The Iraqi War: A Lobbied Lie

President Bush is applauded by Vice President Dick Cheney, left, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, of Ill. while delivering his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on the Capitol Hill Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004. (AP Photo/Kevin Lamarque, Pool)

The man who sold Iraq WMD lies to the press

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Nov
2015

Friday 6^th

posted by Morning Star in Features

SOLOMON HUGHES looks back at the instrumental role Ahmed Chalabi played as ‘PR man’ for the US Establishment in building the case for the Iraq invasion

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The death of Ahmed Chalabi earlier this week prompted a number of obituaries talking about how his Iraqi National Congress “lobbied” or even “fooled” the West into the Iraq war by spreading false WMD stories.
But Chalabi was actually paid by the US government to set up a London office and pump out rubbish stories, many through the British press.
Fleet Street doesn’t like to talk about the lies it is told — which are far worse than any Blair dossier — so it doesn’t always tell the truth about Chalabi.
Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) was one of many anti-Saddam groups. But it was the least effective or popular with Iraqis.
In 1995 Chalabi tried to lead an uprising against Saddam Hussein from Kurdish territory, but Saddam’s forces viciously counter-attacked, making it a bloody failure.
In 2003, when he returned to Iraq on the back of the US invasion, his party never won more than 1 per cent in any Iraqi election.
He was bad at Iraqi resistance or politics. But he was good at spreading lies. The INC acted more like a PR or propaganda group.
It received up to $100 million from first the CIA and then the US State Department.
The money was used to hire PR firms and lobbyists, like the Rendon Group or Burson Marstellar.
The INC’s one successful scheme was the Information Collection Programme, which mostly involved disseminating dodgy “information” from its London offices.
In March 2004 the Knight-Ridder news agency got hold of a letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the US Senate appropriations committee justifying its US funds.
The letter was effectively a bill for stories placed in the press between October 2001 and May 2002 — its regular $4m payment for an “information collection programme” authorised by the US. It reads like an invoice from a PR firm to its client.
The INC listed 108 articles in British and US newspapers that had been inspired by INC material. Many of the newspaper articles contained “information” that was completely untrue.
The INC was invoicing the US government for spreading stories about Saddam’s imaginary WMD programme and false tales about Iraq’s links with al-Qaida.
By paying a private organisation to take control of this part of the information war, the US government was able to put stories into the public arena via the newspapers which were too absurd to put even in their own inflated “dossiers.”
By using a paid-for third party to tell these tall tales, the US government was also able to avoid responsibility for these particular lies after the war.
The INC’s propaganda invoice charges for many stories in the British press. The claims of Iraqi civil engineer Adnan al-Haideri feature heavily in the INC list of stories. He claimed to have built underground biowarfare labs and worked on an Iraqi nuclear programme.
The INC list includes an article by Marie Colvin in the Sunday Times (March 17 2002) headlined “Saddam’s arsenal revealed,” publicising Haideri’s claims.
According to Colvin, a second defector revealed the existence of seven mobile biological labs “disguised as milk trucks.”
Colvin quotes an unnamed official describing the information as “high-grade” and expresses no scepticism. Neither the underground nor mobile labs existed.
The INC also claimed credit for two articles by Damian Whitworth in the Times in December 2001 uncritically reporting Haideri’s claims “about the acceleration of President Saddam Hussein’s work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.”
Also on the list is a December 2002 article by Andrew Gumbel of the Independent and a story by Toby Moore in the Express, both reporting Haideri’s claims without scepticism.
The INC also cites Ben Fenton in the Telegraph on the same subject, under the banner “Defector tells of Saddam’s nuclear arms.”
Christopher Hitchens also features prominently in the INC’s list of articles, including his March 2002 piece for the Evening Standard.
Hitchens stated Saddam was “within a measurable distance of acquiring doomsday materials.” He praised the “heroic” Chalabi, “the symbolic and actual head of the Iraqi opposition” and his “information concerning the whereabouts of the Ba’ath Party’s weapons of mass destruction.”
The INC list also cited a Hitchens article for the Guardian in the same month. This time Hitchens stated Saddam “certainly has nerve gas and chemical weapons.”
Hitchens’s piece shows all the hallmarks of INC “information.” He cited the discredited exile Khidir Hamza to show that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons and used an INC source to show Saddam was linked to the September 11 attacks.
The linkage between Saddam and terrorism feature heavily in the INC’s list. Roping Iraq into the war on terror was one of the central functions of the INC.
Claims that Saddam was behind September 11 are prominent in the list of INC propaganda funded by the US.
They highlight a March 2002 piece by Toby Harnden in the Daily Telegraph saying that Saddam “armed bin Laden and funded al-Qaida allies.”
Relying on INC information, Harnden reported that “Iraq sent conventional and perhaps biological or chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.” The piece quotes former CIA boss James Woolsey and Chalabi.
The list includes a November 2001 piece in the Times by Richard Beeston on the city of Salman Pak headlined: “Saddam’s terror training camp teaches hijacking.”
Beeston’s account, “along with similar testimony from other recent Iraqi defectors, is likely to increase suspicions in America that President Saddam Hussein may have had a hand in the September 11 attacks.”
The INC list also features a November 2001 2,500-word “Focus Special” by David Rose of the Observer which claimed Saddam was not only behind the September 11 attacks but also probably linked to the spate of US anthrax letters.
Rose has given a very honest examination and explanation of how he got caught up in these WMD lies. But none of the newspapers has explained to their readers how or why they pumped out Chalabi’s propaganda.
His death was one last opportunity for the British press to examine their role in the worst reporting failure for decades, one that helped lead to death and destruction. It is an opportunity that, with rare exceptions, they did not take.

The Politician Who Introduced The Antichrist (Rev 13:11)

  
Ahmed Chalabi suffers a heart-attack

The unexpected end of the man who helped deceive America into war in Iraq

Nov 3rd 2015

AHMED CHALABI’S downfall had been declared so many times that Iraqis are struggling to believe that the end of his extraordinary career has occurred through natural rather than political causes. His family, who ran Iraq’s oldest commercial bank under the British-backed monarchy, fled the country with the toppling of the Hashemite king in 1958. In 1989 he then fled Jordan in the boot of a prince’s car, accused of cooking the books of the kingdom’s second bank, Petra. Resurrecting himself as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-financed opposition front, he fled Kurdistan during Saddam Hussein’s brief offensive on the Western-protected enclave in the mid-1990s. And when the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 and flew his armed followers to an airfield near Nasiriya, in southern Iraq, the fighters got lost on their way into town.

Paul Bremer, America’s administrator, parachuted him into his fledgling cabinet, the Governing Council, a 25-man body dominated by exiles, but then raided his compound and arrested his associates for dealing too closely for their liking with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. His party won a mere 0.5% of the vote in Iraq’s 2005 election, and only narrowly survived repeated assassination attempts, including one in 2008 that killed six of his bodyguards.

And yet since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he has been one of Baghdad’s constants. Unlike other exiles, who fled back abroad when militias overran the country, he stayed put, re-establishing the role his family had performed under the monarchy as overseer of Iraq’s finances. He held the finance portfolio in the Governing Council and, following his re-election, headed parliament’s finance committee. Admirers credit him with finessing the country’s budget, despite a plummeting oil price and the soaring cost of the war against the jihadists of Islamic State. “Most members of Iraq’s finance committee are not financial wizards. He was one,” says a western diplomat in Baghdad, who lunched with him the day he died.

Until his fall from America’s grace, he had been the neocons’ favourite Iraqi. As a postgraduate student at Chicago University, he befriended Richard Perle, a future assistant secretary of defence who subsequently pushed for the war on the Iraq, and also became close to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence in the same era. Months before he was stripped of his American government stipend, he had sat next to Laura Bush, America’s first-lady, as her husband gave the State of the Union address. Pentagon officials rushed to blame him for feeding them the false testimony of Iraq’s stash of weapons of mass destruction that served as their justification for war. Even so, he proved he could still deploy his knack for reinvention without his American patrons.
Though a secular Shia, he helped cobble together a Shia alliance that has dominated Baghdad ever since. He brought Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shia cleric whose supporters had fought America’s forces, into the political process, an alliance he maintained till his death. He enjoyed the confidence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s pre-eminent Shia cleric, reviving a relationship his family had played as the clergy’s bankers in exile following the Baath party takeover. Only weeks before his death, senior officials were tipping him as a possible Iraqi prime minister, should the floundering incumbent, Haider Abadi, fall.

Detractors say he used his influence for personal gain and for settling scores. As head of the de-Baathification committee, he ran the “star chamber” that hunted for Saddam’s former henchmen, but also banned competitors from running for office and bidding for contracts his own associates prized. Before his death, he was vigorously investigating accusations that the Iraqi Central Bank’s had been involved in cheque-fraud in Amman, an operation he claimed had cost Iraq over $60 billion. Rivals suspected the investigation was politically motivated. And even his friends joked about his reputation for untrustworthiness. At a signing ceremony for Iraq’s post-Saddam foundational law in 2004, a fellow councillor and future president, Jalal Talabani, was overheard chiding Mr Chalabi, “Ahmed, leave the pen.”

A Troubling Connection To The Antichrist

For Iraq, Potential Leader With a Tarnished Past

Moqtada al-Sadr and Chalabi

By ROD NORDLANDJUNE 30, 2014

BAGHDAD — He took millions of dollars from the C.I.A., founded and was accused of defrauding the second-biggest bank in Jordan and sold the Bush administration a bill of goods on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

At first championed by the Bush administration’s neoconservatives as a potential leader of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi ended up persona non grata, effectively barred from the wartime American Embassy here. Now, in an improbable twist of fate, Mr. Chalabi is being talked about as a serious candidate for prime minister. He has also been back to the embassy.

With Sunni insurgents rampaging across the country and sectarian killings on the rise, everything old seems new again in Iraq — including, apparently, Mr. Chalabi.

And on Monday, Obama administration officials said that about 200 more troops had been sent to protect the American Embassy in Baghdad and the Baghdad airport. The additional troops, who arrived on Sunday, will operate helicopters and drones to “bolster airfield and route security,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.

Iraqi politicians have begun to position themselves as possible replacements for the embattled Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. These are the four contenders.

In addition to those forces, another 100 troops who the Pentagon had previously said would be sent to Iraq are headed to Baghdad to help with security and logistics. The moves will raise the total number of American troops deployed to Iraq for security and advisory missions to about 750.

As Iraq’s political parties held round-the-clock meetings the past three days to try to agree on the shape of a new government in time to convene Parliament on Tuesday and begin choosing new leaders, Mr. Chalabi’s name was one of two being prominently mentioned to replace the incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Mr. Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has only one seat in the Parliament, his own, and it is a measure of his skills as a political operator that he is even under consideration.

It is also a measure of the desperate state of the effort to forge a new government amid severe sectarian strains and demands from both American and Iranian allies that Sunnis and Kurds be included — all while the country is under severe threat from Sunni-based Islamic extremists.

“Our candidates for prime minister are Adel Abdul Mahdi or Ahmad Chalabi,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a prominent leader in the parliamentary bloc of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which in turn is part of the National Alliance, a coalition of all Shiite groups.

The alliance is trying to persuade the State of Law party of Mr. Maliki, also a Shiite, to stand aside for another Shiite. “If State of Law refuses to accept any other candidate, we will ally with the Kurds and the Sunnis to form a government,” said Mr. Zamili, who was accused of organizing death squads when he served as Iraq’s deputy health minister.

“You know, there is a saying in Arabic that when you have seen death, you don’t mind a high fever,” said one aide to Mr. Maliki who is among a growing number of Mr. Maliki’s own supporters hoping that he will bow out. The aide’s point was that almost anything was possible in the contorted state of Iraqi politics.

The normally garrulous Mr. Chalabi did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
On the face of it, Mr. Chalabi as prime minister seems, at best, highly unlikely. His exile-based, C.I.A.-financed Iraqi National Congress never built much of a grass-roots following in Iraq, and he suffered from the Americans’ growing unpopularity as the war dragged on. His role in promoting what many now view as concocted evidence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein badly tarnished him.

Only a year after the invasion, American special forces raided his home in the upper class Mansour neighborhood, apparently in a vain attempt to prove him a spy for Iran. Unlike many returning exiles, Mr. Chalabi stayed in Iraq through all the bad years, and not without risk; one suicide bomber narrowly missed him, killing six of his bodyguards.

Spurned by the Americans, he became an ally of Mr. Sadr, the radical Shiite leader, a friend to Iran and a regular visitor to the Shiite ayatollahs in Najaf.

Mr. Chalabi, 69, put skills honed during long years of exile in Washington as a communicator and back-room operator to good use, though, forging alliances with the Sadrists and their Iranian patrons, and also with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiites’ supreme religious leader.

Some argue that Mr. Chalabi is at best a long-shot candidate, but so is every Maliki opponent at this point. Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party gained the biggest number of seats in the April 30 election, and now claims 95, well short of the 165 needed to make a majority in the 328-seat Parliament. But Mr. Maliki has lost support from the powerful Shiite clerics who, like the Americans, have politely but clearly signaled they would prefer he step down.

Replacing Mr. Maliki is one of the few things nearly all other politicians agree on — the other Shiite parties, as well as the Sunnis and Kurds and a host of tiny parties, which together could theoretically control as many as 233 seats in the Parliament.

Mr. Maliki’s State of Law supporters say the arithmetic is all on the incumbent’s side, however, and scoff at suggestions any other candidate could replace him. “Even if other parties don’t attend the first session, the State of Law with other small parties joining it will have enough seats to form a government,” said a party leader, Alia Nussif.

Nevertheless, at least four State of Law political leaders have said they want to see Mr. Maliki leave for someone whom all Shiites could coalesce around and other groups would find acceptable. That could either be some other figure in his party or, more likely, someone from one of the other major Shiite parties, most likely the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

That is where Mr. Chalabi’s chance comes into play. In the recent elections, he ran as an independent with the Islamic Supreme Council alliance, whose leading candidate was Bayan Jabr. Mr. Jabr, however, was the interior minister during some of the worst days of sectarian violence, when police and security forces were deeply implicated in the killings of Sunnis.

Mr. Chalabi, a secular Shiite, would not have that problem, although he was in charge of the de-Baathification commission that stripped Sunni officials of their positions. Lately, he has called for de-Baathification to be ended in the interest of healing differences between sects.

Mr. Chalabi also has the support of the followers of Mr. Sadr, whose Mahdi Army battled the Americans in the streets until he made peace and joined the political process. Mr. Sadr’s allies control 34 seats in the new Parliament, even more than the Islamic Supreme Council, once the biggest Shiite party, with 29.

The other candidate some of the Sadrists are talking about is Adel Abdul Mahdi, a former vice president and stalwart of the Islamic Supreme Council. Mr. Abdul Mahdi is tarnished by the years that he spent in government, however, and reputedly does not enjoy the level of Iranian support that Mr. Chalabi and the Sadrists have.

“Ahmad Chalabi is close to all the parties and is a good candidate,” said Nahida al-Daini, a leader with the Sunni Mutahidoon party. “But accepting him will also depend on internal and external approvals.” She apparently was referring to Iraqi religious leaders and foreign countries like Iran. Mr. Abdul Mahdi was also a possibility, she said.

Ahmed al-Sharifi, president of an Iraqi think tank called the Center for Strategic Studies, based in Karbala, in southern Iraq, said Mr. Chalabi was the most likely candidate to emerge as prime minister, at least in part because his lack of a political organization puts him in the role of an independent, and because he also enjoys support from the powerful marja, as the council of ayatollahs in Iraq, led by Mr. Sistani, is called.

“He’s a technocrat, an independent within the Shiite alliance, and he’s a man everybody can agree on among Sunnis and Kurds,” Mr. Sharifi said. Even his old C.I.A. connections are no longer a liability, he said. “Nobody cares about that stuff anymore.”