The Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi — formerly a key ally of the Bush administration — is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, government sources told NEWSWEEK
Somebody’s got a problem.
The article doesn’t go into any further detail on that, but it does feature a bunch of neocons (called here “political activists” which cracks me up) in high dudgeon screaming about “witch hunts.”
People might be able to chalk up all this espionage, treason type talk as partisanship or business as usual in the nation’s capital, except it’s got nothing to do with the Democrats!! This is a Republican show all the way and all we have to do is bring the popcorn.
Oh, and by the way:
President Bush also distanced himself from Chalabi, saying he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times.
Who is this Chalabi you speak of?
If that’s on camera, it would make a nice video companion to his notorious “I believe I met Mr Lay when he was working for my opponent.”
And I think the more pertinent question is how many times did President Cheney meet with Mr Chalabi, anyway.
Josh Marshall points out the ultimate paragraph of this piece which is a real killer:
One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.
I’m having milk duds too. This is going to be good.
Update:
Via Atrios, the actual Bush comments from yesterday:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that’s fallen out of favor within your administration. I’m wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly —
THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi?
Q Yes, with Chalabi.
THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven’t had any extensive conversations with him.
…
Q I guess I’m asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it’s going to be in Iraq.
If you haven’t already seen it, go read the patented Eschaton takedown of this obvious lie.
Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott gives the women closest to President Bush a very rough going-over in the latest issue – portraying mom Barbara Bush as a nasty piece of work, wife Laura as timid and ineffectual, former Bush aide Karen Hughes as a wacko and a liar and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as a weirdly worshipful “professional wife.” But, surprisingly, Wolcott concludes with a backhanded compliment for daughters Jenna and Barbara: “I’ve come to have a grudging regard for the Bush twins. Jenna and Barbara may be spoiled brats – tarty party girls – but at least they’re not perpetuating false pretenses, being used as attractive props and tweeting noises they don’t believe.”
I agree with this, actually. Those two girls may be spoiled little Paris Hilton wannabes but you have to give them credit for not buying into the phony sanctimony of their religious-right pander patsy of a father. They told him to go to hell. I’m not sure they’re Republicans.
Chalabi, he pointedly noted, wasn’t the only Iraqi exile with White House connections. He added that the administration has “had relations with a number of groups previously that were intent on seeing Saddam Hussein’s regime removed from power.”
President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.
There was no indication that Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney’s advice, “he would retain him,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.
The lawyer is Jim Sharp, Buchan said, confirming a report by CBS News.
“The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself,” the spokeswoman said.
She deflected questions about whether Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case.
If he’s called before the grand jury can he take Cheney with him?
The early-morning raid on the home and office of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad sends “the wrong message” to America’s would-be allies in the Arab world, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin tells Insight.
“This is a huge blow to America’s prestige,” he said. “The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”
Rubin, who served as an aide to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, spoke with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid Thursday.
“Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he says. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Deeply involved in planning for the Iraq war, Rubin tells Insight that he left the government in April out of a sense of frustration.
“This administration has been taking so many hits, many of them based on outright fabrications or on information from ‘anonymous intelligence sources,’ that I felt I could be more effective on the outside,” he says.
Rubin now is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
[…]
American news reports yesterday gave several variants of the alleged charges against the Chalabi aides, ranging from corruption, fraud and vehicle theft to intimidation and blackmail. But INC sources and Rubin believe there is no doubt that U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer ordered the raid.
“The decision to “cut Chalabi down to size” was taken in Washington,” Rubin said, “but the operation against Chalabi originated in Baghdad. There is no doubt that Bremer signed off on this. Basically, Bremer has gone mad. This raid shows the U.S. has not learned the lessons of Abu Ghraib, and is still trying to “humiliate” perceived opponents.
Attempts by Insight to reach Bremer for comment were unsuccessful.
At a press conference in Baghdad after the raids, Chalabi identified one of the individuals allegedly being sought as Aras Habib, his longtime security and intelligence chief. Before the U.S.-led invasion, Habib ran the INC’s network of informants within Saddam’s regime and identified defectors the INC ultimately helped to escape Iraq.
Chalabi’s detractors claim the intelligence provided by those defectors relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs was false or fabricated. But in fact, says Rubin, the INC provided intelligence and human sources at a time when the CIA has no assets inside Iraq at all.
“The CIA hates Chalabi because he comes out with information they do not have and that later gets confirmed,” Rubin says.
[…]
“The most virulent hatred of Chalabi comes from those who have never met him,” he [Rubin] says. “Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] and U.S. military commanders in Iraq who have worked with the INC have given them stellar reviews. They have used INC intelligence to stop operations by insurgents that were targeting Americans. They have caught insurgents red-handed because of information provided by Chalabi. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage appear to place greater value on winning bureaucratic battles in Washington than in saving American lives in Iraq.”
[…]
In citing [ormer DIA analyst Pat] Lang as an expert on Iraq, neither CBS nor the Washington Post ever has mentioned that Lang has registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for an Arab government.
“How can somebody working for an Arab government parade about as a neutral analyst?” asks Rubin.
What a good question.
Now, I ask you, does Rubin sound here like he might be a tippler? Or is just wired out of his mind on venti-quad-no-foam-lattes?
This article was written the day after the raid. Perhaps what seeps through here isn’t booze or caffeine. It sounds more like panic.
Intriguing as her personal history may be, however, Ms. Miller’s troubles didn’t arise from mere ambition or poor manners. Instead, they reflected the reluctance of her editors to recognize that she was motivated by an ideology shared with her sources. Such ‘passions’ are far more common among mainstream journalists than they like to admit; indeed, strong beliefs are characteristic of many of the nation’s best journalists.
But by failing to exercise adequate control over Ms. Miller’s urge to propagandize, those editors allowed The Times to become an instrument for her neoconservative patrons in and out of government, and for their agenda of ‘regime change’ in Iraq and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East.
Miller is one of the rare reporters whose ideology was evident to practically everyone, which is why her “errors” have been attacked so relentlessly. You didn’t have to be a gernius to realize that this woman was pushing an agenda because she really didn’t make any effort to hide it.
But the fact is that even without a full-on GOP operative working as a reporter, The Times long ago became a willing tool of the right wing when the story was juicy enough. I don’t say that because I believe the editors sincerely want to promote right wing views. Some undoubtedly do, but most of these people are big city cosmopolitan types who probably hold fairly liberal beliefs in most areas. I think there is a much subtler and more sophisticated phenomenon at work.
We know about the “working the refs” angle. They have been affected subconsiously by the decades-long “liberal media” attack on their integrity and so they lend more and more credibility to right wing sources to achieve “balance.”
But, more than that, they have become dependent on the easy, stimulating, tittilating tabloid inspired “scoops” that the right wing propaganda shops learned they liked. The breathless, uncritical style of reporting that Miller personified, and the screaming headlines that accompanied her stories, were very similar in tone to the Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee series’. These were BIG stories about southern gothic corruption, lethal Chinese espionage and “smoking guns as mushroom clouds.” They were sensational. They had pulitzer written all over them if they panned out. But, they didn’t. They were false trails, propaganda and manipulation by people with a political agenda.
The paper has yet to grapple with the fact that they were used by political players. This means that they will remain subject to the same inducements. And they are not alone. Look at a respected TV journalist like Tim Russert. He can be indicted on exactly the same charges as the Times’ editors. He has accepted far too much information from right wing political operatives that turned out to be wrong to justify his continuing to use them. Yet, he obviously does and mostly uncritically. He uses their lies to confront the political opposition and force them to deny them without ever evidencing any qualms that he might be helping to spread falsehoods and wrong impressions by doing so.
The most important thing is for Democrats, particularly in Washington, to absorb the fact that they cannot count on these institutions to be objective. They must not give credence to stories just because they appear in The New York Times and they must not adhere to the “conventional wisdom” that often follows from those reports. As long as these bastions of “liberal media” are subject to right wing manipulation, belief in their credibility by Democrats perpetuates the Republicans’ brilliant use of subliminal anti-liberal cant to demoralize and disillusion us.
It’s a flavorless kind of kool-aid and we don’t even know we’re drinking it.
Just in case there’s anyone who isn’t getting the hint in Josh Marshall’s post this morning about which of the numerous neocon chumps is the most likely suspect to have given Chalabi the Iranian code info, here’s who I think he’s talking about (lifted from my post last week on the subject):
Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. A Yale graduate whose dissertation focused on modern Iran, Rubin has traveled extensively in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.
Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP).
Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.
In a National Review article, Rubin discusses sentiments expressed whenever Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Envoy Anthony Zinni would visit Israel.
“While working at Hebrew University this past year, I took the bus to campus each day. Whenever U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell or Special Envoy Anthony Zinni was dispatched to Israel, colleagues would urge me to stay home until after the suicide bombing. Middle Easterners understand the lesson those in the U.S. and Europe are still learning: When governments engage dictators, civilians suffer.”
Yes. Europe knows nothing about engaging dictators and civilian suffering. Quite the brilliant insight, especially coming from somebody studying at Hebrew University. (I was going to mention that a Yale degree isn’t quite what it used to be, but then I remembered our preznit, so never mind.)
Laura Rozen says that one of her contacts refutes the notion that this person had access to the info. All that means to me is that loose OSP lips sink INC ships. They’re a tight little bunch of crazy mixed up kids. Anybody from Perle to Wolfowitz himself could have spilled those beans to lil’ Mikey. At which point, it looks like Chalabi might have gotten Mikey all likkered up and he told old kindly Uncle Ahmad some things he shouldn’t have.
Note: I posted this earlier and for reasons unknown it disappeared. So, here it is again…
Obviously, I believe that the unlawful enemy combatant designation is unconstitutional and unnecessary. I don’t happen to think this terrorist threat is really a “war,” as the word is commonly defined (outside of marketing circles anyway) so the whole thing is moot in my mind. However, even if I were to stipulate that it is a war then I would argue that we should officially declare it, then hold prisoners under the Geneva conventions and quit this nonsense that we will always be at war with Oceania…err…terrorism. It seems silly to have to point this out, but that is quintessential propaganda in case anybody’s forgotten.
Nobody ever knows going in when a war will end, so this idea that this is unprecedented is nonsense. When the government starts using this “open-endedness” to justify circumventing the constitution, one should be just a little bit skeptical of its motives.
And even if I were to agree that we have no choice but to throw out habeus corpus on an ad hoc basis at the discretion of the president, is there any reason to believe that the enemy combatant issue would be handled by this administration with more competence than they handle anything else? (This is the reason, of course, why you don’t do this. Sometimes leaders bad and stupid — not good and smart.)
This article from the April 26th Newsweek gives a little window into the professional approach they take in deciding who is and isn’t an “enemy combatant.” Let’s just say it validates the concerns of Enlightenment thinkers about the rule of men vs the rule of law:
The Yemeni-born men from Lackawanna, N.Y., were accused of training at a camp in Afghanistan, where some had met Osama bin Laden. The president’s men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men should be locked up indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer. That’s what authorities had done with two other Americans, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. “They are the enemy, and they’re right here in the country,” Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashcroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing “material support” to Al Qaeda.
On that day, at least, the attorney general won the debate, and the Lackawanna Six eventually pleaded guilty. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that top Bush officials would spar over such weighty legal issues.
[…]
…the administration hadn’t anticipated that U.S. citizens might occasionally turn up in the mix. In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates—and even shouting matches—inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.
On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. “There have been some very intense disagreements,” says a senior law-enforcement official. “It has been a hard-fought war.”
It’s far from over. Officials say they eventually settled on “informal” rules to decide whether a detained American should be thrown into the brig or brought to trial.
So, the policy is carried out by “informally” deciding between Cheney and Rumsfeld’s omnicient talents as judge, jury and executioner or John Ashcroft’s need to bask in the spotlight. Who needs that old relic, the rule ‘o law, when you have a faultless sytem such as this? It’s especially edifying that that politics never enter into any of this. It’s always about keeping those babies safe:
In a speech earlier this year, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to reassure critics, saying the White House had an “elaborate” and “painstaking” system to identify enemy combatants. But it didn’t start out that way. In truth, the enemy combatants policy evolved in fits and starts. In the spring of 2002, U.S. soldiers discovered Hamdi, a Louisiana-born, Saudi-raised U.S. citizen, among the hundreds of ragtag Taliban fighters sent to Guantanamo. They realized they had a problem. The other detainees could be tried before military tribunals. But Bush’s order authorizing the tribunals had exempted U.S. citizens a decision intended to disarm critics. Hamdi was flown to a naval brig in Norfolk, Va., while administration lawyers tried to figure out what to do with him. When a local public defender who read about Hamdi in the newspaper petitioned to meet with him, an assistant U.S. attorney made a novel argument in court: Hamdi was an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and had no right to counsel.
Administration lawyers concede that there was a seat-of-the-pants quality to the way events unfolded. “There is a sense in which we were making this up as we went along,” says one top government attorney. “You have to remember we were dealing with a completely new paradigm: an open-ended conflict, a stateless enemy and a borderless battlefield.”
Yes. They were swimming in totally uncharted waters. Americans involved in terrorism was simply unprecedented. Nothing in our legal system could possibly deal with people who were involved in such an operation. (Well, except for the first World Trade Center bombers or Tim McVeigh or the Lackawanna Six or Lind and those guys in Oregon. But still…) If only we had the option of a charge like conspiracy to commit murder carrying life in prison or even the death penalty, maybe we could effectively deal with ruthless potential killers like Padilla. Our only choice was to have Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft hash it out among themselves. Our legal system just can’t handle this sort of thing.
Before long, administration officials would extend the battlefield to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, where agents picked up Jose Padilla on May 8, 2002. The Muslim convert was arrested while returning home from Pakistan, where he had allegedly met with a top Qaeda operative and planned to set off a dirty bomb in the United States. He was named a material witness and appointed a lawyer. But prosecutors soon realized they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with any crime.
Doesn’t that seem odd? The evidence cited today certainly sounds chilling.
To avoid releasing him, Bush decreed on June 9 that Padilla, too, was an enemy combatant. He was sent to a military brig in South Carolina. At first, administration officials saw no problems with Padilla’s treatment. But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him indefinitely without counsel.
Again, why? If this guy is a huge danger and these people have all seen the evidence that makes that so, what is the problem? They’re all signed on to the program, I assume. No, ACLU sissyboys in this bunch, right?
Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little office betting pool. These guys needed to blow off some steam. (Consider how much worse that could have been.) And old Ted would never advise the administration to do anything for purely political reasons. He just doesn’t think that way.
But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants—including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.
I know I feel a lot safer. I just worry that Cheney didn’t get the last word on that truck driver. He’s a man who knows a terrorist when he sees one.
I like this article by Dana Milbank about Bush’s tendency to make straw man arguments. The problem is that Junior isn’t really making straw man arguments. He’s spouting lies and half truths that were spoon fed to him by his staff in small bites that he can understand and remember. By saying that Bush has any awareness of the concept of a logical fallacy serves only to make him seem to have some sort of mental agility when, in fact, he is barely sentient. If Laura circled this article in red crayon for him this morning and he had a look at it between counting the box scores on his fingers and toes, I have no doubt that his response was “Ya’ mean like a scarecrow?”
