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Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of "miles" of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds. That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe. Late last year and several months before Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority became involved, Mr Chalabi had amassed enough information concerning corruption in the oil-for-food scandal to realise that he was...

The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq Sept. 25 — Aquila al-Hashimi, a career diplomat, was the only member of Saddam Hussein's regime to be chosen by Iraq's American occupiers to sit on the interim Governing Council. Al-Hashimi died Thursday of gunshot wounds, five days after being ambushed by six men in a pickup truck near her home in western Baghdad. Widely expected to become Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, she was preparing to attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. Her assassination was the latest in a series of assaults against Iraqis who have worked openly with the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte met Friday with Iraq's prime minister in the second visit this week by a top U.S. official. The unannounced meeting comes amid spiraling violence that included seven American deaths and the discovery of 56 bodies in the Iraqi capital bearing signs of torture. The bodies found scattered around Baghdad were of Iraqi men between 20 and 45 years old, and all were apparent victims of sectarian death squads, police said Friday.All wore civilian clothes and had been bound at the wrists and ankles, police Lt. Mohammed Khayon said. He said the...

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

Hand it to Secretary of State Rice. She knows how to make lemonade out of lemons. When asked on CNN this week her reaction to a communique signed by Iraqi leaders on Monday that recognized a "legitimate right to resistance," she said, "I think what they were trying to do was to get a sense of political inclusion while recognizing that violence and terrorism should not be a part of resistance." 'snip' The State Department, according to Iraqi officials I've spoken with, put tremendous pressure on elected leaders to attend this parley in Cairo. And the see-no-evil reaction to the...

WASHINGTON: Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. The men, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the CIA. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Maloof. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the CIA's finished reports." They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of 2001, they had constructed a startling new picture of...

April 3, 2005 Day of the Serial Fabricator (See original for reference links) Edward Jay Epstein In a scathing ad hominem attack on the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities in the New York Times today, Maureen Dowd protests: "It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon." She then implores, "Please, no more pantomime investigations." Despite such ridicule from Dowd, the nine-person bipartisan Commission is not without credentials and...

In 1987, after he was exonerated of corruption charges, former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan issued the classic plea of the wronged man: "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Whichever office it is, Ahmad Chalabi may want to apply there as well. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress has been the most unfairly maligned man on the planet in recent years. If you believe what you read, Chalabi is a con man, a crook and, depending on which day of the week it is, either an American or Iranian stooge. The most damning charge is...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 - Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite doctor with an Islamist bent, was chosen Tuesday by the victorious Shiite alliance as its candidate to become Iraq's new prime minister. The decision may well open a period of protracted and rancorous negotiations with a coalition of secular leaders intent on sharply curtailing Dr. Jaafari's powers or blocking him and his clerical-backed coalition. Ayad Allawi, the current prime minister, and Barham Salih, a Kurdish politician and deputy prime minister, said in separate interviews on Tuesday that without guarantees renouncing sectarianism and embracing Western democratic ideals they were poised to block...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Interim Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim al-Jaafari was chosen Tuesday to be his Shiite ticket's candidate for prime minister after Ahmad Chalabi dropped his bid, senior alliance officials said. Pressure from within the ranks of the winning United Iraqi Alliance forced the withdrawal of Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon (news - web sites) favorite, said Hussein al-Moussai from the Shiite Political Council, an umbrella group for 38 Shiite parties. "They wanted him to withdraw. They didn't want to push the vote to a secret ballot," al-Moussawi said. The 140 members were to put the decision between Chalabi and al-Jaafari...

IN IRAQ they say “Lil quta sabat arwaah” — the cat with seven lives. No matter how many times Ahmad Chalabi is knocked down, his enemies just cannot kill him off. Exiled, disgraced, convicted, branded a collaborator, overlooked in Iyad Allawi’s Government, then rubbished and dropped by his Washington paymasters, the former exile remains widely disliked by many ordinary Iraqis. Yet Mr Chalabi is now poised to gain a top job in the new Shia-led Government, and conceivably the prime ministership. The victorious Shia coalition was deadlocked last night over its choice of prime minister, with its 140 newly elected...

Soon the whole Middle East will see Iraq's national assembly at work. ALL RIGHT. LET US make an analytical bet of high probability and enormous returns: The January 30 elections in Iraq will easily be the most consequential event in modern Arab history since Israel's six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser's alliance in 1967. Israel's pulverizing defeat of the Arab armies dethroned Nasserism, the romantic pan-Arab dictatorial nationalism that had infected much of the Arab world, particularly its intelligentsia, during the 1950s and '60s. With the collapse of Nasserism, the overtly secular socialist-cum-fascist age in the Middle East closed--except in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 15 - The race for the top job in Iraq's new government narrowed Tuesday to two leaders in the Shiite alliance, with Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa Party squaring off against Ahmad Chalabi, who was mounting a last-minute stand against his rival. Dr. Jafari, a physician who spent more than 20 years in exile and is now a deputy president in the interim government, improved his chances on Tuesday when he persuaded another rival, Adil Abdul Mahdi, to withdraw from the race. Dr. Jafari's party, Dawa, and Mr. Mahdi's, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iraq's interim defense minister said on Friday the government would arrest Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi after the Eid al-Adha holiday for allegedly maligning the defense ministry. "We will arrest him and hand him over to Interpol. We will arrest him based on facts that he wanted to malign the reputation of the defense ministry and defense minister," Hazim al-Shaalan told Al Jazeera television, adding the measures would start after the Muslim holiday which began on Jan. 20.

The Agency Rides Again - Angleton on Chalabi Michael Ledeen/NRO Like everyone else, I've been reading the stories about my friend Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, and the accusations that he's an Iranian spy. I don't believe it, but before launching a tirade against the misnamed Central Intelligence Agency I thought I'd better check with the greatest unliving expert on intelligence, the late James Jesus Angleton. He was the longtime chief of CIA counterintelligence, and knew everything there was to know about spying, so I dusted off the ouija board and got him on the second try. JJA:...

NBC news is reporting: But Pentagon officials told NBC News that they were acting at the behest of Iraqi authorities investigating the disappearance of millions of dollars in cash and other assets following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Arrest warrants issued for 16 people An Iraqi judge issued arrest warrants for 16 people affliliated with the INC, and an unknown number were arrested, the officials said. Chalabi, himself a member of the Governing Council, was not arrested, and scheduled a news conference later in the day to discuss the raids. As NBC News reported earlier this week, Chalabi and his...

HER dusty file was one of hundreds of thousands of documents stacked in a house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Baghdad. Asma Rasheed married a pilot, lived comfortably in the presidential compound of Saddam Hussein and directed a microbiology programme that was not supposed to exist. Rasheed’s light blue folder has emerged from a huge archive seized by forces loyal to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam. The archive — a dark who’s who of Iraq — reveals the tiniest details of blandishments and humiliations by a paranoid regime that shared the Nazis’ obsession...

Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief tried to arrange a meeting last week between US representatives and the former Iraqi leader, who an opposition official believes was seen about three days ago, ABC News reported. Leaders of Iraq's prominent Dulaym tribe told the US network that they had made contact with former CIA officer Bob Baer and others to try to arrange some kind of meeting."They told me the chief of Iraqi intelligence was seeking to get in touch with the United States and could I do anything about that," said Baer, who now works for ABC News.Saddam's intelligence chief, General...

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- Lebanon's finance minister on Sunday downplayed the Iraqi Defense Ministry's transfer of $500 million to a Beirut financial institution, saying he would expect such a transfer to be legal if it was made by the Iraqi government. In southern Iraq, the politician demanding a probe into Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan's decision to make the cash transfer said he would not flee his country. Ahmad Chalabi said he was staying despite Shaalan's threat to arrest him and turn him over to Interpol based on an old Jordanian bank fraud conviction.Finance Minister Elias Saba told the private...