Posted on 04/01/2003 11:46:13 PM PST by kattracks
A key Iraqi dissident group that has backers from every major religious faction in the country is being snubbed by the Central Intelligence Agency in what one newspaper describes as a bid to cover up intelligence mistakes made during the 1990s.
The decision to marginalize the Iraqi National Congress, carried forward into the Bush-era under Clinton appointed CIA Director George Tenet, is making the task of liberation more difficult, the Wall Street Journal said Monday, by complicating efforts of U.S. forces to gain the trust of the Iraqi people.
The Iraqi National Congress is the only opposition movement that can count among its members significant numbers of Kurds, Arabs, Sunni Muslims and Shiites, the paper adds. The INC happens also to be the only dissident group that has had any military success against Saddam.
Yet going back to the mid-1990s, the CIA along with the State Department have shunted the INC aside, despite its strong support in the U.S. Congress and a proven track record of cultivating defectors who have provided some of the best intelligence the U.S. has on Saddam's regime.
Under Director Tenet, the CIA has rejected otherwise undisputed accounts from officers defecting from the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who say they trained al Qaeda operatives at the South Baghdad terrorist training camp Salman Pak in airplane hijacking techniques unique to the 9/11 attacks.
Other past Agency blunders include the initial decision to rebuff Iraq's one-time nuclear weapons program chief Dr. Khidir Hamza, who eventually provided the U.S. with most of what it knows about Saddam's nuclear weapons plans after the CIA finally relented.
According to the Journal, the Agency's continued efforts to cover-up past blunders now threatens the U.S. war effort as the Coalition struggles to gain the trust of the Iraqi people without any visible support from Saddam's indigenous political opponents.
"The whole thing must look like a liberation," INC leader Ahmed Chalibi told the paper Monday. "It's not looking like a liberation now. There is no Iraqi force involved in this at all."
The paper went on to accuse the CIA of "nickle and diming" the INC, "dispersing only a small fraction of the aid Congress appropriated."
A few hundred thousand dollars would have kept the INC's Liberty TV, as well as its radio outlet, on the air. Meanwhile, as Saddam's TV and radio network enjoy at least periodic access to the airwaves, the voice of democratic Iraq searches for a microphone.
Shutting out the INC is complicating on-the-ground relations with the Iraqi citizenry, Mr. Chalabi said, explaining that the U.S. military's "relationship with the population is nonexistent and they cannot distinguish friend from foe."
"The CIA and State may be hopeless as they try to protect their past misjudgments," the paper concludes.
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Time for the Kurd's to charge down from the north!
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