www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_05/003969.php
the love affair between the United States and Ahmed Chalabi is finally over: US soldiers and Iraqi police on Thursday raided the home of Ahmad Chalabi, a Governing Council member who was once the Pentagon's pick to run post-war Iraq, and two office buildings used by his Iraqi National Congress. Hours after the morning raids, a US official and an Iraqi judge disclosed to reporters that arrest warrants had been issued for 15 people on charges of kidnapping, fraud, and "associated matters." For several months, US officials have been investigating people affiliated with Chalabi's INC and possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the currency exchange that took place from Oct. When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out, they discovered that there was a $22 million-plus difference. They raided his home, kicked down his doors, smashed his portrait , and hauled away a dozen computers. I guess it goes without saying that Chalabi was none too happy about this. The odd thing is that Chalabi is claiming that this is all because the United States is unhappy with his investigations into the UN's oil-for-food program. I'm not up to speed on all the details of this, but here's the nickel version: * For some reason, the US allowed Chalabi to take over the old Iraqi intelligence ministry after the war. So Chalabi has in his possession rooms full of Saddam-era intel documents. Among other things, Saddam sold the oil to favored partners who agreed to kick back money directly to him. Unsurprisingly, the investigation has not made swift progress under these conditions. It is not entirely clear why the Bush administration is supposedly so eager to halt an investigation into the UN bureaucracy and one that implicates the hated French at that but that's the story. Chalabi is apparently claiming that we are in thrall to UN negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi, who is in charge of figuring out the mechanics of the June 30 handover, and the UN has threatened to leave us hanging unless we shut down Chalabi. But I wouldn't be willing to risk even a nickel on the possibility that Ahmed Chalabi is telling the truth about anything, so we'll just have to wait and see. It would be nice if the raiding party managed to confiscate some of those oil-for-food documents so we can see for ourselves whether they're for real.
This thing heads further south every damn day of the week. The good news is that I think more and more we'll not only be seeing Bush off this fall, but the Neocons -- PERMANENTLY.
PERMALINK Why do you think the raiding party would show "us" anything at all, and who is the we in all of this. I never voted in this fraud, and neither did anyone else.
PERMALINK Actually, the report I saw said they did all those things to the INC headquarters, not Chalabi's home. There, they negotiated and sent one Iraqi policeman in to look for wanted individuals, no search, no door knocked down.
Chalabi has accumulated more bad Kharma than any man walking. When you swim with the sharks bad things can happen, even to sharks. Having said that, what he pulled off, well, his biography is going to make one hellevu movie one day.
this is a see-through ruse to make it seem like perle and wolfy don't like him now, so if he 'just happens' to make it into the next 'sovereign' govt, we can say he wasn't personally chosen by the fat bastards in washington - and therefore it will 'legitamize' his power!
How dedicated to your party over the country does one have to be to support a guy like Chalabi? I'd have to say all Republicans, at this point, are traitors - not in the Coulter-esque form of the word - real traitors. Or traders - trade honor, dignity, patriotism - for their party.
It's certainly possible that ending or serious stifling the UN corruption investigation was part of the deal that kept Brahimi on board. But if all of this is true, isn't it even more damning evidence that this administration screwed the pooch in Iraq? We're now so beholden to an official of the hated UN that we can't even prosecute the corrupt in the organization!
html) on Chalabi's past, and it certainly looks like he's got his claws deeply into Iraq's financial assets. So whether this raid is a neocon plot or not, Chalabi will come out on top once more.
Doesn't the perfect picture of Chalabi's shattered portrait look like the most planned/planted prop you've ever seen? But of course the movie will probably work, because it's not about a young female soldier who's strong enough to speak the truth. Sometimes I wonder if these jokers have hollywood script advisors and prop men in every office of the admionistration.
PERMALINK Boy howdy, where are Al/Charlie/Norman Rogers today? I'll give you a hint, ladies: Your boilerplate Bush-talking-point response to this is "Well at least Chalabi wasn't as bad as Saddam Hussein, blah blah blah," and then we lay into you for making a completely irrelevant point that means nothing at all, and then you whip out some moldy piece of information about how Chalabi put thirty cents in the March of Dimes canister on the counter of the Sadr City 7-Eleven about 10 years ago and that means he's really a nice guy after all so there, and around and around we go .
PERMALINK FWIW, neocon acolyte Michael Rubin says it's all part of a brilliant plan to allow Chalabi to distance himself from the US and ascend to the throne of Iraq, carried on the backs of an enthralled Iraqi populace.
PERMALINK The exciting thing is, Chalabi may now go on the offensive, releasing tons of information about the run up to the war. It was really stupid for a bunch this machivellian (Bushies) to not arrest him and hold him incommunicado. made damn sure no one ever heard a word Noriega had to say about how Bush's CIA worked with him. I bet there will be a real information dump soon from the INC. I just don't buy that our government has the saavy to set this up as an intricate political operation. I think if they were that good, they wouldn't have such a poor opinion rating in the US right now. I bet this will be a new beginning for Chalabi, his opinion polls should jump 15 points just from this one raid.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz explains that the decision to cut-off Ahmed Chalabis monthly $340,000 stipend was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. Wolfowitz testified to a US Senate committee that in light of the impending June 30th transfer of sovereignty (itself a fraud) continued funding to Chalabi would have been "inappropriate." In addition to being a war criminal, he is a monumental liar, a man whose pronouncements can generally be relied upon to be antipodal to the truth. Even where a Wolfowitz utterance unexpectedly lurches in the direction of the truth, it is merely a feint, a stratagem to clothe a latent lie in a veneer of truth. Wolfowitzs Senate testimony suggested that the inappropriateness of continued funding derived from the potential that overt US favoritism toward Chalabi might undermine the legitimacy of the June 30th transfer. But the truncation of Chalabis nifty allowance has nothing to do with concerns regarding the perceived legitimacy of June 30th turnover. Chalabi has received his monthly stipend, courtesy of Uncle Sam, for the duration of our occupation of Iraq, from the formation of the Iraq Governing Council, through the failed US efforts to craft an Iraqi puppet government, through Brahimis efforts to broker a carefully calibrated coalition of Iraqi factions to take the reigns on June 30th. The damage done to these efforts by the neocon Chalabi fetish long predated the decision to rescind the faustian bargain with Chalabi and his personal fiefdom, the grandiloquently monikered Iraqi National Congress. And so we find ourselves six weeks from the June 30th relay, and were holding the baton without so much as another runner on the track. Where is the fallback position held in abeyance for the contingency of a Chalabi meltdown? And that absence of any lifeboats on the listing USS Chalabi reveals the neocon grand design in Iraq for what it is and always has ...
|
http://csua.com/feed/