Busted neo-con icon, Ahmad Chalabi.

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Busted neo-con icon, Ahmad Chalabi.
17
Sat, 05-22-2004 - 12:16am

"The truth will out". I'm amazed this man was ever trusted.


http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907752980


The spectacular rise and sudden downfall of Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the Pentagon ideologues who launched the war in Iraq and saw him as its future leader, would look Shakespearean in its plot development were it not so shabby, and the irreducible reality of Iraq not so bloody and still so distant from catharsis.











Front pages across the world illustrated the drama through the splintered glass of a framed portrait of Mr Chalabi, smashed after US troops raided his Baghdad house on Thursday. As the ghost of Hamlet's father put it in a different context: "Oh what a falling off was there!"


Mr Chalabi's recent history in many ways encapsulates the delusionary nature of the US adventure in Iraq - not least because it was he who fed these delusions to his patrons at the Pentagon. Some of the most alarming stories the Bush administration passed on to its allies as intelligence - such as the one about Saddam Hussein's mobile biological weapons laboratories - were the fabrications of defectors supplied on demand by Mr Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC). Colin Powell, the US secretary of state who repeated these assertions to the United Nations Security Council as justification for the war, earlier this month described that particular information as "deliberately misleading".


Mr Chalabi's claim that Iraqis would welcome US troops with flowers, moreover, played perfectly to the gullibility of the neo-conservatives in and around the Pentagon who had long been determined to invade Iraq and use it as a lever to reshape the Middle East. But if they were taken in by these stirring tales, it was and is their fault; the record of Mr Chalabi is no mystery.


The INC leader is a brilliant man who lobbied Washington with charm and conviction. A western-educated, secular member of Iraq's Shia majority, he must have seemed an ideal projection of Iraq's future after regime change, a seductive image confused as reality. It seems to have given no one pause that he had no standing in Iraq, which he left as a boy. Or, indeed, that he was best known in the region for the Petra bank fraud in Jordan, for which he was sentenced to 22 years in jail in 1990 (he fled the country to avoid imprisonment). He says he was set up by Saddam; that is not what knowledgeable bankers in Amman and Beirut say.


In 2001 the INC - which has received nearly $40m (£22.5m) from Washington - fell foul of a US audit reported to have uncovered expenditure on paintings for its offices and gym subscriptions for its staff. Now, it appears, the INC seems to have profited from last year's currency changeover in Iraq. Mr Chalabi, a gifted mathematician whose doctoral thesis was on Knot Theory, has left a lot of loose ends dangling in his controversial career.


Unsurprisingly, when the US flew him and his self-styled "Free Iraqi" militia into Iraq last year, those Iraqis who knew him were unimpressed. His part in persuading the occupation authority to dissolve the regular army, as well as a blanket purge instead of the selective rooting out of Saddam's henchmen, top the lengthy list of misjudgments of the past year. So bad has Mr Chalabi's relationship with his former patrons become that officials in Washington are accusing him of passing US intelligence to Iran.


Yet it would be quite wrong to make Mr Chalabi a scapegoat. Ultimately, he was the construct of geo-political fantasists in Washington, which is surely where the responsibility lies for his and their shortcomings.

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Tue, 05-25-2004 - 5:02pm
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Perhaps in fifty years or so we will have a fuller perspective of current events. It will be called when the nation of reason lost it. But absolute truth, in MO doesn't exist, it is always determined through a partiular perspective. We have facts but their understanding relies on human intellect--totally subjective.

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-20-2003
Wed, 05-26-2004 - 1:03am
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I agree. There is no truth only perception is how I've heard it put before.

It's difficult to remember when you are in a heated discussion, speaking for myself only of course.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Wed, 05-26-2004 - 3:57pm
<>

Of course, no one likes to be off balance, we want to stand firmly upon our values and opinions, so we fool ourself into thinking there is a truth and we know it. A reminder now and then helps me.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sat, 05-29-2004 - 9:28pm
Why the raided Chalabi's home. Concluding paragraphs of a WP column.

For several months, U.S. officials have been investigating people affiliated with the INC for possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency that took place from Oct. 15 last year to Jan. 15, according to a U.S. occupation authority official familiar with the case. The official said the raids were partly related to that investigation.

At the center of the inquiry is Nouri, whom Chalabi picked as the top anti-corruption official in the new Iraqi Finance Ministry. Chalabi heads the Governing Council's finance committee and has major influence in its staffing and operation.

When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out in return, they discovered a shortfall of more than $22 million. Nouri, a German national, was arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority. He is being held in a maximum security facility, according to three sources close to the investigation.

In recent weeks, several other Finance Ministry officials have been arrested as part of the investigation. A U.S. official familiar with the case said, "We are cracking down on corruption regardless of names involved."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43761-2004May20_2.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 06-02-2004 - 9:20am

Reports: Chalabi tipped Iran about codes.


Ahmad Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile who recently lost his standing as a special friend of the Bush administration, told Iran that the United States had broken the code of its intelligence service, according to broadcast and published reports.


CBS News initially reported Tuesday that Chalabi had told an Iranian intelligence official that the United States had cracked its codes, allowing U.S. agents to read Iran's secret communications.


Revealing such information would expose one of the United States' most important sources of information about Iran.


Following the broadcast report, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post followed with similar stories, all quoting anonymous U.S. intelligence officials.


More.......... http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/02/us.chalabi.ap/index.html

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 06-03-2004 - 4:28pm

The Christian Science Monitor's most recent article.........


Chalabi: Spy or victim?


 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Thu, 06-03-2004 - 5:25pm


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