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L'Affaire Chalabi Returns! Ahmad Chalabi, now the subject of Iraqi arrest warrants on alleged charges of counterfeiting, spends an awful lot of time in Iran.
Ahmad Chalabi, who fell out with Washington over accusations he provided false information on weapons of mass destruction, said he would come home to fight the charges brought by the U.S.-appointed judge which he said were politically motivated.
"I do not know who is doing this and why. They are not patriots. I have done my duty and helped liberate Iraq," he told Reuters from Iran, where he was on holiday.
"I will return in a few days. I can easily prove that these charges are untrue and I intend to defend myself and clear my name."
On holiday in Iran, perchance to meet with his former intelligence chief?
One thing that doesn't hold. Ahmad Chalabi is accusing judge al-Malaky of acting on the orders of the American government. Uh, Ahmad "I demand to speak with Paul Wolfowitz!" Chalabi, who are you to talk?
UPDATE: Here's the latest from the AP. It's not looking good for Ahmad:
The warrants, issued Saturday, accused Ahmad Chalabi of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars, which were removed from circulation after the ouster of Saddam’s regime last year.
Iraqi police backed by U.S. troops found counterfeit money along with old dinars during a raid on Chalabi’s house in Baghdad in May, al-Maliky said. He apparently was mixing counterfeit and real money and changing them into new dinars on the street, the judge said.
And the AP says Chalabi is attending an economics conference in Tehran.
But INC Washington advisor Francis Brooke is quoted in the Times saying Ahmad is indeed on vacation in a mountain cabin outside Tehran. Sort of like the Aspen Institute, Persia, it sounds like.
Francis Brooke, a Washington adviser to Mr. Chalabi, said the charges against both men were categorically untrue and said both would return to Iraq to defend themselves. He said that the elder Mr. Chalabi would leave a vacation cabin in the mountains outside Tehran immediately and that the younger man would return to Iraq later from his home in London. Mr. Brooke assailed the magistrate who issued the charges, calling him an unqualified political appointee of L. Paul Bremer III, the former chief administrator of Iraq.
"Unqualified political appointees" of certain American officials? Again, I don't think this is something INC officials want to be accusing anybody else of!
Meanwhile, while Ahmad Chalabi is being accused merely of counterfeiting, nephew Salem Chalabi is in potentially very serious trouble:
The charges against the younger Chalabi, Salem, appear more serious, alleging his involvement in the killing of Haithem Fadhil, a director general of the Iraqi Finance Ministry, in June.
"They should be arrested and then questioned,'' Judge Maliky told The Associated Press. "If there is enough evidence, they will be sent to trial.''
If tried and convicted, Salem Chalabi, 41, could face the death penalty, the judge said. Capital punishment was restored by Iraqi officials on Sunday. His uncle, if tried and convicted, would face a sentence to be determined by the judges. One Iraqi newspaper, Al Ghad, reported that the case against the senior Mr. Chalabi was initiated by a complaint by the central bank, and that the other case followed a suit lodged by an individual who was not identified. The newspaper said Mr. Fadhil had been auditing the Chalabi family's financial holdings and real estate in Iraq.
The death penalty just happened to be restored on Sunday, the day of these charges? [One thing I will grant Chalabi's supporters. The fact that both Chalabi, Ahmad and Chalabi, Salem were the subject of arrest warrants on totally separate and unconnected charges, on the same day, by the same judge, while they both happened to be out of the country, does have the faintest whiff of politicization about it.]
One thing is clear: it is war between two old rivals of the Iraqi exile community, Messieurs Allawi and Chalabi. And Allawi seems to want the Chalabis to leave Iraq for good.
P.S. It occurs to me that the Chalabi affair could be rich fodder for Iraq's first reality TV show. [Next week: Chalabi tries to forge an alliance with the young firebrand, Moqtada al-Sadr. Can the Saville Row Shiite and the rebel cleric find common ground? Stay tuned.]
P.P.S. Spencer Ackerman proposes the obvious solution. Allawi could dispense with the whole Chalabi matter in one swift move, by extraditing Chalabi to Jordan. And perhaps store up useful credits with the Hashemite monarchy next door. Why do we still think Chalabi will slip out of this one? [Next week: Chalabi plots his comeback from the prison camps of the East Bank of the River Jordan . . .]