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The New York Times returns!
The information that Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, is believed to have passed to Iran was so highly classified that federal investigators have intensified their inquiry to find out whether anyone in the American government gave the material to Mr. Chalabi, government officials said Sunday.
Federal investigators now suspect that Mr. Chalabi funneled a wide array of Pentagon and C.I.A. secrets to Iran — much more material than they believe he might have obtained through his political contacts with Americans, they said. "This was not the kind of stuff that he would have gotten by accident," one official said.
Intelligence officials have said the investigation centers on a handful of officials in Washington and Iraq who dealt regularly with Mr. Chalabi, and an even smaller number who also had access to the compromised information. Most of them are at the Pentagon, which was Mr. Chalabi's main point of contact with the Bush administration.
So can we keep our gaze on the usual suspects in the office of Doug Feith? Not clear. The NYT walks back a bit from the above, further down, writing:
It is unclear whether investigators suspect that Mr. Chalabi obtained the information from sources inside or outside the government, or from a high-level government official or someone of a relatively low rank, who had access to classified data.
At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has jurisdiction over intelligence investigations, officials would not discuss the case, but acknowledged privately that they had been examining the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.
Meantime, Newsweek's take has the raid on Chalabi signifying almost a soft coup of sorts by the fed-up uniformed military against the Pentagon neocon civilians like Feith and Wolfowitz.
The neocons, who once swaggered, seem to be slipping, losing confidence and clout. It is telling that the ground commanders in Baghdad who participated in the raid on Chalabi headquarters did not bother to inform their chain-of-command higher-ups at the Pentagon. (The raid was apparently OK'd by the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, probably with tacit approval of White House officials.) Embarrassed by horrific images from Abu Ghraib, a growing number of uniformed soldiers are blaming their political bosses in Washington—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith—for whatever goes wrong in Iraq...
The uniformed military is in almost open revolt against its civilian masters in the offices of Wolfowitz and Feith. The troops resent the Bush administration hard-liners as dangerously ideological.
Their animus has been inflamed in recent weeks by the prisoner-abuse scandal. From the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down through the ranks, soldiers blame the politicians for making a hash of the war on terror. By throwing aside the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the true believers at Defense, the White House Counsel's Office and the Justice Department may have put American soldiers at risk in future wars.
This tidbit about Feith from Newsweek -- what a sucker:
Several [neocons], like Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, a then obscure Washington lawyer who had once worked for Perle at the Pentagon—and now serves—as under secretary of Defense for policy—began talking about a speech Chalabi gave to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs in June 1997. In that speech,Chalabi promised that Saddam could be overthrown on the cheap if the United States dared back a guerrilla force led by Chalabi. (Feith told NEWSWEEK that he found Chalabi's vision of post-Saddam Iraq to be "quite moving.") A side benefit, Chalabi suggested in his conversations with the neocons, would be an Arab country friendly to Israel. Soon Chalabi was dining from time to time with Perle, a fellow epicure.
Now apparently, Feith can't distance himself from the "Saville Row Shiite" fast enough:
Much of Chalabi's dubious intelligence was funneled to the DIA through top Pentagon civilians. Under Secretary Feith himself signed a long and detailed summary of the intelligence linking Saddam to terrorists and WMD. The Feith memo, stamped secret, submitted to Congress and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine last summer, reads like a conspiracy theorist's greatest hits. Interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK, Feith was a little defensive about his relationship with Chalabi. "The press stories would have him as my brother. I met him a few times. He was very smart, very articulate," Feith said. Feith allowed he has always been drawn to the stories of exiles who come back to save their countries. But he rejected the idea that he had been Chalabi's tool or dupe.
With the smashing up of Chalabi's China House compound and the break up of the shared Pentagon-DIA-Iraqi National Congress intelligence/documents shop, it's more like the uniformed military and intelligence and foreign service professionals may finally be pushing back against the real coup Feith, Wolfowitz and their allies have conducted against US foreign policy.