The New Yorker - THE MANIPULATOR (Chalibi)

[maddezmom]

by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation?

Posted 2004-05-29
Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the United States and its history. “I know quite a lot about it,” he told me not long ago. It was after midnight in Baghdad, but he was still in his office in the new headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile opposition group that Chalabi helped found in 1992. As a young man, he said, he spent several years in America, earning an undergraduate and a master’s degree in mathematics from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Chalabi began studying the uses of power in American politics, and the subject developed into a lifelong interest. One episode in American history particularly fascinated him, he said. “I followed very closely how Roosevelt, who abhorred the Nazis, at a time when isolationist sentiment was paramount in the United States, managed adroitly to persuade the American people to go to war. I studied it with a great deal of respect; we learned a lot from it. The Lend-Lease program committed Roosevelt to enter on Britain’s side—so we had the Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the American people for the liberation against Saddam.” The act, which Congress passed in 1998, made “regime change” in Iraq an official priority of the U.S. government; Chalabi had lobbied tirelessly for the legislation.

Three days after our conversation, Chalabi’s Baghdad home was raided at gunpoint by Iraqi police, who were supported by American troops. His offices were also searched. Chalabi had sensed that a confrontation with the Bush Administration was imminent. As he put it, “It’s customary when great events happen that the U.S. punishes its friends and rewards its enemies.” For years, he had been America’s staunchest Iraqi ally, and he had helped the Bush Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi developed enemies at the C.I.A. who disputed his intelligence data and questioned his ethics, he forged a close bond with Vice-President Dick Cheney and many of the top civilians at the Pentagon, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Under-Secretary of Defense William J. Luti. Yet now that the occupation of Iraq appeared to be headed toward disaster, he said, many in the Administration had united in making him the scapegoat. As Chalabi saw it, he had understood America too well, and had been too successful in influencing its foreign policy. “There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for the liberation of Iraq,” he said. Then he added with a chuckle, “But how bad is that?”

Between 1992 and the raid on Chalabi’s home, the U.S. government funnelled more than a hundred million dollars to the Iraqi National Congress. The current Bush Administration gave Chalabi’s group at least thirty-nine million dollars. Exactly what the I.N.C. provided in exchange for these sums has yet to be fully explained. Chalabi defined his role simply. “I clarified the picture,” he said. His many critics, however, believe that he distorted it. Diplomatic and intelligence officials accuse him of exaggerating the security threat that Iraq posed to the U.S.; supplying defectors who offered misleading or bogus testimony about Saddam’s efforts to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; promoting questionable stories connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda; and overestimating the ease with which Saddam could be replaced with a Western-style democracy.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism specialist who now consults for the government, told me, “With Chalabi, we paid to fool ourselves. It’s horrible. In other times, it might be funny. But a lot of people are dead as a result of this. It’s reprehensible.”

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

The article goes on to say the raid on Chalibi's house was authorized by the WH.....

[many a good man]

1. It IS reprehensible

Very, very reprehensible.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Kick...

...so how chummy were Cheney and Chalabi? Did Dick tell Chalabi that we cracked Iran intelligence's internal code?

So far, the investigation seems to be covering only "senior Pentagon officials," but they might want to stop by the Old Executive Office building and talk to Crashcart.

Jeebus, is there ONE smart person in the Bush admin? :shrug:

[maddezmom]

3. more: from the crusaders

~snip~
For most of the past decade, Brooke has functioned as Chalabi’s unofficial lobbyist in Washington. Brooke, his wife, Sharon, and their children live for free in the town house, which is owned by Levantine Holdings, a Chalabi family corporation based in Luxembourg. Part home, part office, with a succession of Iraqi exiles camping out in the basement, this was the place from which Chalabi spearheaded a sophisticated marketing operation that Brooke described proudly as “an amazing success.” As he put it, “This war would not have been fought if it had not been for Ahmad.”

Brooke, who is a devout Christian, has brought an evangelical ardor to the cause of defeating Saddam. “I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do,” Brooke said. “I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor is in a ditch, God means for you to help him.”
~snip~

[Pallas180]

16. yes. chalabi

.

[Stephanie]

4. Jane Mayer's been awesome

Her recent article on Cheney/Halliburton was outstanding. Stay off small planes, Jane!

[maddezmom]

5. Cheney ,The Pentagon and Judith Miller

~snip~

An internal I.N.C. document reveals how influential the Information Collection Program was. On June 26, 2002, Entifadh Qanbar, an I.N.C. official, sent a memo to the Senate Appropriations Committee, in which he gave the I.N.C. credit for “product” cited in a hundred and eight English-language news stories that appeared between October, 2001, and May, 2002. These articles, the letter said, relayed I.N.C. information collected from “defectors, reports, and raw intelligence” about Iraq. In addition, Qanbar wrote, the I.N.C. provided its raw information directly to “U.S. government recipients,” including William Luti, at the Pentagon, and John Hannah, the special assistant for national security in the Office of the Vice-President.

The news stories in which the I.N.C. claimed to have placed its “product” include some of the most disputed journalism to appear in the prelude to the war. On December 20, 2001, Judith Miller published a front-page story in the Times about an Iraqi engineer who claimed to have direct knowledge of twenty secret chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons sites in Iraq. One site, he said, was hidden under a hospital. He also described tests of these prohibited weapons on live Kurdish and Shiite prisoners. Miller disclosed in her story that the I.N.C. had helped the engineer to leave Iraq, and had arranged the interview, and that the I.N.C.’s agenda was to overthrow Saddam Hussein. She also noted that U.S. officials were “trying to verify” the defector’s claims. Despite these caveats, Miller reported that “experts said the information seemed reliable and significant.” In a subsequent piece, she wrote that the same defector had given U.S. intelligence officials “dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases.”

The defector’s name is Adnan Ihsan Saheed al-Haideri. Since the war, neither U.N. weapons inspectors nor David Kay, a top U.S. weapons inspector, have found evidence to confirm his accounts. According to a recent Knight Ridder report, American officials escorted Haideri back to Iraq after the war, but he failed to locate any prohibited-weapons facilities. The I.N.C. reportedly provided Miller with the exclusive Haideri story three days after he had shown deception in a polygraph test administered by the C.I.A. at the request of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

When asked about Haideri’s credibility problems, a Chalabi aide who declined to be named disputed the polygraph story, saying that D.I.A. officials had told him that Haideri “was a gold mine” of information, and that “even if only three per cent of it was true” it was worthwhile.

~snip~

[Stephanie]

6. Isn't Hannah under suspicion in the Plame outting?

I believe it is Hannah and Libby who are being talked about as the targets of Fitzgerald's investigation.

[Stephanie]

7. To answer my own question - yes, he is

Libby, Wilson writes, "is one of a handful of senior officials in the administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the covert inquiry that allowed some in the White House to learn my wife's name and status, and then disclose that information to the press."

Wilson also said it's possible the leak came from Elliott Abrams, a figure in the Reagan administration Iran-Contra affair and now a member of Bush's National Security Council. And Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, may have circulated information about Wilson and Plame "in administration and neoconservative circles" even if Rove was not himself the leaker, Wilson writes.

Another possibility is that two lower-level officials in Cheney's office – John Hannah or David Wurmser – leaked Plame's identity at the behest of higher-ups "to keep their fingerprints off the crime," Wilson speculates.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040430-1156-cia-leak.html

[maddezmom]

10. wonderif Cheney etal are trying to blame the outing of Pame on Chalibi?

could this be the secret info Chalibi passed onto Iran? :shrug:

[berry]

11. Given that the info is supposed to be something about how the US

has broken Iranian codes and how it gets intel about Iran, this is NOT a far-fetched suggestion. Plame's work was in non-proliferation, so watching Iran may have been part of her work.

Granted, it seems too much a coincidence for these two issues to be related--but these days all the corruption and crime seems to be related, in a dense web controlled by a relatively small number of spiders. (What would you guess the number of real players in all this would be? a couple hundred? more?)

Note on Mayer's article--it's pieces like this, with a narrative, that make it easier to fit all the other pieces together. I was riveted and couldn't stop reading it until the end. Now, of course, I want more!

One detail I sat up and and said "whoa" at was the info that retired Gen. Wayne Downing (formerly commander of special forces in the Gulf War) had helped draft an invasion plan for Iraq for his friend, Chalabi. This was a plan that assumed it would be a cakewalk. Mayer identifies Downing as right wing.

I'd love to know more about this friendship. Also when and why Downing was hired to be an in-house "expert" on the Iraq invasion by MSNBC. (Or do I have it wrong? Is it CNN?) He had incredible air-time to spread his propaganda.

[salin]

8. My head hurts...

Just read the whole article - and there are numerous interesting points worthy of pulling out. I am out of energy, drained by reading the stupidity, duplicitness and foolishness of so many involved. Have to come back later with notes - if other folks haven't highlighted the same text. Aye-yie-yie.

[acmavm]

9. Although this article is VERY interesting and enlightening, I can see two

problems with it.

1.) It contains words that have over two syllables. This means that many of the idiots who suport this war will not be able to understand what it means.

2.) It's more than two paragraphs long. This is way too much information for the rah-rah crowd to digest. They don't have an attention span that lasts much longer than two sentences.

Other than that, if people would sit down and read articles like this, give them some serious thought, and compare the information in these articles to what we were told before the attack on Iraq and what we have discovered subsequent to the event, they would be able to see how badly we've been taken by this guy and the clowns that backed him. But that would require some real thought process, it can't be done in thirty minutes, and the reader has to be able to process the information for himself, not have it revealed for them in the last paragraph. There are a lot of people out there that don't understand life is not a television show or bad Lynn Cheney type novel. The end of the story has to be written by the reader/watcher.

[Pallas180]

17. Dimson and Chalabi merely following Papa's guidance-he did same

thing with "Iraquis pulling tubes out of babies in incubators" - remember that one? which turned out to be a total lie? by a female
plant, the daughter of some Arab ambassador or such.

[DrBB]

12. Want the really scary part?

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.”

From an office near Victoria Station, the Rendon Group set out to influence global political opinion against Saddam. Given Saddam’s record of atrocities against his own people, it wasn’t a hard sell. “It was a campaign environment, with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy,” Brooke recalled. “It was great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns.” The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the London press. Occasionally, he said, the company would be reprimanded by project managers in Washington when too many of those stories were picked up by the American press, thereby transgressing laws that prohibited domestic propaganda. But, for the most part, Brooke said, “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.”

Let's see. CIA spends tens of millions on a project to manipulate media perceptions. Of Iraq, and Saddam, nominally. Sure. But are there, let us say, serendipities? Spin-offs? What are the boundaries of such an effort and who sets 'em? After all these guys needed to burn money, not conserve it. They develop this "expertise," then what do they do with it? Apply it strictly to this one issue? Or look for other opportunities, other markets? What other clients might be interested in such expertise? Where else might it be profitably applied? And when this project goes away, is that the end of it? Be a shame to waste such a knowledge base, wouldn't it?

I'm sure they have strict ethical constraints against doing this kind of thing for, I dunno, Tony Blair or the GOP. For instance, providing cooked-up memos and incriminating documents that get "found" by Murdoch-owned journalists in Baghdad. Torpedoeing the BBC, maybe advising on how best to manage all these tell-all insiders who have been coming out against Bush lately? Who knows what kinds of opportunities have been turning up, but I suspect we're all getting the benefit of those tens of millions of dollars of ours that the CIA has been spending on this. And will, for years to come.

[demgrrrll]

13. Looks like Chalabi isn't going away

without a few more manipulations. I wonder what he has
up his sleeve.

[maddezmom]

14. look what he's up to today....guess he's now the spokesperson for the IGC

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi said the council had agreed with Washington and the United Nations (news - web sites) on Saturday on key posts in a new cabinet, but other top politicians said the names were not final.



"The Governing Council, Bremer and Lakhdar Brahimi agreed on the list," Chalabi told Reuters, referring to U.S. Iraq (news - web sites) administrator Paul Bremer and U.N. envoy Brahimi.


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

~snip~
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=721&e=1&u=/nm...

[wellst0nev0ter]

15. Liked How Clinton Was Blamed For The Failed

I.N.C. insurgency in 1996, even though the plot was betrayed to Saddam by our Kurdish "friends".

[maddezmom]

18. Jane Mayer on CNN Newsnight with Aaron Brown

she's the one that broke the Chalabi-Iran story.