The Business Of Intelligence
Chalabi Still Cashing In
Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile leader of the Iraqi National Congress, is still on the Pentagon’s payroll, according to Knight-Ridder. Chalabi’s so-called intelligence service, the "Intelligence Collection Program," is getting $3-4 million a year from the Pentagon. (Knight-Ridder gently points out: “It. . . suggests some in the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq’s political future.”)
The INC’s intelligence program is the selfsame unit that manufactured faked intelligence and pushed bogus defectors to help the Pentagon justify its invasion of Iraq. As I reported last week, Chalabi has already admitted that he may have faked the intelligence, but gloated that it worked.
In its report, Knight Ridder also notes that the INC sent its phony intelligence directly to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans(OSP) and to Cheney’s office:
"The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder newspapers, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.
The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.
The INC also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff."
That is tasty grist for the investigative mill, since it catches the Pentagon in an outright lie that its secretive OSP didn’t engage in intelligence collection, only analysis.
Meanwhile, an investigative report is about to be released in Israel that could tie Ariel Sharon to faked intelligence on Iraq, too. It’s hush-hush what the Israeli report will say, but some Israeli officials have close ties to Chalabi, and Israel provided intelligence to Washington on Iraq. In a story I wrote for The Nation last summer, I noted that some U.S. intelligence experts believe that Sharon’s office may have created the doctored documents that said Iraq sought uranium in West Africa. (That’s the scandal that led to Plamegate.)
According to Jane’s (no left-wing rag, that), which reported the state of the Israeli investigation:
Domestic critics of Israel's intelligence establishment contend that the data it provided to the U.S. to enhance their pre-war assessment of Saddam's WMD programmes—pointing to a threat that now appears not to have existed—has damaged both many Israelis' trust in their intelligence establishment and its credibility in the eyes of Israel's allies and friends.
And finally, Jim Hoagland, the reliable mouthpiece for Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Dougie Feith, told us in The Washington Post yesterday that all of us, including the government—and specifically Paul Bremer—should shut up and just let the Iraqi Governing Council (i.e., Chalabi) run things over there. Listen to Hoagland:
Chalabi, who was educated in the United States and who relentlessly lobbied Democratic and Republican administrations to intervene in Iraq, is a lightning rod for such guilt by association. His quarrels with the CIA have also left him branded as uppity and uncontrollable, qualities that have not endeared him to the Bush White House, but that might stand him in good stead in Iraq's nationalistic politics.
Now the entire council is being regularly denounced as feckless and corrupt by anonymous State Department and other U.S. officials quoted in The Post, The New York Times and elsewhere. One intended effect of this is to "establish" that whatever goes wrong in Iraq is the fault of the Iraqis, not the brilliant minds in Washington who were just trying to help.
Who should organize Iraq's election? The answer lies in plain sight—for those with eyes to see. Let the council be the council and get on with its work.
Well. Letting the IGC “get on with its work” now is a recipe for giving Chalabi control of the future of Iraq. The IGC has proved itself to be feckless and corrupt in the extreme. It’s a rag-tag bunch of American stooges, former Israeli intelligence agents, satraps of Iran and other strange characters. The latest goofball item to come out of the IGC comes from Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, its current president. Abdel-Hamid also happens to be the head of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, terrorist-linked organization. This judicious gentleman suggested over the weekend that Iraq just might have some territorial bonesto pick with Kuwait and Jordan.
That remark reportedly “stunned” Kuwaiti officials, who figured, not without some reason, that the new Iraqi government might renounce Iraq’s claims to Kuwait. Now, in fact, Iraq’s claims to Kuwait might be considered legitimate, in fact—Kuwait was carved out of Iraq’s southern province by the British because of all that oil, and it wasn’t even a state until 1961, when the British left. Iraqi governments—not just Saddam’s—have always claimed Kuwait. Still, it’s ironic that an American-installed one is the latest to do so.
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