As I said in a previous thread on Chalabi, nobody should be surprised by any of these actions by him. Conspiracy theories aside, he was long-known to be a crook and unreliable by our own government and it was not until the neo-cons took control that he received any credence or backing. It's good to see that he has been given the boot from favor . . .
George W. Bush last Feburary, on Meet The Press: Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein? President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion. George W. Bush yesterday , Rose Garden press conference: Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that's fallen out of favor within your administration. I'm wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly -- THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi? Q Yes, with Chalabi. THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him. ...
As Robert Baer, former CIA mideast hand said (roughly, paraphrasing): Chalabi scammed the US, but the US wanted to be scammed.
Tip of the Iceberg? The probe into alleged Chalabi leaks to the Iranians may widen WEB EXCLUSIVE By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Updated: 6:42 p.m. ET June 02, 2004 June 2 - The Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi—formerly a key ally of the Bush administration—is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, government sources told NEWSWEEK. The allegation that Chalabi may have supplied the Iranians information about U.S. military plans comes on the heels of recent disclosures that Chalabi or others in his organization may have compromised more recent U.S. intelligence operations by leaking what officials initially described as “extremely sensitive” and “highly classified” information to Iranian officials—information which could “get people killed” if abused by the Iranians. NEWSWEEK has learned that the National Security Agency first uncovered evidence indicating Chalabi’s possible compromises of U.S. intelligence and sent a criminal referral to the FBI requesting an investigation into the alleged leak to Iran. A similar referral was sent to the FBI by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which until recently was responsible for managing Pentagon payments to Chalabi’s group and for supervising its intelligence-collection efforts. Last week, U.S. intelligence officials requested that NEWSWEEK and several other media organizations refrain from publishing some details about what kind of intelligence information Chalabi and the INC were alleged to have given to the Iranians. After some details surfaced in print and TV reports earlier this week, however, officials withdrew their requests, leading to a spate of media reports alleging that Chalabi or one of his associates told the Iranians that U.S. intelligence had cracked a secret code system used by the Iranian intelligence service. U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official. The evidence that Chalabi had compromised U.S. codebreaking was disclosed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney several weeks ago and was a factor in the decision to raid the INC’s headquarters in Baghdad last month. It also influenced high-level Bush administration efforts to distance the administration in recent days from Chalabi, who had once been viewed by Pentagon civilians as a favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as Iraq's government leader. "This is an enormous loss to the U.S. intelligence community," one former U.S. intelligence official said today about the reported leak of the secret code system. "Obviously, the Iranians are not going to use that code anymore. We're going from having a complete window into what their intelligence service was doing to having no window at all." Until last month, Chalabi’s INC was being paid $340,000 per month out of secret Defense Department intelligence funds for “information collection.” Officials of the NSA and DIA declined to comment. But law-enforcement sources confirmed that the FBI has opened an investigation into the codebreaking leak. The investigation will look into whether Chalabi or his group supplied information about U.S. codebreaking efforts to the Iranians. But, given that Chalabi is not a U.S. citizen and does not have a U.S. security clearance, the more critical issue for investigators will be to find out who in the U.S. government might have leaked such highly sensitive information to Chalabi and the INC, some officials say. Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Chalabi and some of his supporters in Washington have insisted that not only did he not compromise U.S. intelligence information by leaking it to Iran but that neither he nor his routine U.S. contacts had access to such tightly guarded American secrets. Chalabi’s supporters claim that the Iranian leak investigation is simply being used by Chalabi’s enemies in the U.S. bureaucracy—particularly at the State Department and CIA—as an excuse to have him sidelined from the Iraqi political process. They see the related FBI investigation as an excuse for a "witch hunt" against Chalabi supporters inside the administration and in the Pentagon in particular. Administration officials are treating the allegations with deadly seriousness, however. In remarks to reporters today, White House national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged: “Now, it’s no secret that the relationship with Ahmad Chalabi has been somewhat strained of late.” President Bush also distanced himself from Chalabi, saying he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times. U.S. officials say the investigations into Chalabi’s activities may have a long way to go. In addition to the inquiry into the leak of classified information to Iran, Chalabi and the INC are under investigation for corruption by Iraqi authorities, who last month staged a raid on his home and office in Baghdad, and last weekend drove INC personnel out of a satellite office in the Iraqi provinces. One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.
The NY Times got fooled by Chalabi *and* his niece. I'm not sure who is slower, the NY Times or the Bushies. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000522848 Details Emerge on Stint by Chalabi Niece at 'NY Times' By E&P Staff Published: June 01, 2004 NEW YORK During the five months that Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, worked for The New York Times in 2003, the reporter who hired her, Patrick Tyler, published nine pieces that mentioned her now-disgraced uncle, according to an article published today by The New Yorker. During this time, she also personally helped Chalabi get across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq. The Times fired Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached New York. According to the article by Jane Mayer, "two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper's war coverage, hired Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper's office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi's daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father's efforts while she was working for the Times. . . .
From Newsweek ... One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans. Could get ugly. -- Josh Marshall
Gossipy and interesting take on the Chalabi scandal. Chalabi: What Really Happened Robert Dreyfuss June 03, 2004 Was the United States set up by Chalabi? Was Chalabi set up by Iran? Some answers and more questions about the scandal surrounding Chalabi and our leaders who trusted him. Robert Dreyfuss writes The Dreyfuss Report blog and is currently working on a book about America's policy toward political Islam over the past 30 years. Here’s what apparently happened in the Chalabi case. My story is based in part on a conversation with a well-connected intelligence veteran. Chalabi had been blabbing about anything and everything to the Iranians for months, especially to the Iranian intelligence chieftain in Baghdad. Because the United States had broken the Iranians’ code, the Iranian official’s reports of his talks with the gabby Chalabi routinely started showing up on the desk of intel officers around Washington, and Chalabi starting becoming even more of a laughingstock than usual among insiders. Then, the gaggle of neocon, pro-Chalabi backers decided to tell Chalabi to shut up, and they warned him that reports of his talks were being picked up by the National Security Agency, which was monitoring the cable traffic from the Iranian intelligence station in Baghdad to Teheran. In doing so, they made the mistake of telling Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken. So Chalabi, in a panic, went to the Iranian spy, saying something like, ‘Look, I can’t talk to you anymore, at least not openly, because the CIA is listening to your cable traffic.” Now Chalabi is a notorious fabricator, and there’s no reason to think that the Iranians would take him any more seriously than the CIA does. Then one of two things is possible: either the Iranian intelligence chief in Baghdad didn’t believe Chalabi, and once again just sent an account of Chalabi’s blathering to Iran; or, the Iranians decided to burn Chalabi on purpose, and sent the message knowing it was going to be picked up and that Chalabi would be trashed. In either case, the message was picked up, Chalabi was caught by the NSA, and now the investigation is underway. The Iranians have a lot more assets in Iran than Chalabi, and it’s silly to think that Teheran needs the portly fabricator for anything. Iran has thousands of agents in Iraq, ties to Muqtada al-Sadr, to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and to Al Dawa, another Islamic fundamentalist party. Chalabi, they don’t need. (The Washington Post ought to win an award for its cartoon today: Chalabi sitting next to a bearded Iranian mullah, saying: “The United States would be easy to conquer and Iranians would be greeted as liberators.”) In any case, the investigation is underway in Washington, and suspects are worried. As Andy Sipowicz, the streetwise cop on NYPD Blue, would growl, “They’re lawyering up.” The FBI is hot on the trail of some of the neocon ringleaders of Operation Bungle Iraq, including Doug Feith, Bill Luti, Harold Rhode and other Pentagon officials, along with Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official now at the American Enterprise Institute. (The Pentagon, and Rubin, who told me last week that “it is untrue,” have denied that they are being investigated.).But, according to intelligence sources, Pentagon officials are looking for attorneys, adding that one of them has hired Plato Cacheris, the mouthpiece of the national security-afflicted. The New York Times reports that the FBI is polygraphing Defense Department officials. (Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Chalabi Party?) It has the potential to become a new full employment program for the legal profession, paralleling the apparent White House scramble for lawyers in the investigation of the Valerie Plame leak. President Bush, taking time out from being a War President, might soon become a Defendant President. Worried about being frog-marched out of the White House, Bush has consulted a hotshot Washington lawyer, James Sharp.
