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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...

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced Thursday it would postpone a conference on academic boycotts scheduled to begin next week in Bellagio, Italy. The conference, which was originally sponsored by the Ford, Rockefeller and Nathan Cummings Foundations, came under attack due to the fact that more than 8 of the 21 academics invited to participate in the conference publicly support boycotts of Israeli universities. Another decisive revelation that led to the postponement of the conference was that material distributed prior to the conference included an anti-Semitic paper by a Holocaust denier. Following the revelation concerning the anti-Semitic material,...

Are you sure you want to keep saying we were fooled by Ahmad Chalabi and the INC? By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 11:46 AM ET The power to cloud congessmen's minds? Click image to expand. The power to cloud congessmen's minds? What do you have to believe in order to keep alive your conviction that the Bush administration conspired to launch a lie-based war? As with (I admit) the pro-war case, the ground of argument has a tendency to shift. I saw two examples in Washington last week. An exceptionally moth-eaten and shabby picket line outside...

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...

The business of podcasting has just garnered some of its first serious venture capital. According to a press release from PodShow, Inc., three investment capital firms have bought an undisclosed share of Adam Curry's and Ron Bloom's new business venture that seeks to commercialize podcasting by aggregating the "large and disenfranchised audience" of podcast listeners. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Sherpalo Ventures have bought into PodShow, Inc., for $8.85 million, according to the press release. In the statement, PodShow, Inc., said, "With its new infusion of capital, Management expects to announce additional features, programs and technologies that...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

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...

If you recall, the MSM, relying on unnamed sources repeatedly tarred the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi with being the source of false intelligence information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Leaving aside for the moment that those sources undoubtedly were located within the agencies that the Commission found responsible for the bad intelligence, it did clear the INC of these false claims--not that you'll know, unless you take the time to read the Commission Report. Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman Report states: "In fact, over all, CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on...

The results of the January 30 elections announced Sunday by the Independent Electoral Commission are another giant step towards building a free and democratic Iraq. Voter turnout, at almost 59 percent, was higher than an U.S. election since 1968. That in itself can be counted as a victory, though hardly surprising except to the chronically pessimistic. But the election results do not in themselves settle the question of who will take power in the transitional government. Handicapping is underway on who will take the top leadership positions. This is taking the form of a debate within the victorious United Iraqi...

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...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

INC News Release BAGHDAD (20 November): The Iraqi National Congress today announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency led raids on four INC facilities recently. Three INC offices in Baghdad were attacked on Thursday and the INC office in Najaf was attacked last week by heavily armed US civilians accompanied by masked Iraqis. The offices were vandalized, a number of staff were assaulted, and equipment and documents were stolen. Staff members who requested to see search warrants were beaten and abused and no warrants were produced. CIA operatives in Iraq are out of control and are operating outside the bounds...

Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician and former US favourite, has said that criminal charges against him in Iraq have been dropped. A judge issued a warrant in August over an alleged counterfeit operation but no action was taken for Mr Chalabi's arrest when he returned to Iraq. Mr Chalabi also announced that murder charges had been dropped against his nephew, Salem, currently out of Iraq. The fact of the charges being dropped could not be immediately confirmed. On Wednesday morning, Ahmed Chalabi survived what seemed to be an assassination attempt when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The BBC's Paul...

The party of Chalabi summoned to evacuate its buildings in the 24 hours The Iraqi temporary government gave Tuesday 24 hours to the Iraqi national Congress (CNI), whose head Ahmed Chalabi is under the blow of a warrant for arrest for frauds, to evacuate its buildings, indicated the ministry for the Interior. "This evacuation was ordered by the office of the Prime Minister Iyad Allaoui within the framework of the restitution of all the properties of State occupied by political parties", affirmed with the AFP Sabah Kadhim, spokesman of the ministry. It stressed that "all measurements necessary would be...

June 3, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — FBI agents are focusing on a Pentagon intelligence-gathering unit in their probe into who told Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi that the United States had broken Iran's secret communications codes, The Post has learned. Word of the probe came as serious new allegations surfaced about the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group he heads. U.S. officials said the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the code breaking security breach is centered on a handful of civilian hard-liners in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, a policy- and intelligence-analysis shop set up after 9/11.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former U.S. ally Ahmad Chalabi told Iran that the United States had broken secret communication codes used by Tehran's spy service, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The paper quoted unnamed U.S. intelligence officials as saying Chalabi, an anti-Saddam Hussein Iraqi exile who has now fallen out with Washington, had betrayed "one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran." It was widely reported last month, after the Bush administration cut off funding for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, that Chalabi had provided Iran with American secrets. But the report published by the New York...

Iraqi police have ordered Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to permanently abandon their office in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, INC official Haider al-Musawi said Sunday. Police and INC officials are still negotiating a solution, he said, and there is no order to confiscate anything from the building. The evacuation order could be something specific to the building rather than to the INC, al-Musawi said. Iraqi police had asked the INC evacuate at some point Sunday, but the deadline was not clear. Two weeks ago, Chalabi's Baghdad compound was raided by U.S. and Iraqi forces. The Iraqi National Congress is a...