Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding

Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding

Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding
Under investigation: Congress is examining whether Ahmad Chalabi inappropriately used U.S. taxpayer dollars to prod America towards war in Iraq.

By Mark Hosenball and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

April 5 issue - Ahmad Chalabi has never paid much attention to rules. As an international financier, he was convicted in absentia in 1992 of embezzling millions from his own bank in Jordan. In the mid-'90s, the CIA tried to make him its point man in a plan to oust Saddam Hussein, but found he was not controllable, leading to a bitter divorce. "His primary focus was to drag us into a war that Clinton didn't want to fight," says Whitley Bruner, the CIA agent who first contacted Chalabi in London in 1991. "He couldn't be trusted." Most recently, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress have been accused of passing on hyped or fabricated reports from defectors on WMD that Saddam didn't have?but which provided the casus belli. Like the CIA, the State Department eventually cut off dealings with Chalabi.

Today Chalabi is in Baghdad and wielding considerable influence as a prominent member of the Iraqi Governing Council. He's overseeing de-Baathification, a purge of alleged Saddam loyalists throughout the country. He apparently has no regrets that his WMD warnings have turned out to be inaccurate. What matters, Chalabi suggested recently, is that he finally got the regime change he had long sought. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful," he told a British newspaper. "That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Some in Congress disagree. NEWSWEEK has learned that the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, is opening a probe into the INC's use of U.S. government money the group received in 2001 and 2002. The issue under scrutiny is not whether Chalabi prodded America into a war on false pretenses; it is whether he used U.S. taxpayer dollars and broke U.S. laws or regulations to do so. Did Chalabi and the INC violate the terms of their funding by using U.S. money to sell the public on its anti-Saddam campaign and to lobby Congress?

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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4615823/

Him and G DUHbya are butt buddies.

Fabricated the whole bio trucks line and fed it to a salivating Bush cabal. Instead of paying Chalabi we ought to be prosecuting him. We should be demanding this swindler be cut off taxpayers funds immediately and thrown out of Iraq to boot.

Seems pretty relevant.

Next you're going to tell me that Cheney is plugged into the defense industry or something wacky like that!

The Office of Special Plans paid Chalabi for the bogus intell, which of course they know was bogus to feed to the Congress. It was a pure sham to force the Congress to sign off on the blank check to Shrub. Most of Congress felt pressure to sign off because they felt that they couldn't look like they weren't defending America. Those who say that the Neocons aren't clever are wrong. It got them Iraq and that's where the US and it's Multi-Natl Corps will stay.

and both should be put on trial.

He fed a group obsessed with ousting Sadam the Info they wanted to hear, now he is setting himself up to be the next 'Saddam'.

who do you think he's talking about HERE, in 2000, in his retirement speech to the USMC?

"There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97 million worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely. That's what can happen when we do things on the cheap."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1301486#1301503

prescient as he was, he had no idea back then, how insane the new crew would be

how could he?

how could anybody who wasn't well-versed in PNAC at the time?

I remember him taking with other Generals and Admirals about why we shouldn't attack Iraq.

Sharon, Rumsfield, and both bushes should be tried for war crimes.

And then we wonder, "Why do they hate us?"

I don't. He is only going to say what he is told to say by his Bush bosses. Feck him and the horse he rode in on. If when Kerry becomes president he sends this piece of shit packing down the road it will all be worth it.

Don