Salon.com
Chalabi provided copious amounts of false intelligence to the United States in the late 1990s and through the run-up to the Iraq war. The defectors, con men and crooks he supplied to the CIA and the Pentagon made all sorts of extravagant and ridiculous claims that were eagerly swallowed by the hawks in the Bush administration.
One source, known as "Curveball," alleged that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs, which is a contradiction in terms. One can only imagine what would have happened to Saddam's biologists, experimenting with dangerous microbes, when the trailer had a flat tire or hit a pothole. Chalabi's source nevertheless succeeded in getting such absurdities included in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.
Chalabi was convicted of massive bank fraud in Jordan in the early 1990s. He was given millions by the State Department and the CIA for the overthrow of Saddam, funds he never properly accounted for. When those agencies dropped him as a result, he cultivated contacts in the Pentagon instead.
In the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, had a secret plan to install Ahmed Chalabi as a soft dictator of Iraq and to arrange some sort of phony elections that would make it look as though he had a mandate. Larry Diamond, in his book "Squandered Victory," writes that their plan was foiled by the State Department, which found out about it. The State Department convinced George W. Bush that it would be a disaster, and he agreed to send to Iraq a former State Department official, Paul "Jerry" Bremer to forestall such Pentagon flights of fancy.
By the spring of 2004, serious charges were launched against Chalabi, presumably at Bremer's behest. He was accused of passing top-secret information to the Iranian government: that the United States had broken Iranian encryption codes. That is, before Chalabi allegedly spilled the beans, U.S. intelligence had deep access to what Iranian government officials said among themselves. After the Chalabi incident, Iran became more opaque to the United States, which already struggled to find out about what was going on inside the country. Chalabi was also charged with having in his possession counterfeit bills.
Chalabi is a spy and a crook. The US needed the access to Iranian intelligence the codes provided. Chalabi showed his real loyalty to himself by currying favor to Iran. If you track his actions in this post, you can see his modis operenti. He plays both sides to curry favor and support from everyone and plays a quiet game behind the scenes by kickbacks, embezzlement, and outright theft. Clearly he is angling for access to the Iraqi oil fields so he can skim profits off the top. If Wolfowitz had successed in installing him as a dictator in Iraq, he would have kept it as long as he could and taken billions. He already have many millions of taxpayers dollars in his stash.
Could Chalabi come to power in Iraq? If the Shiite religious parties get a majority in Parliament, the post will certainly go to a UIA member. Chalabi and his backers may hope, however, that the United Iraqi Alliance will fall short of a majority this time. If so, it will need to form a coalition, and Chalabi may hope that he will be acceptable to all members of the resulting government. That is, he would emerge as a minority prime minister but with the acquiescence of much bigger parties.
[...]That Chalabi, a wily schemer and convicted crook, should continue his sleazy attempts to get control of Iraq's billions in petroleum revenues is completely unsurprising. That a scandal-ridden Bush administration should warmly welcome the fraudster to Washington yet again and have him hobnob with top officials shows profound disrespect for U.S. troops risking their lives in Iraq. Chalabi lied to and manipulated the American public, reportedly passed top-secret information to Iran, and for a while allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Officials in the administration are apparently hoping that the American public won't notice that they are playing the same old games, with U.S. foreign policy and with Iraq. As we know all too well by now, they are disastrous games.
Disrespectful to our troops it is, but the reason the Bush Administration feels comfortable working with him is that they are cut from the same cloth. Crooks work well with other crooks.
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