The Chalabi Affair... new names ... earlier cited by Kiatowski

Can't help it- I think something really big is unfolding in the Chalabi affair related to the charges and investigations about intelligence being passed on to the Iranians. I found the first item linked through DC journalist Laura Rozen's site: www.warandpiece.com

Her current item ( http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000741.html )links to a Dreyfus article in TomPaine.com that is following an article from UPI - that names two folks being investigated - a Harold Rhode (still at the pentagon) and a Michael Rubin (now at AEI). I seemed to recall the first name ... and thought I tied it to Karen Kiatowski's story as she "outed" (forgive the use of the term) the OSP in the Pentagon. Went looking for cross references in items and found it:

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1329/is_1_29/ai_112087888/print

The lie factory: only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war
Robert Dreyfuss

IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Katen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

---snip---

Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."

Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."

According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeated to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."

The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.

Much much more...

So if these two are in some way associated with the intel that was *allegedly* passed on to the Iranian Intelligence Service ... it might fit the allegations (reported as "irrefutable") that the intelligence was of such high security clearance that few in the government had access to it.

This might also account for the ridiculous assertions now being made by Perle to try to discount said investigations that the whole affair is due to the CIA working with the Iranians to set Chalabi up. See, Perle contends that the last thing the Iranians want is for Chalabi to be head of Iraq - of course disregarding Chalabi's own words last week on the US tv circuit that it was well known that he had long ties to the Iranian Government (as if to state - they knew it and didn't care... this is nothing new so therefore there must be nothing there...) Seems to make more sense that what the IRanian's would want now (if they were indeed doing counter intelligence) would be to frustrate US efforts to get the US OUT of Iraq to make it easier to have influence over a Chalabi run Iraq.

Still lots of ifs ands or buts... but the stories seem to lead back to the Neocons - and IF any of the intelligence that made its way to Iran had anything to do with info that could be (or has been) used directly against US efforts on the ground - it would be bordering on treason ... wouldn't it? If nothing else it would make the fiasco - in terms of public perception - surrounding Abu Ghraib look tame.

I wouldn't dismiss the story too quickly as simply neocon attempts to make Chalabi look good to Iraqis OR an attempt to push us into war with Iran (even the neocons know there isn't the manpower to do this...) Certainly things are not what they appear with these stories... but there is also something There... There. Our job is to follow it.

I am printing up both articles (again) to read across them both. Would be interested in DUers' opinions ...

and was amazed see names attached to the allaegations. I hadn't heard of Rhode, but Rubin is one of those guys reporters go to when they need a neocon voice to counterbalance the pessimism about Iraq everyone else is giving them.

not suspects. Very curious.

She's very careful, level-headed. But she's not afraid to keep looking where most other reporters seem afraid to go.

A couple of days ago I sent a slew of questions to Dana Priest on a Washington Post on-line forum. She only answered one (most of her time was spent talking about terror threats!). I asked if she thought a major story about Chalabi was about to break, now that Chuck Hagel was calling for investigations, and she said unless an actual US secret could be found in Iranian hands that could be traced to Chalabi or Habib (et al.), then she didn't think it was much of a story.

that have such high security clearance that only a few US officials have access... is incorrect - according to her?

I think that the DC press corps gets caught in feeding frenzies - and rather than sending many investigative reporters in several different directions to dig - they put many resources on the story dejours - on occaision one of their random stories gets picked up and becomes the current feeding frenzy and they get the big scoop. But it is almost haphazzard when that happens. Today, it seems, the scoop is treated as getting the newest item on the old (current feeding frenzy) story.

Hence - I would read the response as meaning - until something bigger comes out (eg by someone else) - we won't follow it - other feeding frenzies to follow instead...

:eyes:

Still, you'd think it might be part of Dana Priest's day to give a little call over to Hagel's office and find out if anything is really cooking. Or Feinstein's.

seems a lot of folks call in little tidbits to his office...

and getting a response (even if it was a bit of a nonresponse.)

This is what DU has been simmering for years now: We knew this cabal of PNAC/AEI dogmatists were leading our nation into dishonor and ruin ...

NOW the goods are arriving on media shelves in YOUR town ...

NOW the police on the beat HAVE to bring in the unusual suspects ...

NOW is the time for all good citizens speak out against Bush and his allegiance to the false principles of this nefarious cabal ... THIS is THEIR Treason ...

Not even the GOP congress should be allowed to plead such a cheap and affected mea culpa ....

The GOP Congress ENABLED this band of Vulcan Devils; they have denied reasonable (and constitionally required) oversight of the den's of sin in the executive branch ... THEY have protected this cabal from scrutiny, they have colluded with them, they have put OUR NATIONS REPUTATION, AND our mighty institutions IN THE DAMNED TOILET .....

and why ? ...... Filthy Lucre ? .... Petty Egotism ? ...

The GOP Congress MUST be brought to a just and honorable end ...

TOSS THE BASTARDS OUT .... EVERY damned one of them .... From that seething piss-snake Delay to the conniving wannabe machiavelli Hastert to the most vicious doctor next to Dr. Mengele, Mister Frist ...

EVERY damned one of them is a party to this madness ....

US Citizens ? ..... DO YOUR DUTY ! ...

TOSS THEM OUT by a clear ballot this November .....

Great thread Salin ...... Thank you for your clear and lucid mind ...

Thanks Salin

that if true and actually pursued - documents how in their blind ideology and ...er... woodie to go to war for Iraq... these fools turned a blind eye to KNOWN info about Chalabi's long standing relationship with Iran (has been stated as a given)... and intelligence information that his associate Habib was suspected for working for Iranian Intelligence (Josh Marshall has pointed to an old NYT article that refers to this)... and THEN they allow Habib to be in the intelligence collection arm of the Iraqi Governing Council ... working with (sharing an office - as noted by Rosen) DIA agents...

So in their blindness - intentional blindness - blindness to items "hidden in plain view" - they give access to those serving as a conduit to the Iranian Intel agency (the person Chalabi met with reportedly is the head of Iranian Intel focused on American (re: FOILING) interests) - to information relating to US plans (... does this include major troop movement or the like as I believe I read somewhere)?

In a nutshell this story - if the implications in the news thus far bear out - their blind devotion to getting the intel to push this war at any cost made them assume that a known crook could be their man in Bagdhad and their efforts not only cost the War on Terrorism by stripping most resources out of the front working on AlQeada and Afghanistan.. but also their actions have jeopardized the War on the Ground (RE: TROOPS SENT OVER BY THE CONS) in Iraq.

Now that wouldn't just blow up the influence of the Neocons over the GOP, it wouldn't just weaken the press adherence to the now neocon presented "conventional wisdom" from the WH, but it would also create an anti GOP backlash as the GOP Congressional leadership has worked very hard to silence even GOP dissent over the policies pushed by these folks. This story - if it bears out and if it gets reported - has the power to create a political realignment in this country. There are too many visible instances where these policies have greatly weakened national security - and that is already getting through to the public (hence Ws continuing dropping ratings - even on National Security which were - beyond my comprehension - very strong and resilient) THIS type of blunder... along with the growing recognition that these same fools are the ones who passed on the faked intelligence in the first place... esp if the Public begins to be aware that the Iranian Govt MAY have had a hand in the initial disinformation... the concept of the GOP being stronger on defense would forever be tarnished.

And the deaths on the ground of US troops, civilian workers, and Iraqi's... would all be squarely placed on the neocon (and Bush who held fast in his loyalty to them) shoulders.

Let me propose considering a different prism through which you might filter what is known.

What if the loyalties of a group of people (including bushco) are really not to any particular country?

What if this group of people have certain things in common that serve to bind them together? i.e., they have common interests. Or, they interests may be different, but the tactics that are in play, serve the objectives of all parties in this group.

What if the War on Terror is really the means by which the individual interests in this group are promoted?

I'm not trying to be obtuse. Rather, I contend that this War on Terror is a scam. A major league game of 3 card monty where the card mover is Bush and the sucker in the crowd is bin Laden (who of course works with the card mover).

In my opinion, we are being taken for suckers. These guys want us to talk exactly the way we are talking, because if we start thinking in the terms I described, the jig may be up.

The scary part is that the man who is president does not matter if we don't shed some light on the real story.

(edited for grammar)

I have long thought that Bush was chosen because he was perceived to be "electable" (due to the Rovian success of selling him in Texas), and that he was easily played (his ego, his insecurity, his very simplistic way of viewing issues, and his dislike for policy discussions which would allow a flow of ideas...) that would fit your scenario. Could be a larger group that no longer has national ties or interests (either monied/financial interests, or multinational corporate interests)...

I would disagree about Osama, however. I think that Hussein himself would have fit the description you give to Osama.

I do believe that Osama is his own player, with his own objectives which include a messianic view of himself as reuiniting the Muslim world (have the outsider to fight against) and then reshaping it into a Wahhabist vision. However in the short term - the War on Terror (feeding $ interests without a doubt) - fits both his and those to which you refer interests... so in that sense working in concert - though I think more in an opportunistic rather than coordinated way. Each group looking to exploit the moves of the other...

I would disagree that it wouldn't matter who is president. The difference in what has happened when there is a weak dupe... we see is an escalation of amazing proportions in a multitude of directions. Be the manipulation from US based powers that be, or from a multinational group pulling the strings, they are still operating in an era of "Nationstates". As such there are still vagaries they can not fully control - such as populations turning against their actions frustrating and slowing those movements. If what you believe to be true is true, I would say that certainly the forces being moved will manipulate, to a degree, nearly any form of government let alone elected leader - but the matter of degree does matter.

And it could be, that in playing out this current game, because we still live in a nation-state era - that they will have over played so far in so many directions that they will become weakened in the ability to control political actions.

Not sure, however, that I do buy in to the lens that you are suggesting, though I would venture to say that there are levels of interests (moved by greed) that are pushing policies that are distinctly harmful to our country and to the international community. Hard not to see that.

but most Americans will have an impossible time getting their head around that.

most people operate from a set of assumptions, and a BIG one is that nationalistic republicans who represent the United States government are actually working for the United States.

But Bushco isn't working for the United States any more than Wolf Blitzer is working for CNN.

They are all using their employment as an opportunity to give them power to further their agenda.

Bushco's agenda is corporatist fascist control of the lifeblood of the world economy. Military power and oil. With those two things, you can dictate the terms to the world.

Bushco works far more for the Saudi Royal Family than it does for the United States.

Oddly enough it also works for powerful Israeli interests.

Intelligence is THE industry to invest in when there is War on Terror. How convenient, wouldn't you say?

On edit - let me add that what you and I know is a pitifully little. But if our logic can be extrapolated, all we really have to do is look where the money is flowing, and there you will find bushco. They're just about the best darn investment strategists ever.

:kick:

as trivial as my job. :o

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000743.html

Just to keep you distracted a little longer...

from the article:

"Chalabi's brother also works for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Lebanon," (one former long-time Middle East agent) said.

So Chalabi's brother works for the Iranian CIA, and his own head of intelligence has fled to Teheran? Sounds like multiple close ties to me.

Depending on what was passed, and the article makes it sound as though some (related to "our plans in Iraq) are pretty recent, that level of negligence? incompetence? certainly would pass the bar as criminal (if not treasonous?)

The Clinton administration was on to Chalabi in a big way:

"Another former CIA agent said that the agency claimed that Chalabi had failed polygraph tests and labeled him as a "fabricator," and even "put out a what the agency calls a `black book' on him, to warn other agencies away," he said."

No excuse for the current administration to trust him at all. This is unbelievable.

but please do not believe that the admin was "duped". There are no accidents or coincidences. Period.

in my opinion.

great post Salin!

Hope you will keep following the story as it develops.

What is it with republicans and scandals involving Iran? I hope this takes them down.

I wonder if there are GOP links to Iran going back to Iran-Contra days? And we know that Republicans were in discussion with Iranians to delay the release of the hostages so that Carter wouldn't be reelected.

Many of the same people who engineered all that are now directing the Iraq policy. And, clearly, they had at least contacts if not friends in Iran. Was Chalabi involved even then (Iran-Contra days)?

I also wonder how this all links to the illegal arms trade, private armies proliferating, and the privatization of war. (There's a good thread on this--I'll have to come back to add the link, if I can find it.)

But the big question I have on this investigation of the Neo-cons by the FBI is: WHO authorized the investigation? I know there are a lot of CIA people critical of Iraq policy and the Neo-cons in general. But I don't recall hearing criticism from ex-FBI people. And look at the foot-dragging at FBI about investigating the Plame affair. Yes, now they're doing it, but it wasn't without being pressured. So, who could have had the influence to get this investigation going? The CIA may have (surely did) wanted it, but could they get the FBI to act without the public outcry (which wasn't there until maybe now) to push it?

Indeed, this is tangled. Hard to figure out what is going on. Like Burtworm, I'm finding it hard to think about anything else. Thanks, Salin, for putting this all together on a thread.

;-)

Sometime within the last two years - in the press it was (briefly) covered documents (I think) that demonstrated the timeline during the Iraq/Iran war that showed that WHILE we were arming Iraq, we were also selling arms to Iran (ala Iran Contra) - that is - we were simultaneously arming both sides. Not sure where to look to refind those stories - but the time lines were interesting - and perhaps they are worth reconsidering to look at who was involved on the Iran arms dealing side.

Er.. I do remember that Eliot Abrams was somewhere involved in the overall Iran/Contra affair - but not sure if it was on the Nicaragua or Iranian side. His name has surfaced a couple of times recently per the articles looking at those neocons that might have been directly or indirectly involved in the current situation.

"A third prong of the Reagan-Bush international strategy played out in Iran and Iraq, two Islamic countries that went to war over disputed borders in 1980. In the six years that followed, the Reagan-Bush team secretly sold weapons to both sides in the conflict, while CIA Director William J. Casey gloated over the scheme that encouraged the two armies to maul each other. The human cost in Iran and Iraq totaled about 1 million dead."

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/091701a.html


(I think some of Parry's other pieces go into this in more detail -- this was just one that came up easily when I Googled on it.)

I read the article you suggested and there was a bit about Iran-Iraq and a lot of other useful information. But when I went to the front page of The Consortium News, I found this recent article by Parry that answers SO many questions:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/052504.html

Bush Sr.'s Iraq-Iran Secrets

By Robert Parry
May 25, 2004

Before the Iraq War spins further out of control, former President George H.W. Bush should sit down his son, George W. Bush, and level with him about the real history of U.S. relations with Iraq, Iran and Israel’s Likud Party – even if the father has to admit to illegal and unethical conduct in the process.

The latest Iraq embarrassment – allegations that the longtime U.S. favorite Ahmed Chalabi and the intelligence chief for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress were Iranian spies – derives from the younger Bush’s continuing failure to see the Middle East as it is, not how he might like it to be. While Bush junior crafts hopeful nation-building plans, he doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion who the players are, where their true allegiances may lie or why these conflicting interests could undermine U.S. policy.

These are relationships that the senior George Bush knows well because he was there as they took shape over the past quarter century. But he also has spent almost as much time covering up the facts. Now, like the Marlon Brando character in “The Godfather” explaining Corleone family secrets to son Michael, elder Bush needs to tell junior Bush about these hard facts. Otherwise, junior will continue to stumble through the political mine fields of the Middle East, not knowing where the bombs are buried, who to trust or what their past connections to U.S. adversaries may have been.

For instance, Bush should have suspected that Chalabi, an Iraqi Shiite who has lived most of his life in exile, might have been in league with Iranian leaders with whom he met often. They share a background in the Shiite sect of Islam – and a burning hatred toward Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government. Saddam suppressed Iraqi Shiites and battled Iran in a bloody eight-year war starting in 1980. It has long been Iran’s goal to see a friendly Shiite-controlled government in Iraq. Chalabi, in turn, needs a political base of support that promises more durability than Washington.

>>MUCH more

Again, thanks for the tip. I know I've come across some of Parry's articles in the past, but I didn't remember him as especially good on this subject. I'll make a point to read him regularly (and dig into his archives).

His daughter is deep in this one, I know, although I can't just now remember just how. And I could have sworn someone mentioned an Adnan Kosogghi(remember that name)-Chalabi link.

We really do need a map!

Cheney and Rumsfeld anyway were there with Ford and maybe the Reagan campaign in 1980 that pulled off the secret negotiations with Iran. And of course there were the rumors about *Bush Sr. flying to Paris to seal the deal. No end of tantalizing possibilities. I too am not sure about the majority of the PNACers. I do think that the slimy relations they may have with crooks from either country will definitely include business schemes. Feith's law firm set up a business that would help companies get Iraq contracts. Oh, and probably a list of people involved in BCCI would also somehow fit in.

I also need to read some good histories of the Iran-Iraq war (I was living overseas and, frankly, missed most of it). I did hear or read about the US arming both sides. And even if it wasn't through legal channels, there's a great tolerance for illegal arms-dealing if it suits the purposes of those who are "managing" the darker dealings of our govt. Could the Iran-Iraq war be something the US was happy to promote? for what specific purpose? Or, as with the neocons now, were we happy to see chaos in that area, in hopes of managing the outcome?

I need to do some serious homework.

For a long time now, I have believed (unfashionably) that there is a downside to our nation of immigrants. All during the cold war, we gave preference to refugees from communism--and they brought their politics with them. Then their opinions about their home countries carried more weight because they "knew" the situation. Cuba comes to mind. But also the USSR. It was as if, as a nation, we never imagined that the emigres we used to learn about the world might have hidden (or not so hidden) agendas that wouldn't always mesh with the best interests of the US as a whole. Alternatively, of course, it may have just been that the decision-makers in Washington only wanted to hear that one side and were using the emigres. Yeah, that sounds right. But either way (or both), the US view of the world was seriously blinkered, if not twisted. Leading to support of any horrible dictator as long as he was anti-communist.

It's a little better now--for example, people come from both Taiwan and China to study in the US, and there is a range of opinion. But the US is pretty bad at choosing which voices to hear, and has been for a LONG time.

Sorry--none of this is new to anyone here. I just went off on a tangent. Will stop now.

influential-even more criminally inclined imo than Nixon's crew of fascist fuck-ups was. John Dean has a lot to say (for pay) in comparisons between George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon administrations.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/10/03/dean/index_np.html

If anything pans out in the investigation, it will bring down:

The Bush* Administration
The PNAC/Neocon Cabal
The Republican Congress, and

importantly:

The American Enterprise Institute and any group associated with them.

The influence of the AEI is all-consuming. It gives intellectual cover to the Neoconservative Base and serves as a fund-raising conduit for Republican office-holders.

Thanks again for the great post and links.......

This is the TRUE VALUE OF DU

"Mother Jones" article which I had read, but it was a great re-read in light of what's going on the past few days.

All of this is coming together in some interesting ways. Picking out the names in this scenario is interesting. Wish someone could do an "organizational chart," of these criminals so we can keep it for reference. Figuring out who was whom and how they fit would be a help.

There's also a tie to Grover Norquist in this through one of the "participants." I would love to see Gover go down with this group.

Another interesting point is that two of these folks were aides to Senator Moynihan from NY. I'm one of the few DU'ers who didn't like Moynihan. Just because he had neo-con aides doesn't besmerch his memory, but otoh...it makes me wonder what it was about him that I always disliked.

I completely have missed it. Could you point me in the right direction?

links:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: November 02, 2003 ...
... in Doug Feith's shop at the Pentagon, Michael Maloof. ... a parantheses: "In May, Mr.
Maloof, who has ... conservative flat-taxers like Grover Norquist crowing about ...
www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_11_02.php - 94k - Cached - Similar pages

F. Michael Maloof - Disinfopedia
F. Michael Maloof. F. Michael Maloof, according to Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest,
in their January 26, 2004, Mother Jones article "The Lie Factory", write: ...
www.disinfopedia.org/ wiki.phtml?title=F._Michael_Maloof - 12k - Cached - Similar pages

Prison Planet.com: Do You Have the Knowledge to Escape?
... Later in January, Hage went to the United States and contacted another Lebanese-American,
Michael Maloof, who Hage had met in 2002 and developed a relationship ...
www.prisonplanet.com/poovey111003.html - 39k - Cached - Similar pages

Spartacus: Shoddy journalism or political motivation? We report ...
... year, Mr. Hage befriended a fellow Lebanese-American, Michael Maloof, who was working
in the Pentagon as an analyst in an intelligence unit set up by Mr. Feith ...
www.spartacus.ws/000874.html - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

Michael Ledeen on Iraq on National Review Online
... And today, Michael Maloof, whose nearly 30 years of service in the Department of
Defense uncovering all manner of anti-American skullduggery by various enemies ...
www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen082503.asp - 31k - Cached -

Similar pages The Peace Offer that Wasn't
... Then a Lebanese businessman, Imad El-Hage, apparently contacted the Defense
Department's Michael Maloof, with essentially the same offer. ...
www.military.com/ NewContent/0,13190,Defensewatch_111303_Offer,00.html - 28k - Cached - Similar pages

I thought the Dreyfuss/Vest article had a chart with it when I bought the Magazine last January. I just found it doing a Google. It does put it all into perspective. "Mother Jones" Mag may have done a Woodward/Bernstein, here. At the time Bush was high in the polls and the article didn't get much press coverage. But, NOW...everything falls into place. We probably should print this chart to have as things unfold and give a donation to the foundation which supports Mother Jones.

Excellent! Thanks!

on a bigger chart would be useful for us to keep all this straight as the story unfolds. Hopefully some day there will be full investigations. These folks hold the power of America in their hands. We need to know who they all are, their connections and how deep they go so that we never have a mess like the Bush Train Wreck of Policy again.

It's our tax money. We need to know who's spending it and for what.

Good Luck!

...Oscar

and print. Alot of work went into this it it will prove usefull for future reference.Thank You Salin,KoKo1 and others. ...Oscar

:-)'s

money. I forgot to mention his name when I posted the links to you. I was interrupted. Hope this helps you. Maloof also connects into the AEI and the head of AEI came out criticizing him back last January. Things quieted down after that and so I figured the story was dead. I wish I could remember the article. Sorry, but it may be in one of the links from Google I posted to you. I didn't have time to go through them all to find the AEI link.

some may have even been defending him as a sort of possible whistle blower...

Geez this whole story is reminding me of a slew of earlier stories that have been covered through LBN and GD over the past two years- some I can remember enough about to find - others I would have no idea where to look and I remember next to nothing about the details of the story... both frustrating.. and at the same time very interesting (and with so many of us now attending to it - the chances increase that someone else recalls x or y - like you and this connection with Norquist that helps bring it together.)

Maybe I bookmarked it way back in my mess of bookmarks on my browser. If it turns up I'll try to post it, but don't know when I'll get to it.
:eyes:

right on the eve of the war, I'm pretty sure. I think it's mentioned in Dreyfuss's article.


PS: On edit, I found this at Alex Jones's Prison Planet via Google:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/poovey111003.html

On February 19th, Hage faxed a three-page report of his Baghdad trip to Maloof. He said that Habbush and Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, wanted to meet with American officials. The report listed five areas of concessions that the Iraqis would make to avoid a war, including cooperation in fighting terrorism and "full support for any U.S. plan" in the Arab-Israeli peace process. Additionally, the report said that "the U.S. will be given first priority as it relates to Iraq oil, mining rights," and that Iraq would cooperate with the U.S. strategic interests in the region. Under the heading "Disarmament" the report said, "Direct U.S. involvement on the ground in disarming Iraq."

On February 21st, Maloof e-mailed Jaymie Durnan, Wolfowitz's aide, that Perle "is willing to meet with Hage and the Iraqis if it has clearance from the (Pentagon)."

On Friday, February 28th, Mr. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, proved that the war drums against Iraq had never been about WMD's, terrorism, compliance with U.N. resolutions, or anything of that sort. It had been about one thing only. Fleischer explained that disarmament was no longer sufficient and instead talked about the goal of "regime change" in Baghdad.

Hage continued to get communications from the Iraqis for a meeting with U.S. officials which he passed on to Maloof. In early March, Maloof wrote in a memo to other Pentagon officials, "Hage quoted Dr. Obeidi as saying this is the last window or channel through which this message has gone to the United States. Hage characterized the tone of Dr. Obeidi as begging."

to reread and mull over. This really is a very tangled web, eh?

That's exactly what I was hoping for. I just went through Karen Kwiatkowski's Salon.com article "The New Pentagon Papers" picking out the key names that keep appearing for a post replying to Beetwasher below (#32, I think). We need to put the map together. (I forgot to include Scooter Libby and Perle's man in Jordan whose name I forget.)

would need a huge chart to get all the names in. Did you see some of the folks mentioned in the "Blumenthal article?" I think there were a few new names that aren't in the "MJ" article. There are so many it's hard to keep track of them all. "A Silent Army" of PNAC Supporters.

:crazy:

There must be a Website somewhere that puts this all together. I'm going to look for it over the weekend.

Thank you!

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1329/is_1_29/ai_112087888/print

We should try to create a database or map of some kind to connect the dots. I'm sure one must exist somewhere, but I've never seen one clear enough to keep all the connections straight. But Dreyfuss's article goes a long way toward laying out the key relationships, the lines of communication and chains of command, that made this war happen.

mentioned a few names tied to the whole OSP business... and had to refind this article to find which name rang a bell (turns out - both!)

A year or so ago - several DUers tried to dig around the names on the Defense Policy Board - NothingShocksMeAnymore found the thread in the archives and brought it up on a post in the last week or so. It suddenly seems worth trying to re-find. Might help with some of the dot connecting in relation to this current story.

great thread. once again my head is swimming with *dots* and names.

NSMA was kind enough to send me the link to our thread a few months back, made sure to bookmark it

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=1033&forum=DCForumID62&archive=yes

i'll run through it again and see what i can come up with,
in regards to connections. :hi:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=1033&forum=DCForumID62&archive=yes

we had another one in there too...I'll see if I can find it later

the thread that Buddhamama and Nothingshocksmeanymore linked. Heavy - but worth at least a skim.

Don't forget to take a look at Wurmer's wife over at MEMRI.

was tied to a certain ideological "thinktank" on the middle east that has been given more and more attention by the govt and the press in recent years. Ran out of time before meetings to try to dig it up and couldn't remember the name and indeed it was MEMRI. Thanks, there was a very interesting article last year about how the right has made headways into changing public perception on issues - in which MEMRI was a focus point as a sort of "case study." In the context of this story that article seems quite relevant. I will try to find it in the morning.

in pushing the Iraq policy was made clearer to me when I read the March 25, 2004 article by Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com (see my post #83 for the link). Parry makes the connection between Israel's policies and Iran. He says that Israel and Iran had a secret understanding (despite their public rhetoric)--and of course both despised Saddam. Israel backed Chalabi.

So anyway, add Pipes and also Robert Kagan to the list of names? Pipes runs Campus Watch and is involved with Woolsey and Bennett in another group targeting academics and students. (The purpose is to muzzle any opposing points of view on foreign policy.) Pipes also got appointed (over loud objection) to the board of the US Institute of Peace. He's a snake. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4739349-110878,00.html

Another AEI player of importance is maybe Reuel Marc Gerecht. He's ex-CIA and director of the Middle East Initiative at PNAC (or he was--not sure this is current). He's all over the place--on Washington Journal and other TV programs, and writing articles in defense of Bush's Iraq policies. Googling brings over 200 pages. I'm suddenly very curious about what he did in the CIA...

I've noticed this slime ball all of a sudden everywhere. He was on Washington Journal a few weeks ago trying to make PNAC sound like just your average friendly think tank in DC. :eyes:

for him and any connection he has to this group. He's connected I know, but something that will implicate him. He's arrogant and exudes "evil."
Sorry to be so hyperbolic, but anyone who see's this guy will have the same reation.

He was on C-Span on a PNAC or Heritage Foundation panel back in March (I think) raving on about Iran having nuclear capability and they should be the next on the list to get "taken out." A Russian Journalist questioned his information and Raul went at him, the journalist didn't back down and I thought they were going to call guards in to remove the journalist. I had never seen or heard of him before, then. And, things were going well with Bush so he was pretty full of it, but a true "wacko" he is. One that would have us blowing up the whole ME, imho.

:scared:

Reminds me of Jorgen Heider.

when the story first was breaking

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7769

Thing I noticed in this story - she asks what documents Chalabi might have (that the us might want to seize)... he refers to historic (antiquities?) documents that had been flooded early in the siege on Bagdad.

Read that item. Then find the item by Octafish (post 54) in the Baltimore Sun about the fact that ancient Bible and Torah's are in "limbo" .... buried within it... is this:

"Harold Rhode, a Pentagon expert on Middle East affairs who spent six weeks in Baghdad working on the materials, said the records are of great historical interest because the Baghdad Jewish community has nearly disappeared. "

Now why would Rhode - who reports to Feith - be spending six weeks on ancient religious texts? Ah - these were under the care of Chalabi...

collected by Saddam's secret police. What a windfall for someone who wants to blackmail people to consolidate political power--someone like oh, Chalabi. It's hard to believe that NO ONE in the CPA thought about how sensitive such papers would be, and how potentially explosive. There might be records of neighbors ratting on neighbors--that sort of thing. Also, of course, disinformation. There's no need for such info to be true for it to be dangerous and destabilizing for a country just emerging from the police state.

I did read about the antique books, etc. And it does mystify me what Rhodes was up to with that. The remarks in passing about the recent diaspora of the Jewish Iraqi community interested me as well. I wonder what they may be wanting--eg., lost land, property (not unlike Chalabi himself). Probably the antique stuff is symbolically valuable to the Jewish Iraqis, and rescuing it is a useful message to them? Or maybe they contain some passages that mean something to a particular sect of Judaism? I really have no idea.

Anyway, thanks much for the link to that interview with Gerecht. He seems to be still supportive of Chalabi--no surprise there. I wonder if there were/are many like him in the CIA. We tend to think CIA or State thinks "thusly"--but we know there are factions within as well.

One shocker from the interview:
<<The amount of money the INC was getting from the Pentagon, <$355,000 per month> is pathetically small. Just your average cell phone bill in Baghdad, if you use it a little, is about five grand a month. If you use it a lot, ten grand.>>

So how many Iraqis can sign up for cell phone accounts? I sort of remember some noise about the contract going to an American company. Not to Iraqis, at least not directly. And cell phone companies need towers for transmission. I wonder if Nick Berg was involved in that in some way....

Well, I'll quit before I take my free associations any farther. So little to go on, and so many questions!

I think he spreads "disinformation." Curious as to what you think about this latest article of his plus his affiliation with PNAC/AEI. I wonder if he can be considered reliable in anything he says about Chalabi.

Of course that's probably why Rozen interviewed him. Good to hear the opinions of the "Foxes who guard the Henhouses." There is so much conflciting info about the Chalabi "raids" it's trying to sort through to find the truth.

(Here are some of his writings and a bio)

=================================================================

Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib?
From the May 24, 2004 issue: The scandal won't determine the fate of democracy in the Middle East.
by Reuel Marc Gerecht
05/24/2004, Volume 009, Issue 35

ACCORDING TO Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, "the humiliating scenes of abused Iraqi prisoners" and the war in general "have turned that country into a model to be feared and avoided in the eyes of many in the Middle East, and a tool in the hands of governments reluctant to change." Telhami, who was a driving force behind a recent major Muslim-targeted public-diplomacy project chaired by former assistant secretary of state Edward Djerejian and paid for by Uncle Sam, sees American-occupied Iraq as "a far cry from the anticipated model of inspiration that the administration promised would spur demands for democracy in the Arab world." In the eyes of Jackson Diehl, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post who regularly lends his voice to Arabs struggling against dictatorship, "the photos from Abu Ghraib prison may have destroyed what was left of the Bush administration's credibility with Arab popular opinion," which--combined with the administration's recent actions backing Israel's Ariel Sharon and Libya's unreformed dictator Muammar Qaddafi--have surely undermined the promotion of democracy, supposedly the administration's top priority in the Middle East.

Much more of this article..........
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/096u...
================================================================
(HE WROTE THIS ARTICLE BEFORE 9/11, Interesting)

The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2001

Notes & Dispatches
PESHAWAR

The Counterterrorist Myth

A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence

by Reuel Marc Gerecht

George Tenet, who became the director of the CIA in 1997, has repeatedly described America's counterterrorist program as "robust" and in most cases successful at keeping bin Ladin's terrorists "off-balance" and anxious about their own security. The Clinton Administration's senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, who has continued as the counterterrorist czar in the Bush Administration, is sure that bin Ladin and his men stay awake at night "around the campfire" in Afghanistan, "worried stiff about who we're going to get next."

If we are going to defeat Usama bin Ladin, we need to openly side with Ahmad Shah Mas'ud, who still has a decent chance of fracturing the tribal coalition behind Taliban power. That, more effectively than any clandestine counterterrorist program in the Middle East, might eventually force al-Qa'ida's leader to flee Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied intelligence and military forces cannot reach him.

Until then, I don't think Usama bin Ladin and his allies will be losing much sleep around the campfire.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/gerecht.htm
===============================================================

Reuel Marc Gerecht is the Director of the Middle East Initiative at The Project for the New American Century and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is recently a contributor to Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy (Editors Robert Kagan & William Kristol; Encounter Books, 2000) and is the author under the pseudonym of Edward Shirley of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). A former Middle Eastern specialist in the CIA, Mr. Gerecht writes frequently on the Middle East, Central Asia, terrorism, and intelligence, in such publications as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Middle East Quarterly, Playboy, and Talk.

It's very difficult.

Even though I knew it was this bad it's still shocking. The amount of damage is mind boggling to comprehend...We'll all be lucky to come out alive from the next few years I think...

I'm not saying it's going to be. It could be, however, if someone like a Clarke--maybe Karen Kwiatkowski--spurred the kind of interest that would get a hearing, and all the "president"'s neocons--Feith, Luti, Rhode, Shulsky, Wurmser, Bolton, Rubin, Perle, Wolfowitz--and Rumsfeld again were called out of the shadows... It would be bigger than Watergate!

a buzzzzzzzzz - keep finding things, writing about them here - following up - and maybe point these threads out to other progressive net-based organizations... if there is a there there...(as in a real story) perhaps we can help keep it alive and spur it to be followed up in the press. *in best Judy Tanudi (sp) voice* "It could happen..."

So far, it's working. It just takes a lot longer than we thought. DU was ranting about the voting machines two years ago. PNAC, in the months leading up to Iraq. We're 1-2 years ahead of mainstream news. We're the source.

group of folks here - with retentive memories (didn't I hear x name in relation to y... lets go look for that) - evidence of that all over this thread. Very interesting - and yes, I think very ahead of the mainstream news. :hi:

alive... but as a country - I think we will find our stature (diplomatically, economically, etc.) greatly diminished.

writes about her participation in the Iraqi National Congress delegation to Tehran...

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000746.html

Rozen also notes that she hears a buzz of a major PENTAGON pushback in the works against aspects of the Chalabi story.

I could be wrong, but in the current climate in the press - that alone could help spur attention from some media sources to dig around a little more...

... to the mighty BFEE turds Michael Ledeen and Manucher Ghorbanifar.

The Chalabi Follies
The neocons' man in Iraq goes down – what does it all mean?

May 24, 2004

EXCERPT...

One puzzling aspect of all this is how the neocons, who supposedly hate the Iranian mullahs, reconcile their support for Chalabi with his links to Tehran. But we mustn't overlook the longstanding neocon-Iranian connection: it extends all the way back to the mid-1980s when the Iran-Contra scandal was dominating the headlines. Michael Ledeen, one of Chalabi's loudest defenders, was shoulder-deep in the Iran-Contra mire, and has recently been playing much the same role, arranging a meeting between Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in the arms-for-hostages deal, and Harold Rhode, Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith's Middle East specialist. Rhode was also the liaison between Feith's office and Chalabi. A cozy arrangement all around.

I just don't buy the analysis put forward by John Dizard, in Salon, who avers that Chalabi's neocon friends are "turning on him." Dizard purports to tell us "How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons" – but Chalabi is a neocon, and they aren't turning on him, now are they?

The Salon piece cites L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Feith's and friend of the Chalabi family, as saying, "Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," but Zell denies making these comments. According to Dizard, the reason for Zell's disenchantment is that the Mosul to Haifa oil pipeline that Chalabi supposedly promised his neocon friends is not about to magically materialize. However, since the pipeline would have to pass through Jordanian territory, and that is not about to happen for a number of reasons, Dizard fails to convince. Zell's alleged outburst is even less credible when one considers that an Iraqi government isn't even in place yet – it's a little early to be bitterly disappointed about the demise of a long-term project that may never have been all that real to begin with.

I much prefer the Telegraph's take on this, which views the story of Chalabi's meteoric rise and fall through the prism of a titanic struggle between the U.S. State Department, the CIA, and top military commanders, on one side, and the neocon-dominated civilian leadership of the Defense Department on the other. The piece cites an advisor to the State Department as being unable to resist a smile as he quipped:

"Another shattered illusion for our friends at the Department of Defense. How much more can they take?"

CONTINUED...

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2647

Perhaps Chalabi and Rhode are being used by both sides to discredit the other. What DU needs do is make certain the good guys come out on top. In this case, that means the rank-and-file at the CIA, Pentagon and State Department -- not the political "leadership." -- Octafish

EDIT: improved headline and typo

http://antiwar.com/justin/

Doesn't have as much new information as the article you have linked - it primarily ties together the main pieces from yesterday that we have discussed on this thread... It is worth reading, however, to point out that we are not the only ones starting to think about this in this particular direction.

Plus one has to find the title of the article rather... interesting:

Chalabi-gate: None Dare Call It Treason
Neocons behind bars? Sounds good to me….

... as I, should they decide to take all of us with them.

Here's another interesting tidbit on the BFEE turd Rhoad, the guy seems to fancy himself an Indiana Jones type. I see him playing the role of the melting NAZI:

Damaged Hebrew artifacts are in limbo pending outcome in Iraq

Treasures include a Torah and an ancient Bible

By Carl Hartman
Associated Press
Originally published May 28, 2004

WASHINGTON - A damaged Torah, a centuries-old Bible and other rare documents important to Iraq's few remaining Jews were rescued from a flooded cellar in Baghdad, only to remain in limbo here.
Their restoration, like so much else these days, awaits the emergence of a new Iraq.

Historians at the National Archives, which preserves such priceless artifacts as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are examining the treasure trove of materials found in the basement of the headquarters for Saddam Hussein's secret police.

SNIP...

Harold Rhode, a Pentagon expert on Middle East affairs who spent six weeks in Baghdad working on the materials, said the records are of great historical interest because the Baghdad Jewish community has nearly disappeared.

Jews fled Iraq after deadly riots under a pro-Nazi government during World War II; thousands more left after the execution of Jews as spies for Israel and the United States in the 1960s. Many now are in Israel.

SOURCE:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-to.bsohold28may28,0,1506228.story?coll=bal-features-headlines

who reports to Feith... spends several weeks in Iraq... to try to figure out how to save damaged... iniquities? Does this make ANY sense?

Good find -

Sounds like a cover. Just what was Rhodes doing at this time. Very interesting...

The permanent government. They have no stake in George Bush's political career. They'd rather see their children have a world to live in.

I feel this is State, CIA, & FBI career professionals, taking our country back. Whoever it was in the WH or DOD that passed American intelligence to Chalabi is going to jail.

Even if it's Cheney himself.

...for the last three and a half years. The good people in government service know what type of crooks are in charge -- the worst type. And it seems the good guys and gals have got the goods on them. It's a good time to be a good reporter, eh Stephanie?


Chalabi's Long, Costly Charade

If Pentagon's man in Iraq is suspected of being a crook and a spy why was he given the keys to the country?

By Robert Scheer

May 25, 2004 – Can it get any more bizarre? Only a few weeks before Washington's long-promised hand-over of the keys to Iraq, we discover that the lackey the Pentagon only recently had in mind to manage this very valuable property for the United States is suspected by us of being a world-class con artist and, worse, a spy for America's enemies in Iran.

Nobody is speaking on the record yet, but U.S. intelligence officials are making it clear to a variety of preeminent news sources that Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime darling of the neoconservatives who dragged the U.S. into this war, not only fed Western intelligence sources false information about Saddam Hussein's Iraq but is accused of having passed on U.S. secrets to Iran, possibly through his security and intelligence chief, who is now a fugitive.

"This is a very, very serious charge," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on Sunday, noting that his Senate Intelligence Committee will be investigating it. "There were a number of us who warned this administration about . . . . But the fact is, there were some in this administration, some in Congress who were quite taken with him."

We might start investigating which Bush official arranged for this hustler ” already on the lam for a decade from major banking fraud convictions in Jordan ? to sit behind First Lady Laura Bush during this year's State of the Union speech. Was the Secret Service watching her purse?

CONTINUED...

n/t

Office of Strategic Influence-quite a bit of Specials there hey?
Here's what should be publicly known about all this "special" shit-names and dates are under close scrutiny by the people--No One Is Above The Law.
OSP/Cabal Selective Intelligence by Seymour Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

Pentagon Muzzles the CIA by Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html

The New Pentagon Papers by Karen Kwiatkowski
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KWI403A.html

The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence/ISI in the September 11 Attacks by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111A.html

Ahmed and Salem Chalabi/FRIENDS OF "THE FAMILY"/Israelis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1048205,00.html

Despite Thin Intelligence US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime/PNAC by Jason Leopold
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/LEO305C.html

Thanks!

:hi:

:kick:

And the fact that he refuses to turn over Saddam's papers to Bush and the CIA? Is the "Iranian spy" story simply meant to discredit him because he refuses to cooperate with the secret papers?

PNAC calls for Iran change so does the thin intelligence of the neo-conservative traitors featured in this article by Jason Leopold imo
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/LEO305C.html

which all begins to unravel with the raid - that I don't think it is as simple as either only discrediting Chalabi or conversely setting up Chalabi in order to build his credibility on the ground with Iraqis.

A couple more names are listed herein

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/6408542p-7360864c.html
At the center of the controversy are a handful of Jewish men: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser.

All the men are longtime leaders of the neoconservative movement, which was founded on the idea, championed by Reagan, that the United States had to confront the Soviet Union aggressively -- and in recent years has changed its target to radical Islam.

All of the key figures hold senior positions in the Bush administration -- at the Pentagon, in the State Department, at the White House and, in Perle's case, on the Defense Policy Board, a key group of Pentagon advisers.

Most of the controversial Bush aides are strong supporters of Israel's conservative Likud Party, now headed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and several have past ties either to Likud or to Israeli companies.

Perle, in fact, resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board last week -- though he remained a member -- after published claims by New Yorker magazine reporter Seymour Hersch, himself a Jew, that a venture capital firm in which Perle is managing partner might profit from the war.

other real journalists have these links and questions??????

And Dean, Kucinich, Clark, Edwards ...... and of course Kerry.

We can't just assume that everyone follows DU.

new leader of Iraq... responsible for the 45 minute nuke claim? A cousin to Chalabi? Oh my... can't even begin to predict the next twist in this evolving drama: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x589360#589368

Apparently Brahimi was caught by surprise by this decision, but the NYT initially reported it was HIS choice!

www.talkingpointsmemo.com

Though some neocons haven't yet gotten on that bandwagon....

If that is the case - they must believe that they can damage Chalabi enough (or placate/bribe him through this move) that he will stay silent.

Moving target this set of stories.. a fast moving target.

:shrug:

Either they're still in cahoots or now his cousin is playing them or they're all still trying to play eachother...My head is spinning...What I get from TPM is that the admin. needed someone quick after the embarrassment the other day when the scientist backed out, and they had no real good takers, so they settled on a known entity, Chalabi connections, bad intel and all, and foisted him on Brahimi and tried to spin it as Brahimi's pick but as usual, they forgot to ask Brahimi to play along so he's denying it...:shrug:

I think the term Mayberry Machiavelli's was too kind...

both that this could be the quick response any response and thus not quite as well calculated as a move as often is the case... conniving and foolish/stupid all in the same move.

Is it just me or has a major slice of this entire adminsitration totally spun out of control ... would be almost humorous to watch if the stakes were not so high with so many lives on the line.

Ashcroft is calling terror alerts w/out telling anyone, Rove is telling the Chimp to tell people we're tearing down AG, without telling anyone, they install this guy and forget to tell Brahimi...

They're scurrying like a pack of rats trying to outrun a forest fire...It's insane and incredibly dangerous...They are in complete chaos, you are completely right. No one knows what the fuck any one else is doing anymore..Every man for himself...

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000750.html

read the last point... then try to make sense of THAT (the intel possibly coming from ... Blair's corner?) - and the newest movement on the newest breaking story per Allawari being responsible for teh 45 minute claim (didn't that first break out due to the british dodgy dossier?)

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/

<snip>
But why would the militantly pro-Israel neocons, American partisans of the ultra-nationalist Likud party, act as patrons and promoters of an outfit, Chalabi's INC, that was really a cover for Iranian intelligence – their alleged mortal enemies? That's what I couldn't quite figure out, at least not until I read Robert Parry's excellent piece on the subject, and here's the money quote:

"As Chalabi's operation fed anti-Saddam propaganda into the U.S. decision-making machinery, Bush also should have been alert to the Israeli role in opening doors for Chalabi in Washington. One intelligence source told me that Israel's Likud government had quietly promoted Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress with Washington's influential neoconservatives. That would help explain why the neoconservatives, who share an ideological alliance with the conservative Likud, would embrace and defend Chalabi even as the CIA and the State Department denounced him as a con man.

"The idea of Israel promoting an Iranian agent also is not far-fetched if one understands the history. The elder Bush could tell his son about the long-standing strategic ties that have existed between Israel and Iran, both before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979. It was Menachem Begin's Likud Party that rebuilt the covert intelligence relationship in 1980. Since then, it has been maintained through thick and thin, despite Iran's public anti-Israeli rhetoric."

<snip>
Speaking of business connections, how does Richard Perle make his living except by using his government connections to profit handsomely from the war-driven neocon agenda? Oh well, never mind that: let's get to the juicy part. Walker also reports that these poor persecuted neocons "are now beginning to fight back," and in a familiar fashion:

"Richard Perle told this reporter Tuesday that the gloves were off. … Perle has no doubts that some of the attacks on him are coming directly from the CIA, in order to cover their own exposed rears, attacking Chalabi's intelligence to distract attention from their own mistakes. 'I believe that much of the CIA operation in Iraq was owned by Saddam Hussein,' Perle said. 'There were 45 decapitation attempts against Saddam – and he survived them all. How could that be, if he was not manipulating the intelligence?'"

And what is this "decapitation" attempts... not assassination, but decapitation... and 45 attempts no less. Ah Perle, your hyperbole has belied any appearance of "intellectual gravitas" - the image you work so hard to create.

Now that Allawi had been chosen PM of Iraq, Chilabi's cousin, I am guessing that Chilabi's case will be deep sixed. It is insane that they chose Allawi, the 2nd most unpopular man after Chilabi, in Iraq but Bushco is not known for sanity is it?

Chalabi and U.S. 'Ignored' warnings, ruined alliance

May 28, 2004, 11:20PM

By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight-Ridder Tribune News

WASHINGTON -- In June 2001, at an annual retreat in Beaver Creek, Colo., for current and former world leaders, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle introduced two men to each other who would help guide the United States to war in Iraq.

Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi and Vice President Dick Cheney then went for a two-hour afternoon walk, according to a former senior U.S. government official who was present.

---snip---

U.S. intelligence officials have accused his security chief of passing highly classified American secrets to Iran. Iraqi police, backed by U.S. personnel, raided Chalabi's home and his offices May 19, seeking to arrest associates on charges of financial corruption.

The FBI has opened a probe into who gave the compromised data -- so sensitive it put U.S. soldiers' lives at risk and was known to only a handful of officials -- to the INC.

more (requires registration) : http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/2598385

I think it's all going to lead back to him. All of it - Plame outting, secrets spilled to Iran via Chalabi, WMD lies, 9/11 ignored warnings. There's a trail of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Dick.

What is this annual "retreat"? These secretive get-togethers freak me out. Remember Bohemian Grove?

are most certainly touched indirectly - by very close associates. Bush is a conniving, dubious character... but I still think he is more of a happily ignorant, easily manipulated (through his ego, and his recognition that he just doesn't want to work hard enough cerebrally to think about serious issues), completely incompetant. IMO - Cheney, however, is the real force behind all that is vile running through this administration. Rove is awful - but in a political sense (ala Atwater) - in terms of figuring out how to package things to manipulate the public... but it is CHeney that is pushing the policies and actual actions.

It would be interesting to see who else was on the guest list (or who was there and NOT on the official list).

~snip~
Some observers of the I.N.C. wondered what return the U.S. government was getting for its multimillion-dollar investment. In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. officer, met Chalabi several times in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, an autonomous area protected from Saddam by the United States. Chalabi had established an outpost in Kurdistan. “He was like the American Ambassador to Iraq,” Baer recalled. “He could get to the White House and the C.I.A. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.” But Baer added that Chalabi’s long absence from Iraq diminished his power there, and his ineffectiveness made him a useful foil for Saddam. “If he was dangerous, they could have killed him at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing each month “to this shadowy operator—in cars, salaries—and it was just a Potemkin village,” Baer said. “He was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The I.N.C.’s intelligence was so bad, we weren’t even sending it in.” Chalabi’s agenda, he said, was to convince the United States that Saddam’s regime was “a leaking warehouse of gas, and all we had to do was light a match.” But when the agency tried to check Chalabi’s assertions about troop movement or palace plans, Baer said, “there was no detail, no sourcing—you couldn’t see it on a satellite.”

In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi’s operation seems particularly noteworthy. In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. “It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said. To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.

~snip~

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1

a teaser to get people to read the whole thing:

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000754.html

Most interesting is how Chalabi and Francis Brooke set out deliberately to model the INC's American public relations efforts on the successful examples of the pro-Israel and pro-Africa National Congress movements.

The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”...

In 1996, Chalabi and Brooke set up shop in Georgetown, and mapped out a strategy. They studied how the African National Congress had won mainstream support, by portraying apartheid as tantamount to slavery. They also examined how various American Jewish groups organized themselves to support Israel. “We knew we had to create a domestic constituency with some electoral clout, so we decided to use the aipac model,” Brooke said, referring to the American Israel Political Action Committee.

In June, 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if the U.S. would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the I.N.C. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign, he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in 1998 in which he spoke of restoring the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative since the creation of Israel, in 1948.


...more - big plug for folks to read the New Yorker article.

At the time it was a completely new form of government "military-private enterprise" (Hanna 1959) but I think it comes close to this administration-this is a real eye-opener of an article, and it's true.
http://www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo.html

not in the know, who may be to knew to JINSA, CSP-before PNAC was born
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest


and the corresponding Players on the Defense Policy Board


Kenneth Adelman
Richard V. Allen
Martin Anderson
Gary S. Becker
Barry M. Blechman
Harold Brown
Eliot Cohen
Devon Cross
Gen. (Ret.) Ronald Fogleman
Thomas S. Foley
Rep. Tillie K. Fowler
Newt Gingrich
Gerald Hillman
Gen. (Ret.) Charles A. Horner
Fred C. Ikle
Admiral David Jeremiah
Henry Kissinger
Adm. (Ret.) William Owens
J. Danforth Quayle
Henry S. Rowen
James R. Schlesinger
Gen. (Ret.) Jack Sheehan
Kiron Skinner
Walter B. Slocombe
Hal Sonnenfeldt
Terry Teague
Ruth Wedgwood
Chris Williams
Pete Wilson
R. James Woolsey, Jr.

have surfaced (doesn't mean they aren't there... just those "seen").

Neocons - still trying to protect Chalabi and blame CIA/Dia = Gingrich and Woolsey;

Not directly in this story - but of note ... Adelman was a supporter (wrote a book) but has backed away and become critical of the overall handling of the war.

Final note - for clarification - the Foley on this list is an East Coaster, and is not the former Speaker of the House.

Good to keep this list out - as I am sure as we tease through this story as it continues to unfold - that it is quite possible that more names will appear or reappear.

(still a spokesman, it appears)

Key Iraq cabinet posts agreed: Chalabi

Ahmed Chalabi says Iraq's Governing Council has agreed with the US-led administration and the United Nations on key posts in a new cabinet but others caution that the list is not yet final.

"The Governing Council, Bremer and Lakhdar Brahimi agreed on the list," Mr Chalabi, who is a council member, said.

"It is not 100 per cent certain that the nominees will accept it but it is pretty sure they will."

Another senior politician confirms a list has been drawn up and says it would be announced today.

But Iraq's current foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, says list is not final and has yet to be formally agreed.

more... http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1118956.htm

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000755.html

In short - distancing between Wh an Chalabi (claims that Cheney hasn't met with him since before the war.... guess they didn't even talk at the SOTU last January?)

The meeting with Rice and big Neocons (eg Perle, Wormser, Gingrich, et. al.) reportedly requested by RICE - to ask these folks not to hit at the admin on the issue - and noting that they, instead, are attacking the CIA and DIA (is this, also, what the WH wants? More setting up of the CIA...)

And more per from who the info on the leaked intel to IRan may have come.
---

Still very confusing - also note that yesterday there was a piece in the news stating that Chalabi has approved (for the IGC) the various folks being named for position in the new transitional govt. Clearly he may be on the outs with Washington - but he is still a player in Iraq.

Although my feeling is that this is the CIA fighting back against the cons, it's also possible the cons are using this event to manipulate Iraqis.

They usually signal their plans through their PR man, David Brooks.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040512/news_1e12brooks.html

DAVID BROOKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
For Iraqis to win, the U.S. must lose
May 12, 2004

This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq. The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have.

<snip>

Now, looking ahead, we face another irony. To earn their own freedom, the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory over us.

If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose.

That means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the hearts of Iraqi patriots.

a very small item - from Australian Broadcasting Service (that cites bbc) - per a raid - today it appears - on Chalabi's offices.

Also just found that a private contractor was involved in the raid on his home - want to read that item more closely before posting it.

This is so murky that even if there were an attempt to either set him up for local legitimcay - or a set up to go to war against Iran - it isn't going to work. Too many multiple knives pointed at one another seem to be emerging.

and his cohorts and Iran playing the Admin. for fools. I don't think the CIA is involved in this, at least not in opposing the admin. in this instance. The two (at least) sides as I see it are the Neocons (using US resources, but probably not directly) vs. Chalabi/Iran/Iraqi nationals and Various other Arab intel agencies etc...

that article's angle was that the two were rivals - but appear to have come together to block the first name being floated, and appear to be (temporarily??) united on this effort. Concessions made to Chalabi?

How many times in history do we have to see fractioned Arabs uniting to defeat the invading infidel hoardes?

The Enemy of My Enemy is not Our friend.

Police surround Chalabi's office

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1119198.htm

(very little information yet)

Posted on Sun, May. 30, 2004

Chalabi Staffers Evacuated From Office

Associated Press


BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi police on Sunday demanded that staffers of Ahmad Chalabi's political movement evacuate their building in a city west of Baghdad, but officials said they were trying to sort out the situation with the authorities.

Police arrived at the Ramadi offices of his Iraqi National Congress movement and ordered everyone to leave the building, according to INC official Haider al-Musawi. He said the evacuation order came from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

"We are trying to solve this problem peacefully and legally without causing any problems," Haider said by telephone.

link ala the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4148836,00.html

:kick:

and JINSA,CSP and the Defense Polciy Board.

During Clinton's term Sec. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to 'dispand'
the Office of Net Assessment. The letter of opposition can be found at the PNAC website.

i really have only one question,

is Chalabi to be the fall guy and, how much control do the Players have over the current state of events- is all going according to their plans?

on Rubin, his writings in international publications are interesting
and he does his PR work well; undermining UNSCOM and the U.N., as supporters of terrorists
but his past/present connections are harder to find.

what it is intended to do - any idea why Cohen tried to disband it?

I am not sure that Chalabi was initially intended to be a fall guy - seems as though he was getting harder and harder to control... but he is hard to deal with as he has access to Saddam's papers (and the intel collected by the IGC and, I believe, CPA). Yesterday he was speaking as an IGC spokesperson. Today his offices are raided. What to make of it?

I think our players are trying to keep as much control as possible - but that some of it has suddenly spun so far out of control that they are in panic mode. Josh Marshall suggests (echoing our own beetwasher) that the IGC pushed this themselves - taking advantage of the bit of chaos going on. Just read a Salon piece that puts former rivals Chalabi and Allawi working in cahoots (for the moment?!) and both have connections to our boys, though Allawi, it seems, has remained on better terms with the CIA.

has been around since 1973
it has been difficult to determine exactly, with the exclusion of Rhodes, Wolfowitz and Andrew Marshall himself has been a part of the
Office-at least officially.

But the famailiar names are all there, connected one way or another to this Office and others. I disagree with your statment above that very few of the usual suspects from JINSA, CSP and PNAC are showing up in connection with the Chalabi story. They're all there thru their individual Defense offices'.
in my opinion, they'll publicly distance themselves from one another-Perle has already begun-but, it is for show. These guys aren't going away, first JINSA and CSP then PNAC, different names but, the members are the same as are the philosophies/planned outcomes.

exceprt on Andrew Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment

The Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, "the Pentagon's internal think tank,"<1> was "created and Andrew Marshall was named its first director in 1973, and Marshall has been reappointed by every administration and Secretary of Defense since then. The accomplishments of the office are legion. In the 1970s, it produced the analyses of U.S. and Soviet military investment that compelled the Carter administration to reverse the decline in American military spending. It produced the analysis that moved the U.S. nuclear posture away from massive retaliation and towards a strategy that would better deter Soviet nuclear aggression. It was also the office that persistently called attention to the vast overestimates of the Soviet GNP that were put out by the CIA during the Cold War. It was the first to develop the idea that the American military can be transformed by the revolution in information technology. Every Secretary of Defense for twenty-five years, regardless of party, has kept Andrew Marshall close to him, because Marshall spoke truth to power." --Gary J. Schmitt, Project for the New American Century, November 10, 1997.<2>

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Net_Assessment

heck I would bet that many of connections to Chalabi (esp through "business interests" in Iraq). Was just refering to the names that I had run across in the various news items I have been following (eg those who are most visible.)

Ah the offic is an internal "think tank"... no wonder it was so closely tied to the OSP (see Karen Kwiatowski's article up thread). Clearly it no longer (if ever) "speaks truth to power"... am just glad that this fact is finally being exposed to the light of day.

Andrew Marshall worked closely with Abram Shulsky

Abram Shulsky launched his career under the tutelage of Roy Godson, son of a leading AFL-CIO International Department counterinsurgent, Joseph Godson; and he first got into the 'intelligence business' as a staffer for Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) poster-boy Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan in the late 1970s, eventually becoming staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, later, of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB)."<2>

Shulsky is in the OSP- a student of Strauss'(oh boy, aren't they all !!!)

And collaborated with I.Lewis Libby and Cheney on the report
"From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War." It has become to official Pentagon official strategy.

I don't know if this has been posted yet-worth reading

More from Robert Dreyfuss

"A so-called weapons of mass destruction investigation is underway, according to a July 2003 article by Robert Dreyfuss -- Could WMD become Bush's Watergate? -- published in the UK's Red Pepper:
Like OJ Simpson looking for his wife's killer, the Pentagon is scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to al Qaeda. So far, of course, they haven't found any. And some reports claim they've run out of places to look.

But in Washington everybody is looking for a weapon of another kind: a *smoking gun'. Thirty years ago, the smoking gun of Watergate brought down the president.

With at least four separate official bodies conducting investigations into whether the George W. Bush/Bush administration distorted or fabricated intelligence that it used to justify the war in Iraq, it's at least an even bet that the scandal over Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction will explode in Bush's face later this year.

John W. Dean, the whistleblower who helped unravel Richard M. Nixon's administration in 1973, is already comparing the current situation to Watergate. And Charles W. Freeman, Jr., a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says this scandal is far worse. 'Watergate was an interference with the electoral process,' Freeman says. 'But this involves systematic deception, prevarication and lies in matters of national security.'

At the heart of the matter is a tiny but very powerful team of intelligence people who took root at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP). Started as a two-person shop in October 2001, the OSP swelled to 18 under the leadership of Abram Shulsky, a hard-line neo-conservative strategist with close ties to the hawks in the Bush administration.

Operating in utter secrecy, the unit took intelligence developed by the CIA, the DIA and other bodies, blended it with information generated by Ahmed Chalabi's unreliable Iraqi National Congress, and produced intelligence bits and pieces that guided statements by leading administration officials.

So far the scandal has barely hit the political register, however. Polls continue to show that Americans aren't concerned that the Pentagon has failed to uncover WMD in Iraq. And most of the Democratic candidates for president have skittered away from the issue. 'I don't think the failure to find WMD is going to resonate with the US people,' says the campaign manager for one of the Democrats' leading presidential hopefuls."
---snip---


http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Weapons_of_mass_destruction_investigation

thanks.

so far is that, orchestration on the part of neocons to push for the eventual invasion of Iran and Syria.

if Chalabi did go his own way, WHY?
for Power in Iraq- power and money?

without a draft - they can't wage another simultaneous war. Doesn't mean they won't try to keep vilifying Iran every chance they can get to set the stage for a future invasion.

I think Chalabi has always been as much of an opportunistic user as the neocons themselves. Wouldn't be surprised if he did get help from the Iranians in getting the dubious intel to pass on to the panting neocons (to give them their case for war.) Wouldn't be surprised if he was hedging his bets with Tehran and doing some double dealing - and heck - the neocons and DC knew he had Iranian ties - so I am sure that he is as arrogant as they (neocons) are and thinks he can continue as he always have and they won't interfere.

Am also pretty sure that he felt he had as much goods on them (both from their dealings, and from being given immediate access to all of Hussein's papers) to believe that they wouldn't turn on him - and thus he could do as he pleased. But things haven't been going his way in the past couple of months... bringing in Brahimi.. moving towards the UN - he knew he wasn't going to be (as promised, I am sure) the Prime Minister. Lots of reasons for him to start acting out of turn.

I don't know that I think this is how it is playing out - I really can't get a sense yet. I do think that things are very out of control and many players/entities are trying to sabatoge one another. To we who are outside observers - it just appears very, very murky (which is how, I am sure, the powers that be like it.)

is it possible that the neocons thought the world (the U.N.) would be behind them this time with Iran? we've had the IAEA in there for nuclear inspections/programs...reading through some of Rubin's articles today i was reminded of an 'admission' by King Abdullah of Jordan that, Iran had plans to attack Israel from within its borders...and he does lean heavily on regime change there.

you're probably right about Chalabi,
but what were the rest them thinking???

the other pet project of the PNAcers... that there may be an effort to set up some kind of action by Syria via some kind of planned provocation (remember the skirmish at the border where troops went into Syria) - and set in motion a "preemptive" move taken not by the US, but by Israel. There are problems with the scenario... but who knows. Your speculations per (the neocon belief) per the UN and Iran - could follow a similar line of thinking (by the neocons). Hard telling.

I don't think we will ever be rid of their influence, and in many cases their lies and disinformation which has ruined our countries foreign policy.

Where does one find a fresh slate? By now they've indoctrinated so many followers into their "philosophy" that until their "philosphy" is totally reviled and crushed under it's own hubris, there's not much chance of a change.

could his motive in possibly feeding Chalabi info be twofold

in a few of Rubin's articles he speaks poorly of Bush, career diplomats and Bremer in dealing with Iraq- to strength Chalabi's role, a counterpoint position???

would dealing with Chalabi anger Iranians? would their 'disinformation' campaign (if that is indeed what happened)
anger Iranians because its effect was war with Iraq?
would it lead them to revolt against Iranians leaders????

it is clear from Rubin's writing that he wishes to see Regime Change in Iran,

if Rubin did in fact release top secret info to Chalabi,
what was his motives in doing so, in lieu of intense dislike for The Islamic Republic, the U.S.' relations with and, his desire for Regime change?

i can't find the reasoning behind his actions
unless it is so obvious that it's alluding my conspiratorial mind.

It's possible Chalabi was in deep enough w/ these guys to AQUIRE it with them knowing...

not to discredit him, as some have stated
but to out the treasonous bastards in the Administration, Pentagon, DoD.

A foreign National should not have access to Top Secret Intelligence.
The CIA has been 'treated' badly by Rumsfeld et.al.
Their experienced people have been sidelined,ignored but then, made the easy scapegoats when the LIES are exposed. One of their own outed...Perle may be closer to the truth than we realize.

They're targeting him for dual reasons.

They certainly DO want to bust up his spy ring and find out just exactly how much damage he's done, but they ALSO want to expose the seedy under-belly of Chimpco.

They have just as much stake in this as anyone. I firmly believe that Chimpco. was dealing w/ Chalabi outside of established intel networks via the the OSP and the parallel intel ops they set up. They've been bypassing the CIA (and other established agencies) to do their dirty work w/ Chalabi and to cook the Iraq intel. The CIA, or at least the main and proper parts of it have been out of the loop. So while this IS an indirect move against Chimpco. through Chalabi that serves to expose their treason, it's also in some sense a fishing expedition in which they're looking for some answers, enlightenment and evidence.

some work with Chalabi... but also work to undo Chalabi. Don't have a read on it... yet. Remember early on in the preIraqyear Rummy was making noise about not trusting the "quality of the lifers" in the DIA (hence they needed their own intel arm... but it wasn't an intel arm it was a cooking office... )

cooperativeresearch.org's Iraq timelime
(long)
looking for reminders and clues

this jumped out at me after reading your post re: DIA

August 2002

Defense Intelligence Agency reservist and Penn-State political-science professor Chris Carney and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith give two presentations on Iraq's alleged ties to al-Qaeda to the CIA at the agency's Langley headquarters. CIA analysts are not impressed, having seen much of the information before and having already determined that it was not credible. Some of the information will nevertheless be included in speeches by Bush and in testimony by Tenet to Congress. The information is also put into a classified memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee by Feith, which is later leaked to The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine.
People and organizations involved: Douglas Feith, Chris Carney

(Chalabi's associate who has fled to Iran, was known by us intel to have associations with Iranian intelligence, and was put in charge of the intelligence collection efforts of the IGC (an operation which may have been run somehow WITH the DIA). At the same time - some of the push back (including some of the accusations against CHalabi, and maybe some participation in the original raid) came from, allegedly, the DIA.

I have missed the Iraq timeline to which you refer - could you post the link?

if anyone can make sense of all this it's you.

i did a search with the timeline specific to the DIA
link specific

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/searchResults.jsp?searchtext=Defense+Intelligence+Agency&events=on&entities=on&references=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=+Go+




complete Iraq timeline (over 521 items)

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq

has compiled a lot info/resources on Iraq, Pentagon etc etc.

i searched their site for OSP
they do a good job of tying the different individuals and agencies together--
obvious redundancies

Dreyfuss is used often as a source
one linked to on this page he writes about the CIA getting blamed for its intelligence failures, and the other Secrets and Spies is quite good too. nothing earthshattering but, with names and events being thrown around it is easy to forget most of this stuff.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq

signing off for the night
thanks to everyone for providing valuable info and insightful discussion.

read through the data base with the DIA references - need some time to distill - both an overall impression - and a few names/items to highlight. I will follow up with it in the morning. By the way, Wow - that database... What an incredible and well sourced fount of information. I have seen references to the site, but had never read parts of their timeline before. Thanks.

I'd never even heard of him, but I was at the Weekly Standard chasing down a column by Reurl Marc Gerecht when I saw this article in the most recent issue.

It says Carney has been studying the Iraq-al Queda relationship for 18 months (as of Feb '04). So in Aug '02 when he was giving presentations about such links to the Pentagon, he hadn't even begun to study it? I think we need to add his name to the LONG list of players.

It does appear that Carney, for one, had access to some of the top secret Iraq documents that maybe Chalabi also had (it seems no one else could read them, so they let Chalabi handle it?). And what were they looking for? Apparently, ways to invent an Iraq-al Qaeda link. I have no proof, but I do think Carney may have been working with Chalabi's people on these docs. It would be interesting to know if Carney can read the docs himself. NOT that I would take his word on this.

What's most interesting about this "link" is that they are STILL trying to float it. To what end? All I can think is that they believe it's the only thing left that might save *Bush. They probably figure they can forge documents a lot easier than planting WMDs to exonerate him.

And oh yes, Chalabi is a known forger of documents (according to ex-CIA agent Baer). Augh. My mind is running ahead of known info. Anyway, here's the article:

The Connection
by Stephen F. Hayes
06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37

<<This conventional wisdom--that our two most determined enemies were not in league, now or ever--is comforting. It is also wrong.

In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.

An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

A greeter typically meets VIPs upon arrival and accompanies them through the sometimes onerous procedures of foreign travel. Shakir was instructed to work on January 5, 2000, and on that day, he escorted one Khalid al Mihdhar from his plane to a waiting car. Rather than bid his guest farewell at that point, as a greeter typically would have, Shakir climbed into the car with al Mihdhar and accompanied him to the Kuala Lumpur condominium of Yazid Sufaat, the American-born al Qaeda terrorist who hosted the planning meeting.

The meeting lasted for three days. Khalid al Mihdhar departed Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok and eventually Los Angeles. Twenty months later, he was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it plunged into the Pentagon at 9:38 A.M. on September 11. So were Nawaf al Hazmi and his younger brother, Salem, both of whom were also present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting.>>

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/152lndzv.asp

The question is how? My feeling at this point is that Bushco. was leeching off all the other intel agencies including DIA, CIA, NSC to feed their shadow intel group(s) and their dirty deals w/ Chalabi and to cook the books. Chalabi being in so deep had ample opportunity to make side deals w/ contacts within US intel to either "persuade" them or bribe them to pass him other sensitive intel. Whether Bushco. had direct/conscious knowledge of everything that was passed to him is a good question, but at the very least they enabled him and gave him opportunity to access sensitive info.

read the links sent by Buddhamama - ton of informtion - not a whole lot helpful to this story... but there are a few items - and at least one directly related to Chalabi - and this thread. Will post it in the morning....

ie that someone within his inner circle - and thus he might be aware of either who had access to a certain type of information (remember it is said to have had very little circulation due to an extremely high level of security clearance)... not sure what it means. Rozen gave clarification between his being suspect, vs. his being interviewed closely for information in one of her entries late last week (maybe Friday.)

i hate not knowing the motivations.

their actions at this point no longer surprise or shock me
but, i wanna know the WHYs behind what they do.

is why I seem to be so fixated on reading each next item - and reading what others are bringing to the thread that is related. Just have a gut feeling that behind this whole story is something happening (be it in the past or in the current - I am not sure) that is very important.

is playing everyone else and it's all starting to spin out of control.

I think what we need to watch for is the reaction of the Iraqi people to all this double-dealing crap. The man in the street is not pro-Israeli, and of course everyone remembers the disastrous Iran-Iraq war, so if they think that they've been played by everyone because the Iranians and Israelis had a joint interest in seeing their country blown to hell just to get rid of Saddam, things might get pretty damn ugly. There just might be some really big surprises left to come from in 'insurgents' in Iraq.

And now with the problems in Saudi Arabia, the entire Middle East could end up in flames.

This whole mess couldn't have turned out worse than it has.

rinse & repeat

:hi: dad & bro

She has courageously spoken out about these lying schemeing bastards along with Paul O`Neil, Richard Clarke, Amb. Wilson, and the many others who are going to help greatly in bringing down this corrupt band of fools. ...Oscar

for taking a stand, and for telling about it (and naming some names.)

This Lady has guts. She was feeding stories to Col. Hackworth`s Soldiers for truth for months prior to her retiring from the Air force. There are so many fine Military people standing up to this Administration. Mr. War President is being shown to be the little pretend soldier he always was. ...Oscar

vets, juxtaposed to the day before's news that Bush had ordered folks NOT to talk about future budget cuts until after the election - but on the ex offices orders the OMB has figured the cuts (and released them) which demonstrated slight increases in spending for next year in areas such as for Vets - but the BIG cuts the following year (wiping out the slight increases for this year and then some). Creating more vets while cutting gross spending on vets. These folks deserve a whole lot more.

Okay - I digressed. Was watching some of the WWII memorial programming today - struck hard that I would not be here, had my father not survived his service in that war. Struck hard about how many sacrifices were made. Then reflected on the craven behavior of this Administration - and those two items from two consecutive days of news - are just sticking in my throat this evening.

LBN earlier today - a new raid/evacuation of a Chalabi office happened today. A follow up item clarified... the offices were ordered evacuated by the Ministry of the Interior - because the offices are govt property and should be used by the dept of sewage and water (or something like that). Sounds like the Chalabi folks were squatting and got kicked out. But with everything.. timing is interested.

I link the post from the thread - where I dug up the names of the prior Minister of the Interior who resigned under US pressure, and the newly appointed Minster of the Interior (April 04). Any way to find out if either of these individuals have ties either to Chalabi or to the newly named future PM Allawi?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=591720&mesg_id=592474

-person who was the Min of Interior until April 4 or so: Nuri al-Badran
-Person appointed a few days later: Mr. Samir Shakir Mahmoud el-Sumaidy "a Sunni Muslim businessman on the Governing Council"

Outgoing Iraqi Interior Minister Criticizes CPA's 'Excessive' Use of Force

21 Apr 04

London: Al-Zaman in Arabic 21 Apr 04 p1

Outgoing Interior Minister Nuri al-Badran has disclosed the "real reasons" that drove him to recently tender his resignation from his post. He said that this was an attempt on his part "to cross the t's and dot the i's" amidst the wave of speculations and questions that were triggered by his resignation and his sudden departure from the capital without going over the usual handing-over procedures. In a telephone interview from his place of residence in London, Al-Badran said that several factors influenced the nature of the relationship with the coalition authority over the past few months. The coalition authority based its policy on prior advice that it had received and that drove it to cling to mechanisms that totally parted from the requirements of the current situation on the security level. These mechanisms were not in harmony with the nature and special characteristics of the Iraqi society. The coalition authority strayed away from the language of political dialogue and flexible dealing with current events. It used excessive force in dealing with emerging crises and tried to embroil the internal organs and elements in the use of this excessive force. The coalition authority did that despite the repeated warnings regarding the inadvisability of resorting to a military solution, the calls to distance the Interior Ministry from making difficult decisions, and the need to keep its functions confined to preserving security and fighting various forms of crime, especially since this ministry was still growing and was not fully ready.

Al-Badran recalled the fact that he hinted at resigning about four months ago when the coalition "insisted on embroiling the Interior Ministry forces in the city of Al-Fallujah to put an end to the attacks on its units". He insisted on the need "to contain the situation politically and not to embroil the Iraqi police force in confrontations that may have bad consequences". Al-Badran added that the same situation arose when the crisis erupted with the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. He said that the Interior Ministry is under the jurisdiction of the transitional Governing Council. It is supposed to act and operate guided by the policy of the Governing Council and to respond to the needs of the Iraqi judiciary to spread the language of law and justice. Al-Badran also attributed his differences with the coalition authority to "the absence of transparency and coordination with the Interior Ministry pertaining to the exchange of information, the secrecy related to the fate of those charged with dangerous crimes, including organized crimes, terrorism, infiltration, and so on, and the refusal to involve the security organs in the various stages of the investigations. This lack of coordination weakened the seriousness of the security organs in going after and apprehending the criminal elements".

more... not neces. related to this story but interesting nonetheless..

http://tides.carebridge.org/TIRR/D-TIRR174.htm#_Outgoing_Iraqi_Interior_Minister_Cr

from DARPA of all places...

yesterday.

Found this item... very odd references as to who did the kicking out. Frankly I can make no sense of it. http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/05/31/d40531012323.htm

on edit - this post refers to the event (and news link) in post #105.

Maybe this thread's getting too long, but I'm hoping there'll be more to add tomorrow (once the news vacuum of this weekend is over).
:kick:

they are keeping up the story, continuously collecting news/articles related to Chalabi/Iran.

nothing jumped out at me as being new
but others might want to check out their Chalabi page frequently
to see what is new. It may make following this story easier if
we have a place to go for all the latest, with links etc already established. They have a table of contents for Chalabi; gives history and current goings on.

Link Chalabi's Fall from Grace


http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Ahmed_Chalabi:_Fall_from_Grace

with some lesser known names in influential positions
who have, and are still, supporting Chalabi.

Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf

disinfopedia's page on this org.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Committee_for_Peace_and_Security_in_the_Gulf

i'm going to spend some time investigating this snake.
(a little info on Khalilzad)

Zalmay Khalilzad is the highest-ranking native Afghan and Muslim in the George Walker Bush administration. An ethnic Pashtun, he was born in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and first went to the United States as a high school exchange student.

He is one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter sent to President William Jefferson Clinton.<1>

Khalilzad received his doctorate at at the University of Chicago, where he studied closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter.

Khalilzad served under former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush as special assistant to the president for Southwest Asia, the Near East and North Africa.

From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served as a senior United States State Department official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war, and from 1991 to 1992, he was a senior Defense Department official for policy planning.

He served as a counsellor to United States Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for the Unocal Corporation.

In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan.

He has served in both the State and Defense Departments and is a member of the National Security Council.

Khalilzad became the Bush administration's special envoy to Afganistan after the fall of the Taliban as well as is special envoy to the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein.

from what i gather Khalilzad is still active in Iraq.

excerpt of article on Khalilzad/bio

"As one can see from the material posted after these comments, Zalmay Khalilzad's experience is highly specialized. He is perhaps *the* leading practical planner and on-the-scene operative for carrying out the Brzezinski strategy. It involves using Islamic fundamentalist terrorists to advance the US-led Empire. On the one hand, the fundamentalists attack secular movements and societies and take political and organizational leadership of opposition movements which can then be used as tools of the US-led Empire. On the other hand, they provide an excuse for military intervention by the Empire.

Khalilzad helped develop the notion of using the mass media to act as the public relations department for terrorists, demonizing those who resist terrorist attacks as human rights abusers.

All this is documented below.

It is my hypothesis that Khalilzad's role, at this time, is to coordinate the creation of a continuous line of Islamic fundamentalist states, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq, reaching Afghanistan and beyond. These states might be US puppets (Afghanistan) or they might *officially* have strong differences with the US government (Iran) but they must all be integrated, at least on the operational level, with the US-led Empire.

(In the past, Iran and the US have had the most hostile relations *in public* while cooperating extensively on a covert level. This is discussed at http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/deja.htm

It may be necessary for Islamic fundamentalists in countries like Iran not only to denounce the U.S., but also to organize demonstrations and even violent attacks against the current US-led invasion. That sort of thing easily deceives people who are used to thinking that the US *government* is the same as the US-led *Empire*. It is not. It is merely a *part* of the Empire.

As the documents below make clear, Khalilzad has a unique mixture of experience in both planning *and* actual work with terrorists, on the ground. There may be nobody better placed than he to coordinate joint efforts between various covert and semi-covert forces of the Empire, on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalists who must seem to oppose the US-led Empire in order to maintain their political base, on the other."

more http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/khalilzad-facts.htm


article to link Khalilzad to Iran
http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/deja.htm

a whole army of "Independent Contractors" serving in Iraq and that Blair and Bush are so "joined at the hip," I've wondered if some of the "disturbances" and "assassinations of IGC members aren't the work of these "militia" to creat chaos which works to the "Empire" theory.

I didn't know until I did some research on an ad on CBS news site that GB had it's own vast "Mercenary Army" for hire. They had posted on the CBS website looking for recruits and advertising how well they were positioned to "profit in Iraq" by providing security and handling "covert operations" for Corporate and Government interests. They are probably working in coordination with our own US Groups of CACCI, Blackwater and the assorted other contractors we are providing.

Just knowing that these "private contractors/mercenaries" are roaming around with "private missions" and not under our Army or Congress or Parliament's control is enough to make one wonder what the truth of any of the "insurgency attacts" are. It's enough to make one wonder who has
been attacking inside Saudi Arabia and for what purpose.

There's so much we don't know, the more we find out shows how much there is we don't know.

It's all very dark and as Pitt's article says: "Deep."

for other theatres is well documented so, it is not a stretch in logic to consider that it is taking place again.

more questions.

the BBC report cited in the article displays of public tension between the U.S. and Iran while secretly the two countries are working together.

before in the invasion of Iraq, Bush labeled Iran as part of his Axis of Evil. Then as time of invasion approaches and forward,
Bush is willing to work with the Iranians. (we also cannot overlook the current political unrest in Iran, with possible 'covert' interference from the U.S. )
And now, our relationship with Iran has changed once again.

i really can't help thinking that the neocons know exactly what they're doing, that none of the latest upheaval is an accident.

will limit their influence? Or, do they consider Iraq the "Mess" that we here do? There's no money left to pay for all this, even the "Mercenaries" GB and US have used to create the "second Army." The situation there is dangerous whether we are orchestrating it or not.

Is this the huge F**k up we think it is where they "over-reached" or part of a more sinister over-reaching plan which is going better than "they" meaning Neo-Con/PNAC ..ever expected? :shrug:

and theories/stories that don't add up.

the biggest one, imo, is Iran would have been feeding Chalabi bogus intel to push the U.S. into a war with Iraq. Iran wasn't worried about Saddam. And, given the choice between having Saddam as a neighbor or the U.S. occupying Iraq (in view of the PNAC's plan)
which one do you think Iran would choose?

further down i cite a Ha'aretz article from March 2003
where Frances Brooke (Chalabi's second) is considered the 'un-official' U.S. ambassidor to Iran.

Read too, my last post from David Rose of Vanity Fair
on the evidence against Chalabi...????

Francis Brooke( i quickly scanned the thread to see if this piece of info had been posted yet--sorry if it has)

while searching through disinfopedia's database
i came across this mention of Brooke from March 2003 from Ha'aretz

"Ha'aretz reported in late March 2003 that Brooke had acted as an unofficial U.S. envoy to Iran. "Iranian reports indicate ... that diplomatic messages have been transmitted between the U.S. and Iran via Francis Brooke, the American public relations assistant to Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella organization of the Iraqi opposition. Brooke was warmly welcomed in Iran before the war began, mainly thanks to his connections with Condoleezza Rice and with other senior members of the American administration. Brooke theoretically visited Iran as a participant in the conference of the heads of Iraqi opposition in Iran, but he was the only American to visit Iran recently who was not fingerprinted, as has become customary in Iran following similar U.S. treatment of Iranian citizens visiting America. Brooke met with the Iranian foreign minister and with other important people and clarified that the U.S. has no intentions of targeting Iranian installations," Ha'aretz wrote.

Brooke was on the ground in Nasiriyah in April 2003 as the U.S. military flew Ahmed Chalabi into southern Iraq over the objections of the State Department and CIA. The Age reported that Brooke "said local Iraqi leaders had brought requests for Mr Chalabi to mediate with US military authorities on matters such as power supplies and people held as prisoners of war. 'We have been receiving delegation upon delegation... we are inundated,' Mr Brooke said."<3>"

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Francis_Brooke

it's not that long ago i can probably find at ha'aretz's
to cite directly.

to the above mentioned article. i'll read it through it now and look for anything new.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtWar.jhtml?itemNo=276884&contrassID=33&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0

Street" are getting upset over the news from internet and other sources about what's going on in Iraq, the governments of the other Arab states are holding tough and trying not to critcize American involvement. Also, did you get from the article that everyone seemed to agree that Bush Admin. and Iran are closer than they are letting on? So, how does that fit with the Chalabi giving secrets to "Evil Iran?" Was this the PNAC'ers just trying to shift blame onto Chalabi by making up a story that the American public would buy and make the administration look like victims for accepting Chalabi's trumped up WMD non-evidence? Why would Chalabi be willing to take a fall and Iran also take a fall being accused of hyping info to get the Americans to Invade Iraq for their own purposes?

It's all quite odd and really fishy. I feel we are being manipulated by all these stories and in fact only a few people in the Bush Group know the real truth. Who would they be? Huge Disinformation Project Cover your Butt!"

Anyway, this is an interesting clip from the article. I'm not sure what this means either because it can be interpreted that either PNAC is being successful in "changing Arab minds" or that "Iraq is a disaster" and controlling "Arabs on the Street" could become very difficult in the future if more progress isn't made in stabilizing it.

Here's the clip:

With this, there are reports from Lebanese sources that elements in the Syrian government have held discussions about "the day after," focusing on a scenario in which Syria is liable to be subject to American pressure to promote the peace process. These discussions included the anticipation of a long American sojourn in Iraqi territory, which would necessitate Syrian cooperation with any government that is formed in Iraq under American auspices. Then there is one more thing for Hezbollah to consider. This Shi'ite organization cannot object to the ousting of Saddam, who murdered important Shi'ite clerics in Iraq. A "closeness" has been developing in recent days between Hezbollah and the Christian leadership in Lebanon and the secretary-general of the organization even offered not to call the war against Iraq "a crusade, if that expression offends Christians." Apparently, it will be quite a while before there will be any essential change in the positions of the Arab states indicating that the war against Iraq is achieving additional regional goals. For the time being each one of them is taking cover and making sure that the war against Iraq will remain just that, a war against one state.

was on the BBC's World Update this morning speaking on the evidence against Chalabi. His view is, there's something fishy going on.

Chalabi is accused of informing the Iranian Intelligence Service that, the U.S. had broken its intelligence code.

The catch, Chalabi allegedly told an Iranian Intelligence officer stationed in Iraq, and instead of driving the two hours into Iran to pass the info along to his superiors, the officer used the compromised code to relate the message.

i checked the BBC's website and they don't have the interview/story up yet. When they do, i'll post the link in case others would like to listen.

Just to add another piece here we have "deja vu" over Iran having nukes, and Admins. leak tht Chalabi was dealing with Iran. I know the PNAC crowd does want Iran out...or I thought I knew that. But, what if this is just a huge disinformation program, to focus negative attention on Iran and Chalabi connection while all the time "kissing up to them" behind the scenes.

Only problem with this, is that wouldn't Chalabi be guilty of "Treason" if he gave "secrets?" Or, did Chalabi never become an American Citizen in the first place? How far would opinion push Bush to bring Chalabi up on charges...or will they just allow him to "disappear" quietly back into the ME where he would continue to work for us as a "fugitive."

So much that just doesn't add up. :shrug:

U.S. Says Iran Hiding Nuke Bomb Program from UN
Wed Jun 2, 2004 01:43 PM ET

VIENNA (Reuters) - The United States said on Wednesday that Iran continues to cover up a nuclear weapons program and that the latest report by the U.N. atomic watchdog had only made this more apparent.

"I think that this persistent refusal to fully cooperate (with U.N. inspectors) fits a long-term pattern of denial and deception that can only be designed to mask Iran's military nuclear program," the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Kenneth Brill, told reporters.

The United States accuses Iran of running a secret nuclear weapons program that is parallel to its declared atomic energy program. Iran denies this, insisting its ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Tuesday in a confidential report on Iran, obtained by Reuters, there were two major issues it must resolve. First is the origin of enriched uranium traces found at sites in Iran, which some diplomats on the IAEA board say had raised concerns Iran was secretly enriching uranium for use in weapons.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5325324

i wondered out loud in a post to salin that, maybe, just maybe, the neocons thought they could get support from the U.N. with regards to Iran because of the IAEA being in the country conducting nuclear weapons/program inspections.

i don't think Chalabi was ever an American citizen.

Wouldn't charges against Chalabi be dangerous to his Pentagon supporters? He received sensitive, or had access to, material. something that could be tantamount to treason, not by Chalabi, but whoever gave him access. Either way, i don't see Chalabi sitting quietly if he were to be charged and prosecuted.