forces as they destroyed homes, lives, and livelihoods in Iraq which found themselves in the way of Bush's swaggering advance.

The WSJ reported that Chalabi job was to "help Iraqis arrange reimbursement for damage to their cars and homes caused by the security sweeps in the hope of maintaining public support for the strategy." It's almost certain that Chalabi had his hands all over the unaccountable multi-million dollar money pile the Pentagon reportedly used to pacify the resisting Iraqi communities to facilitate their 'surge'.

In an amazing defiance of the rationale for the pimping he provided for Bush and Petraeus' escalation of force, Chalabi was reported to have 'sabotaged' reconciliation efforts with the Batthists (Chalabi as head of Iraq’s 'de-Baathification commission'); the enabling of which was the main argument Bush gave for his escalation of force to Iraq. The NYT reported that, "Chalabi and members of his organization had sabotaged the American-backed plan by rallying opposition among Shiite government officials in southern Iraq, then taking their complaints to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric."

Chalabi's disruptive and self-serving efforts mirrored McCain's foreign policy advisor Scheunemann's initial, ill-conceived opposition to leaving any members of Saddam's Baath party in government positions in his 2003 declaration that: "It is very difficult for me to conceive of democratic institutions being established in Iraq with the Baathist power structure mostly intact."

AN article published by Blackanthem Military News reported that the Commanding General in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, took on himself to rehabilitate the duplicitous opportunist who sold the U.S. the lies about threats from Saddam's regime which led Clinton to legislate regime change for Iraq, and provided cover for the Bush administration's invasion and occupation years afterward.

Chalabi was reportedly treated like a visiting dignitary as Petraeus introduced him to members of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. stationed in Iraq.

In 2005, Chalabi, an 'elected' member of the Iraqi parliament, temporarily held the post of Iraqi Oil Minister. Chalabi's new 'job' in Iraq had been to get the country's electricity back in order, five years after the 'shock and awe' of the invasion needlessly destroyed the majority of Iraq's infrastructure. Yet, consistent with every other endeavor Chalabi had been allowed to involve himself in by this administration, it was been reported that, despite Chalabi's involvement, Baghdad's power supply remained "intermittent and well below pre-war levels." That September, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq told Congress that, Iraq's power supply is "woefully inadequate."

It's not as if there hadn't been more than enough discrediting evidence for the U.S. to completely shun the formerly exiled con man after he mislead (admittedly obliging) U.S. officials who were looking to make a case against Saddam.

Once again Chalabi is being fetted by the U.S. government as a front man for their faltering Iraqi regime. Even Chalabi's reported ties to the rebel Shiite group, led by al-Sadr, who has rivaled and worked to disrupt the influence and authority of the Maliki regime, hasn't been enough for the Obama administration to cut ties with the opportunistic confidence man.

In exchange for the short-sighted support Chalabi provided Bush's duplicitous administration for their rape and plunder of Iraq, he's been allowed to maintain an influential (and lucrative) niche in Iraq which has allowed the U.S. occupation's initial enabler to continue his confidence game with impunity.

Chalabi has stalled reconciliation several times in the past, and, it looks like he's now being promoted in that effort by the Obama administration to manage the increasing unrest in Iraq. In allowing Chalabi continued VIP treatment in Iraq, it's almost as if the administration isn't concerned that his lies are what led us to the Iraq debacle. Once again, Chalabi is under consideration by the U.S. as leader of their junta in Iraq.

Surprised?

related:

U.S. Turns to Old Frenemies
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/19/u-s-turns-to-old-frenemies-for-new-iraq-war.html

Striking Out at Bush's Phantoms in Iraq
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025122509

Progress and Successes of the Bush and Maliki Regime
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025122781