State Secrets Rule Trumps Public's Right To Know

Any time the Bush Administration feels its security policies are about to come in for serious public scrutiny, it invokes a national security defense and wraps everything in a cloak of secrecy. The result is that access to information is locked down, court hearings are held in camera and the public’s right to know is crushed.
It should therefore have come as no surprise to ACLU lawyers and journalists when a federal court in Alexandria, Va. was recently told by Justice Department lawyers that the federal government believed that allowing a lawsuit to proceed against a member of the CIA for illegally imprisoning and torturing a German citizen would endanger US national security. Such a lawsuit, they argued, would expose US secret and intelligence methods to the enemy.
ACLU lawyers, acting for the plaintiff, Khalid-el-Masri, saw the move as a familiar one to silence public debate and to obscure questionable methods used by the CIA. They told the court the CIA owed their client an apology and money damages for kidnapping him off the street in Macedonia and secretly transporting him to a CIA interrogation center in Afghanistan. While there he was inhumanely treated before being released months later without charge when the CIA discovered they had the wrong man. They flew him back to Europe, dumped him on a hillside in Albania and told him to make his own way home.
The illegal arrest, detention and ill-treatment of the German, in what has become known as the CIA’s “Rendition Program”, has never been disputed by the US. As in most reported renditions, he was stripped naked, placed in a diaper and drugged before being strapped to the floor of one of three private jets rented by the CIA.
Germany’s new Chancellor Angela Merkel made one of her first priorities a discussion with the US about the El-Masri case and was told by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice that it was a mistake. Rice also told European leaders the US would never render suspects to countries that used torture. That is not, however, accurate since suspects have been secretly transported for interrogation to countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Afghanistan and Syria, all of which are listed on the State Department’s own website as serial human rights abusers.
The ACLU case, which may likely never proceed beyond this latest hearing, alleges human rights violations against former CIA Director, George Tenet and four aviation firms from which the CIA leases aircraft for renditions. The US government’s legal argument is that all of the defendants are covered by a “state secrets” privilege rule and the case should be dismissed. While the federal judge in Alexandria considers that motion, most observers feel it will be granted because that has been the tendency of the federal courts under this administration.
But, even if this case is made to go away as it were, the CIA’s rendition policy will continue to be a lightning rod for critics of the Bush Administration throughout Europe. In Germany there is an ongoing parliamentary enquiry into the El-Masri abduction while, at the same time, the EU continues to review it and other cases for which there is considerable evidence of CIA wrongdoing. In Italy, there is a similar investigation and the European Commission has not completed its report on the story of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. Another case which is likely to shine a light into rendition and interrogations methods is the one in which four former Guantanamo detainees have been given the right to sue the US in British courts.
For the Bush Administration, a nightmare scenario is that, at some time in the future a CIA operative, or someone else up the US military or civilian chain of command will be arrested in the airport of a country that is a signatory to the International Human Rights Court in The Hague. That person will then be transferred to The Hague to answer for abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or some secret interrogation site, or for the renditions that are extensively documented. Such a possibility does not seem far fetched when one looks at a recent incident when Scotland Yard planned to arrest an Israeli general as his plane from Tel Aviv touched down at Heathrow airport outside London. Scotland Yard officers were standing by with warrants charging him with international crimes for bulldozing the homes of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The Scotland Yard strategy was to seize him the moment he exited the plane and later pass him over to the court in The Hague. However, he was tipped off and never got off the plane, knowing if he stayed on board he had diplomatic immunity because the interior of the plane was deemed to be foreign soil.

Scandal Of Missing Guns

How could 200,000 AK 47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition intended for the Iraqi police and military have vanished into thin air? That is a question no one at the Department of Defense Department appears able or willing to answer. The facts are, however, that four planeloads containing the guns and ammo were flown out of a US base in Bosnia on route to Baghdad in August 2004 but Baghdad airport records show they never arrived.
That leaves the awful possibilities the guns could have fallen into the wrong hands, possibly into the clutches of Al Qaeda of one of its affiliates or even into the hands of insurgents in Iraq.
As much as there is a mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the guns, there is also a complex web of intrigue surrounding the way in which the DOD used cut-out companies to handle the weapons, all of which came from stockpiles of guns handed in for destruction after the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. While there appears to have been nothing illegal in the Pentagon deciding to use such weapons to arm the fledgling Iraqi police and army, there is considerable skepticism about a lack of transparency surrounding the deal and the questionable manner in which the Pentagon turned to private contractors, one whom had a murky past.
What has so far been established is that the four shiploads of weapons and ammunition were scheduled to be delivered to Iraq between July 2004- 2005 and the first major shipload left Bosnian air space in August 2004. Rather than handle the weapons transfer itself, the DOD turned to the UK and US embassies in Bosnia to engage a number of companies that had previously been involved in illegally shipping arms to Saddam Hussein and to all sides during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s. One of those companies was Aercom which was investigated in 2003 by the UN and condemned for its role in the guns for diamonds trade in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nevertheless Aercom was hired to fly the AK 47 shipments to Baghdad from the US Eagle air base at Tuzla in northern Bosnia. According to Amnesty International which carried out a lengthy investigation into the affair there is no record of where the guns went after they left Bosnian air space. It seems they simply disappeared with no record of the flights ever reaching their intended destination. Worse still, on the day of the first shipment the Moldovan government stripped Aercom of its license for security and other irregularities.
The Amnesty report on the missing weapons confirms that the Pentagon, through the military attaché in the US embassy in Sarajevo, used two firms connected to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to oversee the weapons purchases and transport. Those firms – TAOS and CACI - in turn handed out work to other contractors, arms dealers and shippers in the UK, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and of course Moldova where the shady airline, Aercom, was based. In Amnesty’s view the use of Aercom violated UN regulations because the company did not have a proper operating license.

When NATO, the EU and Iraqi authorities were asked if they knew anything about the missing arms they replied that they were not informed in advance about a plan to ship Bosnian weapons to Iraq and they now knew there was no documentation to show the arms reached Iraq. According to several British newspapers, two companies involved in the vanishing arms saga said they had documents to show weapons were delivered to Iraq but refused to produce the documents for scrutiny. It was also reported that a lawyer for one arms dealer admitted a shipment of 1,500 AK assault rifles had gone missing and had eventually ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda. For Amnesty, that still does not address what happened to the 90 tons of rifles and ammunition shipped out of Bosnia at an estimated cost to the US taxpayer of approximately $400 million. According to Amnesty, US military officials responsible for training the Iraqi security forces have confirmed they never saw any weapons from Bosnia and that view was echoed by figures in the Iraqi military when were they were recently approached about the mystery.

Kurds Part Of Covert War Against Iran

Behind the increasingly shrill rhetoric and saber rattling over Iran’s nuclear ambitions the US and Israel are engaged in a secret war against Iran that has echoes of the years when the CIA supported the Afghan Mujihadeen against the Soviets.
This time, the US and Israel are running covert operations with the help of rebel Kurdish militias and Iranian mujihadeen fighters. For some observers, training and arming Islamic fighters smacks of the days of Soviet rule in Afghanistan. Then, the Soviet army, which was the second most powerful military in the world, was defeated by Islamic militants, including men like Osama Bin Laden. They were trained by the CIA and provided with the most up-to-date weapons, including Stinger missiles. It is estimated the CIA spent billions of taxpayer dollars arming the Afghan mujihadeen. Many of those same mujihadeen later turned against America and formed Al Qaeda, the organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Others joined the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan and preached hatred of the West.
Now the US, with Israel in tow, is arming and secretly training a different Mujihadeen – Kurdish militias with links to ethnic Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria and fighters from the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq which has bases in southern Iraq and has provided the US with intelligence on the Iranian military and Iran’s nuclear sites. The history of the Kurds in particular makes them ideal recruits for a covert war in Iran and Syria.
During and after Saddam’s rule, the Kurds of northern Iraq longed for an independent Kurdistan and when the No-Fly zone was in place over Iraq, they had protection from the US and its coalition allies. That enabled them to build an extremely large militia and to develop a strong economy. But, since the fall of Saddam they have become disillusioned with the country’s slide into chaos and have hinted that they would be happy to see Iraq divided onto three. In that event, they would establish an autonomous region called Kurdistan and the rich northern oil fields of Kirkuk would ensure their prosperity for decades if not into the next century.
Not everyone in the region sees the creation of an independent Kurdistan as a good thing. The Turks, Iranians and Syrians who, don’t always see eye to eye on many matters, are united in a belief that it would generate instability by encouraging large ethnic Kurdish communities in their countries to demand separation and an alignment with Iraq’s Kurds. As for the Kurds, they all believe that historically Kurdistan encompassed parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran and that has led to their persecution.
In the 20th century, for example, ethnic Kurdish demands for autonomy led to more than 30,000 of them being slaughtered by the Turks. In Iran, they were brutally suppressed in three provinces they dominated.
It is, therefore, easy to see how the US in it desire to destabilize the Iranian regime and to prepare the groundwork for possible Special Forces attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities should turn to disaffected Iranian Kurds for help and to Iranian dissidents of the Mujihadeen-e-Khalq, (MEK). The MEK has carried out a series of attacks in Iran, using fighters trained by the US in secret bases in southern Iraq. In recent months, there has been increasing instability inside three Iranian Provinces dominated by Kurds, as well as attacks on Iranian troops near the border with Iraq. A Kurdish guerilla group claimed responsibility for two of the attacks, saying they were in retaliation for Iranian shelling into Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
The New York journalist, Seymour Hersh claimed earlier this year that US combat troops were already in Iran and on April 9 Iran said it shot down a US surveillance drone. There was also an incident near the Iran-Iraq border in January when an Iranian military cargo plane carrying ten top Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders mysteriously crashed. Later, there were rumors it was brought down by US Special Forces within Iran.
The US is not the only country involved in a covert war that uses Kurdish fighters based in Iraq and Iran. Israel has been running its own black operations with the help of Kurds it has trained. The Kurds have strong ties to Israel because it supports the creation of an independent Kurdistan. From an Israeli perspective, such an entity would provide Israel with an ally in a region in which it is totally isolated. It was Israel’s neocons friends in Washington who once believed a new Iraq would be Israel’s best ally but the more that has seemed a fiction, the more Israel has looked to the creation of a separate Kurdish state in Iraq as the next best thing.
Israel’s relationship with the Kurds goes back a long way and during the Iraq-Iraq war it supplied the Kurds with weapons to attack Saddam Hussein’s forces. Then, after the first Gulf War when the US and its allies abandoned the Kurds, it continued to provide them with weapons and training. When the No-Fly Zone was enforced by the US to limit attacks on the Kurds in northern Iraq, Israel set up special military training camps there. For Israeli military strategists, Kurdish northern Iraq is an ideal bulwark against its main enemies – Syria and Iran. To that end, Israeli Special Forces and Mossad have been training and recruiting Kurds for black and clandestine surveillance in those two countries. The advantage of having Kurdish fighters carry out operations is that they can easily blend into ethnic Kurdish communities and sow dissent. They can also recruit rebel elements and build bases for future operations. In essence, Kurdish militiamen and fighters from the Iranian mujihadeen (MEK) are seen by the US and Israel as ideal insurgents.
Turkey, a member of NATO, has not taken kindly to the Israeli presence in northern Iraq and to Israel’s use of Kurdish fighters. The Turks worry the Kurds have their eyes on oil and the more Israel arms and trains them the more likely they will be to declare independence and seize the oil fields of Kirkuk. Turkey has warned such a scenario might force it to invade northern Iraq. Should that happen, the region would be further destabilized.
The use of Kurdish rebels and Iranian Mujihadeen in a covert war could eventually backfire on the US if the past history of CIA involvement with Islamic militants is anything to go by. There is also a high risk that a secret war aimed at weakening regimes in Iran and Syria could destabilize the whole region. In particular, if Turkey sent its forces into northern Iraq to seize Kirkuk it would place Turkey at odds with the US and NATO and would wreck diplomatic links between Tel Aviv and Ankara, pitting Israel against one of the largest Islamic nations in the world.
There are some who believe that Israel will act in its own interests and do whatever it takes to weaken Iran and Syria. If that is so, the Kurds could suffer and Israel, as it has done in previous conflicts in that part of the world, would happily supply all sides with weapons and would watch as its enemies annihilated each other. For the US, which has already become bogged down in Iraq, a wider conflict would have catastrophic consequences for the US military.

Guantanamo Secret Project

Four years after the arrival of the first terror suspect in Guantanamo Bay, sometimes referred to as Camp X-Ray or Gitmo, global controversy surrounding the secret internment without trial project continues to increase and there is no sign the camp will be abolished any time soon.

As I reported in April last year, Guantanamo, which still holds close to 500 suspects, is not only a place where interrogations are a major facet of the daily routine but it is also the site of a secret project for recruiting terrorist agents. Shortly after a suspect arrives at the camp he is interrogated. Later, a range of people with varying skills, who were part of the interrogation or observed it, determine whether the suspect should be a candidate for a special project aimed at recruiting terrorist agents – terrorists who can be filtered back into terror ranks to operate on behalf of the CIA and other US intelligence outlets.

When a suspect is selected for the project he is subjected to various forms of in-depth interrogation aimed at breaking his will and making him malleable to suggestion. The process is designed primarily to detach a suspect from any ideological commitment he may have. In order to do that, interrogation is used to expose all his weaknesses - social, sexual, ideological and physical. Knowing where he is weakest is not only a means of breaking his will but also the means by which he can be later controlled.
An experienced interrogator told me the process could best be described as taking a suspect and reducing him to an empty shell which you then fill with the ingredients which you will need to control of him but first you need to peel away all the layers of his personality to expose his underlying subconscious fears. The North Koreans used such tactics during the Korean War and they were made famous in the celebrated movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.” Nowadays, the whole process has become much more sophisticated with the use of technology, designer drugs and knowledge gained through decades of interrogation by the US and its enemies. In most cases in which US military or intelligence personnel are captured, interrogated and later released, they are subsequently debriefed. During those debriefing sessions they are required to painstakingly describe interrogation methods used by the enemy and whether those methods quickly broke their willpower and encouraged them to believe that what they had done for their country was wrong. By studying the success or failure of enemy techniques US interrogators learn how to hone their own skills for dealing with suspects in their custody.

Throughout in-depth interrogations - in Guantanamo and at secret sites run by the CIA - which may involve tactics banned by the Geneva Conventions, a suspect is constantly monitored to ensure he is physically and mentally capable of undergoing extremes of interrogation. For that purpose, psychiatrists and physicians are required to be observers and advisors, thereby playing roles banned under international medical protocols. Evidence gleaned from in-depth interrogations throughout the world, even by the British in N. Ireland in the early 1970s, shows that the secret involvement of bona fide medical staff does not curtail the long term risks of serious mental health among those who have been detained and subjected to techniques such as white noise, hooding, water-boarding, physical assault and threats, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and being subjected to extremes of heat and cold while being made to stand or sit for long periods in unusual and, ultimately, painful postures.

Those who run such interrogations argue that the overall objective is what matters, namely the recruitment of even one terrorist agent who can be inserted into the heart of a terror group like Al. Qaeda. Such an agent, they point out, will be more valuable than all the sophisticated electronics available to the CIA and NSA. And the reality is that for even one such agent to be recruited, scores of others may have to suffer irreparable mental damage.

There is little doubt that terrorist agents are critical to winning the war on terror. That was proven by British intelligence in its undercover war against the IRA for almost 30 years. A terrorist agent is more effective than electronic surveillance because his roots in an indigenous population enable him to blend into that population, whereas an outsider playing the role of an agent would be easily exposed. Terrorist organizations are constantly aware of the risks they face from electronic counter insurgency measures, such as telephone and internet taps and eye in the sky photography and management of the majority of tele-communications across the globe. They are also conscious of the use of man-to-man surveillance by intelligence agencies though that can be difficult to mount in tight communities, in mountainous terrain like Afghanistan and in volatile parts of Baghdad. In contrast, a terrorist agent can blend into his own community where the terrorists find shelter and, if he is properly trained and handled, he can be told to join a terrorist organization. Once on the inside, he is the most lethal weapon an organization like the CIA could ever have. He can alert his handlers to planned operations, identify leading terrorist operatives and reveal the terrorists’ means of communication. He can also be used to plant listening devices in terrorist hideouts and to insert similar bugs or explosive devices in weapons’ caches. The inserting of explosive devices in weapons ensures terrorists are killed the moment they remove weapons from a “dump” or when they try to fire them. For all the above reasons, the CIA will argue that “special” measures such as the project at Guantanamo are required to win the war on terror.

The success of this most secret project at Guantanamo is unknown but all indications are that it will remain active just as the controversy surrounding the camp will continue to damage the image of the US in allied, as well as in Muslim nations. The singular advantage of Guantanamo is its off-shore location and immunity from judicial interference. It also benefits from the fact that no outside body has authority to demand free access to the camp or to scrutinize what goes on within it, especially in respect of the roles played by various agencies and organizations – agencies which include the CIA and its counterparts from friendly countries across the globe and organizations which provide a range of US medical professionals and contract staff. The latter are, more often than not, former, seasoned intelligence officers or interrogators with experience in previous conflicts. Not all of tem are of U.S. origin.

One of the peculiar aspects of the Guantanamo controversy is that there has been more outrage in Europe concerning its existence than in the U.S. where the media has generally ignored the story and neglected to seriously investigate what has been going on behind the barbed wire and searchlights. Four years on, while the Bush Administration insists that Guantanamo experiment has provided vital intelligence – a claim not substantiated with facts – there is growing evidence that most of those arrested and detained in the camp have not been major players and many have had to be released over the years because they posed no threat. In fact, lawyers in Europe have been arguing that the former Gitmo suspects they represent were arrested in error, tortured and detained for as much as three years.

UN human rights investigators, after three years of talks with representatives of the Bush Administration, recently condemned the US for refusing to allow them to make open access “fact-finding” tours of the camp. Condemnation has also come from Amnesty International and other groups, adding to further damage to the US image abroad. One U.N. official complained that many inmates suffered from serious mental health problems.

Irene Khan, international secretary general of Amnesty, has gone so far as to call for exposure of what she described as a “US globalized network” designed for ill-treatment and torture of suspects. She sees Gitmo as part of a highly secret project involving similar camps across the globe, including ones already made public such as the airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan

Gareth Pierce, the most high profile lawyer in Britain, has represented several former Gitmo detainees and claims each of them was subjected to torture. One of her clients, Moazzam Begg, recently told an international conference on the plight of detainees in US custody that places like Guantanamo engendered hatred of the US and Britain. Pierce says Begg went on holiday to Afghanistan with his wife and three children, arriving at the start of the US assault on the Taliban. He immediately fled with his family to Pakistan where he was arrested and handed over to US authorities who moved him to taken to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. He was then transferred to Guantanamo. According to Begg, he was tortured at Bagram but only subjected to “tortuous” conditions at Guantanamo. He and three other British detainees were released without charge after they had spent over three years in US custody. What is interesting about the Begg case is that he has never disputed he attended two training camps in Afghanistan in 1993 and 1998, one for several days. He was also in Bosnia at the end of the conflict there in the 1990s and he financially supported what he called foreign fighters. The Afghan camps he was in were not linked to Al Qaeda. One was run by the Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban and supported the US invasion of Afghanistan. The other, based at Jalalabad in 1998 was run by Kurds training fighters for operations against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq. He never fought for or with terrorists, he claims.

One of the major stories now surrounding Guantanamo – a story rarely covered by the US media – is the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike. London lawyers from the highly reputable law firm of Allen & Ovary, which represents some of the hunger strikers, are demanding action from US medical ethics boards against doctors involved in force-feeding. The practice requires tubes to be shoved up the noses of prisoners and then down into their stomachs. It is widely deemed to be a very painful procedure. It has been confirmed that, at the outset of the force-feeding program in Guantanamo, tubes as large as 4.8mm in diameter were employed in order to speed up the process. Those tubes caused so much nausea, bleeding and pain it was decided to substitute them with tubes of 3mm diameter. Those who undertake the insertion of tubes are trained medical staff who are engaged in a practice banned under Article 5 of the 1975 Tokyo Declaration of the World Medical Association. The lawyers at Allen & Ovary in London have pointed an accusing finger at Capt. John S. Edmondson, head of the hospital at the Guantanamo base, and some senior medical figures in Britain have promised to elicit international medical support for an outright condemnation of the role of members US medical profession in force-feeding detainees.

While the Bush Administration refuses to discuss what goes on at Guantanamo, legal documents obtained by The Observer, a respected British Sunday newspaper, indicate that since Christmas the number of hunger strikers at Guantanamo has increased to 81, representing a 50% increase in a mater of weeks. The documents also show that many of the hunger strikers have been in the camp four years without being charged with an offence or allowed access to the courts. Their lawyers say they have not even been shown evidence they committed any crimes.

As a general principle, the reaction of the Bush Administration to the controversy surrounding Guantanamo is understandable yet predictable. As with all secret projects, involving techniques which potentially contravene international human rights protocols, governments tend to respond by hiding behind a cloak of national security. The government response is either that the public cannot be trusted to know what exactly is happening behind searchlights and barbed wire or the public must blindly accept that the military/intelligence infrastructure is committed to an experiment aimed at protecting the population at large. In the long term, especially in a democracy, that strategy does not work because people are just not that gullible. When the Bush Administration rounds on critics of Guantanamo, one is reminded of the reaction of Margaret Thatcher when asked about comments made by her critics. “They would say that wouldn’t they,” she remarked. So it is with the Bush administration. They would say Guantanamo and spying on ordinary Americans are projects shrouded in secrecy for the sake of national security and the protection of the population at large. Therefore the absence of palpable facts to show that those projects have successfully stopped terror and do not contravene international protocols should not matter. We should therefore unquestioningly accept the word of the president and vice-president and ignore any demands for congressional oversight or investigation.

Is Chalabi really our go-between with Iran?

Claims that Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi credited with being an Iranian spy and with helping to start the war with Iraq, is now our go-between in negotiations with Iran cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Chalabi is like the proverbial cat with nine lives and he keeps turning up at critical times for US foreign policymakers dealing with the war in Iraq and our relations with Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.
The latest story to surface concerning him is that he has been acting as the linkman between our ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and representatives of the Iranian government. It is known Khalilzad has been desperately trying to find a way of jump starting behind the scenes talks with Teheran about the ongoing nuclear crisis and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s support for Iraqi insurgents. Perhaps no better man to help him than Chalabi who was branded a spy by the CIA.
In the meantime, Chalabi’s critics remain dumfounded that he is still around and pulling the rings of US diplomats and policymakers but a close study of his history points to a cunning, manipulative and politically savvy individual. For example, even after it was shown his bogus defectors fed the Pentagon and CIA the information that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and mass stockpiles of nerve gas, his Iraqi National Congress continued to receive massive funding from Washington. He was one of the first Iraqi exiles the US flew into Iraq after the invasion. He was accompanied by his own little small army of militiamen and was installed in suites of offices in Baghdad. His brother was even given the job of spending millions of US dollars organizing war crimes trials, in particular the trial of Saddam.
As a prominent Shiite, Chalabi has always been a darling of the Neocons despite the fact he is still wanted on by Jordan for embezzling tens of millions of dollars from a bank there. Prior to the war, the Neocons saw the embezzler as Saddam’s replacement and the person who would lead a new Iraq into closer relations with Israel. He promised them as much. When the war began, he established close links to the powerful Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani and advised the US to disband the Iraqi army, a move that has proved disastrous.
In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Neocons in Washington like Douglas Feith, the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, Vice President, Dick Cheney, and Sec. of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld were happy with their man Chalabi back in Iraqi to help with the restructuring but they did not count on the CIA. The agency was angry it had taken the hit for providing the White House with faulty intelligence leading up to the war even though most of that Intel came from Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress who were backed by Cheney and senior Pentagon figures. The CIA decided it was time for payback. The agency publicly branded Chalabi an Iranian spy and accused him of feeding Teheran secret codes the US used for its communications in the Middle East. His offices in Baghdad were raided and all his personal documents and computers were seized. He quickly fled to Iran but later returned to Iraq under the protection of the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani.
Just last year he returned to his former glory hole, Washington, to be wined and dined by many of his former Neocon buddies. They welcomed him home like a lost sheep even though the CIA had not backtracked on its claims that he was an enemy of the United States. The reason for the warm embrace in Washington, a year after his fall from grace, was that he remained a great survivor and a useful ally in Iraq. Despite the odds, and with Ayatollah Sistani’s help and no doubt with the assistance of the Iranian leadership which holds a powerful saw over the Shiite leadership in Iraq, he was back at the center of power politics in Baghdad. His reemergence proved once again that his Neocon allies in Washington still shaped Middle East policy.
Now that the embezzler, turned supplier of bogus intelligence and Iranian spy is back in play the CIA cannot be too happy and must be wondering if Chalabi will ever go away.



Claims that Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi credited with being an Iranian spy and with helping to start the war with Iraq, is now our go-between in negotiations with Iran cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Chalabi is like the proverbial cat with nine lives and he keeps turning up at critical times for US foreign policymakers dealing with the war in Iraq and our relations with Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.
The latest story to surface concerning him is that he has been acting as the linkman between our ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and representatives of the Iranian government. It is known Khalilzad has been desperately trying to find a way of jump starting behind the scenes talks with Teheran about the ongoing nuclear crisis and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s support for Iraqi insurgents. Perhaps no better man to help him than Chalabi who was branded a spy by the CIA.
In the meantime, Chalabi’s critics remain dumfounded that he is still around and pulling the rings of US diplomats and policymakers but a close study of his history points to a cunning, manipulative and politically savvy individual. For example, even after it was shown his bogus defectors fed the Pentagon and CIA the information that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and mass stockpiles of nerve gas, his Iraqi National Congress continued to receive massive funding from Washington. He was one of the first Iraqi exiles the US flew into Iraq after the invasion. He was accompanied by his own little small army of militiamen and was installed in suites of offices in Baghdad. His brother was even given the job of spending millions of US dollars organizing war crimes trials, in particular the trial of Saddam.
As a prominent Shiite, Chalabi has always been a darling of the Neocons despite the fact he is still wanted on by Jordan for embezzling tens of millions of dollars from a bank there. Prior to the war, the Neocons saw the embezzler as Saddam’s replacement and the person who would lead a new Iraq into closer relations with Israel. He promised them as much. When the war began, he established close links to the powerful Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani and advised the US to disband the Iraqi army, a move that has proved disastrous.
In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Neocons in Washington like Douglas Feith, the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, Vice President, Dick Cheney, and Sec. of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld were happy with their man Chalabi back in Iraqi to help with the restructuring but they did not count on the CIA. The agency was angry it had taken the hit for providing the White House with faulty intelligence leading up to the war even though most of that Intel came from Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress who were backed by Cheney and senior Pentagon figures. The CIA decided it was time for payback. The agency publicly branded Chalabi an Iranian spy and accused him of feeding Teheran secret codes the US used for its communications in the Middle East. His offices in Baghdad were raided and all his personal documents and computers were seized. He quickly fled to Iran but later returned to Iraq under the protection of the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani.
Just last year he returned to his former glory hole, Washington, to be wined and dined by many of his former Neocon buddies. They welcomed him home like a lost sheep even though the CIA had not backtracked on its claims that he was an enemy of the United States. The reason for the warm embrace in Washington, a year after his fall from grace, was that he remained a great survivor and a useful ally in Iraq. Despite the odds, and with Ayatollah Sistani’s help and no doubt with the assistance of the Iranian leadership which holds a powerful saw over the Shiite leadership in Iraq, he was back at the center of power politics in Baghdad. His reemergence proved once again that his Neocon allies in Washington still shaped Middle East policy.
Now that the embezzler, turned supplier of bogus intelligence and Iranian spy is back in play the CIA cannot be too happy and must be wondering if Chalabi will ever go away.