Posted on 05/20/2004 6:03:15 PM PDT by wagglebee
"CIA: Chalabi Possibly Spied for Iran"
Ah, d'ja think? It was a nice reverse play, and fits right in with the Byzantine politics of the region. High-risk game, with great uncertainty as to whether all players would hold to the same code. During the regime of the "Former Occupant of the Oval Office, 1993-2001", there would have been extraordinary opportunities to pick up a little graft and cover, which seemed to boil away after the discovery that most of Saddam's WMD seemed to have simply disappeared. Now, the Bush Administration has lost all patience with Chalabi, and brought it down around his ears.
Better, though, that he should be discovered and unmasked now, than when he had some opportunity to gain real power in Iraq.
How about a US President that traded US Missile and Nuclear secrets to the PRC for campaign cash?
Dirty and Crooked are not treasonous. That lying sack is in a class almost by himself.
CIA sources told Fox News there are reports that the INC passed information to Iran, but as far as what type of information, the sources said that isn't known for sure.
Its hard to know where to turn heads and hails out of this. We're turning against the secular Iraqi National Congress out of concern it has alleged ties to Iran but giving a pass to Muqtada Al Sadr, a radical anti-American Shiite cleric in Iraq who does? What does the treatment of Ahmad Chalabi say about America's regard for its friends? Chalabi's crime is perhaps being too idealistic about his country which is why is he is anathema to the State Department and now the Pentagon has turned on him in part perhaps to show Islamic radicals in the aftermath of the Abu Gharib prison fiasco that we can be "even-handed." Whatever's behind this strategery, its also idiotic, in a word.
bump
We do know it!
Methinks that rather the CIA is resentmentful that Chalabi was a favored son of the administration. And that this raid is designed to take him down a notch.
Now why doesn't this little bit of news surprise me any?
If the State Department is truly running the show in Iraq now, we're completely doomed, and we may as well just pull everyone out and let them start killing each other.
On another hand he may have been given misinformation to see if he would pass it on. He did and he got caught.
How come it always looks as though the CIA are the keystone cops? What we see is what are are shown. What lies underneath that? That's my question.
We didn't raid this guys house for kicks. Something is seriously wrong and they are trying to fix it.
Not an exact match by any means...and not really a major character in the book. But a tie to the present and a shadow of the real world while being a literary instrument that leads the story towards one of the major opposition character's (Hassan Sayeed's) vision of the world.
This news about the real life person parallels what the fictional character did in that first novel three years ago...except he did it as the first "President" of Iraq after our turn over of power.
It is precisely the "our crook" mentality that has got us into trouble many times. Remember Noriega, Zia Ul Haq, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, etc.
Bush - fire Tenet keep Rummy.
Occasionally it seems to work out, more or less. That's where the temptation arises. Yes, usually a bad gamble. But what choice do you make when all your choces look like bad ones?
It is one of the dilemmas facing an ethical and moral being when confronted with such situations. So, we have to choose very carefully and not let charlatans like Chalabi take advantage of us. Let me illustrate with an example. In Afghanistan, we had to choose between the bad old Soviets and the mujahideen. Bilking us were Pakistan (as it still is), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Osama Bin Ladin, all three of whom we supported to some extent or the other. This was thanks to the CIA (guys like Milt Reardon and Anderson) who gave Reagan cause to believe that the above mentioned three could kick the commies out the fastest.
That was a horrible mistake. We should have chosen Ahmed Shah Massoud instead.
This is how we always screw up. We chose the most expedient path, not the most viable long term one. We choose corrupt manipulators who say what we want to hear, and who turn against us when their goals are acheived.
Such as Chalabi, who lied to us about the WMD's, and is now in cahoots with Iran.
"There will always be an England".
I saw this in an episode of Law and Order already. The dejected wife / UN ambassador, who suffers from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy did it.
"How come it always looks as though the CIA are the keystone cops?"
Who said the CIA? I am sure they wouldn't share info with him (in fact, they hated him and didn't trust him...along witht he DOS). It would have been somebody high up in the CPA or somebody at the Pentagon. There is no good reason to trust a guy like this who is found guilty of bank fraud and whose promises about the war were flat out wrong and self serving.
Jeff Head "psychic" :-)
If person matches persona, then Massoud was a popular, principled leader whose values and foreign policy were fairly compatible with ours. So, yes, apart from his fatal (maybe inevitable) experience with photojournalism, someone like him would seem to be a good choice. But did we have a choice like him in Iraq?
I agree with you comment about the government's preference for expedient vs long-term choices, and our government's proclivity for making poor ones. But long-term choices aren't necessarily the apparently "ethical" ones or "nice" ones, and at any rate are hard to pull off within a US election cycle.
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