Cheney and the Con Man

[rodeodance]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1109-26.htm

Published on Wednesday, November 9, 2005 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)

Cheney and the Con Man
Editorial

Ahmed Chalabi probably deserves some credit for sheer nerve.

But the Bush administration deserves no credit whatsoever for maintaining a relationship with the Iraqi con man that is characterized by sheer disregard for the law and for national security.

Americans will recall that, before the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, it was Chalabi who deliberately mislead U.S. officials and the media about the supposed dangers posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile organization, Chalabi was a primary source of claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - particularly chemical and biological weapons - and that it was rapidly developing a nuclear program that posed a serious threat not just to its neighbors but to the whole world.

It was Chalabi who met with administration aides and journalists to push the line that an immediate invasion was necessary, and it was Chalabi who hooked up journalists such as Judith Miller of the New York Times and the producers of CBS' "60 Minutes" program with exiles who claimed to "know" that the Iraqis were busily building up a nuclear program. ........

[rodeodance]

1. .In other words, Chalabi was a liar. --they hit on the nail!

.....In other words, Chalabi was a liar.

But he was a convenient liar. He told administration aides - particularly those associated with Cheney's office and Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense - what they wanted to hear. And he aided the administration's campaign for war by persuading not-particularly-skeptical journalists to parrot that case.

When it became clear that Chalabi was a liar, some journalistic organizations began to examine his motivations. What they found was that Chalabi had developed a close relationship with the government of Iran, which had waged a long, bloody war against Iraq and was now looking for another means to remove Saddam's secularist government and tip the balance of power in the region.

It quickly became clear that Chalabi was not an aggrieved exile but a foreign agent seeking to get the United States to do the bidding of Iran. And it was eventually revealed that Chalabi had shared U.S. secrets with the Iranians before the war began. In 2004, his headquarters facility in Baghdad was raided by American and Iraqi forces following allegations that Chalabi had leaked vital intelligence to Iran, including the news that U.S. analysts had cracked a secret Iranian code. ........

[bonito]

3. So this meeting is between Iran and the US

Makes sense.

[Wetzelbill]

2. and that cat has nine lives too nt

[stillcool]

4. i wonder if he and Ghorbanifar are related...

this whole Iran thing has me quite befuddled. As soon as i think i might have a clue as to what is going on....it's back to the books. I seem to recall that in the Iran/Iraq war we supplied both sides, and at the end supported Saddam? It sure seems like we're playing nice with Iran now, what with the government that's likely to take power in Iraq....no?