In the wee hours of last night, Ahmed Chalabi, our new Manuel Noriega, was rousted out of his home/Iraqi National Congress headquarters by Baghdad police under the supervision of the U.S. military.
Chalabi has been a key figure in the Bush administration's regime change war, of course, having provided "intelligence" with regard to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. [Are you as sick of hearing that phrase as I am?!?] The raid, which took place in a well-to-do section of Baghdad, gives the appearance that Chalabi has lost face with the Bushies. That he has been speaking out against the U.S. presence in Iraq of late has supposedly set up this raid and, perhaps, the Bush administration's decision to stop the monthly $335,000 payments (or $27 million over the last four years).
I say "supposedly" because of what I read in an article at TomPaine.com:
Neocon Lets Cat Out of Bag
Robert Dreyfuss
May 19, 2004
Michael Rubin — a young staffer at the American Enterprise Institute who's just left the Pentagon, where he played a small role as a neocon cog in the Office of Special Plans war machine — let a herd of cats out of the bag about his favorite Iraqi phony, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress.
Chalabi, of course, is the roly-poly perpetrator of intelligence fraud and the convicted bank embezzler who still hopes to be leader of Iraq. Lately, Chalabi has scuttled into a would-be alliance with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the scowly fatwa man. In doing so, he's had the temerity to criticize the United States, leading some fuzzy thinkers to believe that Chalabi, whose puppet strings are made of steel, might be trying to show some independence from Washington. Well, says Rubin, who served as one the Pentagon’s liaisons to Chalabi, that's exactly what they want you to think:
"Much of the information he collected was to roll up the insurgency and Ba'athist cells. It caught people red-handed," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser who is now at a conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
"By telegraphing that he is not the favorite son of America, the administration will bolster him, showing he is his own man."
In other words, it's all a big con game. The still-neocon-dominated Pentagon—which this week stopped funding Chalabi's INC — is playing its last card, hoping that it can boost Chalabi's sagging fortunes by pretending to sever ties with him. That, the neocons hope, will allow Chalabi to strengthen his ties to Sistani, the king-making mullah who, they hope, holds Iraq’s fate in his wrinkled hands.
It's a shell game. With Bush's approval ratings tanking of late, his neo-con buddies have to do something to make it appear as if progress is happening with regard to turning the reins of government over to, um, somebody. Of course, this appears to be the only way it's going to happen -- make it look as if Chalabi has been wronged by the United States so that he can gain favor of the Iraqi people. That is what puppetry is all about, after all, isn't it?
In a related story, another key Iraqi informant upon whose "intelligence" Bush, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney made their assertions of Iraqi's "imminent danger", has been deemed as unreliable by the CIA and regrettable by Powell.
White House released claims of defector deemed unreliable by CIA
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials told Knight Ridder.
"The overall impression was that he was trying to pass information far beyond his area of expertise," said a senior U.S. official. He and another U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity because some details of the defector's case remain classified.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that other defectors fed him and the CIA misleading information about Iraqi mobile biological weapons facilities before the war.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I am disappointed and I regret it," Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
more >>
Speaking of that Meet the Press, I was busy getting riled up with the roundtable discussion on Fox News Sunday so I missed Colin Powell getting trumped by his press assistant at the end of his interview with Tim Russert.
Powell scolds aide after interview interrupted
The Associated Press
Updated: 3:29 p.m. ET May 16, 2004
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell chastised a press aide for trying to cut short the taping of a television interview Sunday.
Powell, speaking from a Dead Sea resort in Jordan, was listening to a final question from moderator Tim Russert, who was in the Washington studio of NBC’s Meet the Press.
In the broadcast, aired several hours after the interview was conducted, Powell abruptly disappears from view. Briefly seen are swaying palm trees and the water, backdrops for the interview.
Powell can be heard saying to the aide, "He's still asking a question." The secretary then told Russert, "Tim, I’m sorry I lost you."
NBC identified the aide as Emily Miller, a deputy press secretary.
Russert responded: "I don’t know who did that. I think that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary." The host added: "I don’t think that’s appropriate."
With the cameras still on the water, Powell snapped, "Emily get out of the way." He then instructed the crew to "bring the camera back," and told Russert to go ahead with the last question.
After Powell answered, Russert thanked the secretary for his "willingness to overrule his press aide’s attempt to abruptly cut off our discussion."
Five interviews scheduled State Department spokeswoman Julie Reside said Powell had scheduled five interviews, one after another, and that NBC went over the agreed upon time limit. She said every effort was made to get NBC to finish up, but that other networks had booked satellite time for interviews with Powell.
The executive producer of Meet the Press, Betsy Fischer, said Powell was 45 minutes late for the interview and that "everyone's satellite schedules already had to be rescheduled" anyway.
She said the exchange was not edited out because most taped interviews are not altered before airing.
Fischer said Miller called right after the taping to "express her displeasure" that the interview ran long. Fischer also said Powell called Russert a few hours later to apologize.
The State Department would not confirm either call or that Miller was the aide addressed by Powell.
© 2004 The Associated Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment