Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker piece on the Israeli settlers in Gaza and the West Bank is one of the richest and bleakest pieces from Israel I've seen.

The settlers reject the idea of a demographic crisis. They still see themselves as Sharon once saw them—as the avant-garde of Zionism, heirs to the pioneers of the early twentieth century who restored the Jews to Palestine. But, should they somehow prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, they may well be the vanguard of Israel’s demise as a Jewish democracy.

They are, for the moment, prevailing.

Goldberg captures the true depths of fanaticism of these people who are willing quite literally to sacrifice the lives of their children for what they believe is an obligation to inhabit the land God decreed should belong to the Jewish people. He then speaks with leaders of Hamas who share if not exceed the same depth of fanaticism, the same willingness to literally sacrifice the lives of their children for this cause.

One of the proponents of the Israeli settler movement, Rabbi Samson, tells Goldberg:

“...If we were willing to kill their civilians, this war would be over in a week...If the military operated without consideration for civilian deaths, think about how many lives would have been saved! In any case, their children are born with Molotov cocktails in their hands. These are a people as unfeeling as jackals.”

Like many ideologues of aggressive settlement, Rabbi Samson drew lessons directly from the Bible, without the moderating influence of two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism. In the Bible, the heroes are warriors and killers; the Talmud, compiled after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews, asks, “Who is a hero?” and answers, “He who controls his passions.”

Still getting caught up after having been unplugged in the mountains. Some interesting stories over the weekend adding new dimensions to the Chalabi mystery.

This from the Baltimore Sun's excellent investigative reporter Scott Shane, which suggests the only non Iraqis who participated in the raid on Chalabi's compound earlier this month were eight armed US DynCorps contractors seconded to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. [Also present was an American employee of the INC, Peg Bartel, whose note of outrage at the raid was sent round by Laurie Mylroie.]

When Iraqi police raided the Baghdad home and offices of politician Ahmad Chalabi on May 20, U.S. officials hurried to distance themselves, saying that the operation was an Iraqi affair and that no U.S. government employees were involved.

But eight armed American contractors paid by a U.S. State Department program went on the raid, directing and encouraging the Iraqi police officers who eyewitnesses say ripped out computers, turned over furniture and smashed photographs.

Some of the Americans helped themselves to baklava, apples and diet soda from Chalabi's refrigerator, and enjoyed their looted snacks in a garden outside, according to members of Chalabi's staff who were there.

The contractors work for DynCorp, a subsidiary of California-based Computer Sciences Corp. and the company in charge of training and advising Iraqi police through a State Department contract.

A State Department official confirmed the DynCorp workers' presence during the raid. A DynCorp spokesman declined to comment.

The participation of gun-toting American contractors paid by U.S. taxpayers in a raid that the U.S. government has insisted it did not order is only the latest instance of problems posed by the estimated 20,000 contract security workers serving with more than 60 companies in Iraq.

Could it be true that US officials working directly for US agencies were not involved in the raid? That the White House decision to cut off Chalabi was not coordinated with the raid on Chalabi's compound?

This new Time piece suggests that coordination may not have been directed by the NSC or Washington, but that Iraq czar Jerry Bremer himself authorized the raid. Further, it discusses the White House tasking NSC Iraq envoy Robert Blackwill with developing a memo on sidelining Chalabi, who had lost the President's favor after a February 2004 interview. In that interview in the the Daily Telegraph, Chalabi was cited as saying something to the effect, WMD intel be damned, I got what I wanted.

The White House meeting in late April opened with the presentation of a seven-page, single-spaced memo titled "Marginalizing Chalabi." Drafted by the National Security Council (NSC), the document detailed three options for sidelining the controversial Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi — methods ranging from gently pushing him offstage to cutting off U.S. funds for his intelligence-gathering operation. Once a Pentagon favorite to lead Iraq, Chalabi had been criticizing Washington for dragging out the transfer of power to Iraqis. It was time for Chalabi to go.

The April memo marked the beginning of the White House's strategy to cut its ties to Chalabi — a campaign that reached its climax late last month when Iraqi police, backed by U.S. forces, raided the former exile's house and office in Baghdad. But that move hardly came out of the blue. New details of the relationship between the U.S. and Chalabi, provided to TIME by senior Administration and intelligence officials, reveal that after a decade of lobbying Washington, Chalabi began to lose his footing early this year after he ran afoul of President Bush and L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq...

The NSC office of Iraqi expert Robert Blackwill was commissioned to draft a plan to cut its ties to Chalabi. Blackwill's recommendations for "marginalizing Chalabi" were endorsed by State Department and CIA officials, who have long criticized intelligence provided by Chalabi.

The Iraqi had also fallen out with Ambassador Bremer. In early spring an Iraqi judge issued a search warrant in an investigation into alleged theft of property and government vehicles by members of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.). Bremer wanted to make an example of the I.N.C. and prove that no political party is above the law, but the search was stymied: according to a senior U.S. official, the police couldn't get into the I.N.C. offices the first time they went. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials who were working in a Pentagon-funded intelligence program attached to Chalabi's group stopped the officers at the door, arguing that the sensitive intelligence inside needed to be protected. But on May 13, after the Administration decided to cut off the $335,000 monthly subsidy to the I.N.C., the DIA agents vacated the I.N.C. offices. Administration officials say Bremer sent the police back a week later, backed by U.S. soldiers. Bremer has denied prior knowledge of the raid, but sources say he authorized it. Bremer didn't inform the White House or the Pentagon of the timing of the move, an official says, but Chalabi had few allies left in Washington willing to defend him.

And what role did alleged espionage charges involving Chalabi and the INC play in the White House decision? It's still being unearthed, Time reports:

The extent of Chalabi's alleged malfeasance is still being unearthed. Senior Administration officials tell TIME that the U.S. is investigating whether Chalabi revealed to the Iranians highly sensitive information about how the U.S. gathers intelligence in the region. Other U.S. officials told TIME that the FBI has begun reviewing logs and other data that might turn up clues as to when sensitive information was divulged; the feds are also interviewing and giving lie-detector tests to U.S. officials in Iraq who may have had access to the information.

Meantime, the Sunday Times is reporting in the most detail about the Iraqi charges of kidnapping and corruption that prompted the May 13 raid on Chalabi's compound itself. Further, the Sunday Times says a whispering campaign about alleged espionage charges involving Chalabi surfaced in the US within hours of the raid.

The investigation into Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress initially seemed unlikely to trouble President George W. Bush - allegations of corruption are endemic in post-war Iraq - yet the presence of US military personnel at the raid on Chalabi's home signalled a breach in Washington's relations with the man dubbed the Savile Row Shi'ite. Within hours, anonymous US intelligence officials were alleging at private briefings that the 59-year-old Iraqi had passed US secrets to the hardline Shi'ite regime in Tehran and that Habib was in the pay of Iranian intelligence.

Chalabi shrugged off the allegations, but they made embarrassing reading for
the Pentagon neo-conservatives who had promoted him as a suitable successor
to Saddam.

Meantime, Kevin Drum has the latest on a weekend raid on the Ramadi offices of the Iraqi National Congress.

As Kevin says, stay tuned.

This from Knight Ridder:

A senior INC adviser, who requested anonymity, said ties between Chalabi and conservatives in Washington are exaggerated. For example, he said, Chalabi hasn't spoken to Cheney since before the war began in March 2003, and he hasn't spoken with U.S. government officials at all since the raid on his house.

and this from Newsweek's Mark Hosenball:

It now appears that the Bush administration's decision to distance the United States from Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi was considered at the very top. But the controversy over the intelligence activities of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress may have a long way to go. Senior officials tell NEWSWEEK that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were briefed several weeks ago about intelligence indicating that someone in Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress gave the Iranian government "extremely sensitive" and "highly classified" info which could jeopardize U.S. intelligence sources and even "get people killed." Intelligence sources say potential suspects for the leak include Chalabi himself and his intelligence chief, Aras Habib. The National Security Council and other D.C. agencies also knew a couple of weeks in advance that Iraqi authorities had issued arrest warrants for some INC officials and were planning some sort of police action. The White House apparently did not know that authorities in Baghdad were planning to raid Chalabi's house; some officials were skeptical of Defense Department claims that top Pentagon officials were in the dark about the impending raid, since it was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who signed off on a decision to cut off a $340,000 monthly stipend that the Defense Intelligence Agency was paying the INC for intelligence gathering.

Sources said that Pentagon intelligence agencies—including the DIA, according to some officials—sent out confidential "referrals" asking the FBI to investigate the alleged INC leak of classified information to Iran. Law-enforcement sources say the FBI is investigating who in the INC might have leaked U.S. secrets to Iran—and who in the U.S. government might have leaked secrets to the INC. Chalabi and other INC reps have denied passing on any U.S. secrets.

I think my informed theory of a few days back stands. The White House was notified of the alleged INC intelligence breach to Iran by a foreign government, in mid April. Very possibly Britain, during Blair's trip to Washington April 16th. But it could have been another ally. I still think given the timing of the visit and the strength of the relationship, and other intelligence sharing arrangements between the two, it was most likely Britain.

Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice's meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.

Jane Mayer has the whole story here: the cracked codes, Francis Brooke and the Rendon Group, Chalabi's willingness to be fish or foul, Shiite nationalist or moderate secularist, Iranian or neocon agent, to accumulate power and wealth.

Most interesting is how Chalabi and Francis Brooke set out deliberately to model the INC's American public relations efforts on the successful examples of the pro-Israel and pro-Africa National Congress movements.

The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”...

In 1996, Chalabi and Brooke set up shop in Georgetown, and mapped out a strategy. They studied how the African National Congress had won mainstream support, by portraying apartheid as tantamount to slavery. They also examined how various American Jewish groups organized themselves to support Israel. “We knew we had to create a domestic constituency with some electoral clout, so we decided to use the aipac model,” Brooke said, referring to the American Israel Political Action Committee.

In June, 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if the U.S. would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the I.N.C. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign, he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in 1998 in which he spoke of restoring the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative since the creation of Israel, in 1948.

Chalabi’s pitch stirred enthusiasm and curiosity among a group of American neoconservatives who had played crucial roles in the first Bush Administration but were now scattered among Washington think tanks. After the fall of Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi—an educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East—capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time, Chalabi made “a deliberate decision to turn to the right,” having realized that conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against Saddam.

As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”

Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.

Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was “naked politics”: the I.N.C.’s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the Republicans. “Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,” Brooke said. “We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President.” The Republican leadership in Congress, he conceded, “didn’t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President.” Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, “were very receptive, right away.”

This about Chalabi's forgery shop is also quite intriguing, given the role forged documents seemed to play in the US's pre-war Iraq intel misestimates.

In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi’s operation seems particularly noteworthy. In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. “It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said. To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.

Mayer also has some pretty devastating details about the New York Times hiring Chalabi's niece to run their Baghdad office, while the niece was simultaneously working to promote Chalabi's fortunes, and help him flee the desert where he'd been stranded after being airlifted in by the US military. [They fired her when "word of her employment reached editors in New York."]

Still reading. More later.

Spencer Ackerman has got the story on Iyad Allawi's at long last successful coup.

A Shia, he was nonetheless an enthusiastic Baathist in his youth, organizing Iraqi students for the party before the 1968 revolution and working in Europe as a functionary for the Baath afterward. Officially the head of the Iraqi Student Union in London, Allawi served as a handmaiden for Iraqi intelligence in the 1970s, bringing well-heeled Arab students to the attention of the Baath security apparatus. His intelligence work sharpened his key attributes: his ability to cultivate a variety of power players and his eagerness to play them off one another for his benefit...

He's not exactly known for his commitment to democracy. His cousin Ali is defense minister. Governing Council member Mahmoud Othman explained that Allawi's nomination "has a great deal to do with security." It may be that the U.S. has decided to bet on a compliant strongman. Right now, though, it's not clear how strong he really is. Then again, that's typically been the way Iyad Allawi has preferred it.

Thomas Jefferson, apparently, he is not.

Josh Marshall has the run down on the confusion and intrigue surrounding Allawi's, ugh, election to the job.

Chalabi's AEI supporters have taken to the media in the days since the US-Iraqi raid on Chalabi's Baghdad compound, to try to put out the message that Chalabi is a victim of a smear campaign led by an incompetent CIA that has much to be defensive about. But the real target of the neocon defense of Chalabi is not American public opinion so much as the neocons' own former supporters in the Bush administration. They are deeply stung, I am told, by recent events, that reflect how unwelcome their own positions have become in the upper reaches and the bureaucracy of the Bush administration.

Today the New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller reports on Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Danielle Pletka, Newt Gingrich, and other Chalabi supporters mostly from AEI making a pilgrimage to the offices of Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley last Saturday, to try to get the White House to reverse course. Rice, in typical fashion, conceded nothing, apparently.

Ms. Rice told them she appreciated that they had made their views known. But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and made no concessions to their point of view.

The neocons' real angst, the real tension, as has been noted many places including here before, is not between those who long mistrusted Chalabi at the CIA and State Department, and those who have long championd his virtues, such as Richard Perle and Jim Woolsey. The real tension is between those neocons out of government who have long championed Chalabi's virtues, such as Perle, Woolsey, Ledeen, and Pletka, and those inside of government who once supported Chalabi but for the past month and a half have gone on silent about him. Word is that those who have seen what Chalabi is accused of doing, which is limited to those with the security clearance and need to know, including Feith, Wolfowiz, Cheney and their senior staff, can't distance themselves quickly enough from Chalabi.

As Bumiller writes:

Although Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been caustic in their comments about his treatment, there has been relative silence so far from Mr. Chalabi's supporters within the administration. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to numerous requests this week for an interview.

Mr. Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Wolfowitz believed that Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress "have provided valuable operational intelligence to our military forces in Iraq, which has helped save American lives." Mr. Cooper added in the message that "Secretary Wolfowitz hopes that the events of the last few weeks haven't undermined that."

The current views of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, are not known. Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and during the war in Iraq.

I am also intrigued by the Weekly Standard's reluctance so far to weigh in on the Chalabi matter. As the magazine's being leaked Doug Feith's classified memo to the Senate Select Intelligence committee on the alleged connections between Hussein and Al Qaeda last August suggests, the Standard apparently has excellent sources inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I suspect they are being told that what Chalabi is accused of doing is deadly serious. [update: a friend says the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol has never been a fan of Chalabi, or the concept Chalabi and his supporters tried to promote that the US should just aggressively back the INC and perhaps provide it with a little airpower to unseat Hussein.]

What's more, I am told that prominent elements of the pro-Israel contingent in Washington are also persuaded that Chalabi is someone dangerous to US and Israel's national interests. I can only wonder if the relationship between Mossad and the Likud is as hostile as the one between the US's neocons and the CIA. But I am told Mossad hates Chalabi.

One really wonders if the neocons, who are being so cleaved by recent events, will survive as a cohesive ideological movement after this. This seems to me to be shaping up to be one of the decisive turning points for the movement as a whole, similar to during the Carter administration, when many neocon Democrats, like Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick and Perle, frustrated with what they perceived to be Carter's weak foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, ultimately abandoned him for the Republican party and Reagan.

Even if Bush is reelected next fall, the neocons are sure to play a far less influential role in foreign policy. And if Bush loses, the neocons and their Iraq/Middle East project are certain to be perceived to be one of the main reasons. How will they write the history of what went wrong? And why their ideas failed, in Iraq? Who will they blame for the failure? From the gist of the columns and interviews so far, everyone but themselves. Isn't that what they are always accusing Middle Easterners of doing? Blaming all their failures on somebody else?

UPDATE: A colleague has some interesting thoughts, not on the neocons' fall from power, but on the forces that brought them to power in the first place.

He asks, why did the neocons come to power in the Bush II administration, and the Sharon government come to power in Israel? Intelligence failure. And the perception in both countries that their national security establishments, the CIA, and the Mossad/Shin Bet, were discredited by their failure to predict or prevent the second intifadah and the 9/11 terror attacks. Discredited was not just their failure to foresee the attacks, but the very basis for their counter terror strategies: working with the current leadership in the Palestinian Authority and Middle Eastern states, accepting a large degree of status quo, etc. The pragmatic, realist approach.

Now that the neocons' grand strategy for the US defeating the increasingly unstable political order it helped create in the Middle East has seemingly been discredited as well, at least in implementation if not as an idea, what will the future template for regime change and democratization look like?

How about one the Clinton administration successfully achieved in Serbia: aggressively (and peacefully) backing the student group Otpor and its correllary in other tyrannies, not with weapons, but with the lessons in strategic nonviolence and overthrowing dictatorships taught by Harvard scholar Gene Sharp? I got to witness that revolution, which was a thrilling thing, and even more so because it was achieved by Serbian people themselves, not by NATO or the CIA.

The Vulcans believed the US military was the tool to achieve their foreign policy goals. But maybe what was wrong was not their goals but their chosen means of achieving them.

Just got a very interesting unsolicited call from an occasional contact who knows some of these players pretty well. Someone one would more than expect to be extremely friendly to their positions as well. And he told me that:

1) The charges against Chalabi passing highly sensitive US intelligence to Iranian intelligence are true.

2) It involves a piece or pieces of signals intelligence. Intelligence involving how the US listens to Iranian communications, who it taps, bugging, etc.

3) The evidence of Chalabi's intelligence breach came to the US government from a European government. The proof was given to the US by a European government/intelligence agency.

The timing of Tony Blair's visit with Bush in Washington April 16, 2004 is looking more and more interesting. Since mid-April seems to be the time that decisively turned the White House against Chalabi. Made it turn on a dime.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum urges caution about the intel on Chalabi, given how flawed the US and UK's pre-war Iraq intel proved to be. Agreed. In addition, let me just clarify, that it was my presumption that the European government that might have been the one which allegedly presented evidence of Chalabi's espionage to the US was Britain. My guess that it might very well have been Britain was based largely on the facts that 1) two people including the source above told me that the evidence the US received about Chalabi's betrayal came not initially from a US domestic intelligence agency but in fact from a trusted European government/intelligence agency, and 2) then my deducing that the timing of the White House decisively cutting off Chalabi came in mid April, around the same time Blair visited Bush to talk matters Iraq. I think it's important to keep in mind - and this has been reiterated by numerous sources - that it was the White House that decided to cut Chalabi off, around mid April.

Thanks to Atrios for the mention.

This is one of Ledeen's more interesting recent articles.

...Before getting any deeper in this story, I want to repeat that Chalabi is a friend, and that I don't believe he's an Iranian agent. I do believe that the INC, along with every other significant organization in Iraq, has been penetrated by the extremely skilled Iranian intelligence services, and therefore I would not be at all surprised to find one or another of his associates working with Tehran...

If we're going to worry about Iraqi political groups' associations with Iran, let's look at the really dramatic cases. There's Abdul Aziz al Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI is funded directly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (RG) to the tune of $1.2 million a month, and significant numbers of SCIRI members are paid personally by the RG. Hakim reports regularly to an Iranian intelligence official named Sulemani, surely one of the most dangerous men in the country...

But Hakim is a member of the Governing Council and is in our good graces.

Then there's the Dawa party, represented on the Governing Council by Ibrahim Jaffari. The Dawa is a fundamentalist Islamic party that was part of the Iranian-supported campaign against Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s. Its leaders lived in Iran for years — Jaffari was there from 1982-89 recruiting Iraqis to spy in their homeland, and reportedly informed on Iraqis in Iran who might be problems for the regime — and the party is funded directly by the Iranians. Dawa was believed involved in terrorist attacks against United States targets in the Persian Gulf in the early and mid-1980s. On his frequent trips to Iran, Jaffari meets the top leaders of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Khamenei.

But Jaffari is in our good graces.

Then there are the Kurds, most of whom are actively engaged in commerce with Iran, including arms, explosives, and alcohol. Jalal Talabani is closely linked to the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Intelligence Service, and reported to Tehran on U.S. activities in 1996 during the failed uprising against Saddam. His deputy reports directly to Iranian intelligence. Massoud Barzani, the other prime Kurdish leader, uses his cousin as a conduit to Iran, and the cousin is the head of Kurdish Hezbollah, an Iranian creation. Barzani meets regularly in Baghdad with the Iranians' top man, who was a guest in Barzani's house just two weeks ago. Barzani and Talabani both get funding from Iran.

Both Barzani and Talabani are in our good graces...

I would be the last to argue that we should exclude any Iraqi simply because he has good relations with the Iranian regime — he really has no choice...My questions are simply: If it is bad for Chalabi to do it, why isn't it equally bad for all the rest of them? And if Iran is an enemy, why aren't we treating the mullahs and their henchmen as such?

The answer is, because this "story" isn't about any of that. It's about the failure of the intelligence community to do its job properly, and the fear that they may be held to account...

If Chalabi's handful of defectors hornswoggled the entire U.S. intelligence community, then why are we spending tens of billions of dollars on it each and every fiscal year?...

In my view, the worst of the dupes are those who refuse to see what is in front of our collective nose. Somehow, despite a torrent of evidence, this administration refuses to recognize that Iran was, and is, the greatest menace to us, the greatest sponsor of the terror network, and either in possession of atomic bombs or soon to have them. Even if Chalabi turns out to be a master spy, he cannot be blamed for this enormous intelligence and policy failure. Yet we still have no Iran policy. And the nuclear clock continues to tick in Tehran.

I think this piece is interesting at several levels. One, Ledeen clearly seems to know a lot about current operations involving Iranian intelligence. Two, from what I understand he opposes any sort of policy of US engagement with Iran, or US semi official back channel discussion [any sort not conducted by himself anyhow] with Tehran, even on its nuclear policy; but here he seems to be sanguine about such relationships occurring between the Iraqi leadership the US has helped install, and the Iranian regime. He shows himself utterly absolutist, ideological in the first case, and yet in the case of the Iraqis much more pragmatic. Third, the possibility a US sponsoree like Chalabi might have misled US intelligence about Saddam's banned weapons program is blamed by Ledeen entirely on the US intelligence community, and not at all on Chalabi who perpetrated the alleged deception, nor on his out of government American friends who went all out to champion Chalabi's integrity. Talk about refusing to take any sort of accountability. These are out of government friends of Chalabi who often portray themselves as great authorities on intelligence matters and the region. Yet they don't seem to consider that they should be held accountable -- even morally -- if it turns out that Chalabi indeed was a lying opportunist deceiving two timing Iranian double agent. That said, I think Ledeen raises a legitimate point -- the intelligence community of the US should be more able to protect itself from being deliberately misled by defectors. It is staggering to think that a defector program managed by Chalabi could have gone so far to deceive not just US intelligence but the intelligence agencies of leading governments around the world. How could that have happened?

Fourth, Ledeen himself has reportedly been a freelance negotiator with representatives of Iran at various points, as in during Iran contra. Why does he feel he and his crew are entitled to conduct some sort of back channel foreign policy that he seems to believe Armitage, the Senate-confirmed deputy secretary of state, is not entitled to? Who is authorized to conduct the US's foreign policy on Iran?

An All-Chalabi package at Slate. No Chalabi to be found at all at the Weekly Standard [-- for days now, editorial still trying to compare notes with their sources in OSD and their sources at AEI. Epic struggle.] I hear that certain individuals may have been interviewed, but by existing probes...Feith's press guy told me he is going on travel today for bilateral discussions [wonder with whom and what the purpose of those are; e.g. are they of the type, 'Marc, can I have my old office back?' or otherwise]. And Doyle McManus of the LA Times on NPR's Diane Rehme this morning, saying Pentagon is saying Chalabi's defector management program wasn't the only source for their pre-war Iraq intelligence. Clearly. That's not really answering the question. The key divide between current and former Chalabi supporters I'm told remains between those who've seen what Chalabi is alleged to have done, and those who haven't.

Save him. This is the tale of an earnest young fellow Kansan news junky military brat, who blogs at Winds of Change, recruiting himself to AEI. Who answered his call? The dean himself.

...Joe, in an act that can only be described as the act of an absolute saint, decided to pull out all the stops in obtaining other sources for letters of recommendation for me - even going as far as to contact occasional WoC commenter Michael Ledeen to explain the situation to him. With the help of Joe, Robin Burk of USMA West Point, Scott Talkington, one of the CGSC terrorism instructors, and the associate director of the Center for Tactical CounterTerrorism (you meet interesting folks blogging), I soon had my AEI resume complete with some very nice recommendations.

Finally, around mid-April, I received a very cordial phone call from Michael Ledeen.

In all honesty, my first reaction was that was this was some kind of a prank call by several of my peers, who knew about my desire to be an intern at AEI, as well as my high respect for Ledeen and his work. As the realization sunk in that it was Ledeen I was talking to on the phone, I imagine I was acting more than a little stupidly, but he was very kind and very patient to me as he calmly explained that I had indeed been accepted into AEI's internship program for the summer of 2004.

When does his plane land? It may not be too late.

This is one thing AEI and Heritage do really well, and places like Brookings do horribly: cultivate and provide a forum for serious young people who want to get in to the foreign policy discussion in DC, study issues like terrorism, etc. The bureaucracy and credentials one needs to get into a CSIS or Brookings for a program assistant job that pays as much as Washingtonienne's is fairly considerable. The snob factor is pretty considerable too. And the kid probably wouldn't have the opportunity at a Brookings to work on his own stuff either. Without the credentials, the PhDs and the resume as a former deputy director of the such and such, who is going to listen to him? And let's face it, the forum and events on Iraq, intelligence issues, and foreign policy at AEI are just better than any where else in town. [Although since very recently, they seem to have gone dark on the Iraq issue. A planned event for the 25th never materialized, given current events]. They are rarely boring, as so many staid panels and conferences at other places around town are. Noticed in the recent Wash Post article about young conservatives getting jobs in Iraq by posting their resumes at Heritage -- whatever you have to say about an administration that decided to pick their Iraq staff via such a system -- it's smart of Heritage to provide a vehicle for helping to find young conservatives jobs. Why aren't the more lefty think tanks helping out with something like this?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias agrees, and the comments he's elicited are interesting too.

UPDATE II: A serious proposal: Michael Ledeen should put Dan Darling to work creating an AEI blog on foreign policy and national security. I've been dying to see such a thing. Why not? Faster, Iran, and all that?

Tamara Chalabi, Ahmad's daughter, wrote a piece on her participation in a Iraqi National Congress delegation to Tehran for a week in June 2003, en route to northern Iraq.

Iran in support of ‘regime change’ in Baghdad

The week-long meetings in Tehran were a compelling game of seduction between westernised liberal secularism (best personified by Kanan Makiya) and committed political Islam as represented by the Iranian officials who oversee the ‘Iraq file’.

The game was played out around elaborate lunches (with non-alcoholic beer) and late-night teas, offered by our hosts with quintessential Persian hospitality. The discussions were as fascinating as they were endless. There was surprise too, as our hosts listened politely to our frank advocacy of democracy in Iraq, blunt rejections of an Iranian-style government, and elaborate renditions of meetings with high-ranking US officials that reflected a good relationship with the Iraqi opposition.

As a witness to these meetings, and beyond the different strategic and tactical positions, I was struck by the sheer competence of both sides. These Iranian officials displayed a level of knowledge of Iraq and its problems that I could not imagine encountering in the most advanced western think-tanks.

Of course, Iran is both neighbour and (in the 1980-88 war) recent enemy. But the detailed understanding these officials had of Iraqi society also informed their firm commitment to supporting an end to Saddam. Despite the traditional anti-US rhetoric in Iran and its branding as part of the “Axis of Evil”, the Iranians’ readiness to back an Iraqi opposition in alliance with the US was palpable.

Wonder, how palpable?

Meanwhile, am told to expect major Pentagon push back in the next day or so against certain aspects of the Chalabi story as it has been reported.

[thx to R]

Here's the full UPI Richard Sale piece, excerpted and commented on in next two entries below.

CPA handlers suspected in espionage

By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 25 (UPI) -- Officials of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked extremely sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a full field investigation into the matter, these sources said.

"The Iranians took us to breakfast, lunch and dinner," said former CIA operations chief Vince Cannistraro, declining to elaborate.

The chief agent of the deception was the U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and Chalabi himself has been "an active agent of influence of Iran throughout the whole period Bush administration," in the words of one former long-time Middle East agent.

He added that Chalabi has been an Iranian agent of influence since the 1990s and before: "He made it very clear that his existence depended on Iran."

Chalabi's brother also works for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Lebanon, he said.

Chalabi allegedly passed National Security Agency/CIA intercepts to intelligence agents of the Iranian government using intermediaries or "cut-outs" or "gophers" within the INC, another former CIA agent said.

Some of the intercepts, dated from December, were the basis for a recent Newsweek story, but there are others of a later date in possession of the FBI, this source said.

A former very senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told United Press International, "Chalabi passed specially compartmented intelligence, extraordinarily sensitive stuff, to the Iranians."

This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.

Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said.

One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.

The other is still a working Pentagon official, federal law enforcement officials and former CIA officials said.

"These leaks went way beyond some senior Pentagon official talking out of school," the former very senior agency official said. He explained that U.S. officials "are within their authority" and are allowed to talk to someone like Chalabi, but the discussions are "never disseminated."

Chalabi maintains that he is the victim of a disinformation campaign by the CIA, which has waged a vendetta against him since the collapse of a CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein in 1995. Chalabi says he warned the CIA that their plot was penetrated by Iraqi agents.

Administration officials said that Chalabi's INC dispatched fake defectors to several Western European or other allied governments before the start of the war with information designed to blacken Iraq and portray it as a "dire menace and garner support," in the words of one.

Chalabi also had an agent from Iran's Ministry of Interior and Security in his entourage, these sources said.

One person who wasn't surprised by the latest flap was former top CIA Middle East field officer Bob Baer, who worked with Chalabi when the latter was in northern Iraq in 1995.

Soon after a meeting with Chalabi, Baer was recalled to Washington to face an FBI criminal investigation into the charge that he had violated Executive Order 12333, issued by President Reagan in 1981, forbidding the assassination of foreign leaders by U.S. intelligence personnel.

Baer was accused, he said, of hatching a plot to kill Saddam Hussein, except the plot was a "total and complete fabrication of Chalabi's," Baer said.

He then referred to the account in his book, "See No Evil," in which Chalabi met with two Iranian intelligence officers, telling them that the National Security Council under senior Clinton adviser Anthony Lake, had dispatched an "NSC team" to northern Iraq to get rid of Saddam.

According to the account, which Baer confirmed for UPI, Chalabi staged a fake phone call in the middle of the meeting with the Iranians, but left a forged letter, written on NSC stationary out on the table for the Iranians to read.

Baer denied any plot on his part, took a polygraph, passed, and the matter was ended -- except he never forget the talents for fabrication possessed by Chalabi.

"He absolutely cooked the whole thing up," Baer said.

Chalabi had hoped to "swindle the Iranians" into believing that the NSC and the Clinton White House were finally serious about getting rid of Saddam and would have no choice but to support the effort, Baer said.

He went on to say that Chalabi had been behind some extremely clever and successful disinformation campaigns, including being the moving force behind a book, "Saddam's Bombmaker," by Khidhir Hamza.

"That was absolutely a Chalabi disinformation operation," Baer told UPI, and he went on to name several topflight U.S. daily newspapers that had been victims of phony Chalabi stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs in the months before the war.

"He's very slick, very clever with manipulating the facts," Baer said of Chalabi.

Former CIA analyst Stan Bedlington told UPI that the agency had tried to "use and recruit" Chalabi, but that his "information never checked out and was never any good," and so he was dropped "like a hot potato."

Another former CIA agent said that the agency claimed that Chalabi had failed polygraph tests and labeled him as a "fabricator," and even "put out a what the agency calls a `black book' on him, to warn other agencies away," he said.

The intelligence fraud appears to be very widespread, several officials said.

A U.S. intelligence official was quoted in a Newsday story last week as saying: "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information that "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing."

Several U.S. officials said that from the time Chalabi was flown by the Pentagon into Iraq following the close of combat operations, his followers, especially his FIF militia, had posed a problem.

According to administration officials, Chalabi set up at the Baghdad Hunt Club, from which he was expelled by top U.S. administrator Paul Bremer.

But Chalabi was accompanied by several hundred members of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdestan), a Kurdish-Iraqi political party/militia headed by Jalal Talabani, U.S. officials said.

After their transfer to his own forces, the FIF, Chalabi saw that the Kurdish reinforcements were issued uniforms, insignia, and credentials of Chalabi's 700-man militia which were described by one U.S. official as "your basic bunch of street thugs."

Baer confirmed this account from knowledge and continuing access to his own U.S. intelligence sources, saying that the FIF who were attached to U.S. units -- including FBI, CIA and military troops -- "acted as a criminal enterprise."

Baer said they were desultory in performing any duties but quite energetic when it came to stealing. "They were real thieves," Baer said. "The FBI and CIA would wake in the morning to find that their computers or other equipment had
been stolen."

In addition, Chalabi's FIF had made off with a bunch of U.S. Jeeps, which resulted in batteries in U.S. helicopters beginning to disappear: "The helicopter batteries were compatible for the Jeeps," Baer said.

The CPA eventually decided to deactivate the FIF, and the majority of U.S-based hangers-on returned home, he said.

[thx to M and R.]

Hmm. Chalabi's brother works for Iranian MOIS/Vevak in Lebanon? That's kind of interesting. But maybe it gives each brother a certain amount of value, and a certain amount of protection, with their own agencies. One working outright for the Americans, and perhaps covertly with the Iranians; and the other working outright for the Iranians, and perhaps covertly for the Americans. I wonder if this is a common template?

FBI must have interviewed them as potential witnesses, not suspects. It's an important distinction, and the UPI excerpt seems to make it a bit fuzzy. I think Blumenthal gets it right.

UPDATE: Or maybe they were not interviewed at all. Stay tuned...should be able to post more late on this tonight.

UPI scoop? Via Dreyfuss' blog Wednesday.

Next is this, from UPI yesterday, reporting that the FBI is investigating a Pentagon official and a former Pentagon official for having passed classified info to Chalabi. Though not named, the two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute. Reports UPI:

Officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."

This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given to Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.

Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said.

One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.

When Dreyfuss asked Rubin if the story was accurate, Rubin told Dreyfuss "it is untrue."

Can someone send me the UPI original story if they find it? It should be from May 25, 2004.

Update: Hearing much skepticism about this story from various colleagues. One who has run down the AEI part of this said it's wrong on numerous levels. Another colleague expressed skepticism that the characters referred to in the UPI piece would have had access to such sensitive intel, which would seem to make sense. Having not yet been able to see the original UPI Richard Sale piece, I am not sure exactly what the piece is really suggesting: that the two individuals were visited by the FBI to be interviewed as potential witnesses? That is what seems most plausible.

That seems to be what Sidney Blumenthal is suggesting in his Salon piece today.

When is the Pentagon going to stop giving hundred million dollar contracts to Chalabi's cronies? Contracts in which Chalabi seems to get handsome 'consulting' fees? This from the LA Times Wednesday.

The U.S. Army has, for the second time, awarded a contract to supply the Iraqi security forces to a consortium of companies with little arms experience and whose participants include a friend of controversial Iraqi official Ahmad Chalabi.

ANHAM, a joint venture based in Vienna, Va., was the winner of a $259-million contract...The consortium includes many of the same companies as a group headed by Nour USA, whose contract to supply the Iraqi forces was canceled this year amid protests from competing firms and confusion surrounding the bidding procedures...

Army spokeswoman Jan Finegan identified one of ANHAM's component companies as HAIFinance, founded in part by A. Huda Farouk. Another is American International Services, of which Farouki is part-owner. Both were part of the Nour USA consortium.

Newsday's Knut Royce - the real Chalabi stalker in chief - explained when Nour won - and then lost - the first contract in this piece. And just how tight Chalabi and Farouki are. Chalabi seemed to basically drain Petra Bank, feeding the money via Farouki and then going on the lam, the first time. Royce also reports that Chalabi is reported to have personally been awarded a $2 million fee "for helping to arrange the contract." Read it and weep.

One wonders....do any of Chalabi's strong supporters have consulting fees at stake in any of these contracts?

''Get me Wolfowitz!'' Chalabi is alleged to have demanded, when his compound was raided last week, Robert Novak writes in his Monday column. "But it was too late for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz or anybody else to save the erstwhile American favorite in Iraq."

In fact, Wolfowitz...had signed off on cutting ties with the designated leader of a future democratic Iraq...

The last straw for Chalabi, according to intelligence sources, was the discovery of his contacts with the Iranian regime. The same sources say the wealthy Iraqi Shiite had sent armed agents to harass private citizens. Now that his Iraqi National Congress has lost its $340,000 monthly intelligence subsidy, Chalabi has dispersed his agents around Iraq, according to U.S. military sources...

Chalabi years ago was a CIA resource, but the agency dropped him as unreliable. He then was picked up by the neo-cons as their man in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein. Richard Perle, who became a leading Rumsfeld adviser after 2000, for years had claimed the ability of the INC to smoothly grasp power in Iraq. On Feb. 16, 2001, on CNN's ''Crossfire,'' he told me the Iraqi dictator could be driven from power without U.S. troops by the INC's ''political challenge to Saddam that will lead ultimately to piercing the veil of his invincibility.''...

Chalabi's previous governmental sponsors developed instant amnesia. Rumsfeld's comment last week after the Chalabi raid displayed the master of obfuscation at his best: ''I certainly was not aware there was going to be a raid on a home, if in fact there was one. My understanding is that the Iraqis are involved in this, and you'd best ask them.''

Instant amnesia indeed. But Perle seems to have it too.

Quote du jour:

Some contend that neoconservatives resemble the communists they once ridiculed, blaming the failures of communist ideology on the Kremlin's execution.

"It's an argument that shows that they didn't understand the problem to begin with, that you just cannot use military force to dictate outcomes everywhere in the world," said Charles Pena, head of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

This is all good too:

Neoconservatives widely predicted an easy occupation followed by an immediate peace, followed by "a flourishing democracy which would cause a domino effect across the region creating democracies elsewhere," said Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And then the very first foreign policy position taken by this new democratic Iraq, run by their exile friends, would be to recognize Israel, and that would somehow end the Arab-Israeli conflict, and bunnies would dance in the streets, and we would find life on Mars."

Ouch!

Go read Sidney Blumenthal in Salon on the investigation into who leaked to Chalabi.

A former staff member of the Office of Special Plans and a currently serving defense official, two of those said to be questioned by the FBI, are considered witnesses, at least for now. Higher figures are under suspicion. Were they witting or unwitting? If those who are being questioned turn out to be misleading, they can be charged ultimately with perjury and obstruction of justice. For them, the Watergate principle applies: It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

So the FBI has already paid a visit to people in the Pentagon, and questioned at least two, as witnesses for now.

I have heard from another contact that computers at certain offices of the Pentagon have been gone through by the FBI. I think this is going to get really interesting.

The great divide in the neocon push-back: Streaking past the others, Richard Perle has now suggested to journalists that the reason Chalabi has been targeted by the White House of late....is because Iran set him up! But Perle didn't have time to talk to Laurie Mylroie to get her on the same page before he spoke. This from the Forward.

One of [Chalabi's] top American allies, Richard Perle, says he thinks the Iraqi leader was actually a victim of a plot between the CIA and Tehran.

In an interview Monday with the Forward, Perle, a leading neoconservative, said that Iran may have suggested to CIA officials that it had received sensitive intelligence from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in order to discredit him.

"Iranians are involved in Iraq in a very damaging way, and the last thing they want is Chalabi in power," said Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory board to the Pentagon. "They very well may have induced the CIA to believe Chalabi gave them [sensitive intelligence]. And the CIA was certainly very happy to see that."

...Perle claimed the CIA was eager to seize upon Chalabi's reported links to Iran to win over the White House to its long-held opposition to Chalabi. "They have convinced the White House," said Perle, a former Reagan administration official with close ties to the Israeli right. "There is no question [the raid] was a U.S. operation and that it was politically motivated."...

Laurie Mylroie, another strong Chalabi supporter, rejected the notion of an Iran-CIA plot to sabotage Chalabi.

"The Iranians communicated and said nothing regarding Chalabi passing things on," said Mylroie, author of the recent book, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror."

"Why should they want to discredit Chalabi?" Mylroie said. "The CIA made it up."

It's a rare moment when Mylroie is throwing cold water on a conspiracy theory.

I think it's a bit comical to think that Perle is pushing this idea that the CIA and Iranian intelligence are in such regular contact. I thought that was your friends, Mr. Perle?

Slate's Jack Shafer has a good point, here. What every one wants is not for the Times to continue to disappoint on the investigative front. We want them to use their incredible resources to break this thing down.

It's easy to get hung up on the wording of today's editors' note and complain that the Times didn't adequately apologize, or bitch that nobody from the Times was taken out and shot for his crimes. But ignore the editors' note for a moment. The true test of the Times is on the horizon: Having promised to set the record straight on the Iraq WMD story, what sort of journalism will the newspaper commit?

Rise to the challenge, guys and gals. Explode this story. It is still there for the taking.

Post Script: Here are some stories I would attack if I had the resources.

1) The full profile of the INC's defector management program. Who exactly were the defectors? How did they get delivered to the US government? to the media? Where did the coaching occur? 'Where are they now?' [Khidr Hamza] etc.

2) The role -- past and present -- of the US handlers of the INC -- Francis Brooke. The Rendon Group? [Are they still on the payroll to promote the INC? What happened to their contracts on this issue?] Laurie Mylroie seems to have been awfully close. Perle, etc.

3) The real story of INC intel chief Aras Habib Karim, and the intel program he managed for the INC and how it intersected with the OSD, the Information Collection Program. So far, the New York Sun's Eli Lake's reporting on this issue has left everyone else in the dust.

4) The alleged Jordanian dossier? Referred to in the NY Post piece

5) Other countries? The US was not the only country whose intelligence agency was convinced in large part by the INC-managed defectors about Saddam's WMD program. What was the story in Denmark? In Germany? In Britain?

6) What really made the White House, in April, turn decisively against Chalabi and the INC? What happened?

That's a start.

The Prospect's Matthew Yglesias brings to my attention this Wall Street Journal editorial today. In it, the Journal staff reveal that they were leaked a classified Pentagon report, which -- surprise surprise -- declared that Chalabi's INC "proved to be head and shoulders above the information provided by" other Iraqi political organizations with which it was cooperating.

Don't you wonder if this report itself was leaked to the WSJ, not by the Pentagon, but by the INC to its friends with access to the WSJ editorial board? Laurie Mylroie, or the woman who spends night and day writing about the UN oil for food scandal? [and who's taken up Mylroie's other obsession that Iraq might have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing?] I wish I could remember her name, Victoria or Valerie, her initials are VB, I think.

Isn't this part of the problem with Chalabi's neocon supporters? Much like the Feith memo ending up in the Weekly Standard's hand? That showed that Feith and his staff thought that raw intelligence scraps were the same thing as a professional intelligence analysis?

Secondly, remember how neocons like David Brooks wailed on about how everyone was accusing the neocons of being "a cabal," of conducting secretive conspiratorial foreign policy etc.?

"The Chalabi Fiasco: The Iraqi politician is a pawn in a much larger strategic game," the editorial is breathlessly entitled.

Who's crying conspiracy theory now?

Here's what Vince Cannistraro, former CIA and DoD intelligence official, told Australia's ABC today about the Chalabi-Iran matter:

VINCENT CANNISTRARO:...Historic rivalries among various agencies and government officials about the value of Chalabi have pretty much been settled in the last few months. President Bush is apparently persuaded that Mr Chalabi is not someone the US can place any further confidence in.

And there are clear indications that Chalabi's head of intelligence and security, a man named Aras Karim Habib, who is a Kurdish Shia, is actually a paid agent of the Iranian intelligence service. There was an arrest warrant issued for Karim a few days ago, and he has apparently escaped to Tehran where he is beyond the reach of US law enforcement.

ABC's TANYA NOLAN: So as far as you know, the CIA does have hard evidence to prove that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent?

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: Oh yeah, I think that's the case, but in this instance, it's not CIA that is the action agency, it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation which is a law enforcement agency, because the evidence has pointed quite clearly, not only the fact that Chalabi might be an agent of influence of the Iranian government and that Karim may be a paid agent of the Iranian intelligence service, but it is shown that there is a leak of classified information from the United States to Iran through Chalabi and Karim and that is the particular point that the FBI is investigating.

In other words, some US officials are under investigation on suspicion of providing classified information to these people that ended up in Iran.

TANYA NOLAN: And what was the nature of that highly classified information that was allegedly being passed to Tehran?

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: Well, there are differing reports but some of it I'm told centres on highly compartmented information of US military order of battle for one thing, and other special compartmented information that may have been passed.

I'm not privy to the classified information myself but I am told that the investigators are operating on the basis that very, very sensitive and highly classified information the US Government had, was given on an unauthorised basis to Chalabi and Aras.

You can read the rest here.

It would be very interesting to learn more know about how the INC managed the Saddam defection program. I am not sure I take at face value Cannistraro's assertion (made in some press reports) that Iran was responsible for the INC pre-war WMD bogus information. I am more inclined to the LA Times' Drogin report from Sunday citing US counterintelligence officials that the INC might have been acting on its own in that regard.

So, how to find out more about how the INC created a hall of mirrors effect by feeding a dozen defectors and documents to the intelligence services and media in targeted countries? I take it there were far more than the three who are constantly discussed as being responsible for the US being taken in. A fourth would be Khidhr Hamza.

The New York Times apology for its pre-war WMD reporting today helps identify at least one other defector put forward by the INC, and suggests one other:

On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector — his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri — to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs...

On April 21, 2003, as American weapons-hunters followed American troops into Iraq, another front-page article declared, "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." It began this way: "A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said."...This Iraqi "scientist"...in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence.

Reuel Gerecht has asked that I add this to his original statement, posted below. I will just post the whole thought here. Again, he's referring to the allegations contained in a CBS report made by US intelligence officials that say Chalabi met with a "nefarious" character from the "dark side" of Iran's intelligence service, an individual who is known to plot operations against the United States, and never reported it to his US contacts.

...This info all sounds deeply, deeply dubioius. The specifics of an Iranian intel meeting with Chalabi are, however, likely. The Iranian [Chief of Station] COS in Baghdad I think met with Chalabi on occasion--and he certainly met other Iranians on a regular basis--as do MANY Iraqis, including such folks as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim Jafari of the Da'wa, on whom the CPA has often been dependent for communication with Sistani. And last I checked, Chalabi is not an employee of the USG and therefore not required to run to Mr. Bremer or the CIA COS in Baghdad and say, "I just met an Iranian." If he were not meeting with a whole variety of Iranians--especially the "dark force" guys in Intel and the Guards Corps, he would be an idiot, and certainly not the type of fellow you would want on the Governing Council.

It is possible that Aras Habib, the INC security and intel fellow, has an extracurricular relationship with Iranian intelligence. Whether that relationship, if it even exists, is fundamentally different from the relationships that Iranian intel probably has with numerous Iraqis in such organizations as SCIRI or Dawa, whether that relationship denotes control, and whether AH has ever given them info worth any money they may have paid him, is an entirely different question. It would be a very good idea for the NSC and the Senate and House Intel committees to yank up all the intercept, assuming intercept is at the bottom of this, and take a very close look at the history of American intercept of the MOI and see whether the analysis of this makes sense, to be sure we're not being sucker-punched by USG employees to hate Chalabi, hate the War, (oddly) blame Chalabi for the war, and hate those in the Pentagon and elsewhere who disagreed with the CIA about Chalabi, or by Iranian intel. Given the paucity of known facts in this case, I certainly wouldn't write with the certitude that so many in the press seem to have on this subject. It's odd. Given the closed nature of American intel, it's not astute.

Reuel's call for skepticism is a point well taken. And while the jury is still out, I think the neoconservatives would do much better to put Reuel on CNN than Laurie Mylroie. The fact is, neither Reuel nor we the civilian audience really know as a fact what evidence the US government has on Habib, or on Chalabi, for that matter. We are all potentially being spun. And not just by the USG; as happens, there is plenty of spinning coming from the usual places.

What's my take? I myself am convinced there's something to the charges that Chalabi and Habib have a covert relationship with Iranian intelligence. Of two types, secret meetings and actual US intelligence given to the Iranians. [I agree with RMG that Iranian intelligence is certainly meeting with SCIRI and Dawa but SCIRI and Dawa were not co-located with the DIA on a Pentagon-funded intelligence program, nor did we go to war based on the misinformation provided by their defectors, and whatever funds they may be getting from the CIA now, it doesn't amount to the nearly $40 million we gave Chalabi and co.] It is legitimate in my opinion that Chalabi and Habib should have been expected to behave according to a higher standard of transparency and forthrightness in terms of secret meetings with Iranian intelligence, given the fact that they were on the Pentagon payroll to provide intelligence to the DIA.

The White House (especially this White House) doesn't turn on a dime so easily. Think how long we've suffered through "misstatements" on the Iraq troop issue, for example. Something happened, more than Chalabi got to be a pest.

What's more, I have sources telling me that the people who are most troubled by the charges are in the Pentagon office of the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense's office. eg people who have both been made aware of what the nature of the charges are, and how it could affect them.

And there are the FBI, CIA and DIA investigations. And the CIA and DIA and whoever else really did go in to Baghdad and basically smash apart Chalabi's offices, with guns and sledgehammers. There are other ways to stop working with a pest, and one way would be just to cut him loose from the payroll, and tell Mr. Brahimi he's welcome to put whoever he wants on the Iraqi transitional government. [Permission he was apparently granted.]

Once a virtue, now a liability? This from the Guardian's Julian Borger:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused by the CIA of passing US secrets to Tehran, claimed to have close links with Iranian intelligence seven years ago, according to a former UN weapons inspector. Scott Ritter, who before the war insisted that Saddam Hussein did not have significant weapons stocks, made the claim to Andrew Cockburn, a Washington-based journalist and the author of a biography of the ousted Iraqi dictator.

"When I met [Mr Chalabi] in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence," Mr Ritter said, according to an article by Mr Cockburn published today in the Guardian. "He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence."

Mr Chalabi has repeatedly denied passing secrets to the Iranians and has denounced the allegations made by US intelligence officials as a CIA "smear".

He also denied providing false information about weapons of mass destruction to the US.

He said he only put the CIA in touch with three defectors, who were believed to have had critical information. The FBI and US intelligence agencies are re-examining information provided by or channelled through Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, to determine whether the decision to go to war in Iraq was influenced by Iran.

Mr Ritter told the Guardian he stood by his allegation. He said he never made the trip to Iran because the CIA refused permission.

Meanwhile, both Democratic and Republican senators have called for an investigation into the alleged links between Mr Chalabi and Iranian intelligence.

US intelligence officials have said they have hard evidence that Mr Chalabi passed US secrets to Tehran, and that his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, was an Iranian agent. Mr Habib is being sought by Iraqi police, and according to one American press report is now in Tehran...

The Pentagon defends the INC's intelligence input. An official said yesterday: "We should point out that the INC has provided valuable intelligence that has saved coalition lives and has provided great quantities of documents from Saddam's regime that are of great value."..

Richard Perle, a former adviser to the Pentagon, and one of the INC's most outspoken backers in the capital, said he did not believe the CIA's allegations against Mr Chalabi.

"I believe they have been hostile to Ahmad Chalabi for a long time and are not to be trusted on this and I think they are seeking to transfer responsibility for their own intelligence failures to others," Mr Perle told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday.

According to US intelligence sources, the FBI has opened an investigation into the leak of secret information to the INC from within the administration...

A Pentagon official confirmed that a "reassessment process" was under way, but refused to give details.

Crashing on deadline this morning, so posts later. Meantime, this Conason piece puts l'affaire Chalabi in the proper context of the Bush administration's larger failings in its approach to the Iraq project.

Back when Bush was running for president, supporters deflected concern about his utter ignorance of foreign affairs with assurances that he would surround himself with the most brilliant, seasoned, adult advisors. Everything would turn out well so long as the people he selected to formulate and execute policy were the right choices, in every sense. Unfortunately for him, those choices have performed less adequately than advertised, their swollen self-regard notwithstanding.

From the intelligence bungling that drove the decision to invade Iraq to the arrogant diplomacy that drove away traditional U.S. allies to the false expectations and inept planning that created postwar chaos, Bush's neoconservative policy elite promoted mistaken assumptions and bad decisions. Now, as Iraqis and Americans suffer the consequences of those errors, the neocons demand more of the same failed policies, and continue to imagine that U.S. military power will salvage their misadventure.

At the moment, the neocons' blustering matters somewhat less than their blundering. The news emerging from Iraq suggests that although they regard themselves as hardheaded realists, they are in fact silly dreamers.

Keeping Sistani happy... Hussain Shahristani, a Shiite nuclear scientist close to Sistani, trained in London and Toronto, who was jailed in Abu Ghraib for ten years under Saddam Hussein, proposed by Brahimi and Blackwill to serve as the Iraqi caretaker government prime minister. The WaPo reports:

Shahristani, who has a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto, served as chief scientific adviser to Iraq's atomic energy commission until 1979, when Hussein became president. When he refused to shift from nuclear energy to nuclear weaponry, he was jailed. For most of a decade, he was in Abu Ghraib prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He escaped in 1991 and fled with his wife and three children to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and, eventually, Iran, where he worked with Iraqi refugees. He later moved to Britain, where he was a visiting university professor.

But unlike other exiles, Shahristani was not active in opposition parties, choosing instead to focus on humanitarian aid projects. He does, however, have a critical connection: He is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, whose support is essential for the viability of an interim government.

Shahristani, who has described himself as an adviser to Sistani, said he has met with the ayatollah several times since the fall of Hussein's government. Shahristani said Sistani has played a "very, very constructive" role in Iraq over the past year. Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said Shahristani's lack of political affiliation could be an asset, allowing him to serve as a bridge between various factions.

Shahristani crossed into Iraq two days before Hussein fell to deliver aid to the city of Karbala. Since then, he has divided his time between Karbala and the southern port of Basra, working on humanitarian projects in both places.

"I've been actively working to help the Iraqi people to free themselves from Saddam's tyranny, but I have always concentrated on serving the people and providing them with their basic needs rather than party politics," he said.

Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said it was an op-ed piece Shahristani wrote for the April 29 Wall Street Journal that piqued Brahimi's attention. Headlined "Election Fever," the piece criticized the U.S. occupation authority for failing to prepare for elections sooner and for promulgating an interim constitution that was drawn up behind closed doors. He called for the government taking power on June 30 to have limited powers aimed at preparing the country for elections -- a position advocated by Sistani.

Now everybody's coming clean..."The New York Times prepares an 'Editors' Note' about its prewar WMD reporting," Slate's Jack Shafer reports.

Post Script: Who's next? The Weekly Standard? AEI? It's almost too much to bear.

Post-Script II: This is about as forthcoming as Rumsfeld on Abu Ghraib.

More pushback? Maybe. Or maybe just the perspective of someone who believed the CIA would do well to meet with some Iranian spooks as well. This from Reuel Gerecht, a former Middle East expert at the agency, now at AEI and a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard. He's reacting to an email I sent him asking about the allegations by US intelligence officials in the CBS report I mention below, that Chalabi met with a "nefarious" character from the "dark side" of Iran's intelligence service, an individual who is known to plot operations against the United States, and never reported it to his US contacts.

Laura, This info all sounds deeply, deeply dubioius. The specifics of an Iranian intel meeting with Chalabi are, however, likely. The Iranian [Chief of Station] COS in Baghdad I think met with Chalabi on occasion--and he certainly met other Iranians on a regular basis--as do MANY Iraqis, including such folks as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim Jafari of the Da'wa, on whom the CPA has often been dependent for communication with Sistani. And last I checked, Chalabi is not an employee of the USG and therefore not required to run to Mr. Bremer or the CIA COS in Baghdad and say, "I just met an Iranian." If he were not meeting with a whole variety of Iranians--especially the "dark force" guys in Intel and the Guards Corps, he would be an idiot, and certainly not the type of fellow you would want on the Governing Council. Best, Reuel >>

Was Chalabi required to tell his American sponsors about his meetings with Iranian intelligence officials? Does it just look bad that he met with a particularly nasty sort and kept it from his administration friends? Does it look especially not good combined with the fact of the INC until recently getting $340,00 a month from the Pentagon to provide intelligence to the DIA, and his intelligence chief Aras Habib Karim apparently going on the lam to Iran? After passing off some apparently very limited distribution US intelligence to someone in Tehran?

I hope we understand the real story soon enough.

Meantime, the Prospect's Matt Yglesias chronicles the ties between Chalabi and certain administration officials, one of whom recently told Newsweek magazine he was never really that close with Chalabi:

The press stories would have him as my brother. I met him a few times. He was very smart, very articulate.

Ahmad who?

This from Wonkette:

Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Department, Part 2 #

From the president's address on Iraq: "Iraqis can be certain a free Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America. "

His name is Richard Perle.

Bush's Remarks on Iraq at the Army War College [WP]

We are helpless in the face of neocon humor.

From the Guardian's Julian Borger today:

"An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had been restricted to a handful of officials.

"This was 'sensitive compartmented information' - SCI - and it was tracked right back to the Iranians through Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.

Hmm.

And this, later on: "An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr Chalabi's 'handlers' in the Pentagon."

Whole piece here.

Still processing. There's something to this electronic intercept story. But the proof of the chain of custody leading to Aras Habib Karim just hasn't been explained or reported out yet that I've seen.

What really is Ahmad Chalabi thought to have done with Iran? One too many friendly conversations too far? A meeting unreported? Passing off a bit of US operational intelligence that the Iranians likely already had?

That's not what I'm being told. It was suggested to me today to revisit the allegations in the CBS 60 Minutes piece from May 21, 2004. I was told that gets at the real line that Chalabi is believed to have crossed, between a guy who has a relationship of convenience with neighboring Iran, to a guy who is working for the bad guys.

Here is that CBS transcript:

DAN RATHER, anchor:

Now a follow-up to a story first reported on this broadcast last night that Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the US-appointed Governing Council in Iraq and a former favorite of the Bush administration, is suspected of passing US secrets to Iran. "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl broke this story and she's back tonight with new details. Lesley.

LESLEY STAHL reporting:

Dan, senior intelligence officials were stressing today that the information Ahmad Chalabi is alleged to have passed on to Iran is so seriously sensitive, that the result of full disclosure would be highly damaging to US security. Because of that, we are not reporting the details of what exactly Chalabi is said to have compromised at the request of US officials at the highest levels. The information involves secrets that were held by only a handful of very senior intelligence officials. Meanwhile, we have been told that grave concerns about the true nature of Chalabi's relationship with Iran started after the US obtained, quote, "undeniable intelligence" that Chalabi met with a senior Iranian intelligence officer, a, quote, "nefarious figure from the dark side of the regime, an individual with a direct hand in covert operations against the United States."
Chalabi never reported this meeting to anyone in the US government, including his friends and sponsors.

So two important points here: US intelligence officials are telling CBS that there is "undeniable" evidence that:

1) Chalabi himself has been having unreported meetings with

2) A senior Iranian intelligence official "with a direct hand in covert operations against the United States." In other words, someone who plans operations to kill Americans.

A terror master, some might say.

It's hard to see how anyone could interpret that as benign in any way. And I am again told today that Wolfowitz et al do not find it benign and believe this is gravely serious.

Why were 2,000 pages removed from the copy of the Taguba report delivered to the Senate Armed Services committee investigating abuses at Iraq's soon-to-be razed Abu Ghraib prison?

Time reports:

Committee aides discovered belatedly that their copy of the 6,000-page report on prison abuses produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba might not be complete. The copy they got after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on May 7 was a thick document with 106 annexes, and it was quickly arranged into separate binders. Only later did the committee stack up all the pages, compare them with a ream of 6,000 blank pages and decide that at least 2,000 pages were missing. "We'd certainly like to know why they're missing," said Republican Senator John McCain. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita insisted, "If there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight." Committee staff members haven't actually counted the pages. Chairman John Warner will investigate this week to see what is missing.

Oversight? The New York Times reports that the missing pages include "200 pages from Colonel Pappas's sworn statement, including a document titled, Draft Update for Secretary of Defense."

Meantime, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is relieved of her command, and the Pentagon announces that the top Iraq ground commander Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez will be replaced, and the DoD says Sanchez's dismissal has nothing to do with Abu Ghraib? Because they want a four-star general to head the multi-national force in Iraq after June 30? Hmm. That sounds about as convincing as the bogus explanation William Cohen gave for dismissing Wes Clark in the wake of the Kosovo war involving Ralston needing to get promoted within a two month time window of finishing his other command, or something.

Who did Ahmad Chalabi piss off? Paul Bremer, the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports, in a piece today pushing the line that Chalabi's oil-for-food investigation would have contained uncomfortable revelations about how Bremer had managed Iraq's post-war Iraqi oil revenue fund. [He seems to be getting some push-back from his sources.] Lakhdar Brahimi, says Slate's Fred Kaplan; it is to the UN's Brahimi of course that the Bush White House has turned in desperation to coordinate Iraq's political transition, and indeed, that transition plan has become the main talking point for Bush's Iraq exit strategy (and his own reelection hopes). But it is deep in Kaplan's piece that I think the turning point, the really key player Chalabi pissed off, may be revealed:

The crucial rupture took place last month, when Chalabi started actively resisting Bush's plan for transferring sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. A central element of this plan is to turn the transition planning over to the United Nations' envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. Such a move threw off Chalabi. Brahimi has turned out to be Chalabi's most formidable rival...

The problem is that Bush, who once heaved contempt on the United Nations, now realizes that Brahimi is his only hope for an exit strategy or a coherent Iraqi strategy of any sort—which he desperately needs before the November election. Chalabi's hostility to Brahimi is, in Bush's eyes, hostility to Bush...With Bush grinding his teeth, the Pentagon's neocons had to surrender. Last month, the National Security Council decided to cut ties with Chalabi, according to the current Time. His allowance was pulled a few weeks later.

The person who Chalabi crossed too far may very well be the White House envoy to Iraq who has spent the past three months working with Brahimi and sipping tea with Sistani and Kurds and Adnan Pachachi in the hopes of salvaging some sort of US exit strategy from Iraq, Robert Blackwill. Condaleezza Rice's former boss at the Bush I National Security Council. A man with (trust me) a limited amount of patience. And who, unlike Brahimi, or even Bremer I suspect, was regularly in direct daily phone contact with Rice, and via her, the president.

As far as I can tell, the decisive rupture for Chalabi came not because the State Departmant and CIA were becoming more powerful in the Green Zone at the expense of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or that Chalabi refused to turn over the oil for food documents to Bremer, or that Karl Rove is trying to send a message to the neocons, or even that the Iraqis were investigating alleged massive corruption by the INC in the Finance Ministry, de-Ba'athification program, the currency transition, etc. [all true]. The decisive rupture of course was when the White House decided to cut Chalabi off. When the President of the United States and his entourage decided to cut Chalabi off. Back in mid-April. [Seemingly before King Abdullah of Jordan came May 5 with any sort of intelligence dossier on Chalabi.]

Now how does this fit with the Iran espionage charges? I suspect that there has been a long time US counterintelligence investigation of Chalabi and crew involving Iran, but that it had been moving along on a separate track from the Chalabi-is-a-pest track, below the radar of the White House, until the two tracks had a reason to converge, seemingly in April. [Perhaps in the person of Robert Blackwill.] I don't think, like Ledeen, that we can dismiss the Iran espionage charges as purely politicized. Why? Because it's pretty clear that Chalabi's intel chief Aras Habib Karim has split to Iran for a reason, and that the US intelligence community has a lot of reason to believe he is truly a long time on-the-payroll spy for Iran. His position heading the DIA-led Information Collection Program in Iraq had two DIA officials working in his very office, and a source familiar with the set up tells me the intel sharing in such a setting is certainly two-ways. It truly seems like an Iranian spy was heading up a joint US-INC intel shop in Baghdad for much of the past year. [Just think for a moment about how compromising such a scenario presents in and of itself.] What's more, it's clear that there had been a much longer relationship that involved regular sharing of sensitive information between high and mid level Pentagon civilians and intelligence and military staffers assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the INC's Aras Habib Karim and Chalabi. Even after it became obvious in the wake of the war and the failed hunt for Iraq's WMD that what the two had fed the OSD and the Office of the Vice President was all lies, paid for by $33 million American taxdollars. Still, Wolfowitz and Feith kept Chalabi's crew on the payroll, and put Karim in an even more sensitive position, working in the very same offices with DIA personnel reporting back to the Pentagon and DIA, on matters including US force protection in Iraq. Stepping back, it's hard to understand how any serious person could not be sobered up by the gravity of the Iran espionage charges involving Aras Habib Karim, and trying to assess how much such a set up potentially threatens the lives of US troops and compromises US operations in Iraq.

Re: l'Affaire Chalabi. Am told by an individual at a certain neoconservative institution that there is quite a difference between the public statements and private water cooler talk about this issue chez eux....

"A lot of people even here who have had a lot of exposure to Ahmad would not be surprised to learn he’s playing both ends against the middle..."

About the perceived discrepancy between the OSD distancing itself from Chalabi versus well known outside-of-government neocons defending Chalabi, this individual says: "I think part of it is simply that a lot of the perception of closeness to Chalabi thing on the part of the administration was a misunderstanding." Paul Wolfowitz, he suggested, was not really close to Chalabi. Chalabi's real constituency was always people outside of government than in, he said.

For those still defending him, he said, he believes there is some suspicion that "electronic intercepts" of what whoever might have been telling the Iranians is not really very reliable. If the evidence is all based on intercepts, he said, they would be dubious. It depends what the evidence is. He believes we will be hearing more exactly about the nature of the alleged evidence against Chalabi in the coming days and weeks.

More later.

Update: Not sure what he's saying around the proverbial water cooler. [And in fact, his piece suggests that if there is real evidence against someone like Chalabi, we shouldn't expect to ever know about it; which would seem to totally contradict what the individual above suggested. It would also mean that the only intelligence scandals we ever hear about are cooked up ones...]. But is he really so sure that James Jesus Angleton was the greatest unliving expert on intelligence ever? From what I understand, the CIA Soviet counterintelligence program was pretty much shredded to bits by the end of Angleton's tenure in 1974, and the Soviets/Aldrich Ames ultimately kind of won on this one, and had almost every CIA asset in the Soviet Union killed.

Chalabi's best friend, at least, when Ahmad's not in Tehran, Richard Perle, described in this long Post business piece. [Thx to S for the heads up.]

The Prospect's Matt Yglesias points out a seeming mystery here: if the charges against Chalabi are so grave and rock solid as have been reported, why are not various administration officials and neocons singing from the same song book?

...Based on what I'm hearing from people the administration isn't simply playing its cards close to the chest -- rank-and-file people on the right are just as confused as I am. Again, if Chalabi's friends have flipped, you would expect a unified message to bubble downwards and outwards from the center, internally if not publicly. Moreover, Chalabi's friends in media and think tank circles certainly don't seem to have turned against him. If their better-connected allies inside the Pentagon have, this is puzzling. The Sun tries to explain this by saying they haven't had access to the evidence themselves. Fair enough, but why can't they seem to convince anyone just on their say-so -- we're talking about a group of people who know each other and have collaborated together on and off for years.

Point well taken. But think of it this way.

Wolfowitz, Feith, Luti, and the people in their offices, in particular, and the DIA people assigned to liaise with Chalabi/the INC/the Information Collection Program, are the subject of multiple counterintelligence investigations. (There must be a DIA one, there is an FBI one, I suspect there's a CIA one, there may be more). And that could shut one up pretty quickly. It seems in the course of such investigations quite likely that such people's computer hard drive and phone records may be sifted through at any moment.

Say you're Wolfy's chief of staff. Say you have just been sitting in the room during some meetings at which Chalabi was present during which strategy was discussed, intelligence was discussed, operations were discussed, documents were discussed, maybe even passed around. [At the time, he was your partner, heck, he was providing most of the "intelligence" on WMD and Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda and defectors you were basing major decisions on.]. You are more than dimly aware of other such meetings and activities by other players close to and far from you, within the Pentagon, in Baghdad, in the White House, who knows, at Richard Perle's gourmet dinner table.

One might get very very quiet. The stakes are very high. People will go to jail. One may get an attorney who would order one to be very quiet.

I don't think it's surprising that Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin don't get a phone call from Wolfy saying the game is up. And here is what we are being told Chalabi and/or Habib gave to Iran.

[editor's note: I took out my original version's reference to "criminal" investigations. I don't know that's true.]

Post Script: I should clarify. So, in my example above, if you were that staffer to Wolfowitz, or Luti, and

a) you had been present at a few "ambiguous" meetings with Chalabi or Habib himself that involved discussion of sensitive material, and

b) now your office is aware that there are multiple counterintelligence investigations into both what sensitive US intelligence senior INC officials pased to Tehran, and into who on the US side gave such sensitive US information to Chalabi and company, and

c) your boss and other people in the office aren't chatting away so much these days about the investigation, or Chalabi, and

d) even if you were not the person who passed Chalabi the code book or sent him sensitive plans about US operations or backgrounders on US intelligence on Sadr, or interception or decoding technology, and you were not even exactly sure who it was, but

e) your notes, computer and telephone records, your boss's notes, computer and telephone records could be taken to be part of an investigation, and

f) you and your colleagues could be asked to testify even as witnesses at some point, as part of a grand jury/FBI investigation, a DIA review, a DOD IG investigation, or at potential Congressional hearings into what Chalabi/ the INC passed to Iran and into what exactly your office might have shared with Chalabi, then

g) you would still have every reason in the world to keep quiet right now.

UPDATE: Told the FBI has not yet interviewed/visited Wolfowitz [they probably can't even get a building pass]. A separate individual told me that there is unlikely to be a DOD Inspector General investigation. Am told there are DIA, CIA and FBI counterintelligence investigations.

Who is the kind of person who would be asked to be a go-between between Doug Feith's fourth floor Pentagon offices, and the Baghdad Information Collection Program headed by Chalabi's now fugitive intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem? It wouldn't be a high level official. We know when Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz travel more or less. Someone more mid level, or someone seconded from the DIA say to the office of the secretary of defense. Someone who would be more vulnerable than a high level Bush appointee.

Update: Some of these people are the kind of in-the-trenches staffers to Luti and Feith who were assigned to work closely with Chalabi that I would find particularly interesting.

Victor Bout Follow Up:

Wow. Alex Harrowell blogging out of the UK sure seems to have the goods on the US-UK coalition forces using an airline owned by notorious black market arms dealer Victor Bout to transport supplies to Iraq. Unfreakingbelievable.

He writes:

Le Monde reported the day before (really the same day because it is an evening paper) that a Bout airline operating under the name "British Gulf" was transporting goods for the US forces in Iraq, with the strong suggestion that his removal from the blacklist was a quid pro quo.

British Gulf International Airlines appears to be based in Sharjah, but registered in Kyrgyzstan (does this sound ominous yet?), and was formed from the assets of a company of the same name registered in Sao Tome of all places, but interestingly also based in Sharjah, in the Sharjah Airport Free Zone. (Its phone number is 06-5570316. Isn't the net great?) It would appear that the owners of BGIA folded their shelf company in Sao Tome and formed another with the same aeroplanes. It apparently operates some four Antonov 12s, of which at least 2 and possibly another were originally registered to old BGIA. The old version of the company possessed some four An12s and an An26. AeroTransport.org lists one of those An12s as "ultimate fate obscure" but does reveal that the An26 was given its registration, S9-BOV. Oddly enough, although as far as is known the "new" BGIA took over the "old" one's entire fleet, this aircraft is still listed as being with the "old" firm. Another An-12, S9-CAQ, is in storage in Sharjah under the "old" company's name. This stored ship, serial number 3341408, has a past. Its last owner was an outfit called Savanair based in Luanda, Angola. There, some five of its sisters were leased from none other than the Bout company Santa Cruz Imperial. Its friend S9-BOT (serial 5343305) was last registered to a "private operator in Angola". Who could that possibly be?

Now, you might be wondering if we - the Glorious Coalition - would really have dealings with this bunch of pirates. What about this? It is a record of purchase agreements signed between the US Defence Energy Support Centre and commercial enterprises. At the top of page 29, there is a listing for:
British Gulf International Airlines, TC
SAIF Zone, A3-24
PO BOX 26078
Sharjah, UAE.

The date of the agreement is given as the 5th of April, 2004. Now, what exactly is a Defence Energy Support Centre? ...It is the US armed forces' organisation for the supply of fuel. Looking up the DESC's contract instruction manual (aren't you glad I did it and not you), here, we find the details of how to interpret those purchase agreements. The "Signal Code" on the agreement shows "which activity receives the fuel and which activity receives the bill". On the one in question it is A, which according to the manual means "Ship to requisitioner/Bill requisitioner". That would appear to mean that the fuel is to be shipped to the billing address.

Which means that, without a doubt, British Gulf is working in our names. We are supplying its fuel.

Go check out this website. Amazing gumshoe and enormously disturbing to think the likes of Bout are being used by the Defense Department. It's like a very bad spy novel.

This is a real scandal. But it's a scandal occurring in a season of non stop jaw-dropping scandals, from Abu Ghraib to our Iraqi golden boy being a spy for Tehran, to the world's most notorious arms dealer being on the US payroll, so the competition is tight.

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.

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.

Who tipped Chalabi and Aras Karim Habib off to the coming raid? And who were the DIA officials who worked so closely with Habib at the Information Collection Program? and which Pentagon civilians signed off to Habib, a long time suspected Iranian intelligence agent, heading the Pentagon funded ICP?

On May 13, dia officials who worked with the i.n.c. abandoned their office in Baghdad. The next day, the Iraqis who had been working there brought three trucks into the compound to take away files and computers from the office. A confidant of Chalabi's says that by the time the U.S. ordered last week's raid, the i.n.c. had already removed its most sensitive intelligence documents.

But the intensified FBI and CIA focus on the i.n.c.'s ties to Tehran have now put Chalabi himself under the microscope...Since the beginning of the occupation, the i.n.c. has worked closely with the dia and the U.S. military in Baghdad, feeding intelligence to the U.S. on the whereabouts of top Baathists and the movements of insurgent cells. But that relationship also gave Chalabi and his aides extraordinary access to members of the U.S. intelligence community. At least two dia agents who were attached to the icp worked in the same office as Habib, the i.n.c. intel czar who is believed to have relocated to Tehran. Chalabi and his advisers deny that they received any classified information from the U.S...It may still take months for the U.S. to sort out just how much damage its flirtation with Chalabi has wrought.

That's interesting. For days have been hearing "for instance, dia official assigned to the Information Collection Program" as source for the highly classified intelligence given to Chalabi and the INC they are suspected of feeding to Iran. Is this a cover story that everybody is being told? or is there something to it?

Here's more on the CIA/FBI investigation:

U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement officials tell Time they are also investigating more serious offenses. After a CIA complaint, the FBI launched a full field criminal probe into whether Chalabi and senior i.n.c. aides passed high-level intelligence to Iran—information believed to be so sensitive, a senior U.S. official says, that it may have provided Iranian authorities with insights into the U.S.'s sources and methods for collecting intelligence and could even "lead to the loss of lives." U.S. intelligence officials told the FBI that they have "hard" evidence that Chalabi met with a senior officer of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iraq. A senior U.S. official says Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, are suspected of giving Iran "highly classified" data that were "known to only a few within the U.S. government." The FBI investigation, sources say, will probably involve dozens of agents and a full arsenal of investigative techniques, possibly including court-authorized searches and wiretaps. The probe will examine whether U.S. officials illegally transmitted state secrets to the i.n.c. The investigation could ultimately reach high-ranking civilian officials at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency (dia) who have dealings with Chalabi and his organization.

More soon.

Keeping the Feith. Don't accuse some neocons of letting the ugly facts get in the way of their allegiances. Paul Wolfowitz's erstwhile Middle East expert and Office of Special Plans veteran Harold Rhode and Iraq conspiracy guru Laurie Mylroie set out to defend Chalabi and his Iranian intelligence agent intel chief Aras Karim. This is just classic. Check this out.

From: Laurie Mylroie [mailto:sam11@XXXXXXX] Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 2:04 PM To: Laurie Mylroie Subject: Report from an American who witnessed the Raid Against Chalabi

From an American Friend Who Witnessed the Humiliating Raid Against Chalabi

(With thanks to Harold Rhode)

Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 10:26 AM
Subject: Baghdad update

Hi folks,

I wanted to let everyone know that I am safe in Iraq after what was a very eventful day yesterday. As most of you know, I work closely with Dr. Chalabi in Iraq, assisting the INC as a financial advisor. Yesterday, as I was sitting in my nightshirt and shorts, getting ready to face the day, my guard came in and told me that Dr. Chalabi’s guards were being arrested. Yelling to my friend and housemate Francis [editor's note: would this be Francis Brooke?] , I raced over to Dr. Chalabi’s house to find a confrontation between the Iraqi Police (IP), guarded by the US military and advised by plain clothed “advisors” to the IP. Two Americans demanding to know who was in charge of this operation, startled them. Suddenly some of the American “advisors” disappeared into their cars. The US military were fine—just obeying orders. After a back and forth with the IP and the US military, one unarmed IP was allowed inside to search for the persons for whom they had warrants.

It is helpful to understand that these “warrants” are coming from a special court established by Paul Bremer and reporting directly to him. The judge used to be a translator at the CPA Ministry of Justice and was imposed on the court by the CPA. His first charge was against Aras Kareem, the head of INC intelligence. According to the arrest warrant, he was charged with stealing 11 vehicles that belonged to the Ministry of Finance. Those 11 vehicles had been parked on INC property for protection and the MOF had taken the keys with them. The temporary offices of the MOF (its permanent building was damaged in the war) had no room for the vehicles. The MOF sent a letter to the judge saying there was no basis for the charges. The judge threatened the MOF lawyer with imprisonment if the MOF did not withdraw the letter. He also refused to take the letter from Aras’s lawyer. Even yesterday, when they came to arrest several people (none of course were at Dr. Chalabi’s house), their investigation was so poor that they did not even know the last names of the people they were trying to arrest. They tried to arrest one of Dr. Chalabi’s drivers just because his first name was Kamaran—a common Kurdish name. It would be like going to an office with a warrant to arrest Mike and arresting anyone with that first name.

After the police left (with nothing) I went over to China House—the INC office--where this time there was no pretense of arresting anyone. The plain-clothed American advisor without ID said they were seizing the building. I asked to see the warrant but none was available and no one would admit to being in charge. Under the watchful eye of these advisors, the IP ransacked the office, shooting Dr. Chalabi’s picture, overturning furniture, looting what they could carry off and spewing garbage everywhere. Dr. Chalabi had a group picture of his father—about 50 persons in total. The police had smashed the glass and punched a hole through the face of Dr. Chalabi’s father. We forget that Iraqis have long histories and long memories. That this police officer would recognize the face of Dr. Chalabi’s father in a sea of faces is illustrative of the roots of the invasion of his office.

Paul Bremer’s imperious manner has resulted in a tremendous loss of American and Iraqi lives. His subversion of Iraq’s nascent judicial system to silence a political opponent not only undermines Iraqi democracy but ours as well. I am okay in Baghdad, but angry.

Peg

Can we say "sinking ship?"
[Thx to my Mylroie spy, who shall remain initial-less.]

A couple days ago, Josh Marshall raised one of the most interesting questions about the Chalabi-Iran espionage case so far. The fact that as far back as the mid 1990s, elements of the US government have believed that Aras Karim, Chalabi's now fugitive intelligence chief who has headed the Pentagon-funded Information Collection Program in Baghdad, was an Iranian intelligence agent.

He writes:

We've been discussing for some time that Chalabi's connections to the Iranians...has been known about for years. But suspicions that Aras Karim was an Iranian agent are not new either.

Take this October 13th, 1998 New York Times article, which says that "An F.B.I. report said Mr. Karim's cousin Aras Habib Muhamad Al-Ufayli, who had been the intelligence chief for the Iraqi National Congress, had a 'well-documented connection to Iranian intelligence.'"

So, how could someone even suspected by US government agencies of being an Iranian intelligence operative [and reports suggest Aras Karim was considered to be a full fledged, on the payroll Iranian intelligence operative, not a fellow traveler receiving occasional tactical support from Tehran] be trusted by the powers that be at the Pentagon to run the intelligence program in Baghdad that was to help ensure US force protection, among other tasks? How was this permitted? Who signed off on this?

Let's go back to 2001, when the Information Collection Program was created, presumably in the weeks after September 11 when Paul Wolfowitz was agitating for the war to be taken to Baghdad. As Knight Ridder reports:

The INC's Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was "designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information" from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee...

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.

Can one imagine during the Cold War that a Soviet defector suspected by the US government of being a Soviet agent would be permitted to head a sensitive US government-funded intelligence program in Germany, that not only was long believed to be providing blatantly false misinformation about Soviet troop and weapons issues, but is charged with providing intelligence to ensure the protection of US forces stationed there? That intelligence reports provided by him would be sent to the Defense Secretary and the Vice President's office directly?

It would be madness. Asking a suspected agent of one's very enemies to be trusted with the most sensitive US intelligence and the security of US lives, operations, communications. Who would let such a person into the inner sanctum of US intelligence operations?

It's beyond madness.

How did this happen? Who signed off on Karim at the Office of the Secretary of Defense? How was he let in in the weeks after September 11 into the inner sanctum of the secretive US intelligence operation being assembled in the Pentagon? Is that not out and out treason?

On the issue of the FBI counterintelligence investigation into who leaked classified US intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, and who Chalabi leaked it to...Chalabi and ABC's George Stephanopoulos both referred to the FBI investigation on This Week this morning. An FBI source tells me the investigation is not being conducted out of the DC field office, where foreign investigations are normally housed, so it is likely being run out of FBI headquarters.

Chalabi said he would be willing to face trial in the US, but not in Baghdad ("Abu Ghraib" he sniffed). Who is Ahmad Chalabi to tell anyone where he is going to face trial or spend prison time? This is an Iraqi politician demanding full sovereignty for Iraq, insisting that he not be the subject of an Iraqi investigation? And demanding that any future jail time he serve be done in the US?

Meantime, Iran is rising to Chalabi's defense. "We had continuous and permanent dialogue with Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi Governing Council," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said at a press conference, as reported by Fox News. "But spying charges are unfounded and baseless. It's not true at all. We didn't receive any confidential information from Chalabi or any other member of the Iraqi Governing Council." That settles it.

More epitaphs for Ahmad Chalabi.

“We never provided any classified information from the U.S. to Iran, and neither I nor anyone in the INC. And that is a charge being put out by George Tenet.”

--Chalabi on CNN's Late Edition

“Indeed we have had many meetings with the Iranian government, but we have passed no secret information, no classified documents to them from the United States. Furthermore we have not had any classified information given to us by the United States.”

--Chalabi on Meet the Press.

"We gave no information about weapons of mass destruction, we introduced the U.S. government agencies to defectors at the request of the U.S. government agencies -- three defectors. It was up to them to analyze this (information), and the responsibility for reporting to the president after analyzing the information is not mine.”

--Chalabi on ABC's This Week.

Chalabi also claimed on Meet the Press to not know who the identity of the INC-provided defector code-named "Curveball" is. Indeed, to hear Chalabi tell it, Curveball may be a figment of the West's imagination.

But this LA Times article reminds us how Curveball came into circulation, and played an absolutely crucial role in deceiving the US government into believing that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs.

Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.

U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army...

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling...

"This is the one that's damning," he said...Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

So who is Curveball? And how did he come to the attention of western intelligence? It's uncanny, that it happened in the months after the UN inspectors came to Chalabi in 1997 asking for help getting information on Saddam's suspected biological weapons labs. As the LA Times reports:

The Curveball case began in 1992, when weapons inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq, frustrated at their failure to find Iraq's germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report in which they speculated that Baghdad could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified vans or trucks...

In December 1997, [UN weapons inspector Scott] Ritter said, he and his deputy, a former British army major attached to the U.N. team, flew to London to ask Chalabi for help. They met for three hours over dinner at Chalabi's Mayfair residence with the influential Iraqi exile and Ahmed Allawi, who headed intelligence operations for the Iraqi National Congress.

"Chalabi outlined what he could do for us," Ritter recalled. "His intelligence guy outlined their sources and said he had people inside the government. They told us they had the run of Iraq. Just tell them what we needed. So we outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bioweapons labs. Basically, we gave them a shopping list."

"They began feeding us information," Ritter said. "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff flowing in. At first blush, it looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

...U.S. officials say Curveball apparently showed up in Germany in 1998, but it is unclear how he got there...What is clear is that by 2000, Curveball had provided a vast array of convincing detail about the illicit program he claimed to manage.

He outlined how each office was set up and the names on each door. He described how walls were moved to help hide trucks. He identified several dozen fellow team members — even a lowly aide who rented their cars. He provided diagrams showing how stainless steel tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts were configured on nickel-plated flooring in each truck.

U.N. weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002...checked every site Curveball had identified, as well as others picked by U.S. intelligence. They tested waste lines in food-testing vans, took samples from refrigerator trucks, and searched for truck parts, blueprints, purchase orders or other evidence in factories, laboratories and elsewhere.

"We didn't find anything," the former inspector said...

During the summer [of 2003], Kay's investigators visited Curveball's parents and brother in Baghdad, as well as his former work sites. They determined that he was last in his class at the University of Baghdad, not first as he had claimed. They learned he had been fired from his job and jailed for embezzlement before he fled Iraq.

"He was wrong about so much," Kay recalled. "Physical descriptions he gave for buildings and sites simply didn't match reality. Things started to fall apart."

But to hear Chalabi tell it on the Sunday morning talk shows today, Curveball is an apparition, a mystery, a figment of everyone's imagination. This exchange between Chalabi and Fox News' Chris Wallace April 25 2004 captures how Chalabi is able to deny the very existence, the very identity, of one of the four individuals the INC delivered to western intelligence that became the principal human sources for the fabricated WMD intelligence the US went to war on.

WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, when this war began, you were a favorite of the Pentagon and of Vice President Cheney. Your group still gets -- although there's talk about cutting it off -- I think it's $340,000 a month for intelligence gathering.

But there are increasing complaints here in -- among Bush administration officials that you gave the U.S. bad information into the lead-up to the war, that your organization coached defectors to tell horror stories to U.S. intelligence, that basically you sold the U.S. a bill of goods.

CHALABI: Of course these are false charges. They were hyped up by people, journalists with an agenda and people who have tried to do blame shifting...

WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, let me give you one example that people cite, however. And this is the question of Saddam Hussein putting biological weapons labs on trucks.

According to U.S. intelligence officials, the two prime sources for that information were people that your organization provided. One of them turned out to be a known fabricator, and the other, the prime source, who was code named Curveball, just turned out to be the brother of one of your top lieutenants.

CHALABI: That's a lie. There is no Curveball that is the brother of any member of the INC leadership at the high level or at the low level. We don't know who he is, we never heard of him, and we have nothing to do with this information, and we never saw him.

As for the other person, we presented him to the United States and they took his information.

We did not coach him. They met him a few times, and they decided whether to take this information or not. We did not press him on them. We thought that it may be useful for them to talk to him...

The point is, this Curveball incident is an example of the blame-shifting and the lies that have been spread about our role in this.

It is almost dizzying to witness how utterly this guy fabricates, to apprehend what a black hole of lies he is. But it is even more staggering to think how for 12 years, US intelligence and, under this administration, the very highest levels of the US government, were played by this guy. And just perhaps, played by whoever was running him.

The Los Angeles Times' Bob Drogin, who had one of the earliest stories back in August 2003 conveying US government suspicion that Chalabi may have been proferring false defectors or even been a Saddam agent, advances the Chalabi-spy story Sunday. Drogin informs us that Chalabi sent false defectors to at least eight countries' intelligence services, including the US, the UK, Italy, Germany, Denmark, France, Spain and Sweden. Drogin also gives us crucial information about the nature of the classified US intelligence that Chalabi and his intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem are believed to have passed to Tehran.

Officials said other evidence indicated that Chalabi's intelligence chief had furnished Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security with highly classified information on U.S. troop movements, top-secret communications, plans of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and other closely guarded material on U.S. operations in Iraq.

The U.S. investigation into the suspected spy operation was a key reason behind Thursday's raids on Chalabi's Baghdad house and the offices of his Iraqi National Congress. Several INC members were accused of kidnapping, robbery and corruption.

This sounds much broader than what the LA Times reported was passed to Iran by Chalabi et co on Friday. But it seems to include both operational and highly technical components. I am assuming that the nature of the intelligence Chalabi/Aras Karem Habib are alleged to have given to Tehran is one important clue to determining who from the US side had access and might have given it to them.

Was the INC acting at Iran's behest when it fed disinformation via defectors and false documents to western intelligence services about Iraq's alleged WMD? On this point, Drogin says, US counterintelligence believes the INC may have been acting on its own.

It is not clear whether Iran had any role in the alleged use of the INC to provide disinformation to the West. U.S. officials say the INC may have been acting on its own when it sent out a steady stream of defectors from 1998 to 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.

The whole piece is available here.

Meantime, on the subject of the INC's fugitive intelligence chief, Aras Habib Karem, and the nascent Iraqi intelligence services he was growing from the Pentagon-funded Information Collection Program, the New York Sun's Eli Lake has a useful, Baghdad-reported backgrounder on the ICP published March 1, 2004. The piece details what the ICP program was tasked to do, what it looked like, how the US military and intelligence agencies liaised with it, etc.

But most interesting to me given current developments is the part I have underlined below, which indicates that by March, the CIA was preparing to take over from the Defense Intelligence Agency in overseeing and sponsoring the Information Collection Program. Is it in this transition review process from the DIA to CIA control of the ICP that some of the alarming revelations about what INC officials like Karem were allegedly passing to the Iranians was uncovered? The timing makes sense.

Here's the Sun piece.

One of the most significant battles going on here is one that hasn't yet hit the newspapers--the maneuvering over who is going to inherit the intelligence agency run by the Free Iraqi movement under Ahmad Chalabi.

The intelligence operation, known as the Information Collection Program, was
founded by the Iraqi National Congress and the State Department. In
subsequent years it has been largely funded by the Pentagon's Defense
Intelligence Agency and has racked up a string of intelligence successes.

The CIA station here has started negotiations with Mr. Chalabi's group in a
bid to take over the operation, which has come under scrutiny from Senator
Clinton, a Democrat of New York, and others for peddling false information
to the Bush administration before the war. But the intelligence unit, known
as the Information Collection Program, has also led to the capture of U.S.
Central Command's 55 most wanted Baathists, uncovered Saddam Hussein¹s
illegal intelligence stations, and captured documents that uncover the role
of foreign corporations in busting United Nations sanctions and trading with
Iraq's military, according to a draft summary of the program's activities,
obtained by The New York Sun.

That summary says that between May 2003 and January 2004 the INC's
operatives provided more than 1,300 intelligence reports to the Defense
Intelligence Agency's Defense Human Sources unit. Today, the ICP has evolved
from its modest beginnings in the fall of 2000 as a State Department program
to document war crimes against Kurds to an embryonic intelligence agency and
counterterrorism strike force...

Questions surrounding Mr. Chalabi's intelligence arose last month after the
Knight Ridder newspaper chain published a story claiming that the DIA had determined a defector made available to American intelligence agencies in
2002 had lied about his knowledge of mobile biological weapons labs...

Since the war, the task of the program has focused more on counterinsurgency. The summary of the program's activities says, Specifically, the mission of the office is to provide precise, timely, sensitive, actionable information to Coalition Forces. "The Information Collection Program has saved American lives," one Pentagon official told the Sun last week. "They have worked closely with the military."

At a tour of the ICP bureau in Baghdad Thursday, uniformed Army officers
were meeting with members of the bureau. Since May of 2003, the ICP has
cooperated with the 1st Armored Division of the Army, the 82nd Airborne
Division and special forces units in Baghdad "to exchange intelligence
information regarding the security issue in Iraq," according to the summary.

The ICP arranged for coalition forces to first contact General Kamal Mustafa
Abdullah Sultan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, where he was first
interrogated at the INC's compound at the Hunting Club in May. The INC's
Free Iraqi Forces, which worked on ICP intelligence, also arrested Muhammad
Hamza al-Zubaydi, Saddam's former deputy prime minister and member of the
Baath regional command. ICP operatives also helped arrange for the surrender
of the governor of Basra, Walid Hamid Tawfiq al-Tikriti, on April 29.

To be sure, a number of Iraqis have provided coalition forces with information on former Baathists. It is rumored still in Iraq that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan came up with the tip that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December. But no other organization has detailed the organization or activities of Iraq's intelligence services in as systematic way as the ICP.

The summary says the ICP has documents which prove that the Iraqi Mukhabarat served as a liaison with Qaeda-sponsored organizations in northern Iraq...

In addition to providing information on Iraqi agents abroad, the program has
also interviewed a number of officials affiliated with Saddam's organization
responsible for deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors. It also has debriefed
scientists working with Iraq's Military Industrial Corporation, the
principal agency the regime used to obtain prohibited materials during the
U.N. sanctions...

Since December, the ICP is turning into what may be the intelligence service
for a sovereign Iraq, tentatively being dubbed either the Iraqi Military
Intelligence Request or the Iraqi Security Service.

Under the leadership of longtime INC spy chief, Aras Habib Karem, the
organization has expanded its ranks to include intelligence operatives from
the two major Kurdish parties, the INA and Sciri. Mr. Karem is an acting
deputy at the Ministry of Interior, but his post has yet to be approved by
L. Paul Bremer...

The CIA station in Baghdad this month has started talks with the INC on
taking over responsibility for the program from the DIA, according to
American and ICP officials. One ICP official told the Sun last week, "The
CIA has expressed an interest in the program and taking it over. We are now
discussing it."

Worth pondering and following up on.

Finally, a note on media coverage on this issue. Like many of you, while obsessively following news reports on all developments Chalabi the past few days, I am struck by how totally lacking the New York Times' coverage has in general been on this issue. They would do well to poach the likes of the Sun's Lake or Newsday's Royce or Knight Ridder's formidable Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. Perhaps I have somehow just missed their key investigative stories on this issue. But I've been looking and doubt it. The Times has been totally put to shame by coverage in several other publications with far fewer resources than scrappy journalists with incredible gumshoe and dedication.

UPDATE: Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel and John Walcott have more details on what INC intelligence chief Aras Habib is believed by US counterintelligence to have given to Iranian intelligence in their Saturday piece.

...A U.S. intelligence official said the evidence of Habib's ties to Iran includes both intercepts and some documentation. The official said Habib provided sensitive information, some of it classified above top secret, to the Iranians..."The bottom line here is that much of the information the administration had about Iraq may have come from an Iranian agent," said the intelligence official. "If that's true, this is a huge scandal."

Thanks to Kevin Drum for the nice plug.

Dept of Interesting Letters:

Hi Laura,

I served in the military as an intelligence agent
(Vietnem era) and later worked for a number of years
as a criminal investigator in the private sector.
I've been following the Iraq WMD/al Qaida story for
some time now. (Thanks to the internet, I probably
have better access now than I did then...)

If Chalabi and the INC were working with Vevak, then
not only have a bunch of acedemics been caught playing
spy games, but a PR agency playing spy games (the
Rendon Group) was and probably still is the conduit
between it and OSP/OVP.

Don't mean to point out the obvious, and thank you for
your reporting.

Sincerely,

[Name Suppressed]

Thanks for the letters...Expect there will certainly be follow up inquiries into Rendon's close ties with Chalabi, etc.

Met with a friend who thinks about counterintelligence issues professionally. [It's worth noting that he is not at all unfriendly to the neocons, and has his own history with them.] He helped me think through some of the Chalabi/Iran story through the frame of the following questions.

1) What is the real ultimate purpose of CounterIntelligence?
To use penetration agents or agents of influence to gain control of the opponent's intelligence apparatus.

[Could Chalabi have been used by Vevak, the Iranian intelligence agency [correction: Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS)], against the US thus?]

He suggested thinking back to Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence division from the early 1960s to a disastrous end in 1974. Angleton got taken in by a Soviet defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, a legitimate defector who provided the CIA good stuff...But Golitsyn convinced Angleton that any defector who comes after him is a plant...The next defector who came was Lysenko. Over time, Angleton became obsessed with the idea that the CIA had a mole, but was misdirected by Soviet plant to miss the real mole, Aldrich Ames, who basically gave the Soviets info that had almost every US asset on the Soviet Union killed. In effect, neutralizing the CIA's Soviet intelligence program.

[I am sure I am butchering this history a bit, but the point is, this is the example my friend cited to try to show how a foreign intelligence service might use an agent to devastating effect against an opponent's intelligence service. And when one thinks about the degree to which US foreign policy and US intelligence appeared to be misdirected by disinformation provided in large part by Chalabi and the INC, for years, it is pretty astonishing. How just a few individuals could apparently so mislead the entire US government.]

2) Chalabi et co clearly had been crossing lots of gray lines in a liaison role -- that is partly what made him/them useful to the US in providing intelligence support to for instance the Pentagon.

Perhaps political winds have changed in Washington as much as that Chalabi has crossed clear black lines in 'liaising' with the Iranians (but perhaps not -- and the thrust of many news reports so far suggests Chalabi has provided highly damaging US intelligence to the Iranians).

3) The timing of the Jordanian intelligence dossier presentation to the White House may be key (late April). CORRECTION: The visit of Jordan's King Abdullah to Bush was May 5, e.g. three days after the Newsweek article talking about the White House being briefed of an investigation into Chalabi involving intercepts of him providing highly sensitive US intelligence to Iran.

4) Who really is Ahmad Chalabi? Why did so many other Iraqi exiles hate him? Why did Kanan Makiya publish his book under a pseudonym, Allawi have his legs broken in the UK, but Chalabi live with his number posted in the US phone book? The other high profile Iraqi exiles lived in fear of Iraqi intelligence services. Chalabi did not seem to.

Update: A well informed friend writes that Iraqi agents "tried to poison Chalabi at least twice" that he knows of.

Was Chalabi a cooptee of the Iraqi intelligence services; or of someone else's intelligence service?

If he was an Iranian cooptee, what was Iran's ultimate aim? Who really benefits?

5) Was the real back story to Gulf War II not that a group of neoconservatives tried to realize their grand strategy for the Middle East, but that a bunch of academics playing spy games got duped by Iranian intelligence?

A word of warning, that this Chalabi story is being sourced from so many directions, with so much speculation and even false flags, that the basic story line is bound to drastically evolve. Some walking back on various aspects of the plot, am hearing now. Will try to straighten out any misconceptions I have posted as I can...

Jordan tipped Bush White House off to Chalabi Iran ties, reports the (neoconservative friendly) New York Post.

Jordan's King Abdullah fueled the U.S. move against Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi by providing bombshell intelligence that his group was spying for Iran, The Post has learned. An explosive dossier that the Jordanian monarch recently brought with him to White House sessions with President Bush detailed Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran, diplomats said.

That new information led to the Bush administration's decision to stop its $340,000-a-month payments to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and back an aggressive Iraqi criminal probe into his activities.

The file was compiled by Jordan's intelligence service, which has had an interest in Chalabi since the 1990s, when the Iraqi exile leader was convicted in absentia for embezzling millions of dollars.

The scandal stemmed from the collapse of the Bank of Petra, which Chalabi controlled, the diplomatic officials said...

King Abdullah's dossier provided critical confirmation of U.S intelligence gathered elsewhere that the INC was playing a double game with Ba'athists and that Chalabi and his security chief were passing sensitive information to Iran.

That was when the Bush administration decided to break all ties with Chalabi, sources said.

More on Chalabi's at large intelligence chief, Aras Habib Karim (or Aras Karim Habib), 47, here and here. Until he went underground in March, e.g. fled to Tehran, Karim headed the Pentagon-funded, DIA-managed Information Collection Program. But Newsday is reporting that the ICP was run by the Iranians since its inception in 2002.

As my friend says, the real Iran contra II has been in front of our eyes for all to see for all of this time...

One other important thing I was told tonight about l'affaire Chalabi. Those who are in the position to know what Chalabi passed to Iran -- Wolfowitz, Cheney, Feith -- have very loudly not offered any defense of him for more than a month and a half. At Feith's appearance at AEI May 4, he decidedly did not rise to Chalabi's defense at Danielle Pletka's expression of bewilderment why the US had stopped supporting the de-Ba'athification program. The only defenses one is seeing are from the likes of Perle, Ledeen, etc., who don't know -- but are being wildly signalled by their friends to surrender on this one.

Showing that his judgment about hucksters has not improved since Iran Contra, Michael Ledeen sets out to defend the noble democrat Ahmad Chalabi from these vicious allegations that he's been spying for Iran.

Now the usual unnamed intelligence sources are whispering to their favorite journalists that they have a "rock-solid case" showing that Chalabi was in cahoots with the Iranians. This, coming the same crowd that told President Bush they had a "slam-dunk case" on Iraqi WMDs, should arouse skepticism from any experienced journalist, but it doesn't (another grim sign that confusion reigns supreme in Washington these days). It's a truly paradoxically accusation, since the refusal of the American government to provide Chalabi with support and protection for the past decade is what drove him to find a modus vivendi with Tehran in the first place. And Chalabi is not alone in dealing with the Iranians and their representatives in Iraq; it is hard to find any serious organization or any serious leader of any stripe — Kurdish, Shiite or Sunni, imam, mullah, or Ayatollah — who doesn't work with the Iranians. How could it be otherwise? We have shown no capacity to defend them against Iranian-supported terrorists. And terror works. Finally, it's hilarious to see this crowd of diplomats and intelligence officers attacking an Iraqi for talking too much to Iranians, when Powell's State Department and Tenet's CIA has been meeting with Iranians for years.

As I once wrote, the war against Saddam is nothing compared to the war against Ahmed Chalabi.

All of this is the inevitable result of the fundamental misunderstanding of the war against the terror masters. It is a regional war, not a war limited to a single country. Since we refuse to admit this, we are unable to design an effective strategy to win. Deceiving ourselves, we lie to the mirror, saying that defeats are really victories, that Baathists are our friends and independent minded Shiites are our enemies, and that appeasement of the mullahs will end their long war against the United States.

Oh vey. The not even irony that those who are most vociferous about the need to overthrow the terror masters in Iran are the very same ones who cultivate the back channels to those same figures, and defend their middle men.

Chalabi's Information Collection Program used to spy for Iran, Newsday's Knut Royce reports. See my post from several hours ago that speculates as to how this might have worked.

First, this from Newsday:

The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years...

At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a raid on Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.

Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection program.

The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions said that Karim's "fingerprints are all over it."

Whole piece is here.

I must say, I'm fairly impressed with how close so far some of what I have heard and have posted is to what's coming out later in sources such as Knut Royce. It IS the ICP....is exactly what I've heard. And the neocons. are. imploding. over. the. issue. of. Chalabi.

I am also wary. But not as wary as some, who maybe cannot believe that this is finally happening. Neocon sources are quite clear however that the evidence against Chalabi, and the nature of what he passed to Iran is so damaging, it is taking this Chalabi house of cards down.

Also: the "China compound" raided in Baghdad yesterday does house the Information Collection Program, but does not include Chalabi's residence, I learned. They have Chalabi's personal computer. US intelligence will. never. let. Chalabi. in. again.

Also, I heard, don't rule out Feith.

Update: Well informed friend says that while Royce is usually very good, the explanation in this article seems "too perfect." Perhaps.

Here's some background on the INC's Information Collection Program, from a very good February 2 2004 Knight Ridder piece.

It is here that there seemed to be a really interesting, concrete and operational nexus of INC intelligence operations and the US officials who received the fruit of their labor.

The INC's Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was "designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information" from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee...

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.

The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.

The INC also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff...

The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the DIA, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department decided to give it up in late 2002.

The defense official defended the current support of the INC effort, saying that it has been of some help to the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group...

INC-supplied informants also have identified insurgents who have been waging a guerrilla war that has claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. troops and hundreds of Iraqis, he said...

"You never take anything at face value," he continued. "When the INC gives information, we absolutely pursue it. You never know what that golden nugget is going to be."

Were the offices of the ICP raided on Thursday? Would be worth finding out.

Meantime, the New Republic's Spencer Ackerman warns, I may be too quick to dismiss some of the obvious suspects.

Re: Names we don't know: surely someone from the Intelligence Collection Program is friendly with Chalabi. Who makes the payoffs? It's always been reductive -- or, to put it differently, impressionistic -- to say that whole agencies are anti-Chalabi; surely there's someone in the ICP who's taken a shine to him. Not to be conspiratorial, but I wonder if the OVP/OSD (uh, not to be reductive) Chalabi allies didn't have something to do with the leak. Whatever the intel that got its way to Chalabi was, it had some kind of value to him, and even if the OVP/OSD crowd didn't know what it was, they could still have known that it existed, and that it should make its way to Chalabi. I have no reason to doubt your sources when they say it's someone deep in the weeds; I just mean that often those guys are bagmen and not the sorts of folks who decide to let certain documents slip -- at least not without authorization.

Noted and I agree with this. Am the first one willing to believe that it was one of our friends from the OSP/OVP but am hearing differently. Trying to keep an open mind and pass on what I can.

On possible motives for those who leaked classified intel to Chalabi, Spencer writes:

Possible motive: Chalabi can stay a step ahead of his political competitors. I would imagine the intercepts useful to him are those from Iran, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In each case, he and his crowd would be able to know what foreign actors are doing/planning in Iraq -- information he can leverage either to position himself directly over his competitors, or to make other notable figures indebted to him. For instance, if he can listen in on what the Iranian Pasdaran are talking about, he could either a) figure out what they're doing/planning with SCIRI and he can manuever accordingly, or b) pass on that information to a nonaligned/anti-Iranian force like Sistani's people, who become reliant on Chalabi for information.

Those sponsoring Chalabi clearly want him to have a leg up, or to have him positioned well for the future, in which case leaking classified stuff to him is in their perceived interest. I could be completely off-base, but i imagine Chalabi's allies could simply make low men on the totem pole (in intel or otherwise) known that the higher-ups don't mind if chalabi gets his hands on ... stuff, and they can interpret that at their discretion. like how no orders exist telling military intelligence or MP jailers to torture anyone, but the atmosphere certainly seems to have been set from above.

I find this highly persuasive. Particularly the argument that a possible motive of the leaker to Chalabi of a highly technical decoding type technology might have been to help Chalabi with his own intelligence collection on foreign country activities in Iraq, such as Iran's backing of SCIRI. Or perhaps even, the motive was to provide Chalabi's Information Collection Program with the tools it needed to be useful for US force protection?

I find this highly persuasive.

UPDATE: Let me be clear. When Chalabi was considered by the Pentagon to be a partner of the US, and Chalabi's Information Collection Program was on the Pentagon payroll, and when one of the ICP's mandated duties was to provide intel that would benefit US force protection, it is not a stretch to believe that one of ICP's customers might have reasoned that Chalabi and the ICP could have provided very useful intelligence to US forces on say Iranian intelligence activities among the Shia in Iraq. Perhaps it was reasoned Chalabi's crew could provide superior intelligence on such activities, if they just had access to the intercepts the US had access to. And so, is it such a stretch to think that this kind of sensitive technology might have been passed to Chalabi, with an eye to improved US force protection? And then over time, US counterintelligence discovered, Chalabi and crew were passing it on to the very foes from which they were supposed to protect US forces?

I found this highly plausible.

Update to "Some people think they know who passed Chalabi highly sensitive US intelligence":

The Prospect's Matt Yglesias writes, on the question of who would have had access to the type of intelligence referred to in today's LA Times article:

Based on what you've got up on your site, it sounds like we're talking about something possibly pertaining to the technical aspects of American cryptography -- something the Iranians couldn't find out on their own and something the usual OVP/OSD suspects wouldn't have access to. Does Chalabi have a mole in the NSA? Surely, they've had to hire a lot of new translators over the past few years and while they must have been screening for dual loyalties vis-a-vis Iran and the Arab states perhaps they weren't so disturbed by the prospect of Chalabi ties. Indeed, ties to the INC may have been taken as a sign of dedicated American patriotism and trustworthiness.

Like Matt, I'm hearing informed speculation that, given the allegedly highly technical nature of the intelligence some officials allege that senior INC officials passed to the Iranians, there is a strong possibility that who leaked to Chalabi is a name we haven't heard, for instance, like a DIA official assigned to the Information Collection Program, or a SIGINT specialist, or someone like that. Of course, there are certainly principals and deputies who would have access, as well.

Two questions I have been mulling with fellow Chalabi story stalkers is:

1) What is the nature of the intel that Chalabi was thought to have passed to Iran?
2) Who had access to that type of info?

If it's as the LA Times reports, "information on U.S. capabilities for decoding and translating protected communications -- a potentially serious breach" -- which Gerecht told me he'd be shocked if Chalabi got access to -- I think it would be very very limited to real intel professionals. I don't think Wolfowitz and Feith go around with that stuff.

Now if it's operational plans on what US forces/authorities planned to do say about Sadr, that Chalabi passed to his friends in Iran, I think that would be intel a much broader range of people would have access to.

It depends a bit on what the meaning of "intelligence that could get US forces killed" is, as CBS reported it.

I imagine that from the rubble of the raids, the direction of the investigation will become more clear over the next few days.

The Prospect's Jason Vest hones in on Sabbah Nouri, the office manager of the INC-led Finance Ministry, who was arrested in Baghdad in late March on corruption charges. Nouri is a.k.a. "Sabbah Nouri Ibrahim al-Salem" in the killer NY Sun piece I excerpted earlier today.

Vest writes that Nouri may be Chalabi's undoing:

Perhaps the most interesting strand of the investigation involves one Sabbah Nouri, an INC official whom Chalabi had installed in the Ministry of Finance earlier this year -- and who's virtually the star of a front-page story in today's generally Chalabi-friendly New York Sun.

Nouri has not been a particularly high-profile figure, but he could end up being the demolition man for Chalabi's political aspirations and the INC. Identified in a January 13 broadcast of the Voice of the Mujahideen (the short-wave program of the Shia Supreme Islamic Council for Revolution in Iraq) as the "director of the finance minister's office," Nouri popped up in a March 11 Washington Post story about millions of missing Iraqi dinars from Iraqi banks.

After Iraqis traded their old dinars for new ones late last year, a Finance Ministry bank audit revealed a $22 million gap. According to the Post, the Finance Ministry quickly rounded up scores of bank tellers, whom it accused of accepting counterfeit scrip or outright theft. Though lawyers for the accused noted that suspects extended beyond tellers, Nouri, identified as "head of the Finance Ministry's bank audit committee," asserted that "it was impossible that anyone but the cashiers could have inserted forged bills or taken some of the money," adding that "in the past, employees did not have any respect for law. We want to teach people this respect."

Nouri returns to the pages of the Post today (May 21) -- which fails to reference its earlier story -- and is now identified as being "at the center of the inquiry" into "a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency." According to the Post, Nouri was "arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority."

Similarly, the Times identifies Nouri as having been "arrested on corruption allegations that include stealing a dozen cars from the [Finance] Ministry" and standing accused of "theft, extortion, kidnapping and murder."

But the most thorough description of the Nouri investigation comes -- perhaps somewhat surprisingly -- in a front-page story Friday in the neocon's paper of record, The New York Sun.

According to that report, Nouri has told Iraqi investigators that "Mr Chalabi's organization instructed him to strong-arm bureaucrats and steal government property." Citing Nouri's arrest date as March 24, the story also reveals that his charges include "coerc[ing] confessions from bank tellers" in the dinar investigation, and that when arrested, he attempted to extricate himself by invoking the name of Aras Habib, the INC's intelligence director.

As Vest alludes to towards the end of his piece, I think the really intereresting figure, and the man who has really become Chalabi's biggest liability, is Aras Habib [Karem], Chalabi's intelligence chief. Spencer Ackerman has more on Habib here.

The allegations against Chalabi and the INC fall into three real baskets:
1) political intrigue and tension between Chalabi and Bremer and Brahimi;
2) rampant corruption, of the kind Nouri is accused of serving as a Chalabi middle man for; and
3) espionage and real sedition against US troops, e.g. senior INC officials like Habib and Chalabi himself passing sensitive US intelligence to Tehran.

Are the activities -- corruption and espionage for Tehran -- interlinked? The apparently close ties between Habib and Nouri are interesting from that perspective. [Nouri gave Habib's name up shortly after he was arrested, and there is now an arrest warrant out for Habib, whereabouts unknown.] What was the real reason the raid came now? It's not yet clear, to me anyway.

But given the staggering amount of corruption and kick backs that one hears are rampant facts of life throughout the Iraq post war reconstruction process, and not just on the Iraqi side either, my money is on the likelihood that it was the Iran connection that tipped the scales. Bolstering that: CIA and FBI agents present at the raids. They just would not be involved in political squabbles between Bremer/Brahimi and Chalabi, or political transition issues. I am not sure they would even be involved in a corruption investigation, especially one being led by an Iraqi judge. But they would certainly be involved in an investigation into who leaked Ahmad Chalabi highly classified US intelligence.

Some people think they know who passed Chalabi highly classified US intelligence. Of a type that Reuel Marc Gerecht told me today it is pretty much impossible that anyone at the INC, including Chalabi, would have been given access.

Lauren*, It is IMPOSSIBLE that the INC could have passed such information to the Iranians since no member of the INC, including Ahmad Chalabi, would have been in possession of such information. Simply would not have happened. Anyone who told you that has no idea of how intercept is handled in the USG. Best, Reuel

[Gerecht was referring specifically to a report in today's LA Times that what senior INC officials were accused of passing to Tehran involved "information on U.S. capabilities for decoding and translating protected communications -- a potentially serious breach."]

I am told that the usual suspects one would a) expect to have access to highly classified intelligence on US operations in Iraq of the type Chalabi is alleged to have passed to Iran and b) who were well known to be close to Chalabi, did not in fact necessarily have the kind of access described in a). "Principals, deputies, and those whose names we don't know" is what I've been told.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: As I understand it, the access to the type of intelligence Chalabi is alleged to have passed to Iran is much more close-hold than people realize. And I am told that what was given is so damaging, this person hopes it doesn't ever come out.

Can someone please illuminate what is so sensitive about all of this? Presumably, Iran has plenty of its own intel operatives running around Iraq, learning lots about US forces and operations. What is Chalabi thought to have given to Tehran that is so damaging? That so could have gotten US forces killed? Does this have to do with plans to go after Sadr? Other plans? Dick Cheney's cell phone number?

*[Given that Reuel Marc Gerecht must have had his name butchered his whole life, that is, when he wasn't using the pseudonym Edward Shirley, I forgive him for calling me 'Lauren.']

All roads of the Chalabi investigation appear to lead to the Iran connection, reports Spencer Ackerman. And many of them seem to travel via Aras Habib [Karim], Chalabi's intelligence chief.

All roads here--Chalabi's apparent embezzlement from the currency changeover, Chalabi's zealous de-Baathification, Chalabi's increasing criticism of the occupation--appear to lead back to the Iran connection. As Hirsh reports, Iraq's Central Criminal Court "is also investigating whether INC officials, including Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Habib, misused the Baath Party files they seized upon being helped into Iraq early by the U.S. military." That same Habib, notes the Los Angeles Times, "is suspected of being one of those who passed sensitive information about U.S. security operations to Iranians." And, reports Lake, when one of Chalabi's aides, Sabbah Nouri Ibrahim Al Salem, was arrested in connection with the currency embezzlement in March, "he told Iraqi police that he was a friend of Aras Habib Karem, Mr. Chalabi's intelligence chief, prompting Iraqi authorities to issue a warrant for Mr. Karem's arrest."

A possible explanation here is that, for the U.S., Chalabi's relationship with Iran--the evidence for which, says "60 Minutes"'s source, is "rock solid"--was a bridge too far. The principal link between Chalabi and the mullahs appears to be his intelligence chief, who has his fingerprints on a whole lot of incidents that have proven troublesome for the U.S. already.

More on Habib and the Iran connection later.

More on the FBI investigation into how Chalabi got ahold of highly classified US intelligence.

This from the WSJ:

..."The FBI's interest is not in Chalabi," said an FBI official. "Our interest is in how he got the information" that he allegedly gave to Iran. A second federal law-enforcement official said the big question for the U.S. government and the coalition is where the information came from. "He wasn't privy to information about our operatives and I don't think we'd trust the guy with the kind of secrets that would get our people killed," he said.

As I understand it, the FBI does not raid houses in Baghdad because Iraqi politicians say mean things about Paul Bremer and the CPA, or even, God forbid, Lakhdar Brahimi.

Chalabi Press Wrap-Up. Chalabi's Iran ties are looking like a bigger and bigger deal. And more specifically, who from the US provided Chalabi with such highly classified information that was passed to Tehran, over two years. Chalabi's intelligence chief, Arras Habib [Karem], for whom an Iraqi judge has issued an arrest warrant, is thought to have passed such sensitive US intelligence to Tehran. A senior INC official is reported by CBS to be on the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security [MIOS] payroll. The LA Times reports that senior INC officials are believed to have given the Iranians "information on U.S. capabilities for decoding and translating protected communications -- a potentially serious breach." FBI agents were reportedly involved in Thursday's raid -- why? Because of a high level FBI-led counterintelligence investigation into who passed the classified info to Chalabi. The stakes are high for people here who may be the target of that investigation.

There is also the corruption case involving Sabbah Nouri Ibrahim al-Salem, the office manager for the INC-led Finance Ministry, who was arrested in Baghdad in March and who has told authorities that "Mr. Chalabi’s organization instructed him to strong-arm bureaucrats and steal government property." Then there is an INC official who seems to have stolen millions in Iraq's currency conversion. Finally, the White House has been aware of these investigations into Chalabi and his associates for a while now.

The Los Angeles Times' Edmund Sanders and Monte Morin:

...U.S. officials have been growing increasingly concerned about Chalabi's apparently cozy relationship with Iran. They suspect that Chalabi or his aides may have passed along to Iran information on U.S. capabilities for decoding and translating protected communications — a potentially serious breach — according to a former U.S. official...

Chalabi, who has denied passing secrets to Iran, said the raids were part of a political campaign by the U.S. and his Iraqi rivals to discredit him and silence his recent criticisms of the American-led occupation.

He recently angered U.S. officials by launching his own investigation of allegations of corruption in the United Nations' "oil for food" program. He has refused to turn over relevant government documents to other agencies investigating the allegations...

More recently, an aide to Chalabi has been linked to fraudulent deals involving the conversion of old Iraqi currency, Iraqi officials said. Others have been accused of improperly selling or using government property.

One of the INC members being sought by police is Arras Habib, Chalabi's intelligence chief. Chalabi said Iraqi police and U.S. authorities here wanted Habib for questioning because he had embarrassed the CIA by being more successful at gathering intelligence about terrorists.

But Habib is suspected of being one of those who passed sensitive information about U.S. security operations to Iranians.

The New York Sun's Eli Lake:

...Three sources confirmed to The New York Sun that the National Security Council for weeks had known about an investigation into the INC from an Iraqi judge and was discussing action against the one-time American ally, INC leader Ahmad Chalabi...

CPA officials told the Sun the arrest of a high-level official in the Iraqi finance ministry in March led to the decision yesterday to have American soldiers raid the homes of Mr. Chalabi and several of his associates...

The National Security Council last month also began a review of Mr. Chalabi’s contacts with the Islamic Republic of Iran, culled from electronic surveillance of his meetings with Iranian officials going back nearly two years...

That legal matter stems from the testimony of Sabbah Nouri Ibrahim al-Salem. He told Iraqi investigators that Mr. Chalabi’s organization instructed him to strong-arm bureaucrats and steal government property.

On March 24, Iraqi police arrested Mr. al-Salem, the office manager for the Iraqi finance minister, Kamil al-Gailani, on 17 charges including claims that he kidnapped and coerced confessions from bank tellers charged with stealing newly printed Iraqi dinars in January.

When he was arrested, according to two sources familiar with the investigation, he told Iraqi police that he was a friend of Aras Habib Karem, Mr. Chalabi’s intelligence chief, prompting Iraqi authorities to issue a warrant for Mr. Karem’s arrest...

In interviews last month, INC officials said Mr. al-Salem was a low-ranking member of their organization and that he joined the INC shortly after the liberation of Nassiriyah.

“He was assigned to be a guard to the Ministry of Finance, he had a quarrel with a CPA Finance Ministry contractor. He was arrested and we don’t want to prejudice the investigation,” Mr. Chalabi said in an interview last month with the Sun...

But one official who worked as an adviser to the Finance Ministry told the Sun Mr. al-Salem was perceived to be running the ministry by many of the employees...

One of the charges against Mr. al-Salem is that he was seizing vehicles bought for the ministry and selling them for personal profit or keeping them for himself. Some of those vehicles ended up at INC residences, though the finance minister issued a statement last month saying the vehicles found at INC buildings were not stolen...
[thx to reader KW for the link]

The Boston Globe report informs us that Chalabi is being represented by a Boston attorney. [Is Jim Woolsey no longer available?]:

...In an angry letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller III and CIA Director George Tenet, the Boston law firm that represents Chalabi, Markham & Read, said a large contingent of police and armed plainclothes Americans ransacked the INC's offices and Chalabi's nearby home, ripping computers from their sockets and smashing doors.

''They marauded his office and disrespected his family," attorney John J. E. Markham II told the Globe by telephone. He said Chalabi believed the US-led coalition had launched a vendetta against the INC leader because ''he is starting to distance himself from the folly of [Paul] Bremer," the top US administrator in Iraq...

Markham asserted that FBI and CIA agents were involved in the raid. ''Bremer and his boys will not listen to the Iraqis about anything," he said. ''Now that Chalabi is distancing himself from measures taken by the Americans, this happens. What a coincidence."

The important thing to note here is that Chalabi's attorney says FBI agents were involved in the Baghdad raid. It bolsters evidence I have been hearing from my sources that there is a high level FBI-led counterintelligence investigation into who leaked highly classified US intelligence to Chalabi, that he and his intelligence chief passed to the Iranians.

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh on corruption and how the INC profited from Iraq's currency transition, and by demanding reconstruction contracts or threaten to frame people as members of the Ba'ath party:

...Thursday’s raid stems from a long-running probe by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq into financial corruption and criminal charges linked to the INC and its alleged efforts to profit illegally from Iraq’s reconstruction. Among the documents police were searching for relate to charges that INC officials profited from the introduction of a new currency. According to an official with the Coalition Provisional Authority, an INC-affiliated company was placed in charge of destroying the old currency, but “a lot of money was coming out again into circulation instead of being burned. Some of it had signs of partial burning.” The currency handover was supposed to be a one-to-one exchange, he said, “but we got a lot less in old money then we gave out.”

Among the felony counts already filed are theft of government property, theft of government money, misrepresentation and abuse of power, he said. Some of the other charges are connected to the INC’s seizure of government-owned homes and cars, especially through the group’s effective control of the Ministry of Finance, the CPA official said.

The CCCI is also investigating whether INC officials, including Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Habib, misused the Baath Party files they seized upon being helped into Iraq early by the U.S. military. Chalabi ultimately became head of the De-Baathification Committee, and U.S. officials believe that some Iraqis have been threatened with blackmail by being identified as Baath Party members if they declined to do the INC’s bidding, the CPA official said. “Just recently we learned of a situation where a senior official in the Ministry of Science and Technology refused to sign off on a contract brought in by the INC. He felt it was overpriced or that there was something else wrong with it. Because he refused, the minister and the De-Baathification Committee included his name on the list [of Baath Party] members, and they sent a letter saying you’re a Baathist and you’ll be eliminated.” The official also said about 1 billion dinars allocated for de-Baathification has mysteriously disappeared.

The WaPo's Robin Wright:

When he arrived in Baghdad, after U.S. troops liberated the Iraqi capital, Chalabi almost immediately began rubbing U.S. officials the wrong way by asserting himself -- and becoming a rival authority, U.S. officials say...

But Chalabi's close relationship with Iran, the only neighboring state that regularly deals with him, is now a further cause of concern in Washington. The INC chief has always been a master at balancing the two foes, but U.S. officials have recently cited fears that Chalabi's ties could endanger U.S. operations in Iraq.

...Washington fears that he will try to undermine whomever U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi names, possibly next week.

Richard Perle as cited in the New York Times appears to be sticking with Mr. Best Friend of Tehran:

"It is far from obvious how we advance American interests by acting against someone who shares our values and is highly effective," Mr. Perle said in an interview. "They have gone in recent days, at the C.I.A. and the State Department, from saying he has no influence in Iraq to a panic that he is really quite effective and could emerge with great influence" when the occupation ends. He predicted that "the crude nature of this action will actually have the reverse effect, and bolster Ahmad."

Iran is still emerging as the biggest deal. Again, this from CBS 60 Minutes:

Senior U.S. officials told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly-classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.

The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." The evidence is said to be "rock solid."

Sources have told Stahl a high-level investigation is underway into who in the U.S. government gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place.

In addition, sources told Stahl that one of Chalabi's closest confidantes — a senior member of his organization, the Iraqi national congress — is believed to have been recruited by Iran's intelligence agency, the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) — and is on their payroll.

[Editor's note: all italics above added].

Who with access to highly classified US intelligence gave Chalabi such information in the first place? I am told the stakes are very high, and this is the big deal here. That is the investigation that has people worried on this side of the pond. I am told that those automatically assumed to have such access may not have. Stay tuned...

The Washington Post has seen Abu Ghraib videos and has more photos. Sworn statements about the abuse obtained by the Post are worse than we've heard. [I warn you, this is very upsetting].

Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. "Most of the days I was wearing nothing else," he said in his statement.

Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures...

Hilas told investigators that he asked Graner for the time one day because he wanted to pray. He said Graner cuffed him to the bars of a cell window and left him there for close to five hours, his feet dangling off the floor. Hilas also said he watched as Graner and others sodomized a detainee with a phosphoric light. "They tied him to the bed," Hilas said...

Mustafa Jassim Mustafa, detainee No. 150542, told military investigators he also witnessed the phosphoric-light assault. He said it was around the time of Ramadan, the holiest period of the Muslim year, when he heard screams coming from a cell below. Mustafa said he looked down to see a group of soldiers holding the detainee down and sodomizing him with the light.

Graner was sodomizing him with the phosphoric light, Mustafa said. The detainee "was screaming for help. There was another tall white man who was with Graner -- he was helping him. There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures."

Another detainee told military investigators that American soldiers sodomized and beat him. The detainee, whose name is being withheld by The Post because he is an alleged victim of a sexual assault, said he was kept naked for five days when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib and was forced to kneel for four hours with a hood over his head. He said he was beaten so badly one day that the hood flew off his head. "The police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling, and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet," he said in his sworn statement.

One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to open his pants. "I started screaming," he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him.

"I was glowing and they were laughing," he said.

The detainee said the soldiers eventually brought him to a room and sodomized him with a nightstick. "They were taking pictures of me during all these instances," he told the investigators.

It goes on and on, the sworn statements of how the abuse happened as told by the Iraqi victims. Graner really is a sadist who should be ground into pet food. But there are still all the questions of the role of military intelligence and other government agencies, how high up this goes, command responsibility, cover up, that these stories don't clarify.

As for Kaus' Faster Iraq recommendation, why not move up the US elections instead? That would really throw Zarqawi off.

I stand corrected. Very well informed source says, notice how Wolfowitz, Feith, etc. have been extremely quiet about Chalabi over the past one and a half months. In fact, what is important here is not that Chalabi's ties to Tehran are being investigated, he says; but that FBI Counter Intelligence agents are conducting a high level investigation into who in the US government has apparently given Chalabi the kind of highly classified US information that he passed to Tehran that could have gotten US forces killed.

Senior U.S. officials told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly-classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.

The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." The evidence is said to be "rock solid."

Sources have told Stahl a high-level investigation is underway into who in the U.S. government gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place.

Who gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place?

Chalabi, a Spy for Tehran? So says CBS. Yawn. This is so yesterday's news. But then again, like all this stuff, when you really think about it, it's just kind of hypocritical for those folks who make such a big fuss about the terror masters in Tehran, to seemingly be so blase about Chalabi's cozying up to the mullahs. Unless, what? Is Chalabi a vehicle for some certain neocons to some certain Iranians? It sounds nutty, but I am not sure it is. Were certain particularly strident neocon allies of Chalabi naive about him, or were they not at all naive about him and his alleged Iranian friends? One thing seems clear. Some, but not all of them, will write this whole investigation off as the smear campaign of a CIA that has long had it in for Chalabi.

If you were wondering, as I was, what Laurie Mylroie's reaction to today's events in Baghdad was, here's your answer.

From: Laurie Mylroie [mailto:sam11@XXXXXXX] Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 3:20 PM To: Laurie Mylroie Subject: Jim Hoagland, Iraq Salvage Job, & Iraq News note

NB: Jim Hoagland is extremely knowledgeable about Iraq. This piece follows on Fouad Ajami's May 12 WSJ article, in which Ajami cautioned, "We can't have this peculiar mix of imperial reach, coupled with such obtuseness."

And that was before today's outrageous, and totally uncalled for, raid on Ahmed Chalabi's compound. Just what is the U.S. doing in Iraq?

Washington Post
Iraq Salvage Job
By Jim Hoagland
May 20, 2004

Americans are too individualistic to have great natural talent for warfare.
But they learn from their mistakes quickly and adjust decisively. That point
is said to have been made by Nazi Germany's greatest general, Erwin Rommel,
after he watched U.S. troops turn the fortunes of World War II in North
Africa.

The Bush administration stretches the thesis attributed to the Desert Fox to
the breaking point with its failure to adjust to mistakes and
miscalculations in Iraq. It has been unable to stabilize the position of
strategic strength it established a year ago by removing Saddam Hussein's
hated regime.

Instead the administration stumbles toward a June 30 transfer of
"sovereignty" that is cloaked in confusion and manifest insincerity. The
moral clarity that President Bush promised as the centerpiece of his foreign
policy is being jettisoned in Iraq, where the obligation and opportunity to
demonstrate such clarity were greatest.

This pushing of sovereignty on the cheap now endangers Bush's chances of
salvaging even minimal U.S. goals in Iraq, and perhaps his own reelection.

More Hoagland.

[Italics added. Thx to reader R.]

Just out: my interview this morning with former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht, on the subject of the raid on Chalabi.

More Chalabi.

Why is CPA spokesman Dan Senor trying to insist the raids on Chalabi and the INC's offices did not involve US participation? Clearly, there were armed US uniformed and plainsclothes personnel at the scenes of the raids. Reuters, the AP, NBC, and BBC eye-witness reports among others made this clear. So why is Senor pointing so hard away from US participation in this series of raids?

Secondly, I am hearing that the motivation for the raids has two components: a criminal investigation of Chalabi, possibly involving aspects of his handling of oil for food documents; and a political one. One that may indeed not only affect Chalabi, but possibly even the activities of some CPA officials themselves. We can expect to hear more about things CPA officials signed off on soon, I'm told. I'm not sure if this is a case of the empire strikes back, or not. Will post links when I can. [Thx to those who wish to remain nameless for now.]

UPDATE: It looks like the criminal investigation involves allegations INC officials were involved in kidnapping and fraud. This from MSNBC:

An Iraqi judge issued arrest warrants for 16 people affiliated with the INC, and an unknown number were arrested, the officials told NBC.

A senior coalition official, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said that an Iraqi judge issued warrants “for up to 15 people” on allegations of fraud, kidnapping and “associated matters.” Several people were arrested, and Chalabi was not a suspect, he said.

As NBC News reported earlier this week, Chalabi and his INC members are accused of stealing millions of dollars in cash and other assets from the former Baath Party and the Saddam Hussein regime following their overthrow by the U.S. military.

Among the allegations are that INC members illegally profited during the conversion from Saddam-era dinars to new Iraqi dinars late last year.

The allegations are the primary reason that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz severed the Pentagon's official ties with the INC earlier this week, ending the U.S. government payments to the INC that recently totaled $340,000 per month.

Chalabi.

Here is what I am hearing after a few hours working the phones, lurking in on the better informed, and reading the news.

1) The raid on Chalabi's residence and INC offices around Baghdad were to seize documents. But not only. Several theories on what is the reason they were seized.

Theory a) Iraqi officials believe Chalabi and the INC stole millions of dollars after the fall of Saddam.

b) Tussle between Bremer and Chalabi over investigating alleged kickbacks in the UN oil for food scandal.

c) Concern that boxes of thousands of documents Chalabi and the INC had taken possession of after the fall of Baghdad with the permission more or less of disorganized US authorities could become source of potential blackmail, abuse, antidemocratic activities by the INC.

d) Rift between Chalabi and Kanan Makiya over Chalabi increasingly surrounding himself with thugs, and other gangsterish behavior.

2) Neocon source tells me the raid reveals what he has known to be true for the past three months. The Pentagon no longer controls the CPA, State and CIA do. State and CIA were, with notable exceptions, against going to war, blame Chalabi for the US going to war, and hate his guts.

3) As true as it is that Chalabi's political fortunes could only be enhanced by being seen to be dumped by the Americans, pretty much no one credible I have talked to believes this was a deliberate strategy.

4) Strangely enough, the two reasons most Americans would probably want to see Chalabi tarred and feathered do not seem to be the reasons his residence was raided. [But as with Rumsfeld, we'll take what we can get. He may be most guilty of misconduct in the Iraq post war, but if Abu Ghraib is what will take him down, so be it.]

a) Chalabi's double dealing with Iran. [That Chalabi has long ties to Iran's hardliners is a fact almost all acknowledge at this point; some neocons give him the benefit of the doubt, suggesting such ties were necessary and pragmatic, not about shared strategic vision; others don't even bother.]

b) His deceit of the US government on the Saddam WMD issue.

But perhaps we'll have the chance to see tarred and feathered those on the US government side who facilitated Chalabi's deceit, denied deceit was even an issue, defended it, and lied to our faces themselves.

US TROOPS RAID CHALABI'S HOME...

UPDATE: THEY ALSO RAIDED KANAN MAKIYA'S MEMORY FOUNDATION OFFICES. MORE COMING SOON. . .

CORRECTED UPDATE: US FORCES APPARENTLY PAID ONLY A FRIENDLY 'VISIT' TO KANAN MAKIYA'S IRAQ MEMORY FOUNDATION OFFICES. IT WAS NOT A RAID, SOURCES CLOSE TO THE FOUNDATION SAY. AND WAS NOT RELATED TO THE RAID ON CHALABI'S HOME.

UPDATE II: WHAT WAS CHALABI DOING ASLEEP AT 11AM?

(AUDIO -- Chalabi in English -- NC052045)
"I was asleep, I opened the door, and the police went into my room, carrying pistols. They had been through our rooms of the house. I told them to get out. They said: 'We are slaves under orders.'

[thx to reader JB]

...Troops were reportedly "looking for fugitives." Put guns to Chalabi's head. Took Chalabi's personal computer and boxes of documents. Accused him of interfering with investigation into oil-for-food.

U.S. and coalition officials have recently accused [Chalabi] of undermining the investigation into the oil-for-food program. The U.S.-backed investigation has collected more than 20,000 files from Saddam's old regime and hired an American accounting firm Ernst & Young to conduct the review.

Chalabi has launched his own investigation, saying an independent probe will have more credibility. Chalabi took an early lead in exposing alleged abuses of the oil-for-food program and has been trying to force the coalition to give him the $5 million in Iraqi funds set aside for the probe to pay for his effort. The move was strongly resisted by the U.S. governor of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.

Chalabi's backers have hired a different firm, KPMG, to do its audit, but they want Bremer's administration to pay the bill from the Iraqi funds it controls.

Is this about seized archives, oil-for-food, or about leaking sensitive US information to Iran?

More recent news reports suggest Iraqi officials think Chalabi stole millions of dollars after the fall of Saddam. [Well, he did steal million of dollars, didn't he, but from us, right? Some $27 million?]

More from Bob Dreyfuss, and the Daily Telegraph.

UPDATE III:

BAGHDAD, May 20 (AFP) - Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi said Thursday his relations with the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were "non-existent" after an overnight raid against his house.
"My relationship with the CPA now is non-existent ..." he told reporters after claiming a firefight had narrowly been avoided between his guards and US-backed Iraqi police during the raid.
"I am America's best friend in Iraq; if the CPA finds it necessary to direct an armed attack against my home you can see the state of relations between the CPA and the Iraqi people."
The former Pentagon favourite also called on US President George W. Bush to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people without delay.
"My message to the CPA is let my people go, let my people be free. We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs," he told a press conference.

UPDATE IV: But is there not something seemingly staged about all of this? Entifadh Qanbar to CNN: "Even his Holy Koran, his personal holy Koran was taken as a document." Maybe the INC is just smart enough to make political hay of a genuine freeze in relations with Washington. [thx to S]

More from Newsweek.

There is an almost Zelig like quality to Abu Musab Zarqawi's presence at the center of almost every recent high profile Islamist terror attack, from the Madrid railway bombings to the killing of Nick Berg. This bio of Zarqawi, born to a Palestinian Jordanian family in 1966, in the Weekly Standard, goes far deeper than others I've seen. Indeed, reading it, one is struck at how painfully thin has been knowledge of Zarqawi in the western press, and how wrong assumptions [and US-pushed propaganda] about him has been. Far from being the one-legged Al Qaeda operative rising through the ranks, Zarqawi, this profile says, represents a true, and a decidedly more radical, rival to bin Laden.

PROBABLY THE MURKIEST and most intriguing feature of this man of many mysteries is the question of Zarqawi's relations with Osama bin Laden. Though he met with bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, the Jordanian never joined al Qaeda. Militants have explained that Tawhid was "especially for Jordanians who did not want to join al Qaeda." A confessed Tawhid member even told his interrogators that Zarqawi was "against al Qaeda." Shortly after 9/11, a fleeing Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the main plotters of the attacks, appealed to Tawhid operatives for a forged visa. He could not come up with ready cash. Told that he did not belong to Tawhid, he was sent packing and eventually into the arms of the Americans.

Zarqawi and bin Laden also disagree over strategy. Zarqawi allegedly constructed his Tawhid network primarily to target Jews and Jordan. This choice reflected both Zarqawi's Palestinian heritage and his dissent from bin Laden's strategy of focusing on the "far enemy"--the United States...

The Tawhid cell uncovered in Hamburg after 9/11 scouted Jewish targets, including businesses and synagogues. Zarqawi's operatives have been implicated in an attack on a Mombassa hotel frequented by Israeli tourists and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli jetliner. He is also suspected to have played a role in the Casablanca bombings of a Jewish community center and a Spanish social club...

The slaughter of Shias touches on another Zarqawi beef with bin Laden. While both men follow the strict code of Salafi Islam, which reckons Shias as apostates, bin Laden prides himself on being a unifying figure and has made tactical alliances with Shia groups...Zarqawi, by contrast, favors butchering Shias, calling them "the most evil of mankind."

...Zarqawi's letter is addressed to a colleague or even a potential competitor rather than to one he regards as his sheikh or emir. He offers darkly, "We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you." Zarqawi gives bin Laden two choices: "If you agree with us . . . we will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders, and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly and in the news media. . . . If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship."

Zarqawi exemplifies Sunni terrorism after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, what some call "al Qaeda 2.0."

...Historically speaking, the dynamic of revolutionary movements favors the most radical faction--the Jacobins, not the Girondists, the Bolsheviks, not the Menshiviks. If this dynamic prevails in contemporary Sunni terrorism, Abu Musab al Zarqawi represents the future.

There is much here worth pondering.

But one thing that intrigues me is this: This does not read like an academic or think tank work, or journalistic work. It reads like some pieces I have read that I have later learned were written by intelligence professionals.

Hastert accuses McCain of not understanding the meaning of sacrifice. Reader JR asks, invitation to leave the party?

Victor Bout Follow Up:

SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Secretary Armitage, I’ve served on the, as you know, on this committee and on the Subcommittee on African Affairs for almost 12 years. One name that keeps coming up and is very familiar is the name of Victor Bout, because he appears at the center of an illicit arms trafficking network that has fuelled devastating conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere.

Is Victor Bout or any firm associated with Victor Bout providing air freight services for coalition forces in Iraq, as the Financial Times alleged in an article published yesterday?

Has the United States opposed including Bout on an asset-freeze list being compiled by the U.N., which targets individuals who are involved with the criminal regime of former Liberian President Charles Taylor? And if so, why?

ARMITAGE: As you, I have seen the name Victor Bout. I believe he’s a Ukrainian arms merchant, or merchant of death. I certainly hope what you suggest is not true. And as far as I’m concerned, he ought to be on any asset-freeze list and anything else you can do to him.

FEINGOLD: So would you follow up with me on any awareness of that that might be available to the State Department?

ARMITAGE: Of course.

FEINGOLD: Secretary Wolfowitz, do you know anything about the question I just asked with regard to Mr. Bout? Has he been involved with providing air freight services for coalition forces in Iraq?

WOLFOWITZ: I don’t know more than what you and Secretary Armitage know, but I share your concern about it and I will work with Secretary Armitage to look into it to try to fix the problem if there is one.

Notice the answer to Feingold from both Armitage and Wolfowitz was not, "No, Senator, I can assure you that Victor Bout has not received any contracts with the coalition forces in Iraq."

Senator Russ Feingold:

Mr. Chairman, I’m sure my time’s up. Let me just conclude by saying, a number of us started in late July and early August of 2002 to raise these very questions, to ask what was the plan with regard to a possible negative reaction from the Iraqi people, and also specifically what was the plan with regard to securing any weapons of mass destruction.

I, frankly, feel we were never given real answers to that, and I have a feeling that it’s because there wasn’t a serious plan, and I think at this point we’re paying a serious price for it.

But I do thank the witnesses for their answers.

WOLFOWITZ: Senator, there was a serious plan. I’d be happy to give you for the record the full table of organization, the number of people that were planned to do it. A lot of thought went into it. It may not have been perfect, but there was a lot of work done on it.

FEINGOLD: I wish that we had been told about these plans, because whenever we made an effort to ask about it, we were just told to trust you, and we didn’t get the assurance that we needed. But I would like to receive those materials.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Posted by Laura at 09:44 AM

Michelle Goldberg's piece on Muslims being abused in US prisons after 9/11 is almost too upsetting to read. I don't think I can even pick out which disturbing anecdote to cite, so go read it yourself.

Is US prison as bad as a Turkish prison? No, (not even after 9/11) from what I understand. It's fairly commonplace in Turkey that one gets arrested, one goes to prison, one gets tortured, etc. I recognize the US is not the most criminal country in the world.

But why should we be comparing ourselves to Turkey? Why not to Canada or Germany or France or Japan, one of the rich industrialized countries with which we have more in common? Are we pretty much resigned that people who go to prison in the US should be subject to violence, abuse, rape, etc.? Why is our society so tolerant of such conditions? Do we think, those who end up in prison deserve whatever they get? That it's too horrible to think about?
Are there just no photos yet that confront us with how horrible it is?

"There's definitely a cover-up," says Sgt. Samuel Provance. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet."

Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to.

"What I was surprised at was the silence," said Provance. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."

Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison. He said that while he did not see the actual abuse take place, the interrogators with whom he worked freely admitted they directed the MPs' rough treatment of prisoners...Provance says the sexual humiliation of prisoners began as a technique ordered by the interrogators from military intelligence.

Link here.

A reader has informed me about an interesting daily press wrap up on Iraqi reconstruction and security, funded by of all things, DARPA. Check out the DARPA Tides Iraq Reconstruction Report here. It features a daily wrap up of many stories translated from the Arabic language press...

The Boston Globe's Brian McGrory contemplates Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in a new light in today's column. [thanks to JB for the heads up].

Maybe steadfastness is overrated. Spencer Ackerman is tracking the trial balloons coming from London and Washington and says a 'declare victory' then cut and run 'strategy' seems increasingly in the cards. One problem has long been that the Iraq post war was being run as a kind of eastern outpost of the Bush/Cheney '04 reelection campaign...one that's only going to help elect Kerry. But it's staggering to think that the US/UK would cut and run before it's considered trying the sensible option Wes Clark, John Kerry and Joe Biden have long recommended: get NATO into Iraq. Do whatever it takes to get the UN Security Council authorization that some NATO allies demand before contributing troops. And the international security forces could still remain under US command.

The Bush administration has resisted the successful Bosnia and Kosovo models of post-war governance and security because they were invented in the Clinton administration. But a UN-led post-war civilian administration combined with a NATO-led security force, with a lead country (the US) in charge, is a model that's worked. It's awfully late to be trying this now, and there's the strong possibility that some NATO countries would continue to resist becoming involved until there's regime change in Washington; And indeed, that the US will be faced July 1 with a new Iraqi caretaker government asking its forces to leave. But, without considering the NATO option, abandoning Iraq to the insurgents and the forces of chaos that would be unleashed in the subsequent security vaccuum seems a guarantee for catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Lebanon combined, and writ large. And not the kind of instability remotely likely to produce the pro-western democracies the neocons somehow fantasized would emerge from the rubble of the US's Iraq invasion. As Fareed Zakaria writes in this column, there is no possibility for democracy without security. Even the Post's Middle East veteran reporter Robin Wright was on NPR this morning talk about her fear that what could emerge from the Abu Ghraib scandal, the US invasion and botching of Iraq, is a real clash of civilizations. It's worth reading.

Update: As Senators grilling Paul Wolfowitz at a foreign relations committee hearing today expressed considerable exasperation with, just what exactly the plan for the US role in post-handover Iraq is, is the subject of great uncertainty at the highest levels of the US government. This event at the US Institute of Peace on Wednesday suggests who has at least been asked to manage such issues at an operational level at State and DoD.

Just out, my piece on Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith's very ill timed appearance at AEI a few weeks back. The event marked just one milestone in the great neocon meltdown of 2004.

Chalabi to be taken off the Pentagon payroll! So reports Reuters:

WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) - The Pentagon plans to stop funding Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile it hoped might help lead Iraq but whose intelligence reports and motives were questioned elsewhere in Washington, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
The officials, who asked not to be named, said the Pentagon would stop giving Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress roughly $340,000 a month as of June 30, when the United States plans to give hand over some authority to a still unnamed interim government.
U.S. officials have for weeks said the U.S. government was debating cutting off the INC, saying they had questions about the intelligence it provided as well as about whether Chalabi was motivated more by a desire for power.
The Pentagon, however, defended the INC's information in public and a U.S. defense official echoed that, saying: "They have provided decent information, especially in regards to force protection issues and the whereabouts of folks (Iraqi fugitives)."
INC spokesman Entifadh Qanbar declined comment on the funding or on intelligence the group may have provided, but he said: "I cannot talk about this confidential issue ... but INC personnel are risking their lives every day in Iraq to save American lives."

So, the INC is not coming off the Pentagon payroll 'til July 1. Do we wonder if it's going to continue to be funded by US taxpayer money via some new vehicle? The US embassy, a subcontract, the new Iraqi intelligence services? Just which Iraqi institutions is the INC now basically in de facto control of -- the Ba'ath party archives, the war crimes tribunal for Saddam Hussein, the Defense Ministry....

Slate's Fred Kaplan nails the sense that the lid is about to blow off this whole mess.

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate...Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee have said they will keep their hearings going until they "get to the bottom of this."...

Second, the courts could get involved. Newsweek reports that the Justice Department is likely to investigate three deaths that occurred during CIA interrogations, possibly with an eye toward charges of homicide. War-crimes charges, for willful violation of the Geneva Conventions, are not out of the question...

Third, Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren't going to stand for it...Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day.

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years...

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

No, it's not. And here's one of the more suggestive lines from the piece: "If lesser officials are sacrificed—Cambone, Feith, and so forth—there is no guarantee that they will go gently, especially if they face possible criminal charges. The same, by the way, is true of Rumsfeld himself, a savvy survivor who can be expected to take some interesting memos with him—for possible widespread circulation—if he were forced to leave the building."

The way this Pentagon and this White House have conducted the Iraq post-war is criminal, but one could never dream that they would actually face criminal charges. Until now. One just didn't expect that the charges could amount to war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions until the past few days. One will not mourn the careers and reputations destroyed.

As Kevin Drum notes, it's going to be a hot summer in Washington.

David Brooks has recovered his optimism. Or maybe he has just overdosed on the Prozac.

No other nation would have been hopeful enough to try to evangelize for democracy across the Middle East. No other nation would have been naïve enough to do it this badly. No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do.

The continued grim facts on the ground don't warrant Brooks' renewed optimism that America and Iraq will muddle their way through, according to Iraqis and coalition officials interviewed in Baghdad by the Post's Dan Williams.

Inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified U.S. administration compound that Salim was about to enter when the suicide bomber struck, expectations are grim. "It will take a lot of doing for this not to end in a debacle," a senior occupation official said. "There is no confidence in the coalition. Why should there be?"

On Baghdad's hot and dusty streets, Iraqi working people also expressed a deep sense of pessimism. "Our country is at a loss. I don't think that even after the handover the government will control things," said Ali Fakhri, who owns a fabric store in the Kadhimiya district.

Meanwhile, this piece from last week's Wall Street Journal describes how US authorities have created new vehicles for exercising US power behind the scenes in Iraq after the June 30 handover.

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.

Ever mindful of the public relations effect their actions have on the Iraqi population, where do you think US officials have decided for now to locate their new 2,500+ person embassy in Baghdad? In one of Saddam's former palaces.

The nerve center of the U.S. presence in Iraq will be a massive new embassy. CPA officials recently decided that most employees of the new embassy will remain in a former palace used by Saddam Hussein even though the building is seen by many Iraqis as a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty. The embassy needs the space: It will ultimately employ approximately 1,300 Americans, as well as 2,000 or more Iraqis. The current occupation authority employs 1,500 people."

The Journal piece is one of the most detailed in describing just how considerable the US plans its post-handover role in Iraq to be.

Michael Tomasky offers much insight in this piece on conservative morality unchecked.

Liberals believe in public morality and in adherence to democratic process, while conservatives value personal morality and positive, efficiently achieved results. What has happened at Abu Ghraib specifically and in Iraq generally are, in fact, direct expressions of conservative morality unchecked...

What's this got to do with Iraq? Everything. Rumsfeld was another one who was sold to us as a good, strong man. He reveled in the image, and the press, especially after September 11, went right along ("You're America's stud!" Tim Russert once gushed to him). Paul Wolfowitz, the neocons in general -- strong men who knew exactly what the United States needed to do in the world and who didn't have time for all this sissified diplo-speak with the United Nations and the French, all fit into this process. They would eliminate al-Qaeda. They'd corral Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. And they'd do it all as a function of their personal morality, their intense will. If they bent a few rules, well, they were on the side of good versus evil, and they were making one of history's grandest omelettes. Eggs would be broken. That's the way it is.

Read Hersh's piece in this context. Adherence to process was treated with contempt, never regarded as anything other than a roadblock to be circumvented.

Contempt for process. Contempt for law; contempt for consultation with Congress, international allies, the UN; contempt for transparency; contempt for thinking, debate. It really epitomizes the attitude of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bush in everything from energy policy to environmental regulation to stubborn, arrogant mismanagement of the Iraq post-war, and refusal even now to commit enough troops.

As in San Francisco, these photos from Cambridge City Hall are very moving.

Bomb packed with sarin neve agent exploded by insurgents in Iraq two days ago?! This is only making it in the news now? Does this have Zarqawi's fingerprints on it, or what?

Plame prosecutor wants journalists to testify at grand jury. That's not likely to happen. WaPo's Susan Schmidt asks, does that mean, desperation, since Justice department guidelines indicate journalists are to be asked to testify only as a last resort? Or that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is close to issuing indictments?

Why are the US and Britain protecting the notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout?

In short, to put it very bluntly, because, according to the Financial Times, he's apparently our bastard. Specifically, Bout seems to have made himself useful to people in the Defense department. And he's alleged to have been the recipient of "recycled" US government contracts in Iraq, which I take to mean subcontracts.

According to the FT investigation:

Western diplomats say they have been told of reports that an air freight company associated with Mr Bout, who is subject to a UN travel ban because of his activities in Liberia, may be involved in supplying US forces in Iraq and that the US may be "recycling" his extensive cargo network.

A former UN official familiar with the sanctions process said he had also heard of Mr Bout's Iraq connection. The ex-official said he had been told by a reliable source about a month ago that "the American defence forces are using Victor's planes for their logistics".

A well informed human rights activist friend writes me, "He totally works for the CIA. According to Doug Farah's book, he was the supplier to the Northern Alliance when we got into Afghanistan. He'd supplied them before, then switched to the Taliban. Unreal."

Is this for real? Does the US really have nobody else to fly supplies into Iraq, than a company belonging to a man who has been described as "the merchant of death?" And whose very same cargo planes have carted gold for al Qaeda and attack helicopters to Liberia? Isn't that a bit cynical, even for the likes of this bunch?

If this is true, the US government should be shamed into getting this guy off the US payroll at least. [Right after the Pentagon finds that INC personal services contract and cancels it.] Why the British let themselves be bullied by Washington into keeping Bout's name off a UN sanctions list of individuals whose assets should be frozen because of their involvement with Charles Taylor, arms trafficking to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the blood diamonds trade, is beyond me.

UPDATE: My human rights activist friend has been digging about Bout. He permits me only to summarize some of his findings below.

Victor Bout, 37, was born in Soviet Tajikistan, became the leading international arms dealer, and has his own air fleet, flying out of Dubai. "He delivers not only small arms, but whole weapons systems, including attack helicopters. The '90s were big for him, dealing to many Congolese factions, UNITA. A lot of the weapons came from Bulgaria, via Togo..."

Bout became linked to Charles Taylor through Sanjivan Ruprah, a
Kenyan, in 2000. Ruprah was a biz partner of Bout's, and has two Liberian passports...Bout and Ruprah got some diamond mines in exchange for their services...Bout was happy to take diamonds in payment for his lethal loads to Liberia, Congo and Angola. He had even tried to set up a diamond export business in the Congo...

By the late 1990s US intelligence officials had discovered another Bout tie that worried them far more: possible weapons supplies to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Lee Wolosky, the Clinton-era NSC director for transnational threats...noticed that Bout's name popped up in almost every conflict the NSC was tracking, from the African wars to the Philippines...

I'll summarize - he was supplying the Afghan government before the Taliban took over, and then switched sides. He did this from his base in the UAE - one of the governments that recognized the Taliban, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It was a financial and gold clearinghouse. He also supplied parts to Ariana Airways and the Taliban airforce. Ariana was a vital link in the Taliban and Al Qaeda's financial network. He also flew charter flights to Taliban HQ in
Kandahar.

The Clintonistas were upping the pressure on the UAE to boot Bout, but the Bushies dropped the ball. After 9/11, "Suddenly he was back on out radar screen in a very significant way. His importance suddenly loomed very large."

...At Belgium's urging, Interpol issued a red notice on Bout for illegal weapons trafficking on February 25, 2002...

In other words, not the kind of guy one would expect the US would want to do business with in Iraq. And would protect from UN sanctions. Unless what?

My good friend from Balkan days left Washington today to head to Liberia to work as a public information officer for the UN. We sent her off with a party last night that has me feeling a bit under the weather today. Good luck, Serif, in Africa, and be safe.

Were severe beatings of Gitmo detainees videotaped? So alleges one released British detainee in an interview in the Observer.

Maybe we will see the back of Don Rumsfeld after all? Here's Seymour Hersh on Copper Green, one of the code names of a secret Pentagon operation that was signed by Rumsfeld and which encouraged "physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners."

Rumsfeld...authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps...All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

Set up during the US campaign in Afghaistan in late 2001, the secret 'quick access' program was extended to Iraq in the fall of 2003, when the Pentagon leadership started to apprehend how badly the post-war was going.

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly...The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency...

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time...

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation...

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply.” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added.

Hersh would seem to have just expanded the field of who might face justice.

He also picks up on Rumsfeld's deliberate use of ambiguity -- including the deliberate mixing up and blurring of which agency and department [MP or MI or OGA] had responsibility for which part of Abu Ghraib -- as a tactic to try to hide the secret interrogation program he and his staff had ordered. [Even Gen. Janis Karpinski admits not knowing who many of the US personnel conducting interrogations in Abu Ghraib were or for which agency they really worked -- a state of affairs for which it seems she has largely herself to blame.] This muddying of identities and ambiguity of authority was, Hersh tells us, deliberate, and Rumsfeld had been called on it by military lawyers.

Newsweek captures how Rumsfeld's orders "opened the door" to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, while letting poorly trained lower level GIs sweat the details:

It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques...But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions...In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation.

Newsweek also points fingers at "a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration" who argued that post 9/11, "international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply" to the US's conduct of the war on terror. "These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales."

Newsweek also shows that White House lawyer Gonzalez is well aware that US officials could be the subject of charges of war crimes:

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

What are the lessons here? Bush and Rumsfeld clearly wanted the results that they thought lawless interrogations would provide, but they didn't want to be told the details. When the Abu Ghraib inquiry was exposed, Rumsfeld's first inclination was to blame the GIs, not a system he and his staff were clearly instramental in erecting that encouraged excessively aggressive interrogations. What kind of leadership is that?

The concept of giving 'pre-approval' for US special operatives to take out a limited number of real al Qaeda terrorists in a field like Afghanistan would seem to make a certain amount of sense when it was conceived. But it was when Rumsfeld and Cambone transferred that specialized program to the Iraq theater that we can see a tiny secretive program designed to go after maybe a hundred hardened terrorists got corrupted in a prison environment and went horribly awry. The administration's deliberate blurring of "the war on terror" with the Iraq campaign muddied its own judgment. The liberties [the violations of civil liberties, the loopholes from the rule of law and international law] they allowed themselves in the exceptional circumstances of fighting against a nebulous, stateless enemy like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Gitmo - was transferred to Iraq, a traumatized country with a powerful police state structure and prison system, as if it was one and the same fight. Which is absurd. We knew they were dissembling when they tried to blur the war on terror with the war on Iraq. But they let such dissembling muddy their own judgment, their own operations. Secret programs that skirt any sort of outside oversight may have their place in exceptional circumstances. But Rumsfeld and Cambone demonstrated exceptional misjudgment, and dangerous addiction to a program without bureaucratic oversight, by allowing themselves to transfer a program designed for exceptions to Iraq's vast scale. To do so matched inappropriate means to an inappropriate, fairly massive population of Iraqi insurgents, and exposed such utterly anti democratic, anti-legal behavior by the US to the eyes of the world.

It's a message Iraqis and the Arab world understand very well, I suspect. The Bush administration talks liberation, talks freedom, talks democracy, but it practices government conducted in secret, torture conducted in secret, foreign policy conducted in secret. In secret, conservative US government lawyers have interpreted laws to facilitate the administration's outlaw behavior.

That's not the message on which to carry the banner of liberation to the Middle East. Nor will it lead to anything but the kind of backlash against such rogue US government operations by the American Congress and public that followed history's earlier examples of secret US operations gone awry in Latin America and elsewhere. Rumsfeld's excesses have potentially dealt a fatal blow to the US's moral authority. They may have also severely wounded the legitimacy of the US's conduct of the war on terror.

Talk about six degrees of separation. Berg was both investigated by the FBI for a bizarre connection to Zacarias Moussaoui, and became a victim of al Qaeda.

Ashcroft was also asked about FBI questioning of Berg in 2002 after a computer password he had used in college turned up in the possession of Zacarias Moussaoui, an al Qaeda adherent who is currently awaiting trial in the United States on conspiracy charges related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Berg's family and U.S. officials said Berg had loaned his computer and e-mail address to a man he met while riding a bus to classes at the University of Oklahoma in 1999 and that the man turned out to be a terrorism suspect who was acquainted with Moussaoui.

"The suggestion that Mr. Berg was in some way involved in terrorist activity or may have been linked . . . is a suggestion that we do not have any ability to support and we do not believe is a valid one," Ashcroft said.

He discounted the significance of Berg's reported sharing of his e-mail address and the subsequent link to Moussaoui.

"We do not believe that reflects any association with terrorist objectives or activities," Ashcroft said. "It's not uncommon for individuals from time to time to allow computer use by other individuals in university settings."

Ashcroft said he did not know whether Berg ever knew Moussaoui, adding, "I do know that the matter was resolved, and it was resolved in a way that indicated that there was no inappropriate involvement in terror."

Have any of the news reports explained how Berg came to be in the custody of Zarqawi? Where is Zarqawi believed in Iraq to now operate?

Want to know why Abu Musab Zarqawi is still free to engage in acts of terror, such as the beheading of Nicholas Berg last week and providing operational support to the Madrid railway bombings? Daniel Drezner reminds us, via Kevin Drum, it is because the Bush administration deliberately chose in June 2002 not to target Zarqawi's Ansar al-Islam camp in northern Iraq, "fearing it would remove one of their reasons for going to war." What was that reason, of course? The bogus Saddam-Al Qaeda connection.

Amy Sullivan has a reasonable proposal at the Washington Monthly blog, urging the Kerry campaign to open up its tent to include pro-life Democrats.

These are people who are willing to support Democratic candidates despite differing views on abortion. All they're looking for is some acknowledgement that it's possible to be a good person and a good Democrat and have questions about abortion. That individuals can be sincerely troubled by abortion.

Fair enough. Seems the Democrats could show more tolerance for their pro-life constituents than the Vatican has for Democratic politicians who are pro-choice. And as Sullivan points out, "it wouldn't cost them much, if anything."

You can keep up with Sullivan's work on religion and politics when she is back from her trip to Costa Rica here.

David Moniz, the top notch Pentagon reporter for USA Today, and president of an association called Military Reporters & Editors, is seeking nominations for the best military related stories of 2003. Since some of my readers have considerable military experience and follow this, you may be interested. Here's Dave's note:

Dear MRE members: A reminder that the May 31 deadline for entering our first-ever MRE contest is approaching.I would encourage as many of you to enter as possible. And if you have the chance, please pass information about the contest to colleagues and friends. We're doing our best to the get the word out. Details are on the web site. Thanks, Dave Moniz

www.militaryreporters.org

I myself am a big fan of the work of UPI's Mark Benjamin, who has been pounding the pavement covering the homefront of the war.

Heard an interesting bit of Kremlinology the other day from a neocon source. The WaPo's Robin Wright [who my friend and reader JR quite rightly declares 'a class act'] gets a personal briefing with Colin Powell every week. And so, her pieces should be read as a reflection of what Powell/State is trying to advance.

"Powell raised the detainee issue frequently in meetings of the Bush national security team, aides reported. They said he often felt like a lone voice." This from a May 7 Wright piece. That certainly does sound to be carrying water for Powell, huh?

It's hard to have any respect for that guy. As with the ICRC, what good is it now for them to tell us how much they knew, and how little effect they had before, to stop this abuse? It seems Powell or the ICRC could have leaked their considerable concerns months before Hersh got the accused soldier's defense attorney to pass him the photos.

Finally, some good news from Abu Ghraib. I don't understand why they don't just close this place down. Wouldn't that create some space for good will?

In the days after Serb forces fled Kosovo in June 1999, I was taken to a torture chamber, in the basement of a Serbian police station in the provincial capital Pristina, then being manned by British troops. In the basement, there was a bed with a ratty foam mattress and leather handcuffs, bottles of medicines of atropine and syringes on the wet filthy floor, and a kind of briefcase full of hammers and torture devices with names engraved in them beside it. Calendars of Serbian saints hung from the walls of the offices upstairs, and the hardest core pornography and lots of bottles of half empty bottles of liquor were on the desks. The British troops were as horrified as I was. The atmosphere was so sinister, so clearly one of torture, that a feeling of revulsion and nausea just kind of settled on one, and even now, remembering, returns.

Old fashioned oversized communist police ledgers with the registered person's name and identification number and photograph were scattered around the entrances to the police station, the identity of those who had been interrogated there.

Reading the description of the brutality detailed in the investigative records of Specialist Jeremy Sivits, scheduled to be court-martialed next week, reminds me of that dank torture chamber in Pristina. The prisoner handcuffed to the bed while being beaten by US troops, and the US troops making the Iraqi prisoners beat each other for their entertainment, as Serb forces had done to their victims in the Keraterm concentration camp in Prijedor.

The first soldier scheduled for court-martial in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has told military authorities a harrowing tale of abuse, including an episode in which a guard used a nightstick to beat an Iraqi detainee who had been shot in the legs and handcuffed to a bed.

As the prisoner screamed, "Mister, Mister, please stop!" Military Police Spc. Charles A. Graner struck him twice with a police baton, fellow guard Spc. Jeremy Sivits told military investigators...

Sivits said Graner once punched a detainee in the head so hard the man fell unconscious. "His eyes were closed and he was not moving," Sivits said.

They later had to check to see that he was still breathing.

Later still, Graner was shaking his fist, saying, "Damn, that hurt."

Another time, Sivits said, Graner punched a detainee in the chest.

"The detainee took a real deep breath and kind of squatted down," Sivits said. A medic was called and Frederick thought the man was having a heart attack, Sivits said.

"I tried to show the detainee how to breathe slowly," Sivits said. "It was as if his breath was gone."...

Another, he said, was handcuffed to a bed, with wounds on his legs from where "he had been shot with buckshot." He said Graner did not care, and instead would wield a police baton and "strike the detainee with a half baseball swing."

Said Sivits, "The detainee would beg Graner to stop by saying, 'Mister, Mister, please stop.' "

Another time two inmates were told to strike each other. At first, they refused, Sivits said, then complied. "One of the inmates punched the other, then the other struck that one back. They hit each other once each."

Honestly, it sounds naive, but I did not expect US troops to so easily become the kind of war criminals I saw evidence of in Serbia. My first encounter with US troops was flying in with them on a C-130 into Bosnia in December 1995, when their very presence was stopping a war. I had, I have huge respect for them. I thought that the kind of power these people represented was a force for good. My encounters with them throughout my time in Bosnia and Kosovo between '95 and '99 only reiterated my respect for the force for good US military troops could be. I can't tell you how disillusioning it is to see how corrupting occupation can be on people, including the US military. How ordinary, how unpremeditated, how random was the cruelty and violence Sivits and Graner and their team perpetrated on their victims. It's truly sickening.

The difference between an occupation force and a peacekeeping force comes down to one thing: if you have the consent of the country's people to be there. The Bosnians and Kosovars thanked their lucky stars US troops came. Even the Bosnian Serbs, who understandably resent us more, respect what our presence means in terms of the stability in their lives. After all, a few more months of war, and they would have been the refugees.

Even much of the Iraqi population that was originally glad to see us must now be, I suspect, anxious to see our backs. For much of the past year, the answer to the lack of stability in Iraq seemed more international troops. But at this point, is that still the answer? And either way, aren't we likely to end up in a year or two with an Iraq and an Iraqi citizenry that is far more anti-American after the invasion than it was before?

Ok, Europe can be an easy target. But then the European Commission envoy to Slovakia does something like suggest Roma children should be forcibly removed from their parents, that makes beating up on it irresistable.

Challenged by the Dutch television crew about the morality of taking children forcibly from their families, Mr Van der Linden, argued Roma families could be offered money to break any resistance.

America may be headed for decline, but...I am not inclined to believe Europe is going to replace us in the world any time soon. Not unless they accept Turkey.

Speaking of which, I heard a really interesting idea from former US ambassador Mark Palmer the other day. It is that essentially NATO be expanded to be the UN's standing army. Palmer is vice chairman of Freedom House and is among a group of activists trying to find ways to make the UN more democratic and less coddling of dictatorships and human rights abusers. One of their ideas is the democracy caucus, getting so much attention from neocons like David Brooks these days, that would essentially create a global alliance of democracies. The neocons would have the community of democracies replace or bypass the UN. Palmer, a moderate Republican, doesn't go that far; he thinks the UN is salvageable, to a point. [Many of these ideas I discuss in an upcoming article in the Prospect.] In any case, Palmer was also interesting in describing how resistant the Bush administration was initially to the democracy caucus idea, even though it was originally developed by a bunch of Freedom House board Republicans -- Palmer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ken Adelman, Peter Rodman -- because the idea had eventually been supported by the Clinton administration -- Madeleine Albright and her chief of policy planning, Mark Halperin. "I had endless discussions with Elliot Abrams about it," Palmer told me, exasperated, of the weeks and months after Bush came into office, as Condi Rice ordered lengthy reviews of every such Clinton policy decision [including apparently Richard Clarke's counterterrorism ideas]. Until finally, three years later, Colin Powell's State Department has gotten behind it.

An earlier US intelligence scandal.

Declassified government documents shed new light on the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies in the years following World War II, according to a book ["U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis"] released yesterday by historians who have been reviewing the records for the government...

According to a chapter by Timothy Naftali of the University of Virginia, former SS officer Otto von Bolschwing was recruited as an agent in 1949 by the CIA, which decided to protect him from war crimes prosecution by claiming falsely that it had no files concerning his past -- which included a close association with Adolf Eichmann and a supporting role in anti-Jewish violence in Romania.

In 1953, the agency pressured the Immigration and Naturalization Service to let von Bolschwing enter the United States, where he eventually obtained citizenship...

Naftali also writes that the documents contain evidence of the extensive employment of ex-SS officers by the Gehlen Organization, a CIA-subsidized German intelligence group set up by Reinhard Gehlen, the Wehrmacht's former intelligence chief on the Eastern Front in World War II.

Supported by the United States as a source of information about Soviet military activities in Eastern Europe, the Gehlen Organization developed into the official intelligence service of West Germany, known as the Federal Intelligence Service.

But the Gehlen Organization produced relatively little good information, Naftali writes.

"This is the most troubling for me," Naftali said in an interview, "given the context of Iraq, where we once again have to reconstruct a foreign national security system, and we have to do it fast."

So the CIA was working with a few Nazis in post WWII Europe and the Middle East, with the fascists in places like Italy and Spain, with white supremacist apartheid governments in proxy wars across Africa, with the mujahaddin in Afghanistan and the ISI in Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, with right wing dictators and paramilitaries across Latin America, it installed Saddam and the shah, etc. What's the CIA's record of success overall for the 20th century? Counting for blowback? Like, 1.5%?

Maybe it's time just to start all over. For all its demonstrated questionable moral judgment in its not-so-secret foreign alliances with fascists, Nazis, war criminals, torturers and the like around the globe over the past half century [and it's apparently making friends with the Mukhabarat in Iraq again too], the CIA does not seem to be even halfway competent at basic intelligence gathering or analysis. Pearl Harbor, 9/11, India's nuclear testing, Iraq's WMD, North Korea's nukes, the extent of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation over the past decade, Al Qaeda, etc. [Could they not at least help locate Mr. Zarqawi, the one-legged Al Qaeda operative who has hatched so many terror attacks of late and issues as many CDs and videos as Christine Aguilera?] Is that unfair? Did they save us from communism? For the most part, I suspect the communists finished themselves off quite nicely by themselves.

Phil Carter is the go-to site on Abu Ghraib. I am outsourcing my posting on this subject unless something really outrageous occurs and I can't help myself.

Letter on US military interrogation survival techniques. This from a former Air Force pilot, who writes:

Allow me to echo some of what you've probably heard from your other sources/readers regarding interrogation techniques and the pictures we've seen. I went through a extremely benign POW training course 20+ years ago as a newly minted tactical aviator (all aircrew go through this). They kept us awake for two days, kept us standing at attention with hoods over our heads in dark "cells" (think 4' x 4' broom closet with a coffee can for your toilet needs) or cramped inside small wooden boxes, and they took pictures of us in simulated compromising position (handed me a board to hold up at chest level, took a picture, I couldn't see the front of the board...a war criminal confession was printed on it). They put us in "stress positions" to simulate beatings. All of this was to prepare us for capture by Warsaw Pact or North Korean forces. Fast forward to [the early eighties] to my assignment in Germany. Each summer about a half dozen guys from AF fighter squadrons would play "evader" for a week being hunted by US Army forces. Volunteers knew they would be caught and interrogated for several days. I never volunteered. Guys were glad when it was over. Every guy I knew that played this game of hide and seek spent two or three days and nights chained to a radiator (the room heater not the auto part)...wearing nothing but a hood and handcuffs. They also had the experience of getting their picture taken and hearing a woman ridicule the size of their penis while they were naked/hooded. One squadron mate got particularly upset because he was extremely religious (woman's place is in the home raising kids etc). All of this was supposedly to prepare the participants for capture by Warsaw Pact forces. I never connected the dots that the Army was training for their mission to question prisoners. Make of this what you will, the fact remains we invaded Iraq for dubious reasons and now we're in deep shit. Neither you nor I know if the Iraqis photographed were evil SOBs or innocent civilians. At this point it does not matter. Let's hope that the good that comes from this will be that gwb and his cronies are unemployed come Jan 2005. The bad of course is the toxic damage to our (the USA's) image around the world. Then there is the clueless element of our citizenry that are blaming the Press for attacking "the american way of life and everything we stand for..."

So it doesn't sound like the perpetrators of abuse at Abu Ghraib necessarily dreamt those particular tortures up by themselves, but that there is some institutional memory of this stuff. Many tens of thousands of people must have been trained in these techniques, at least in terms of surviving them should they be caught by the enemy, right? Is this an open secret?

Thanks much for the letters.

Post-Script: The same letter writer sends this link to this interesting ABC news investigation, by Brian Ross and [the ever controversial in the blogosphere] Chris Vlasto, on "Bending the Rules: Former Army Interrogator Trainees Say They Were Taught to Get Around Geneva Conventions."

The U.S. military has taught future interrogators how to cause physical pain while questioning detainees but remain technically within limits set by the Geneva Conventions, former trainees told ABCNEWS.

The former trainees, husband and wife Rafael and Margaret Chaiken, said instructors at Fort Huachuca in Arizona taught them ways to get around the rules.

"They cite examples of ways to bend the Geneva Convention," said Margaret Chaiken, 26, "bend the rules in order to get the information that they need."

The Chaikens trained to be interrogators at Fort Huachuca from July to October of 2003. They say the actions depicted in the pictures of U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqi detainees are a classic technique they were taught in order "to break a prisoner, and cause them to talk."

These techniques included "putting them in humiliating positions, stress positions, sleep deprivation," said Margaret Chaiken...

The Chaikens describe a different story. "One of the instructors showed how you can make them get down on knees in a certain way that, like, it hurts him," said Rafael. "And that he demonstrated in front of the class actually."

Even the need for a medical IV can be used to interrogators' advantage, they said

"Sometimes it takes them three or four times to poke you till they put the needle into the vein. Well, it can also take 12 times," said Rafael Chaiken, 28. "It's not very pleasant, and you're not breaking the Geneva Convention, and you might get some information out of him."

Systematic efforts to teach soldiers and intelligence officials to inflict pain, terror and humiliation while perhaps technically getting around US and international laws on humane treatment of detainees and prisoners of war have their consequences. As Matt Yglesias writes in today's Tapped, "part of what we're seeing at Abu Ghraib, though, is how hard it is to use 'just a little' torture...Worse, once it becomes known that the political leadership is willing to wink and nod at this sort of conduct, lower-level people under pressure to get results have every incentive to push the boundaries ever-further."

It's becoming nauseatingly evident from the accumulation of news reports and human rights groups reports and military investigations that what happened at Abu Ghraib is business as usual in Bush's 'war on terror,' not an isolated case.

UPDATE: Phil Carter writes to inform me that the "Chaiken husband and wife duo...were both kicked out of the Army MI school for poor performance, and [then] they subsequently tried to sue the Army because they’re Orthodox Jews and couldn’t get enough accommodation, or something like that. Anyway, their credibility is suspect in my eyes."

Will bear that in mind. Why didn't Ross/Vlasto make this more clear in their piece, I wonder? As a journalist, I know there's a temptation to buck up the sources one cites, but it's never a good idea to leave something like this out which comes back to discredit the whole piece.

Meantime, Carter's pointing people to Mark Bowden's Atlantic Monthly piece on the Dark Art of Interrogation.

Post Post-Script: Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth wisely calls for an end to "stress and duress." For a while now, the human rights community has been struggling with how to be relevant in the post 9/11, gloves are off, anything goes age. Maybe they are starting to rediscover their footing. The Bush administration may have stiffed the International Criminal Court; but in a way, Rumsfeld's arrogant contempt for the laws that civilized nations have agreed to, and his sense that the rules simply don't apply to him, may be the fatal flaw that brings him down. Even if he clings to his job.

Dept of Complaints. Why is TNR such a boys club? Granted the stable of bright young things is impressive. Although so few of their current writers seem to have done anything like been in the field or done anything other than the Ivy League as a stepping stone to the club of entitled opinion making. That's what TNR is. But couldn't they have a few token different voices? [Well, they have Michelle Cottle, which counts for something]. But is it not just the most wee bit limited, to always provide a forum almost exclusively for what these 29 year old whatever whatever debate among themselves? Three blogs, and all the voices sound almost exactly the same, and their profiles are almost interchangeable. Am I missing the diversity here?

Slate, Salon, the American Prospect, TomPaine, the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Yorker, the NYT Sunday magazine, and other places seem to have made better efforts at rounding out their editorial and reporting teams with some different perspectives, and the magazines are often just a more interesting read for it. Just a bit more, unpredictable.

Post-Script: A letter asks if TNR is less ideologically diverse than the Nation, Salon, and TomPaine, and I agree with its writer that it is probably more so, especially in crossing the pro- and anti-Iraq war position, for instance.

Meanwhile, War & Piece has been mulling a related, somewhat politically incorrect topic. Not quite ready to post it all yet. But have been thinking about, why, in general, women, including this one, don't make for very good bloggers. And kind of self-select out of the culture of argument that is what makes some of the best blogs most engaging. I suspect it's the same reason TNR has so few women writers. In general, I don't think most women feel naturally inclined or entitled to inhabit the authoritative voice that is central to the culture of argument epitomized by TNR [and lots of other places] and some of the best blogs. There are certainly exceptions [the fearless Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette, Virginia Postrel, Garance Franke-Ruta's work at Tapped]. There's no lack of female journalists who write brilliantly on foreign policy, national security, and politics in other less polemical genres -- Jane Mayer, Samantha Power, Elizabeth Rubin, Laura Secor, Jennifer Senior, Debra Dickerson, etc. And there's no denying that there's a degree of self-referential clubbiness among some of the guys who run some of the most read sites. But it's certainly not impenetrable. Most of their owners, I suspect, are enlightened enough. I think the problem is as much that women kind of self-select out, for the most part. Am pondering this for a potential future piece, so if you have thoughts, let me know.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board against the widows of 9/11: Just so we all know whose side the WSJ is on. Apparently not the victims of terrorism, just those who try to take political advantage of terrorism.

Will Bunch sends his very interesting article on Nick Berg, from the Philadelphia Daily News. The FBI seems to have been questioning Berg about his correspondence with an Arab student at the University of Oklahoma somehow associated with 9/11. An observant Jew who wore a yamulke, Berg was apparently carrying a Koran and a book called "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution" when he was stopped at the Mosul checkpoint, and the Iraqis arrested him for suspicious behavior. That his chosen professon was inspecting radio communications towers must have made him appear all the more suspicious.

...On March 24, Berg was arrested while riding in a taxi in downtown Mosul. The military source in Iraq, who spoke with the Daily News by telephone, said he was jailed because unescorted Americans aren't usually seen downtown and "they didn't know what to do with him."

He said police were suspicious because of "his demeanor," and authorities also wanted to know why he had the Koran and a book that the source said may have been called "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution."

Hollinger said it wouldn't be surprising that Berg was found with the Koran and various books in Iraq. "It would have surprised me if he wasn't studying up on the culture of that land," he said. "He was an avid reader. He always did his homework and wanted to learn about the culture of the country he was in."

The source said it's unclear exactly why Berg spent close to two weeks in jail. Although he insisted that Berg was under Iraqi control, the FBI also questioned Berg three times and visited his parents back in West Chester.

"He'd made some contact with Arab kids at the University of Oklahoma - that's what the FBI was checking into...a guy from Oklahoma," the source said. He said the FBI wanted to know if the Oklahoma connection was "why he came over here."

He said the Oklahoma contact was "related to somebody who was involved in 9/11." But he didn't know if that person was jailed al Qaeda supporter Zacarias Moussaoui, who attended the University of Oklahoma close to when Berg was there in 2000.

Hollinger said he knew Berg had attended the University of Oklahoma and made friends with some Arabs or Muslims. He made friends with people from every culture and religion. "He told me there was some type of identity mixup - either with ID or e-mails, something along those lines," Hollinger said. "He said he was contacted by some prominent officials."

On April 6, after Berg's parents filed suit seeking his release, he was visited in jail by an American delegation that took him aside in a small room.

Reading all this, one wishes the American authorities had abused their authority just to put this kid on a plane and send him home.

Tom Friedman, like Andrew Sullivan, is coming to realize what frankly many of us realized a long time ago. These guys aren't serious.

It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?

"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics."

Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That's why they spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I'll bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.

I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

And this by Maureen Dowd gets at something important:

The Bush hawks, so fixated on making the Middle East look more like America, have made America look un-American. Should we really be reduced to defending ourselves by saying at least we don't behead people?

...The problem, of course, is that the war in Iraq started with lies — that Saddam's W.M.D. were endangering our security and that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11.

In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism. The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.

That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.

Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a "terrorist"; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or "humanitarian do-gooders," to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican...

So, since September 11th, has there been no Congressional oversight or awareness of the fact the CIA is torturing al Qaeda suspects? Was this really kept secret from normal channels of oversight? No wonder the CIA or Other Government Agency officials and contractors sent to Iraq thought the gloves were off. When are Tenet and Ashcroft going to be dragged to the Hill, people, to answer for this?

I don't shed any tears for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But it's clear what's been corrupted in this whole process is our own government. There is just no accountability. It's a secret government, that's created secret rules, with seemingly no oversight. Although Justice department and CIA lawyers apparently helped craft the new rules that allow for US intelligence officials to flout the US's own laws against torture and the Geneva conventions by formally "rendering" suspects to another country, it's a system clearly designed to allow US intelligence to 'benefit' from torture of the same suspects. That's the danger, and the consequences are the excesses we see in Abu Ghraib.

Is it legal? Is it ethical? Is it effective? If no one in the US public is allowed to know, does it matter? Do we live in a democracy, or not really? What is the basic level of consent we as American citizens feel entitled to, before our government takes such actions? Why has this never come out 'til now?

Since when did US forces defer to the Iraqi police in Iraq? It seems US authorities at some level were complicit in Berg's detention in Iraq, even if it were their proxies that held him. Something is definitely not right with this story, beyond the poor kid's horrific demise.

PS: As far as I can tell, CPA spokesman Dan Senor is about the biggest, most self-satisfied shmuck ever. He lies as a duck takes to water.

To wit:

Senor would not specify why Iraqi police, who generally take direction from coalition authorities, had arrested him and held him for some time.

"We don't want to speculate," Senor said. "Obviously it is extremely sensitive; and it is an extremely difficult time for the family and it would be highly irresponsible for us to begin speculative discussions about what he may or may not have been involved in."

More like, we don't to speculate, because showing how elements of the US government were complicit in Berg's detention and failure to get out of Iraq before he was seized by Al Qaeda would hurt the Bush White House's efforts to try to use Berg's decapitation to their political advantage. Sick bastards.

A friend calls: he ran into an Army military intelligence official, who professes to be as dismayed by the Abu Ghraib abuse as everyone else. But he tells my friend that he has just been part of a big meeting, and apparently, he warns my friend, what is going to come out is "much worse" than what we have already seen. Given my friend's relative agnosticism to some of the disturbing coercive techniques we have learned about, I can only imagine that what is yet to come out is much worse than what we have seen so far.

Post-Script: I guess the Senators agree. But I am not sure these are what the Army military intelligence official was talking about. Is there another shoe to drop here?

Post-Post-Script: In testimony Wednesday, Rumsfeld again proves why he has to go:

Rumsfeld defended U.S. military interrogation techniques in general Wednesday, rejecting complaints that they violated international rules and could endanger U.S. captives.

Testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Defense Department’s budget, Rumsfeld said lawyers for the department had approved such methods as sleep deprivation and changes in diet and making prisoners hold “stress” positions...

Rumsfeld [said] that the Geneva Conventions applied to all prisoners held in Iraq but not to those held in Guantanamo Bay, where detainees captured in the global war on terror are held.

Where to begin? Rumsfeld's deputies had ordered Abu Ghraib to be Gitmo-ized. The implication is clear. Secondly, clearly, many Iraqi detainees held in Iraq were not being treated by any standard any where near approaching the Geneva Conventions, for which Rumsfeld has again and again expressed disdain. He consistently expresses the conviction that he is entitled to make up the rules that he thinks should apply. It's a dangerous signal from the top whose implications are now clear.

I second Daniel Drezner's proposal that Gen. Eric Shinseki replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. [I even had the same thought before I read it elsewhere].

Meantime, it's worth reading American Enterprise Institute military analyst Tom Donnelly's article on the Pentagon's misconduct of the Iraq war and post-war in the Weekly Standard. It is stunningly harsh on Rumsfeld, the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Feith, Wolfowitz, the joint chiefs of staff, Tommy Franks] more broadly and Bush, keeping in mind its author very much is of the AEI, pro-war crowd, and previously worked at the Project for the New American Century itself.

Targeting Bush:

Certainly Kofi Annan is anxious to change his institution to be relevant in post-9/11 politics. President Bush has, ironically, been reluctant to seek that same sort of change. The U.S. military--its forces, its plans, its budgets, its weapons programs--remains essentially unchanged from the world of September 10. Nor has there been any fundamental change during the past year, as it has become clear to all that our commitment in Iraq must be open-ended.

Even though there is a pressing need for some more troops in Iraq, there is an even more urgent need to prepare the American people, their government, and their military for longer and larger missions...

And the indictment against Rumsfeld and the OSD more broadly:

The scandal is not, as Bob Woodward and others have "revealed," that the administration immediately began planning for the invasion of Iraq after the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has been planning for a march to Baghdad since 1991. The real scandal was that the war plan was so at odds with the president's goals.

To be fair, no government bureaucracy has really embraced the idea of remaking the Middle East into an oasis of democracy. Rumsfeld's Pentagon has served the president better than Colin Powell's State Department or George Tenet's CIA. But the mistakes of diplomacy and the mistakes of the intelligence community in estimating Saddam's weapons programs pale in significance to the failure to understand the nature of the war. Moreover, these were mistakes that no military staff college student would make; they violated not only received American doctrine but the most essential tenets of campaign planning.

From the start, the decision to limit the size and capabilities of the invasion force had unintended but predictable consequences. Almost from the start, the attempt to fight a "just in time" war meant that even small surprises--the resistance of the Saddam fedayeen and other irregulars, the terrible sandstorm of the last week in March--sapped the strength of a too-small force. In particular, stripping down force units of their usual complements deprived the force of the logistical wherewithal to continue operations past Baghdad.

More on this soon, in a longer piece on Feith.

Unspeakably awful. So eerily like the killing of Daniel Pearl.

In the portion of the tape that follows, which has not been broadcast in the United States, the masked men push the seated man to the floor, saw off his head as he screams and then hold it aloft, according to Reuters. The tape was briefly made public on a Web site linked to Islamic militants, Reuters and other news organizations said, but it quickly became inaccessible.

The video is titled ``Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American.'' It was unclear whether Mr. Zarqawi - a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda - was personally in the video or was taking responsibility for ordering the execution. American military officials have said they believe Mr. Zarqawi is behind many of the attacks in Iraq against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians.

The victim himself speaks on the videotape shortly before he is killed.

``My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael ... I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah,'' says the man, who was shown bound wearing an orange jump suit similar to a prisoner's uniform.

RIP, Nicholas Berg, 26 years old.

The author of the report on Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, is currently testifying at the Senate Armed Services committee, carried on C-Span.

The possibility that the Abu Ghraib torture scandal might make a Kerry-McCain ticket possible, suggested by Andrew Sullivan, is about the only thing that would give me hope at this point. Americans, Iraqis, Europeans, should pray for this. Meanwhile, is it safe to say that Sullivan has crossed to our side?

Sullivan begs McCain to consider abandoning his party to save the country.

Would McCain agree? The one sticking point has been his loyalty to his party. That counts for something. But we are now in a national crisis of confidence in the middle of a crucial war. The next president, whomever he is, may well have to encounter seismic shocks from new terrorist atrocities in America and the world. Under those circumstances, America cannot afford more polarization, partisan division, and acrimony...

McCain could say that this national crisis demands that he put country ahead of party and serve. His loyalty to his party would therefore be trumped by loyalty to his country. Kerry could also say that his impulse is to be a "uniter, not a divider," and that, unlike Bush, he will actually show it in his pick for the vice-presidency.

Amin and Amen.

Some of this is as bad as what we heard about Saddam.

In June, a group of men arrested by Iraqi police "allegedly had water poured on their legs and had electrical shocks administered to them with stripped tips of electrical wires," the [International Committee of the Red Cross] report notes.

One man's mother was brought in, "and the policeman threatened to mistreat her." Another detainee "was threatened with having his wife brought in and raped."

I have no words for how horrified and disillusioned I am in the US military and intelligence officials involved, the administration, really the scum of the earth - at their cruelty, their incompetence. Not only that they perpetrated torture, but that they perpetrated war crimes on a prison population, 70 to 90% of which had done nothing, but were picked up because apparently the US military is too incompetent to know who anybody is in Iraq. It's getting clearer we did lose Iraq, a long time ago.

Soldiers in Iraq will be reading this in their copy of Army Times: Rumsfeld and Myers should be held accountable for Abu Ghraib. Finally, something that will make it in the Early Bird.

A reader involved with the military writes: "Every soldier I have here is still shaking their head, trying to find a dungeon deep enough for those involved. Their unanimous view is that (and some are just kids so that they take a larger view gives me continued faith) My Lai, Nuremberg, etc., proves that what's wrong is wrong and orders don't trump individual responsibility. My view is that layers of insulation don't trump command responsibility either. Sadly, there is enough to go around. The only good that can come is a positive message that:
a) such things being discussed would've never happened under the previous regime and that,
b) ultimately we hold ourselves to a higher standard and DO punish those responsible."

Another reader involved in US intelligence disparages the idiocity of the Abu Ghraib perps for having taken photos, but still more than disturbs me with talk of interrogation being "not pretty" and "coercive measures." I don't take it that too many people in his world are shocked, which I find revolting. A military intelligence official was quoted on NPR this evening saying 70 to 90% of those picked up for interrogation in Iraq were mistakes, cases of mistaken identity.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, Steve Cambone, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the Joint Chiefs J-2 intelligence officer, and others are set to testify at the Senate Armed Services Committee Senate Dirksen office building Room 106 on Tuesday, starting at 930am.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan here.

THE INEXCUSABLE: The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. I sensed the hubris of this administration after the fall of Baghdad, but I didn't sense how they would grotesquely under-man the post-war occupation, bungle the maintenance of security, short-change an absolutely vital mission, dismiss constructive criticism, ignore even their allies (like the Brits), and fail to shift swiftly enough when events span out of control. This was never going to be an easy venture; and we shouldn't expect perfection. There were bound to be revolts and terrorist infractions. The job is immense; and many of us have rallied to the administration's defense in difficult times, aware of the immense difficulties involved. But to have allowed the situation to slide into where we now are, to have a military so poorly managed and under-staffed that what we have seen out of Abu Ghraib was either the result of a) chaos, b) policy or c) some awful combination of the two, is inexcusable. It is a betrayal of all those soldiers who have done amazing work, who are genuine heroes, of all those Iraqis who have risked their lives for our and their future, of ordinary Americans who trusted their president and defense secretary to get this right. To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen - after a year of other, compounded errors - is unforgivable. By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

Dick Cheney should be forced to eat the entire Iraq Survey Group report when it finally comes out.

The first neocon admits defeat. The only honest one as far as I can tell. Although the entire editorial board of the Weekly Standard sounds pretty pessimistic.

Here's Brooks, admitting that our moral defeat in Iraq has destroyed our future will and capacity to intervene in places that may really be necessary:

No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot. This experience has been too searing....

I wish the U.S could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of "coalitions of the willing" to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach.

Discredited that approach, and profoundly destroyed Americans' trust in our government.

This excerpt from Seymour Hersh's new New Yorker piece on the chain of command in Rumsfeld's Pentagon that allowed the war crimes at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to occur, stands out, and echoes Tom Ricks' must-read piece today in the Washington Post:

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario.

Secrecy and wishful thinking. Deliberate indifference to bad news. Refusal to take accountability. Punishment of dissent. Sounds like the defining characteristics of the Bush administration.

More Seymour Hersh. Anyone involved in this stuff should just kill themselves. These photos of US personnel setting attack dogs on Iraqi prisoners occurred in another wing of Abu Ghraib, and was committed by other military perpetrators than the six MPs previously identified. In other words, Rumsfeld's contention that the photos we already saw represented isolated incidents confined to one area of the prison appears to be a big fat lie. It seems that dozens, even hundreds of US personnel were directly involved in, witnessed, or knew about these war crimes.

[I've figured out why this newest picture is so much more viscerally upsetting even than the others, which were already extraordinarily upsetting. Because the victim isn't wearing a hood, and you can see the incredible terror on his face. In fact, compared to the US soldiers, who are just uniforms weilding German Shepherd attack dogs, [and who resemble more than anything Nazis], the Iraqi man is the only one in the picture who seems human. Honestly, I think the US military personnel who did this deserve to be inside Abu Ghraib when we raze it, which we should do at the first possible opportunity. What the US is doing in Abu Ghraib is terrorism: the photographs are designed to terrorize beyond even the brutalizing of their victims. It's amazing how all in an instant, the tipping point has been reached, and one goes decidedly from being on the US' side in this campaign [what the heck are we doing there again?] to the Iraqis who want us out of there and want to have their country back. There is no bit of information, there is no order, there is nothing in the world that makes this right. Nothing. We have no right to be there torturing these people. It is their country.]

And did all this torture and abuse and perversion do anything to make us win in Iraq? No, remember, we are very much losing this war, and we have certainly lost the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Iraqis, people in the Middle East, the Arab world, and Europe. What's more, evidence of this unspeakable behavior makes one understand why most of the world desperately wants to see us lose. What's more, I think these photos have made us lose AMERICAN hearts and minds. Who can have the stomach any more to see US military or intelligence officials in Iraq? They are fighting an unjust cause in Iraq that clearly has only gone to make America the most detested nation on earth, only more unsafe, and the only honorable thing to do at this point is to get out.

Hersh informs us that Maj. General Antonio Taguba identifies only three US military personnel "deserving of praise." Here's one of them, Spec. Joseph M. Darby, profiled in the Washington Post. "Darby, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, placed an anonymous note under the door of a superior, describing incidents of sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi detainees by some members of the unit that, documented by hundreds of explicit photographs, have shocked the world. He later came forward with a sworn statement....Those who knew Darby before he enlisted wondered why he, more hothead than hero, came forward." Just goes to show that even hotheads can have the kind of conscience and sense of moral compass so few other US personnel working in Abu Ghraib seemed to possess.

Post-Script: Re-reading Hersh's new piece, when it compares the abuse of John Walker Lindh to what happened in Abu Ghraib, I wonder if part of what has changed is not the way US forces have conducted interrogations since the war on terror began, but American sensibilities about it. Many of us knew dimly that Lindh and prisoners in Afghanistan kept in windowless containers, some of whom suffocated, were being treated outside any legal compass. We knew certainly about the enemy combatant status of Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, deprived of all their constitutional rights in an instant by John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld without even a hearing or access to a lawyer. We knew of hundreds of Muslims being held on no charges in prisons across the country, sometimes languishing for months. Maybe these pictures have helped us come to our senses, to understand what it means when President Bush and Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft try to put the US beyond the scope of the rule of law. I think Americans will finally come to reject the insanity of it, now that we have seen and really been able to visualize what a Hobbesian world without rule of law means in terms of human life. It's hardly worth living. And it's turned dozens of our own soldiers and intelligence officials into bona fide war criminals.

Tom Ricks in the Washington Post writes of growing anger at Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz within the Pentagon:

The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30.

Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated U.S. goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public.

Some officers say the place to begin restructuring U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him.

A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Like several other officers interviewed for this report, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required to occupy postwar Iraq.

Wolfowitz comes off as literally on another planet from the rest of us. Are the people around him insulating him the information the rest of us are getting? Are people so afraid of getting punished for dissent they just tell him only the good news?

Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's No. 2 official, said he does not think the United States is losing in Iraq, and said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. "I am sure that there are some out there" who think that, he said in an interview yesterday afternoon.

"There's no question that we're facing some difficulties," Wolfowitz said. "I don't mean to sound Pollyannaish -- we all know that we're facing a tough problem." But, he said, "I think the course we've set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self-defense."

...A Special Forces officer aimed higher, saying that, "Rumsfeld needs to go, as does Wolfowitz."

Asked about such antagonism, Wolfowitz said, "I wish they'd have the -- whatever it takes -- to come tell me to my face."

He said that by contrast, he had been "struck at how many fairly senior officers have come to me" to tell him that he and Rumsfeld have made the right decisions concerning the Army.

Someone has to step up to the plate.

This is just typical of the way the US treats the UN. You do it, but we're in charge. Now, go do it, our way. If the White House keeps this up, Brahimi may very well be tempted to quit. My sources at the UN say he has already declined to take on the job of being the UN special envoy to Iraq once he's done organizing the transition...

Wanted: moderate Arab former foreign minister for a thankless job....

Reading this interview with Sabrina Harman, one of the soldiers who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib who was apparently the source of over 1,000 of her own digital photos of the abuse to the Post, one is really reminded of Hannah Arendt on Adolph Eichmann. How do people have so little moral capacity that they would consider this just the course of their duty? Who needs to be trained in the Geneva Conventions to know this is wrong?

And who are the much reported about CIA operatives these articles keep referring to? When is Tenet going to be called to testify? When is Tenet also going to be fired?

These guys just don't give up. Is it not enough that Chalabi is apparently a double agent for AEI and Tehran? Did that give anybody [that means Richard Perle, the ever gracious Danielle Pletka, and all the other usual suspects at AEI and OSP] pause? And if not, why not? Is Chalabi a channel for the neocons to certain Iranians? It's not as farfetched a notion as that might sound.

Rumsfeld made very clear that there will be more awful photos and video likely to leak in coming days. He says he and Gen. Richard Myers only saw the DoD's copies of the photos and videotapes last night at 7pm, from the criminal investigation files. He and Myers suggested Peter Pace had informed the President that CBS had described such photos in their possession "in early February." These are just some rough observations after having heard only the last hour of the testimony.

It's too early to tell, but from the tone of many of the Senators questions today, I unfortunately am inclined to believe that Rumsfeld is going to be able to ride this one out. And perhaps [very cynically] for Democrats, that is not the worst thing, as this drags out, and more and more of this sticks to him and the Bush administration.

Revelations like the Red Cross report leaked to the Wall Street Journal will raise more questions about command responsibility for "widespread" and "systematic" abuse, torture, and killing of prisoners. [Here is a link to excerpts from the report, dated February 2004.]

TREATMENT DURING INTERROGATION

Methods of Ill-Treatment

• Hooding, used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. One or sometimes two bags, sometimes with an elastic blindfold over the eyes which, when slipped down, further impeded proper breathing. Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come. The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity. Hooding could last for periods from a few hours to up to two to four consecutive days, during which hoods were lifted only for drinking, eating or going to the toilets

• Handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, which were sometimes made so tight and used for such extended periods that they caused skin lesions and long-term aftereffects on the hands (nerve damage), as observed by the ICRC

• Beating with hard objects (including pistols and rifles), slapping, punching, kicking with knees or feet on various parts of the body (legs, sides, lower back, groin)

• Pressing the face into the ground with boots

• Threats (of ill-treatment, reprisals against family members, imminent executive or transfer to Guantanamo)

• Being stripped naked for several days while held in solitary confinement in an empty and completely dark cell that included a latrine

• Being paraded naked outside cells in front of other persons deprived of their liberty and guards, sometimes hooded or with women's underwear over the head

• Acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the head for prolonged periods, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position

• Being attached repeatedly over several days, for several hours each time, with handcuffs to the bars of their cell door in humiliating (i.e. naked or in underwear) and/or uncomfortable position causing physical pain

• Exposure while hooded to loud noise or music, prolonged exposure while hooded to the sun over several hours, including during the hottest time of the day when temperatures could reach 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher

• Being forced to remain for prolonged periods in stress positions such as squatting or standing with or without the arms lifted

These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an "intelligence value."

I am really wondering now. Not dozens, but hundreds of US personnel must have been involved or witnessed such behavior. Who are they? Where are they? Have they just looked the other way the whole time?

Also: the ICRC report catches Rumsfeld in what would seem to be a lie - including a lie to Congress. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In mid-October, ICRC officials visited a section of Abu Ghraib where they witnessed "the practice of keeping persons completely naked in totally empty concrete cells in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days," the report says.

Upon witnessing the treatment in the prison, which included making male prisoners parade around in women's underwear, ICRC officials complained to the military intelligence officer in charge, who explained that the practice was "part of the process," the report says.

Despite the ICRC's October inspection and warning of abuse at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters earlier this week that the allegations of guards sexually humiliating and abusing inmates at the facility didn't surface until Jan. 13, three months after the ICRC complained of the problem to military officials in Iraq.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the situation in Abu Ghraib was pervasive rather than an anomaly. Hundreds of US soldiers, officers, and intelligence officials had to have witnessed daily abuse, even torture, beatings, and brutal interrogations of Iraqis, many who had not even been charged with a crime. Such an atmosphere had to be condoned, or be perceived to be condoned, from the top.

Busy editing an article today. Garance Franke-Ruta has a strong wrap up of Rumsfeld must go, Day 2, over at Tapped. Eschaton gets his hopes up that Bush will fire the whole top level management of the Pentagon. Marshall is still cautious, taking into account that Bush can't afford to fire Rumsfeld six months before the elections.

I've been reading about Rumsfeld in the highly recommended Rise of the Vulcans. He has faced down the wrath of Kissinger and Nixon, and when they were ready to fire him, he managed to position himself to get an ambassadorship to Nato out of it, just because they so wanted to get him out of town. He is not the submit-one's-resignation type. And he and Cheney are very close, and I believe that Cheney is still the most influential man at the White House. So I expect, that this White House won't be firing Rumsfeld. Remember how many times Tenet seemed like a goner, and folks in Congress across the aisle were calling for his retirement. Unless....questions start seriously being raised about when Bush knew what, and what he did about it.

Worth reading: Anthony Lewis on the virtues of the rule of law.

The New York Times joins the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Tom Friedman calling for Rumsfeld to go.

The fingerprints of an Oregon attorney who converted to Islam and represented the "Portland Six" convicted of trying to aid the Taliban by entering Afghanistan via China have been found on a bag at the Madrid train station bombings site. What a bizarre case.

Tom Friedman is must-read today.

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago.

Do read the whole thing. And then call your Congressman and Senator and demand Rumsfeld and Bush be held accountable.

Post-Script: Philadelphia Daily News journalist Will Bunch emails me his article on Steve Stefanowicz, originally of Telford, Pennsylvania.

A few thoughts on this latest news story indicating that not only has nobody from the government yet contacted the defense contracting company CACI International whose employees are alleged in the Taguba report to have been involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib. The identified employee Steve Stefanowicz is still working at Abu Ghraib!

Here is the thought: this is a private sector firm whose employees are shielded from both the US military justice system, and by written agreement, from Iraqi law. The only place they can really face justice is right here in the USA.

I think some enterprising Americans lawyer should head to Iraq, identify the Iraqis who were in Abu Ghraib who were abused and get a class action law suit going here in the States, and sue the wazoo out of this company. [CACI International is a public company, and such a lawsuit would at least destroy the company's stock value for the time being, and get shareholders riled up]. There's a bit of America for you, Iraq! Sue every private contractor involved. Perhaps Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International would file briefs to back up their case. Here are more victims and perps.

Jesus Christ, he should sue too.

[My, the Weekly Standard is quiet on this case. Not a word! Not a peep! It's not a very pleasant look at the American morals they believe we should be spreading all over the Middle East at the point of a gun.]

I have a question: do some American troops think that the Iraqis were behind 9/11? Have Cheney and the Bush Administration's none so subtle efforts to equate Saddam Hussein with the perpetrators of 9/11 had the effect of making some US troops think the Iraqis are "the enemy?"

I posted this a few days ago, but will just say it again as it gets more, needed attention: Isn't Major General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of Guantanamo now moved to head Abu Ghraib, part of the problem?

Rumsfeld is in trouble with his boss.

Via Juan Cole, a really interesting article on South African apartheid-era and Serbian mercenaries working as private security consultants in Iraq. What the author fails to note is that Erinys Iraq, the company that employed some of the South Africans who admitted to apartheid-era killings of blacks before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, is affiliated with a relative of a close aide of Ahmad Chalabi.

Erinys Iraq came into being last May, after the U.S.-led invasion. Saboteurs had started blowing up oil pipelines and attacking other petroleum facilities, plunging Baghdad and other Iraqi cities into darkness. Blackouts and fuel shortages remain endemic. The authority solicited bids on the pipeline security contract in July. Just two weeks later, the contract was awarded to Erinys Iraq.

A founding partner and director of Erinys Iraq is Faisal Daghistani, the son of Tamara Daghistani, for years one of Chalabi's most trusted confidants. She was a key player in the creation of his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which received millions of dollars in U.S. funds to help destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime before the coalition invasion last year. The firm's counsel in Baghdad is Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalabi.

Anne Applebaum is 100% right in this thoughtful oped about the unintended culture of impunity Rumsfeld may have fostered in US troops, here.

Dept. of Pure Speculation: Was Richard Perle's resignation from the Defense Policy Board in February related to emerging revelations that Ahmed Chalabi had been feeding US classified information to Iran? Perle's resignation letter to Rumsfeld was written February 18th [and leaked February 25 to Knight Ridder]. An interesting Stratfor analysis on Chalabi's long reputed ties to Iran was published on February 18th as well. Who was providing Ahmad Chalabi secret US information? [Thanks to reader RS for the pointers, we are happy to speculate]. Here's my question. The Iranian government is as factionalized as our own. Who is Chalabi's Iranian?

Meantime, Perle's co-author David Frum has the most ridiculous piece in the National Review online trying to defend Chalabi's ties to Iran! Perle and Frum don't usually have any use for those who defend foreign policy realism and talking with such regimes as Tehran's -- except when it involves their own crooks.

So the neocons are apparently split on Chalabi. Perle, Frum, Harold Rhode, Michael Ledeen, Laurie Mylroie still weakly defending Chalabi in one corner, and apparently Mark Zell and -- who else? -- in the other. [Does Mark Zell even count as a neocon, or is he just a neocon by association with Doug Feith?]

Interesting discussion of the uses and uselessness of the UN going on at Dan Drezner's site, born of despair at Sudan, whose government has been implicated in contributing to the single largest wave of ethnic cleansing currently on earth these days, re-winning its seat on the UN High Commission for Human Rights. More on these issues soon!

Here is the full text of the Taguba report.

Much of the specific witness testimonies about violence and abuse against prisoners have already been reported, and are the most upsetting.

But this is also very disturbing: why is the CIA trying to sneak prisoners out of the site of the Red Cross?

33. (S/NF) The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees “ghost detainees.” On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of “ghost detainees” (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law. (Annex 53)

Is this really necessary? Is that how we expect US prisoners of war to be treated by foreign governments?

Here is more on the alleged abuse by contractors.

11. (U) That Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, Contract US Civilian Interrogator, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his employment file, termination of employment, and generation of a derogatory report to revoke his security clearance for the following acts which have been previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

Made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses.

Allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by “setting conditions” which were neither authorized and in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.

12. (U) That Mr. John Israel,Contract US Civilian Interpreter, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his employment file and have his security clearance reviewed by competent authority for the following acts or concerns which have been previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

Denied ever having seen interrogation processes in violation of the IROE, which is contrary to several witness statements.

Did not have a security clearance.

13. (U) I find that there is sufficient credible information to warrant an Inquiry UP Procedure 15, AR 381-10, US Army Intelligence Activities, be conducted to determine the extent of culpability of MI personnel, assigned to the 205th MI Brigade and the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib (BCCF). Specifically, I suspect that COL Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary action as described in the preceding paragraphs as well as the initiation of a Procedure 15 Inquiry to determine the full extent of their culpability. (Annex 36)

Would be interesting to find out more about Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz (Stefanowicz), and Israel

Post-Script: The New York Times reports in Wednesday's addition that Israel worked for a subcontractor to Titan [whch Titan would not reveal]. I wonder who? It seems it's only a matter of days or even hours 'til it all comes out.

Isn't Miller part of the problem at Abu Ghraib? It was he who wrote one of the military's internal investigation reports of the Abu Ghraib prison, recommending that US military police serve as "enablers" of the interrogations. I wouldn't want him to be in charge of policing the hen houes by any means. And better get the Red Cross in there.

Meantime, how seriously can the Pentagon be taking this case, if it has not even contacted the two private defense contractors, CACI International, and Titan, whose employees are alleged in the Taguba report to have been responsible for urging US MPs to soften prisoners up? Indeed, one of the civilian contractor employees was accused of raping an Iraqi youth, two people who reviewed the Taguba report told the Wall Street Journal.

And the New York Times reports in Wednesday's paper that in over 30 criminal investigations the Pentagon has been conducting about abuse of detainees in US military custody, nobody has gone to jail.

Meanwhile, three people have seen and described to me some extremely disturbing other photos. of US abuse of prisoners in Iraq out there. I have no way to know if they are genuine or not. The website where they are supposedly available is so overloaded one cannot open it, but this is it: www.albasrah.net. Again, I reiterate, I have not even seen the photos myself and have no way of knowing if they are genuine or fake.

Post-Script: The photos described above are most likely fake.

I know some of my readers esp. those with family serving abroad will be interested in this oped in the New York Times today by William Broyles that calls for bringing back the draft.

If the children of the nation's elites were facing enemy fire without body armor, riding through gantlets of bombs in unarmored Humvees, fighting desperately in an increasingly hostile environment because of arrogant and incompetent civilian leadership, then those problems might well find faster solutions.

The men and women on active duty today — and their companions in the National Guard and the reserves — have seen their willingness, and that of their families, to make sacrifices for their country stretched thin and finally abused. Thousands of soldiers promised a one-year tour of duty have seen that promise turned into a lie. When Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, told the president that winning the war and peace in Iraq would take hundreds of thousands more troops, Mr. Bush ended his career. As a result of this and other ill-advised decisions, the war is in danger of being lost, and my beloved military is being run into the ground.

This abuse of the voluntary military cannot continue. How to ensure adequate troop levels, with a diversity of backgrounds? How to require the privileged to shoulder their fair share? In other words, how to get today's equivalents of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney — and me — into the military, where their talents could strengthen and revive our fighting forces?

The only solution is to bring back the draft. Not since the 19th century has America fought a war that lasted longer than a week with an all-volunteer army; we can't do it now. It is simply not built for a protracted major conflict. The arguments against the draft — that a voluntary army is of higher quality, that the elites will still find a way to evade service — are bogus. In World War II we used a draft army to fight the Germans and Japanese — two of the most powerful military machines in history — and we won. The problems in the military toward the end of Vietnam were not caused by the draft; they were the result of young Americans being sent to fight and die in a war that had become a disaster...

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People's Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it's not worth your family fighting it, then it's not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration's handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

Stunning story on Chalabi at Salon. Doug Feith's former law partner Mark Zell, who's been a business partner of Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalbi, now has only the harshest words for him:

Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another." While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

What's turned Zell? Chalabi's reputed long ties with Iran, and post-war dissing of Israel.

[This piece says Doug Feith will resign by mid-May. Hope to learn more about this when Feith speaks Tuesday at AEI].

Post-Script. This piece is brilliantly investigated, and makes one ill. The neocons in policy positions [Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle] have to go to jail. They willfully deceived the American public, perhaps even the president, and they allowed themselves to be deceived by the kind of two-bit con artist you or I wouldn't buy a car from. Why did some of my smartest friends subscribe to their baloney for so long? And what do they have to say for themselves now? It just goes to prove that intelligence and intellectual ability have nothing to do with good sense.

What to do with Chalabi is easily answered: a one-way ticket to Jordan, where he will face prison for the rest of his sorry life.

Should we get out of Iraq? Something that seemed inconceivable a few months ago as a foreign policy failure of staggering proportions, now seems something that some sensible people are urging. Including military analyst Andrew Bacevich, in this op-ed, that compares the US "descent into dishonor" in Iraq to the French campaign in Algeria:

Day by day, the evidence mounts that an ugly war is turning uglier. U.S. and coalition troop losses, which have again spiked upward, provide one measure of that ugliness. The ratcheting up of American firepower and the climbing toll of Iraqi dead, many of them evidently innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, provide a second. But there is a third measure, perhaps the most troubling of all: hints that the discipline of U.S. forces is beginning to fray.

Indiscipline, lawlessness and the excessive use of force will not guarantee
victory in Iraq; indeed, the reverse is true.

The French experience in Algeria stands as a warning: Down that road lies not
only defeat but also dishonor.

Bob Dreyfuss highlights more US officials calling for getting out as fast as the US can here.

[Thanks to reader JR for the heads up on the Bacevich article].

Post-Script: When I read articles like this, I am so outraged, it's hard to think straight. It is clear that the people who conned us into this war, including Richard Perle, Ahmad Chalabi and Doug Feith, should go to jail. Even watching the coverage of the abuses on that White House cheerleader Fox News the past few days (I was in the Midwest, captive of other people) it seems to me that Americans will not long have the stomach for seeing the monstrous deeds that some US forces and intelligence have committed in Iraq.

Whatever anyone thought invading Iraq would get us (and oh yeah, forgot to create the conditions that would allow us to stabilize it and win), it's not worth it to turn our own forces into the kinds of monsters one hears about in the war crimes trials at the Hague. It's only a matter of degree. [I've been assured by a friend in the intel business who's been in Iraq that he's just as horrified by these revelations as everyone else]. But I would be interested to know what they think, given their past talk about the "school girl" rules that US intelligence had to operate under in the era following the Church committee hearings. But surely between the Geneva Conventions and the 'schoolgirl' rules and what we are reading about in the New Yorker, there must be some middle ground, right? What happened? When does the tremendous pressure the US military and intelligence is under to produce more actionable intelligence translate into human rights abuses and torture of detainees? Are the rules changing again?

What does it come down to? It's trying to remember what was the point of this whole exercise of invading Iraq, which had less to do with Al Qaeda than at least five other governments. To protect this country. To get rid of an admittedly very evil man who had aspired to possess weapons of mass destruction and invaded another big oil producing country twelve years ago. To show that the US was willing to take losses, to project American power into the heart of the Arab world. But isn't it clear that after a year of demonstrating how stretched thin and desperate we are in Iraq, that what we have wrought is so incredibly destructive for Americans, that the Iraq misadventure has demonstrated weakness, failure, incompetence, arrogance, and now -- this -- that, in the eyes of most in Iraq and I would bet most people in the Middle East, we are perceived as hardly any better and arguably worse than the power we overthrew in Baghdad? What was the point of this little exercise? Whatever it was, at some point, better sooner than later, one has to count one's losses and go home. This administration clearly doesn't know how to climb its way out of a paperbag. It doesn't have any fresh ideas for how to fix the situation in Iraq that doesn't have us reinstalling Saddam's Republican Guard or turning our own personnel into war criminals. Clearly we've got to change our regime. And put Perle, Chalabi and the others on trial. Simply having them lose their jobs will not reveal all they did to get us in this half century rare world class screw up.

Post-Post Script: Will the humiliation of what we've witnessed at Abu Ghraib (and what Hersh says we will see more of in coming days) lead Americans to reject the extra-judicial gray area the US has waded into post-9/11 in Guantanamo and elsewhere? Do we really want our interrogators and our soldiers and our government to feel beyond the scope of international law, the constitution, commonly understood ethical behavior and the law? Will it remain such an abstract notion? Will we remember why restraints were put on these institutions in the past?

For before Maj. Gen. Antonio Tagaba reported on the abuse at Abu Ghraib earlier this year, apparently a director of the US facility in Cuba, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D Miller, investigated reports of abuse in the Baghdad prison and wrote that US MPs should act as "enablers" for US military intelligence officials. "In late August and early September 2003, a team from Guantanamo overseen by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller visited Iraq to advise U.S. prison operations there. Among its recommendations were that military police guards act as "enablers" for interrogations, Taguba reported," the Post reports.

Moreover, doesn't the fact that nobody has lost their jobs, nobody has been fired, nobody has gone to prison, or worse, so far in this case, indicate that something is seriously wrong with the follow through by the US military in investigating these reports of abuse? Isn't there an air of condoning this sort of thing, until it becomes a PR problem? [or a career problem for someone like Sanchez?] Shouldn't we have expected more action in a military system with clear chains of command and photographs for g-d's sake and three internal military investigations conducted several months ago by now? And if we haven't seen any action until the 60 Minutes report, what does that indicate? A serious lack of will, it would seem to me. Should Rumsfeld be implicated for failing to condemn this?

In his article on the torture, abuse and the killing of at least one Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib by US military intelligence officials, contractors and reservists, Seymour Hersh notes that an internal army report on the abuse by Gen. Antonio Taguba found that military intelligence officials, some on contract from private firms, were most culpable for encouraging such wanton criminal behavior:

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The blogosphere has gone to work to figure out who these alleged perpetrators are. Billmon found Stefanowicz described here, apparently working as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib as recently as April 26.

Here's some more on Stefanowicz, who has been identified by Hersh as an employee of CACI International, but who may indeed be affiliated with a naval reserve program. His mother is written about here.

Jean Campbell's son, Steven Stefanowicz, is on active duty with the Navy in the Middle East...Jean [of Telford, Pennsylvania] said she admitted that from the outset she never wanted Steven, her second of four children, to join the armed forces...

About four years ago, Stefanowicz joined a Naval Reserve program for people aged 28 to 32. When terrorists attacked the American homeland Sept. 11, Stefanowicz quit his job as an information technology recruiter in Australia and was back home by October. He volunteered for active duty in the Middle East and was sent overseas in March.

More on this later. It's disturbing the military has been sitting on these internal reports since at least January. Mark Kimmitt on Fox on Sunday said they'd been concerned for months about the impact those photos would have. Clearly. But why does it seem like the military was sitting on purveying justice to the perpetrators until 60 Minutes II put this on the air? Why does this incident seem to have been treated more as a PR problem than a seriously disturbing substantive one, that demanded that the identified perpetrators and their superiors lose their careers and go to jail? And what does it mean that Stefanowicz is still apparently knocking golf balls off the roof of Abu Ghraib?

Post Script: Hersh, on Fox's O'Reilly Factor Monday night, said he has received calls in the past twenty-four hours that there are more photos, and videotapes, of abuse and torture by US personnel of Iraqi prisoners, including of underage Iraqis. He also pointed out that Taguba's report, which came out in January, is the third internal military report on abuse at Abu Ghraib. Why haven't heads rolled yet?

Post-Post Script: Phil Carter offers more insight into how the military police are likely to treat their own found of criminal wrong doing, as well as pointers to some pieces on the problem of the legal loophole involving defense contractors found to have committed criminal wrong doing on assignments abroad.

Seymour Hersh on the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. More on the internal military report on 'sadistic' treatment of detainees by US soldiers. "This systematic and illegal abuse, Major General Antonio M. Taguba reported, was perpetrated by members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, and also by members of the American intelligence community." I wonder, who are the members of the American intelligence community and are they subject to prosecution as well? I agree with Kevin Drum, that we should turn these scumbags over to an Iraqi court.

British troops have their own abuse scandal. The Guardian report suggests that one of the detainees in Abu Ghraib abused by US soldiers died from the stress of his interrogation. The Guardian is also on top of the fact that contractors from defense contracting firms Titan and CACI were apparently involved in the prison abuse. When are firms like this going to pay - seriously pay - for when consultants on their payroll break the law or the most basic moral standards of human behavior abroad? These contractors who commit crimes in countries abroad with no functional justice system are not accountable to the military justice system as US soldiers would be; when a contractor commits a crime, engages in 'human trafficking' as employees of DynCorps have been involved in in Bosnia and Kosovo; tortures prisoners as in Iraq, the companies just quietly fly these criminals back to the States and fire them. When is that loophole going to be closed?