Doug Lorimer
Ahmad Chalabi, who up until a few months ago had been the Bush administration's favourite to head Washington's puppet regime in Iraq, now stands accused of duping the US into invading Iraq.
On May 18, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced that the Pentagon was suspending a program under which it was paying US$340,000 a month to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) party for "intelligence".
Two days later, Chalabi's Baghdad offices and home were raided and ransacked by Iraqi police — accompanied, according to the May 21 New York Times, by "American soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothing who Iraqis said were American [intelligence] agents".
According to the May 21 San Francisco Chronicle, US occupation officials said the raid had been approved by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer and was part of an investigation into the alleged theft of US$22 million from the Iraqi finance ministry by Sabah Nouri.
Chalabi, head of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council's economic and finance committee, had appointed Nouri, a leading INC member, as the finance ministry's chief anti-corruption official. Nouri was arrested in April on 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority.
While Chalabi himself had not been charged, US occupation officials told the Chronicle that charges — including theft of government property, extortion, bribery and kidnapping — had been laid against at least a dozen of his associates, including Aras Karim Habib, the head of the INC's "intelligence service".
A May 21 United Press International report noted that in the "fledgling opinion polls of the new Iraq, Chalabi always polls lower in popularity than Saddam [Hussein]. His arrival in Baghdad last April was not as a returning dissident hero, but as a man with a reputation as a criminal — based on his fugitive status in Jordan — who had not lived in Iraq for more than 40 years."
In 1992, Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to a 22-year prison term for embezzling $288 million from the Amman-based Petra Bank, which Chalabi had founded and ran until its collapse in 1989. Jordan's former Central Bank governor Mohammed Said Nabulsi told UPI: "Chalabi was one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East." Indeed, Chalabi is widely referred to by Iraqis as Al Harami ("The Thief").
Then, on the evening of May 20, the CBS TV network's Evening News program claimed that it had been told by unnamed US intelligence officials that Chalabi was suspected of having delivered "top-secret US intelligence" to the Iranian intelligence ministry.
The CBS claim was, in fact, based on a May 19 Newsweek magazine report, which attributed the allegation to the CIA.
The next day, the espionage allegations against Chalabi became even wilder. New York's Newsday ran a story stating that Chalabi's US paymaster, the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), had concluded that Chalabi had been used by Iranian intelligence operatives to dupe the US into invading Iraq in order to clear the way for the eventual election of a Shiite-dominated, pro-Iranian regime.
Newsday reported that "Patrick Lang, former director of the DIA's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues that Chalabi's US-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction ... was an Iranian intelligence operation". Lang claimed it had been "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history".
However, as former treasury secretary Paul O'Neil has revealed, top administration officials including President Bush, his vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all sought to find a pretext to invade Iraq from the moment they were sworn into office in January 2001.
Wolfowitz admitted in an interview in May 2003 that, in seeking to find a public justification for invading Iraq, top Bush administration officials "settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason".
It is well-known that the CIA-created INC received about $40 million in US funds over the past four years, including $33 million from the State Department and $6 million from the DIA, to provide "intelligence" on Iraq.
In December 2002, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro, obviously speaking for his colleagues at the agency, publicly stated that the INC's "intelligence isn't reliable at all... Much of it is telling the defense department what they want to hear."
According to the May 24 London Guardian, "an urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through" the INC. "Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq."
"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner", the Guardian quoted an "intelligence source in Washington" as saying. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."
Chalabi has vehemently rejected the allegations as "a lie, a fib and silly", accusing CIA director George Tenet of a smear campaign against himself and Habib.
According to the Guardian, the CIA has called for an FBI counter-intelligence investigation into "Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands".
"The CIA allegations", the British daily noted, "bring to a head a dispute between the CIA and the Pentagon officials instrumental in promoting Mr Chalabi and his intelligence in the run-up to the war. By calling for an FBI counter-intelligence investigation, the CIA is, in effect, threatening to disgrace senior neo-conservatives in the Pentagon", beginning with Chalabi's "handlers" at the Pentagon's now-disbanded Office of Special Plans.
The five-person OSP was set up by Wolfowitz and his boss, Rumsfeld, shortly after 9/11 to pressure the CIA, the DIA and other US intelligence agencies to accept the bogus "intelligence" data on Iraq's WMD provided by Chalabi's INC. The OSP's day-to-day operations were run by William Luti, a former aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Luti's immediate superior, Douglas Feith, under-secretary of defence for policy.
Chalabi has openly admitted that the INC supplied the Bush administration with fabricated stories about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. In February, he told the London Telegraph, "we are heroes in error... As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."
Chalabi said later he was misquoted. Misquoted or not, it appears that the professional spooks in Washington have decided to not only make him the scapegoat for the WMD "intelligence" fiasco, but also the scapegoat for getting the US into an unwinnable and increasingly disastrous war in Iraq.
However, this does not explain why Bremer — who answers directly to the White House — would have approved the raid on Chalabi's home and offices.
According to the March 23 Time magazine, US occupation officials had become increasingly annoyed at Chalabi's attempts to sabotage Bremer's plan to have UN special envoy Lakdar Brahimi nominate a group of Iraqi bureaucrats to head Washington's puppet Iraqi government. A key part of this effort has been Chalabi's claim that documents the INC confiscated from Iraqi ministries immediately after the US occupation of Baghdad indicate there was massive corruption by those involved in the post-1995 UN oil-for-food program.
Under the program, UN officials handled $15 billion a year in revenues generated from the sale of Iraqi oil. The UN bureaucracy collected a 2.2% commission on every barrel of Iraqi oil sold, generating more than $1 billion in revenue for the UN.
Time magazine noted that "Chalabi hired an accounting firm to investigate the oil-for-food scandal. In March, Bremer hired a different accounting firm to direct the probe. Chalabi aides charge that Bremer snuffed out Chalabi's campaign, fearing it would discredit the UN and Brahimi. Chalabi says last week's raid was aimed at confiscating oil-for-food documents that could embarrass UN officials."
However, it is not only UN officials who could be embarrassed by the oil-for-food corruption scandal.
In November 2000, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported that while Dick Cheney was its CEO, the Halliburton oil services company engaged in illegal business dealings with Saddam Hussein's regime under the UN oil-for-food program, and assisted his regime to earn an extra $1 billion that year through selling oil on the black market.
These deals were being carried out by Halliburton at the same time as Cheney and his associates in the Project for a New American Century — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Luti — were lobbying the Clinton administration to invade Iraq and open the way to US oil companies plundering Iraq's huge oil resources.
"Most American companies were blacklisted [by Iraq]", a UN diplomat with the oil-for-food program told the February 16 New Yorker magazine. "It's rather surprising to find Halliburton doing business with Saddam. It would have been very much a senior-level decision, made by the regime at the top."
It would certainly not be beyond Halliburton executives to have used bribery to gain contracts with Hussein's regime. In May 2003, Halliburton admitted that one of its subsidiaries had paid millions of dollars to a Nigerian official in 2001 in return for tax breaks. In early February this year, the US Justice Department began a criminal investigation into claims that Halliburton was involved in a $180 million bribery scheme to secure a contract from Nigerian officials for construction of a natural gas plant during the late 1990s, when Cheney was running the company.
From Green Left Weekly, June 2, 2004.
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