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The difference between neocons who still defend Chalabi and those who wish they never laid eyes on him comes down to who has seen the real charges against him, suggests this New York Sun piece.
The charges and the evidence against Mr. Chalabi are so grave, administration officials say, that some of Mr. Chalabi’s long-standing allies have begun to distance themselves from him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who once testified before Congress on behalf of the legislation that started the initial public stream of funding for the exiled leader’s Iraqi National Congress.
“If the evidence against him were nonsense,Wolfowitz would have said it was nonsense,” a Pentagon official told The New York Sun. “This is serious evidence, whether or not it’s proven in the end, it’s at least credible enough that we are concerned and angry about it.” Another administration official described the evidence as “irrefutable.”
There are multiple counterintelligence investigations, including an FBI probe, inside the government in an effort to find the person who passed the sensitive intelligence to the former exiled leader.
That information was so secret, two administration officials said, that the evidence against Mr. Chalabi has only been shared at the most senior levels of the government,and many working level policy-makers have been rebuffed in their requests to see the particulars on the erstwhile American ally.
For this reason, many of his lowerlevel defenders within the administration have cast doubts on what the evidence against Mr. Chalabi means and dismiss the charges against him as either a set-up from the Iranians or a smear job from his foes at the CIA.
[That probably means you, Harold.]
This piece also reports that fugitive Chalabi intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem, now reported to be in Tehran, passed a DIA-administered lie detector test. "When the Pentagon took over the Information Collection Program in the fall of 2002, Mr. Karem took a lie detector test in which he was asked about his ties to foreign governments, including Iran’s, and did well enough that the DIA went ahead with the program with Mr. Karem at its helm." I'm not sure if that doesn't speak worse for the reliability of polygraphs rather than well for Habib.
Great stuff here as well about Chalabi's cozying up to Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq, his family's funding of mosques in Iran, and AEI fellows Richard Perle's and Michael Rubin's continued defense of him....which is either naive....or worse.
The piece reiterates how Feith and Wolfowitz and others in the administration who have apparently been made aware of the actual charges against Chalabi cannot distance themselves from him fast enough. Is that because they are the subjects of investigation into who leaked what to Chalabi?
Meantime, wonder why, with some notable exceptions, everybody seems to hate Chalabi? Kevin Drum has a helpful timeline.