1 Boring Old Man

Iraqi National Congress
From SourceWatch

^{In May 1991, following the end of Operation Desert Storm, then-President George H.W. Bush signed a presidential finding directing the CIA to create the conditions for Hussein’s removal. The hope was that members of the Iraqi military would turn on Hussein and stage a military coup. The CIA did not have the mechanisms in place to make that happen, so they hired the Rendon Group, a PR firm run by John Rendon, to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign.}

^{"The Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation of a media strategy company [Rendon Group] doing the bidding of the United States government."}

^{In 1998, however, the U.S. Congress authorized $97 million in U.S. military aid for Iraqi opposition via the Iraq Liberation Act, intended primarily for the INC. In April 2001, the Iranian government allowed the INC to open US-funded offices in a plush northern suburb of Tehran. It marked the first time since the Iranian revolution in 1979 that Washington allowed government funds to be spent inside Iran…}

^{In March 2002, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that "exile groups supported by the I.N.C. have been conducting sabotage operations inside Iraq, targeting oil refineries and other installations… Hersh added, "A dispute over Chalabi’s potential usefulness preoccupies the bureaucracy, as the civilian leadership in the Pentagon continues to insist that only the INC can lead the opposition. At the same time, a former Administration official told me, ‘Everybody but the Pentagon and the office of the Vice-President wants to ditch the INC.’ The INC’s critics note that Chalabi, despite years of effort and millions of dollars in American aid, is intensely unpopular today among many elements in Iraq. ‘If Chalabi is the guy, there could be a civil war after Saddam’s overthrow,’ one former C.I.A. operative told me. A former high-level Pentagon official added, ‘There are some things that a President can’t order up, and an internal opposition is one.’" Notwithstanding these concerns, Hersh reported that "INC supporters in and around the Administration, including Paul  Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, believe, like Chalabi, that any show of force would immediately trigger a revolt against Saddam within Iraq, and that it would quickly expand."}

^{In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the administration of George W. Bush actually preferred INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over analyses provided by long-standing analysts within the CIA. "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency.," he wrote. "The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. … Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war."}

^{Much of the pro-war faction’s information came from the INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country’s tumultuous politics consider the INC’s intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. … The Pentagon’s critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC’s leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else."}

^{"The [INC’s] intelligence isn’t reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi’s own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."}

^{In February 2003, as the Bush administration neared the end of its preparations for war, an internal fight erupted over INC’s plan to actually become the government of Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Chalabi wanted to "declare a provisional government when the war starts," a plan that "alienated some of Mr Chalabi’s most enthusiastic backers in the Pentagon and in Congress, who fear the announcement of a provisional government made up of exiles would split anti-Saddam sentiment inside Iraq."}

^{A classified study prepared by the National Intelligence Council in early 2003 found that only one of Chalabi’s defectors could be considered credible, The New Republic has learned. A more recent investigation undertaken by the DIA has found that practically all the intelligence provided by the INC was worthless. Despite this, it was revealed that in March 2004, the Pentagon continued to pay the INC $US340,000 a month for "intelligence collection". "We’re still getting good information from the INC … There are a lot of insurgents that are doing bad things and they have a lot of contacts and [are] making better ones every day," an unnamed Pentagon official claimed.}

^{Knight Ridder reported that the false INC intelligence fed to the US intelligence agencies was also distributed to news outlets in the United States, Britain and Australia. "A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress’s Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq… The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons," Knight Ridder reported.}

It’s a pitiful story. A megalomaniacal sociopathic expatriot lead our President and Vice President around through the nose, and they only backed off from him when he planned to install himself as Iraq’s new President after the invasion. But he did get a position in Iraq’s government and was, I suspect, behind the deBaathification that helped stoke the "Insurgency." As is apparent in my last post [hook, line, and sinker…], he’s still at it. His life is chronicled in a biography, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, currently on its way from Amazon.com to this very place…