[plschwartz]

All we have to do is relocate him to Joran but maybe their king wouldn't like it.
I think we should simply banish him from the Green Zone and let nature take its course

[DNeurococo]

I'd rather he be put on a public trial. I think he would squeal like a stuck pig, and tell where a lot of dead bodies are buried.

[eggplant43]

I wouldn't be surprised if he were "disappeared".

[Al-Firdaus]

ANOTHER OF YOUR STOOGES HAS SOMETHING TO SAY...

Letter From Ayatullah Sistani To UN Security Council
Jun 08, 2004

H. E. Head of the United Nations Security Council,

Greetings,

We have been informed of the attempts to include the so called “administrative law for the transitional period” in the new UNSC Resolution on Iraq, with a view to making it appear internationally legitimate.

This “law” that has been drawn up by an un-elected council under occupation, and through its direct influence, would restrict the national assembly which is due to be elected early next year – to draw up the permanent Iraqi constitution.

This is against the laws and rejected by most Iraqi people. Therefore, any attempt to make this “law” appear legitimate by including it in the international resolution is considered as contrary to the desire of the Iraqi people and a forewarning to dangerous consequences.

Kindly convey the position of the Religious Marja’iyya in this regard to their Excellencies the honorable members of the Security Council.

Thank you

Seal of the Office of Ayatullah Seestani in Najaf
6 June 2004

[plschwartz]

If the allegations of Mr. Chalabi's ties to Iran are true, however, this could become the most prominent espionage episode since the Alger Hiss case in the late 1940s

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opi...oped-headlines
Chalabi: Iraqi Pied Piper or Iranian pawn?



By Ted Galen Carpenter

June 16, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's disenchantment with its one-time favorite Iraqi client, Ahmad Chalabi, has centered on the explosive allegation that he and his associates may have forwarded highly classified U.S.


information to the fundamentalist Islamist government in Iran.
Specifically, Mr. Chalabi and his cohorts are accused of informing Tehran that the United States had broken the communications code of Iran's intelligence service.

Mr. Chalabi dismissed the charges as part of a CIA plot to discredit him. The CIA has long suspected Mr. Chalabi's motives, and many analysts resent his ability to pass off speculation as fact, even over the advice of genuine experts within the U.S. government.

If the allegations of Mr. Chalabi's ties to Iran are true, however, this could become the most prominent espionage episode since the Alger Hiss case in the late 1940s, for it raises the question of who in the U.S. government passed such sensitive information to Mr. Chalabi. Clearly, the allegations are serious and should be the subject of a thorough, independent investigation. But such an investigation also needs to look at another possibility.

What if the Chalabi-Iran information pipeline flowed both ways? It is well established that much of the information that Mr. Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress, supplied to the United States in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was erroneous. The inaccurate intelligence was most evident with regard to the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein's regime supposedly had, but it also involved assurances that U.S. forces would be welcomed as liberators and that the post-Hussein political transition would be rapid and easy.

The conventional wisdom is that Mr. Chalabi was the architect of that campaign of disinformation. But what if he was not the source of such disinformation but merely the channel for it? Is it possible that Iran used Mr. Chalabi to lure the United States into invading and occupying Iraq?

The troubling reality is that Tehran would have had multiple motives for such a strategy.

First, Iranians regarded Mr. Hussein as more than just an adversary; they viewed him with the same kind of fear and loathing that Russians in the 1940s viewed Adolf Hitler. Mr. Hussein had invaded and ravaged their country in a war that lasted nearly a decade, and he had used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and possibly Iranian civilians. Washington did Iran a gigantic favor by eliminating a man that Iranians regarded as a demonic enemy.

Second, Iraq was the only credible strategic counterweight to Iran in the region. Iran's military capabilities dwarf those of Saudi Arabia and the gulf states. And while Turkey is a potential strategic counterweight, Ankara has long been reluctant to play a major role in that region.

A united Iraq was the principal obstacle to Iranian pre-eminence. A U.S. occupation of Iraq (especially the disbanding of the Iraqi army, which Mr. Chalabi strongly advocated) significantly advanced Iran's interests. The possible destabilization of Iraq -- and the possible emergence of a friendly, Shiite-led successor government -- was a potential bonus for Tehran.

Finally, the Islamist regime had an incentive to distract the United States. The Iranian nuclear program has moved forward, even as the United States has been bogged down in Iraq. Hope for a European-brokered agreement to allow new inspections of Iran's suspected nuclear facilities has now given way to pessimism.

Before the Iraq war, Washington was beginning to pay an extensive amount of attention to Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Iran's leaders might have reasoned that a nation-building quagmire in Iraq would reduce the likelihood that Washington would be able to take pre-emptive action against Iran.

The loose talk in some hawkish American circles about the Iraq war being merely the first stage of a campaign of forcible regime change throughout the Middle East has subsided greatly as the difficulties of the Iraq occupation have mounted.

True, an Iranian strategy to lure the United States into Iraq would have been a high-stakes gamble. After all, the conquest of Iraq meant that the United States would have a sizable military force in a neighboring state for an extended period of time. But governments have been known to adopt bold and risky strategies before, and Tehran may have done so in this case.

We will never know unless there is an independent investigation of all aspects of the Chalabi-Iran connection. Congress should insist on nothing less.


Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author or editor of 15 books on international affairs.


Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

[DNeurococo]

The Columbia Review of Journalism had a good article on Chalabi ==>

www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp

It discusses major articles supporting the war on Iraq that were inspired by the Iraqi National Congress. It discusses U.S. funding for the INC, and names some of the reporters who are listed as being "taken in". Worth a read!

[flyeater]

[Al-Firdaus]

Editor's Note | The New York Times has crafted a strange headline for a strange story. One must plow through to the fifth paragraph before coming to the name of Ahmad Chalabi, the Bush administration confidant accused of spying on America for Iran. It appears, according to this Times report, that Iraqi informants fed the Bush administration false information about Hussein's WMDs. These informants were put into the mix by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Senator Pat Roberts is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the controlling hand in the drafting of the report blaming the CIA for the lack of WMDs in Iraq. The presence of Chalabi in the mix, however, augers responsibility for these failures towards the White House. Senator Roberts is not being forthcoming with the facts. - wrp

Doubts on Informant Deleted in Senate Text
By Douglas Jehl
New York Times

Tuesday 13 July 2004

Washington - Among the passages deleted from the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Iraq is a detailed assessment that casts doubt on the credibility of an Iraqi defector whose claims about Iraq's mobile biological weapons laboratories have been discredited, according to government officials. His name was kept secret because he is still working for British intelligence, they said.

About one-fifth of the 511-page report still has not been made public, despite objections from both Republican and Democratic senators. As in the case of the Iraqi defector, the deletions were the result of objections raised by American intelligence agencies in the interest of protecting sources and methods, sometimes in deference to a foreign intelligence service, according to American government officials who have read the classified version of the Senate committee's report.

In the classified version of the report, the officials said, nearly three pages are devoted to questioning the credibility of the defector, who was one of four human sources cited last year by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations as having provided crucial information about Iraq's mobile laboratories. But in the public version of the report, released Friday, all but one paragraph in those pages is blacked out.

The defector, known to the Central Intelligence Agency as Red River, failed a polygraph examination, the American officials said. But they said crucial information about the source had been deleted from the report in deference to British intelligence, which originally relayed the information provided by the defector to the United States and has maintained a continuing relationship with him.

On the mobile laboratories, the public version of the report includes a detailed indictment of the American agencies' reliance on one central source, known as Curveball, who was introduced to German intelligence by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and some information about a second source, who was introduced to the Defense Intelligence Agency by the I.N.C. and eventually labeled a fabricator by the D.I.A.

But in the public version, references to the other two sources - Red River and another whose code name included the word Red - are blacked out even in the table of contents. The only information about the source known as Red River is an apparent reference to the failed polygraph test, which notes that the intelligence committee staff has asked a polygraph expert from the Department of Defense "about the possibility of a 'false positive' " resulting from a polygraph examination.

The source known as Red was identified only in one paragraph of the report, which is partly blacked out, according to one government official. The public version of the report does not say whether he, too, was introduced by the I.N.C., but it notes that his only claim about mobile biological weapons laboratories was spelled out in a June 2001 report.

In the same e-mail message sent to a Central Intelligence Agency official shortly before Mr. Powell gave the speech citing the defector's account, an American intelligence official working with the Defense Department, who had questioned Curveball's credibility, did the same with Red, the report shows. The official noted that the source was "one whose reliability nor reporting has been valuated" and that the reporting had "inconsistencies that need further checking," the report said.

Among other material deleted from the report, government officials said, were details of covert actions undertaken by American intelligence agencies to gather information about Iraq and to disrupt suspicious shipments to it, including aluminum tubes.

But the deletions also included material that appears to have been much more benign, including single words, which in at least one case could have referred only to the gender of a C.I.A. official not identified in the report.

The public version of the report contained much more information than the C.I.A. had initially been willing to approve for release, according to Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the committee. In early June, the agency had approved for release only about half of the document, Mr. Roberts said last week, and relented only after long negotiations with the committee staff.

Mr. Roberts and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel, have said they will continue to press the C.I.A. to agree to the release of more of the document, adding that they still believe that more information could be released without harm to American national security.

Government officials who took part in the negotiations described a process in which representatives of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency in particular raised the most objections to release of material contained in the classified version of the report. Those agencies were primarily seeking to protect information about the sources and methods of their intelligence-gathering activities, involving both human and technical intelligence.

The officials said that the C.I.A. was also protective of its relationships with foreign intelligence services, including those of Britain, Germany and Jordan, which provided much of the human intelligence on Iraq and its supposed illicit weapons. None of those intelligence services is mentioned in the Senate report, which takes American intelligence agencies to task for their reliance on foreign governments in providing sources of human intelligence on Iraq and illicit weapons.

"While these sources had the potential to provide some valuable information, they had a limited ability to provide the kind of detailed intelligence about current Iraqi weapons of mass destruction efforts sought by U.S. policymakers," the report said. "Moreover, because the intelligence community did not have direct access to many of these sources, their credibility was difficult to assess and was often left to the foreign government services to judge."

[Wino]

Originally Posted by flyeater

From the looks of GWB's nose and cheek, this must have been taken shortly after the 'pretzel' incident.

[Al-Firdaus]

Iraq judge issues warrant to arrest Chalabi
Sunday 08 August 2004 9:08 PM GMT

Ahmad Chalabi – the Pentagon's number one ally before Iraq's invasion – has continued his fall from grace in dramatic style after Baghdad issued a warrant for his arrest. But the Iraqi politician, who fled Iraq in 1958 to return in 2003 as a potential national leader, has vowed to fight the charges on Sunday – characterising them as "outrageous". Specific accusations made by Judge Zuhair al-Maliki include counterfeiting and financial irregularities.

His nephew, Salim Chalabi – head of the Iraqi tribunal trying Saddam Hussein – is also to be arrested over the murder of the director general of the finance ministry, Haitham Fadil. "They should be arrested and then questioned and then we will evaluate the evidence, and then if there is enough evidence, they will be sent to trial," al-Maliki said.

Death sentence?

If convicted, Salim Chalabi, 41, could face the death penalty - which was restored by Iraqi officials on Sunday, the judge added. Any sentence for Ahmad Chalabi would be determined by the trial judges. Both men, who were out of the country on Sunday, denied the charges and said they were politically motivated. "There is no case here and I will go to meet those charges head-on … I have been fighting Saddam for many years and we survived that" Ahmad Chalabi, Interim government member

Salim Chalabi called the accusations "ridiculous," while Ahmad Chalabi said the charges were "outrageous," and "manufactured lies." Speaking from Tehran to a US broadcaster, Ahmad said: "There is no case here and I will go to meet those charges head-on … I have been fighting Saddam for many years and we survived that."

Chalabi left Iraq in 1958 to return in 2003 as a prime candidate for the interim presidency. His nephew, Salim has served as a legal adviser to the interim Iraqi Governing Council and was a member of the 10-member committee framing the basic transitional law for the new interim government.

End of Chalabi?

Iraqi police and US troops had already raided Ahmad Chalabi's Baghdad offices in May.

Washington also cut off its $340,000 a month funding to his Iraqi National Congress party. But it still may be too soon to write off his political career. He had already been convicted in absentia for a multi-million dollar bank fraud in Jordan but still managed to obtain favour at the Pentagon and a leading role in Iraq's interim government. However, in recent months, Chalabi has repeatedly criticised US policy in Iraq, insisting Washington hand Iraq control of its own oil revenue and condemning the transfer of power in June as meaningless.

Aljazeera + Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exer...CB1A807E42.htm

After a 45 year absence, Chalabi may still see an Iraqi jail The price one pays for being an american stooge.

[eggplant43]

Does the New Iraqi regime have an extradiction agreement with Jordan?

[Al-Firdaus]

Originally Posted by eggplant43

Does the New Iraqi regime have an extradiction agreement with Jordan?

I've no idea. Anyways, Chalabi is in Iran and and says he plans to return to occupied Iraq to face the charges against him.

[eggplant43]

Just a little attempt at humor Al. Jordan has tried Chalabi for bank fraud in abscentia, found him guilty, and sentenced him to 22 years. Hopefully, this one won't get away.

[Al-Firdaus]

Originally Posted by eggplant43

Just a little attempt at humor Al. Jordon has tried Chalabi for bank fraud in abscentia, found him guilty, and sentenced him to 22 years. Hopefully, this one won't get away.

Oh. Anyway, he'll get whats coming to him. One way or another.

[eggplant43]

Call me cynical. I find it interesting that Allawi's government conveniently issues arrest warrants for these two while they're out of Iraq. Could it be they want to appear to be "doing the right thing", while making sure the Chalabi's are out of harms way?