The Chalabi Factor

The Chalabi Factor
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 28 July 2006

Their man - the dissident leader who sat behind the first lady in the president's box during the State of the Union address in which Bush prepared the country for war - appeared to have been working for Iran all along.

- James Bamford, "Iran: The Next War"

Ahmad Chalabi has been many things to many people over the last several years. Officials in Jordan considered him to be a petty criminal, convicting him of 32 counts of bank fraud and sentencing him in absentia to 22 years in prison.

Chalabi was, for a time, the leader of a manufactured dissident group called the Iraqi National Congress, and received millions of American taxpayer dollars thanks to the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act. This made him a source for New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who used his false information about Iraqi WMD capabilities to frighten the populace into war.

Chalabi enjoyed a short, shining moment in the spotlight during Bush's harrowingly incoherent speech to the United Nations in September 0f 2003. The occupation was only six months old at that point, and Bush was before that body to try to justify the whole thing. Below him, seated in Iraq's chair as if he were already in power, was Mr. Chalabi. Chalabi also sat beside First Lady Laura Bush during the State of the Union address that propelled America toward the invasion.

For Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the masterminds of the Iraq invasion, however, Ahmad Chalabi was the anointed one, a statesman-to-be, the man who would replace Saddam Hussein once they figured out a way to attack and overthrow his regime. Chalabi had been chosen for this position as early as 1997, before this whole mess was anything more than a twinkle in the vice president's eye.

As it turns out, September 11 gave Rumsfeld and Cheney the pretext they required. Once the so-called "cakewalk" of invasion was over, they believed, Chalabi could be installed as the next Iraqi leader and the nation could be happily run by remote control from Washington and Houston.

It didn't quite work out that way.

(snip)

It is possible, by way of a long series of very deep breaths, to objectively encompass the vast array of blunders, missteps and outright catastrophes that have marked the passage of the Bush administration. We lost two towers in New York. We lost the city of New Orleans. We invaded and occupied a nation that was no threat to destroy weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. A lot of people have been killed and maimed, and our national bank account is deeply in the red.

And now comes this Chalabi revelation, and the deep breaths stop working. This man manipulated the neo-conservatives within this administration into an invasion with false information they were all too willing to believe, and did so to gain himself a nation and its oil revenues. Once this didn't work out, this man sold our soldiers and intelligence services out to Iran in hopes of wrangling himself into power by way of a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government run by remote control out of Tehran.

Ahmad Chalabi was able to do all this because Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration picked him, groomed him, touted him, championed him, and helped him along every step of the way. Ahmad Chalabi was the physical manifestation of their dreams for Iraq. He has become, instead, the physical manifestation of absolutely everything that has gone sideways since this catastrophe was first undertaken.

2,570 American soldiers are dead, along with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Those civilians are dying now at the rate of 100 a day, according to the Washington Post, killed in the streets in a wave of sectarian violence that has all but doomed that nation to complete chaos. Iran, more than any other nation, reaps the benefits of this terrible situation.

Ahmad Chalabi has been many things to many people. Now, with the story fully told, we know him to be a back-stabbing spy for Iran. We know him to be responsible for an unimaginable number of deaths, thanks to the assistance he gave Iran in tracking our troops and foiling our intelligence networks.

We know him to be a long-time friend and boon companion of Donald Rumsfeld.

More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072806Z.shtml

This sounds like a Vonnegut novel.

Iran's the big winner in this mess. Is he still running the Ministry of Oil in Iraq?

But more importantly. . . what is the significance of that guy smoking a butt in a lion's mouth?

Likely the most stunning reporting I have seen since the begining of the war. It will never see the light of day i the MSM.

Thanks for spreading it a bit further!

snip>

The FBI suspected that Chalabi, a Shiite who had a luxurious villa in Tehran and was close to senior Iranian officials, was actually working as a spy for the Shiite government of Iran. Getting the U.S. to invade Iraq was apparently part of a plan to install a pro-Iranian Shiite government in Baghdad, with Chalabi in charge.

snip>

The question: who was running whom?


Interesting article

is for all this to just stop.

course most people didn't & still don't know who he was & the role he played. If you haven't read Bamford's "Pretext to War.." do so. It was the best book I've read on the lead up to the Iraq war. It didn't get that much play time because he was linking the Neo-cons to Israel and he was starting to be labeled - anti-semitic.

Chalabi is your typical corporate crook that the Bushies love so much. All the signs were there - he is still wanted in Jordan for bank fraud & did some fraud in Lebanon as well. The US was paying his organization 300K a month for years to get 'info' on Iraq. He feed us what we wanted to hear and pocketed the money. If I'm not mistaken - he is the one that gave us 'curve ball' as a source on Iraq.

I remember his arrest in Iraq and the fact that he sat behind Laura during the state of the Union speech. He was their man for Iraq & they were cheering him on "Chalabi, Chalabi, he's our man, if he can't do it no one can' - I thought - whoa they got him now that he has been arrested - well low & behold nothing came of it. Next thing you know it he is some Iraq minister. Here is a guy who was caught red handed and should have been shot for treason - and now everything is forgotten and honky dory. :mad:

here at du? i remember that this issue was discussed on whether or not he was a spy. i know there were iraqi bloggers who knew he was a fraud although they may not have known he was this far involved.
just think he sat next to laura the unloved during the state of the union speech while he was selling out our country to the Iranians

yes there has been much reported about Chalabi on DU and elsewhere from way back, and yet even recently Chalabi was treated like royalty when visiting DC. People generally still have not woken up to the fact that our administration embraces and rewards treasonous behaviour.

his spying for Iran, but the STATE DEPARTMENT intervened

did you see the Rolling Stone article by Bamford, or the thread here on it?

this is a MAJOR news story, one that we've been waiting for patiently to finally receive coverage. It's also odd that only Rolling Stone is covering this.

The Office of Special Planning (OSP)?

Or whatever equivalent they give foreign leaders who keep their mouths shut.

:grr: It's the incompetence :mad: Driving me mad I tell ya .

Great piece Will :loveya:

My family is very familiar with his. For multiple generations my family had gone toe to toe with his in Iraqi politics, and i'm even, sadly, related distantly (a marriage that ended in divorce but produced children who are my cousins)

They are cheats and scoundrels and have been for generations. When this whole thing first came up and Chalabi was in the forefront my family was very vocally worried. They, we, knew he couldn't be trusted.

Ah well. Bush et al didn't care.

Thanks to LiberalConspiracy.Com for the photos!

These guys bought into everything this spy told them. What did he get in the election in Iraq? something less than 2%?

He's got an inventory to sell; that's what he does.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is a procurer of the first order. Or maybe of the 4th or 5th order, since the whores he hires are so lackluster in performance.

:kick:

The mafia in the White House must have dossiers on everyone in D.C.

...and when Chalabi is finally gunned down by masked men it will probably be for the wrong reasons as well.

I can't believe that the "Grownups" fell for all of this crap. I'm just a dude and I saw right through it all. From those moments when the twin towers were still burning, before they fell down, I saw through it all. (and I saw that happen with my own two eyes) The "Grownups" must be REALLY stupid! Or maybe, just maybe, their REAL agenda is being properly carried out and the sheer incompetence that we are seeing is willful? Ya think?

There is only one way out of all of this. Iraq needs to be partitioned or split up into three countries. The fucking Turks need to get over the fact that there will be a Kurdistan and the Neo-Cons (what will be left of them after the Revolution) need to get over the fact that the Shiite partition will be aligned with Iran. Israel needs to get their fucking settlers back inside of their pre-1967 borders and the Palestinians and Hezbollah need to understand that if they don't stop their shit, Israel is gonna rightly kill them. Along with innocent babies, because that's their style. I'm just a dude, and I know this, what's wrong with the fucking geniuses in Washington that they can't figure this out?

Oh yeah... this is all what they WANT to happen...

Subject: Chalabi met with Rice & Cheney after passing Iran state secrets.
Message:
From Wikipedia; "In November 2005, Chalabi traveled to the U.S. and met with top U.S. government officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Robert Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser. At this time Chalabi also traveled to Iran to meet with controversial Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

While no doubt Chalabi was traveling under an Iraqi diplomatic passport, and protected from arrest by the concept of diplomatic immunity, that he would be received by those in charge of America’s national security after having destroyed an intelligence asset of vital importance (to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars the intercept technology cost taxpayers) is an insult of the highest order.

Clearly Chalabi’s passing of state secrets to Iran received the tacit approval of the Bush administration, just as the outing of Valerie Plame was approved in the oval office.

There is another security breech from this administration that’s worse than the Plame and Chalabi breeches. Condi released information that lead to the press identifying Pakistani Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan to justify a bogus “orange terror alert” in the days before the 2004 Presidential election. Who was Khan? Only an al Qaeda computer communications expert that had been turned (turned = persuaded by the gentle means of the ISI to become a double agent). He was passing communications from al Qaeda’s leadership to Pakistani intelligence When Rice blew his cover. After admitting that she had released the damaging information a few days later she recanted her admission.