Gee, couldn't happen to a nicer guy. The truest Neo Con, convicted embezzler and all around good felon, Ahmed Chalabi. Seems that he's fallen out of favor with his American masters...
A year ago, as U.S. troops swept toward Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi and about 400 hastily assembled fighters were secretly airlifted into southern Iraq to rally other Iraqis and begin a march toward Baghdad to help topple Saddam Hussein, an operation that won the concurrence of U.S. officials all the way up to Vice President Cheney's office. Chalabi had predicted that he would become Iraq's Spartacus, cutting a wide swath through Iraq and mobilizing vast numbers behind him, according to U.S. officials.
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"The vast majority of reports of his proximity to and influence on administration policy have been greatly exaggerated," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy who knows Chalabi.
Which explains why a US Military aircraft flew the crook and company into Bagdad after the "liberation", right? Gets better...
One of his aides declared himself "mayor" of Baghdad. His supporters established what U.S. officials called "Chalabi cantons," complete with roadblocks and tolls. And loyalists sent out word that Iraqis should report to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) before returning to work.
His agents were also faster than U.S. troops at getting to Iraq's intelligence headquarters, where they took thousands of sensitive files, which the INC has refused to return to the new intelligence ministry, U.S. officials say. Supporters were implicated in commandeering the property of former Baath Party officials, from homes to upscale cars.
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"Now it's demonstrable that he told the U.S. government a lot of things that were not true," said Pat Lang, former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency. At the United Nations last year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the U.S. case for war, which included information on mobile labs for the production of chemical or biological weapons based on data from a defector provided by the INCdata that the United States has since conceded were untrue.
But Chalabi, a Shiite Muslim educated at MIT and the University of Chicago, has been unrepentant. "We are heroes in error," he told the Daily Telegraph of London in February. "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."
I suspect that about 780 or so families would like to argue that point up-close and personal with ol'Ahmed, not to mention their buddies and others in Iraq right now.
Maybe they'll just quietly hand him over to the Jordanians...trussed up like a Thanksgiving Turkee. How appropriate would that be?
posted by Jo Fish on 05.21.04 at 01:59 AM
Comments:
Read Jim Hoagland's defense of Chalabi in today's WaPo. Chalabi is obviously a charter member of "Hoagland's Heroes". Pray tell, who might be Hoagland's Sergeant Shultz?
posted by: Shag from Brookline on 05.21.04 at 06:44 AM [permalink]
Imagine what treatment he'd get in jail in arab lands since he's done counterintel schemes for Israel also...and he sat next to the worst lady at the mistake of the union address...
We were all over this from day one. A spade is a spade after all...
posted by: Mr.Murder on 05.25.04 at 02:05 AM [permalink]