Posted on 03/20/2004 4:41:43 PM PST by Pokey78
Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein last December, the deposed Iraqi tyrant received a visit in his underground prison cell from a rotund, balding, 59-year-old former banker. Saddam immediately recognised Ahmed Chalabi, one of the leaders of Iraq's new interim administration, and greeted him with a sneer: "So, are you going to be the new ruler of Iraq?" he inquired.
Chalabi, who had been taken to Saddam's secret prison cell by US troops to confirm the captured leader's identity, made no reply. "You don't take orders from a dictator and certainly not from a war criminal," he later explained.
Nevertheless Saddam had clearly hit a raw nerve, for, even before last year's military campaign to overthrow the Ba'athist regime had begun in earnest, Chalabi had already set himself up as Iraq's official leader-in-waiting.
Indeed, as we mark the first anniversary of the war, there are many people in both Washington and Iraq who would argue that Chalabi ultimately carries more responsibility than Saddam for starting last year's war - not least because of the intense propaganda campaign that he masterminded against the Iraqi regime in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), one of the Iraqi exile groups that received significant funding from the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency in the run-up to the war, is now blamed for planting false allegations in the American and British media. It was the INC that claimed Saddam had collaborated closely with Osama bin Laden for many years and was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, even though intelligence officials have found scant evidence of operational ties between Iraq and al-Qa'eda.
Chalabi is also being held responsible for a range of other unsubstantiated claims, including the suggestion that Saddam was training al-Qa'eda operatives in the aeroplane-hijacking techniques used in 9/11, and the charge that Iraq had mobile biological warfare facilities disguised as milk trucks. The latter claim featured prominently in the presentation made by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the UN last year on Saddam's WMD capability.
Nor was it just the more gullible sections of the media that were hoodwinked by Chalabi's alarmist reports. David Kay, the American weapons expert who until recently headed the search for Saddam's WMD arsenal, says the reason that so much of America's pre-war intelligence was so wide of the mark is that it relied too heavily on Chalabi and his supporters for information.
That American intelligence agencies dealt with Chalabi at all is a mystery, given his somewhat cheqeured CV. If he were ever foolish enough to set foot in Jordan, he would face immediate imprisonment, for a 22-year jail sentence that was passed in absentia following his conviction for banking fraud. There are also many officials in Washington, particularly at the State Department and CIA, who have not forgiven him for his involvement in a coup attempt against Saddam that failed disastrously in the mid-1990s.
Chalabi, like Saddam, is a survivor, and the fact that he can still entertain ambitions to be Iraq's first post-Saddam president is a testimony both to his resilience and arrogance.
But while Chalabi has proved remarkably adept at impressing his neo-Conservative audience in Washington, he has enjoyed less success in Iraq, where a recent opinion poll revealed that Chalabi had been voted the most unpopular member of Iraq's 25-member Governing Council. Even so, Chalabi cannot be written out of Iraq's future political equation. After all, popularity was never exactly Saddam's strongest suit.
Wish we had a small idea of the truth about this man.
I don't think regular American intelligence did deal with Chalabi. Didn't he deal with that special ad hoc intelligence operation set up by some folks in the defense department to bypass the CIA (and to cherry pick the regular intelligence services)?
Nothing recent about it.
And, I'll repeat I wish I had a better handle on this man and his agenda.
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