The Iranian Answer to Ahmed Chalabi Plays the Pentagon

Lost amidst the yawns greeting the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war intelligence [Is it news, anymore?] was the supplemental report on the 2001 visit between Americans and Iranian exiles in Rome, in which the US solicited yet more faulty intelligence from previously-debunked exiles.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Much as Ahmad Chalabi sold his bill of goods to eager and unwitting Bush officials like Doug Feith long after the CIA declared him an unreliable charlatan, US officials eager to depose Saddam and topple the Iranian regime eagerly soaked up faulty intelligence from Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Ghorbanifar, who was a middle man in the Iran-Contra dealings, was labeled a 'fabricator' by the CIA in 1984 in a notice which said Ghorbanifar "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance. Any future approaches by subject...should...not be taken seriously." [SIC, pg 5] The situation mirrors that with Chalabi, whereas an exile who's been long regarded as unreliable continued to be welcomed, and paid well, by hawks in and out of the administration who were fixing the intelligence around the preordained end, rather than setting the end goal based on reliable intelligence.

Among the three members of the US party were Larry Franklin, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to passing classified information to AIPAC, Michael Ledeen, employed by the American Enterprise Institute and traveling as a citizen, and Harold Rhode, personally charged with "purging the DoD of anyone opposing the anti-Iraq policy." Surrounding Franklin's conviction, the Pentagon released a statement indicating that Franklin, in spite of the accusations, never influence Middle East policy and was thus not a liability. The Rome visits, however, belie that claim outright.

Returning to McClatchy:

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

Again, the Defense Department, and Feith's Office of Special Plans, was soliciting dubious intelligence from exiles, but had to conceal that it was doing so because it knew that the other US intelligence agencies would not accept any intelligence culled from meetings with Ghorbanifar as reliable. There is only one explanation for continually seeking the consult of long-debunked sources, and that is because the US team knew what they were getting. As Chalabi and Ghorbanifar supplied the stories the OSP wanted to hear, there was little concern for veracity.

Indeed, when other agencies learned of the meetings, they were none too pleased:

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

On the surface, the Iranian exiles were concerned with the toppling of the Iranian regime [including a curious--and expensive--plan for a regime-crushing traffic jam], but Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know." As Iran has been the biggest strategic beneficiary of the Iraq invasion, it is not inconceivable that information could have been peddled by Iranian intelligence covertly in order to expedite the toppling of their arch-nemesis, Saddam Hussein. The animosity between Saddam and Iran seemed invisible to the OSP, however:

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy.

Again Ledeen is providing a plan for the evidence he will supposedly find, rather than finding evidence and reaching a conclusion based upon it.

The Rome meetings illustrate a contradiction to the running narrative of those on the defensive over pre-war intelligence. People such as John McCain are fond of saying that, while faulty, the intelligence available at the time all told the same story and was without conflict. The reports released today tell a much different story. Aside from the shading of intelligence to fit preordained conclusions, the Bush administration actively sought the council of sources long known as "nefarious and unreliable."

That the reliability of the sources was of no concern to the DoD is perhaps one of the clearest indications of the reverse relationship between intelligence and conclusions in the years prior to the invasion of Iraq.

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This Time We Mean It. Really.

As a parent counts to three using a series of inane fractions, so has the United States government dealt with the Iraqi exile and charlatan, Ahmed Chalabi. McClatchy reports that the US has again cut ties with one of the men most responsible for war in Iraq and the concomitant faulty intelligence.

The U.S. decision...is the fourth time that the U.S. has ended an alliance with Chalabi, whom officials in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office once touted as a successor to Saddam Hussein. The State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, however, have long regarded Chalabi as untrustworthy and a "charlatan."

Ahmed Chalabi began working with the US in the late 80s in fits and starts, but rose to prominence following the first Gulf War. At that time, he was being paid by the CIA, but that agency cut him off in 1995 after it became clear to them that he was selling fraudulent goods. Despite being known by US Intelligence as a source of false information, Chalabi used his friends in Congress to convince the State Department to pick up his tab, and he continued to fight to depose Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps no single person is more responsible for building the case for invasion than Chalabi. And certainly no one intentionally provided more false information to the government and journalists, most famously Judith Miller. This false information ranged from WMD caches to phantom ties to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Chalabi wanted Hussein gone, and wasn't the slightest bit concerned with the means, so long as he got the end he wanted.

Aram Roston, author of "The Man Who Pushed America to War," spoke to Amy Goodman in March and detailed how Chalabi got his false information into America's stream of consciousness:

No, exactly. It was—it’s all a slew of journals and a slew of television programs, but each one typically would get a piece of the pie that he was producing, a piece of the product of what ended up being phony propaganda that the Iraqi National Congress was coming up with. And they had a very elaborate system set in place to get these stories in the press and into the intelligence stream.

They weren’t very successful getting these stories into the intelligence stream. And what I found was they were most successful after the attacks of 9/11. People were very—they wanted stories about terror and about Saddam Hussein, about weapons of mass destruction. So Chalabi’s group became very successful at planting these stories. They weren’t that successful, it seems, in getting it into the CIA, because the CIA at that point didn’t trust a word that Chalabi’s group said. But they were much more successful in impacting public opinion. And that had an immense impact, obviously, on America.

Essentially, Chalabi was very good at running a propaganda campaign utilizing a cabal of journalist dupes and a credulous American public. The Bush administration, for its part, was all too happy to stoke the fire. But that the CIA didn't want any part of the intelligence speaks volumes about the run-up to the war. When the central agency for gathering foreign intelligence knows it's being sold rotten fruit, the policy makers and opinion shapers should have looked twice before biting down.

From a March, 2004, McClatchy article:

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.

In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.

Aside from the now-obviously lack of truth to his intelligence, Chalabi has a long history of fraud and embezzlement.

Chalabi, who lives in London, fled Jordan in 1989 after his Petra Bank collapsed and was convicted in absentia three years later for embezzlement. [...]

Earlier this year, the State Department threatened to cut off the INC's funding for information programs and other nonmilitary activities after an audit turned up expenditures that were deemed questionable or were unaccounted for.

The inspector general's audit of $4.3 million in grants mostly criticized the group's accounting and payroll procedures. But it also found questionable expenses, including $2,070 for a gym membership, $5,541 for legal fees related to a rental dispute and other money used for first-class plane tickets.

The audit also suggests the INC may have used taxpayers' money to lobby in Washington, which is illegal.

The funding continued, however, illustrating a recurring theme. Chalibi, having been convicted of embezzlement and cut-off by the CIA for providing faulty intelligence, continued to misuse tax dollars with relative impunity. He would receive several threats, always to have his funding restored in the end. He would be similarly 'cut-off' in 2004, this week [which, of course, is unresolved,] and intermittently in between.

So, given that it is now indisputable that Chalabi was selling faulty goods, the only question remaining is whether the administration was simply mislead in good faith, or bought into intelligence they should have knownn was bad from the start. The former is a favorite line of defense for supporters of the invasion, but the theory doesn't hold water.

As far back as the mid-90s, the CIA knew Chalabi's story. When the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't trust the intelligence, you might want to get a second opinion before spouting it out in knee-jerk fashion.

Also, in October 2002, it was clear to many that there was plenty of dispute over the veracity of Chalabi's claims.

The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate assessments of Iraq intelligence.

[...]

A major source of contention is the Pentagon's heavy reliance on data supplied by the Iraqi National Congress. The INC, the largest group within the divided Iraqi opposition, has a mixed reputation in Washington and a huge stake in whether President Bush makes good on his threat to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam by force. Its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, sees himself as a potential successor.

[...]

It is not clear whether the Pentagon solicits the views of the U.S. intelligence community on the material it collects directly from the Iraqi opposition.

A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed grave fears that civilian officials in the Pentagon may be blindly accepting assertions by Chalabi and his aides that a U.S. invasion would trigger mass defections of Iraqi troops and a quick collapse of Iraqi resistance.

"Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch," one official said.

The special unit within the Pentagon was Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, now known as a farcical cherry-picking operation based, not on gathering intelligence, but on manufacturing a case for war.

To claim that there was insufficient evidence as to the shaky foundation upon which the case for war was built prior to invasion is to ignore the facts. Chalabi was long known as a snake-oil salesman, and it was his un-verified intelligence that provided the crux of the case. Lifelong intelligence officers were pleading with the administration to take his information lightly, but the suits who wanted war were hearing none of it.

All of this information was available before the war. Feith and his cohorts can revise history all they want, but the evidence is there.

If Chalabi had two strikes for misusing funds and selling false information, then strike three comes from his dealings with Iran.

Roston:

Well, the Iranian group that is charged by Iran with exporting...the Islamic revolution is called the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards. And...the man who runs their operations in Iraq now, and did before the war, is a general named Ahmed Foruzandeh. And Ahmed Foruzandeh is considered a very talented intelligence officer, and he’s very good at covert operations for the Iranians, and he’s very committed, he’s very sophisticated, and he’s no joke. And it’s certainly true that Chalabi had met with him before the war, before the US invasion.

What concerned American intelligence officers was when they found out—they believed he was meeting—he had met with him after the invasion, while the DIA was still funding the Iraqi National Congress’s intelligence operations in Iraq. It would have been in the spring of 2004. And they had serious concerns about that.

Now, more recently, Ahmed Foruzandeh, this man I mention in the book, he’s been named by the US government itself publicly as supporting terror, supporting insurgency. He’s been designated by the Treasury Department under an executive order as a real threat to efforts in Iraq.

Passing US intelligence to Iran:

The U.S. government has launched an investigation to determine how Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi obtained highly classified American intelligence that was then passed to Iran, Bush administration officials said Friday.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, said the compromised intelligence was "highly classified and damaging."

Chalabi's most recent ouster comes as "U.S. military and intelligence officials said Chalabi is close to Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force." Suleimani, you may recall, brokered the cease-fire in Basra in March, and is also a proud member of the US terrorist watch list.

It is hard to imagine any single person who has done more harm to the United States as an outsider. Chalabi has pilfered money from tax payers to provide incredible, false intelligence claims that led the nation into a drawn-out, destructive occupation. Concurrently, he is negotiating and dealing intelligence secrets to Iran, our next target and current replacement for the USSR. Not only should Chalabi not be receiving US funds, he should be in a prison somewhere. Maybe he can be extradited to Jordan for his prior conviction, I hear they treat their prisoners real nice.

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Down Is the New Up

Doug Feith, everyone's favorite revisionist historian, took the opportunity on Hugh Hewitt's show to claim, "We took an extremely strongly pro-Geneva Convention position in the Pentagon." An interesting take on historical record, indeed, considering the well-documented steps Feith and the rest of the Justice Department took in the overt aim of subverting the Geneva Conventions. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. And so on.

In Feith's conversations with Phillippe Sands, one might mistakenly construe that just the opposite is true.

With the war in Afghanistan under way, lawyers in Washington understood that they needed a uniform view on the constraints, if any, imposed by Geneva. Addington, Haynes, and Gonzales all objected to Geneva. Indeed, Haynes in December 2001 told the CentCom admiral in charge of detainees in Afghanistan “to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted” in the questioning of John Walker Lindh.

[...]

On January 25, Alberto Gonzales put his name to a memo to the president supporting Haynes and Rumsfeld over Powell and Taft. This memo, which is believed to have been written by Addington, presented a “new paradigm” and described Geneva’s “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners” as “obsolete.”

As to Feith's own opinion:

Douglas Feith had a long-standing intellectual interest in Geneva, and for many years had opposed legal protections for terrorists under international law. He referred me to an article he had written in 1985, in The National Interest, setting out his basic view. Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; those who chose not to follow the rules, he argued, shouldn’t be allowed to rely on them, or else the whole Geneva structure would collapse. The only way to protect Geneva, in other words, was sometimes to limit its scope. To uphold Geneva’s protections, you might have to cast them aside.

[...]

As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke.

Feith seems to be in a constant state of schizophrenic flux, not sure if he's settling on the storyline that he played an immense role in the administration or whether he was merely swept along unwittingly by the "idiots" that surrounded him.

Whatever narrative he chooses, the historical record enjoys no such fluctuation, always landing on the precise opposite of Feith's ludicrous claim to the Pentagon being "pro-Geneva."

There is enough in the public record now to firmly conclude, without an ounce of doubt, that the Bush Administration, both the Departments of Justice and Defense, actively sought a legal apparatus to eliminate the need for adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Far from being pro-Geneva, the Administration sought to render it useless and inapplicable.

As far back as 2004, around the time of Abu Ghraib, it was clear to nearly everyone that Feith had a long-standing, personal opposition to Geneva.

It was Feith who devised the legal solution for getting around the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on physically or psychologically coercing prisoners of war into talking. As a Pentagon official in the 1980s, Feith had laid out the argument that terrorists didn't deserve protection under the Geneva Conventions. Once the war on terrorism started, all he had to do was implement it. And even more damning than his legal rule-making is Feith's reported reaction to complaints by military Judge Advocate General lawyers about the new, looser interrogation rules. "They said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Scott Horton, a lawyer who was approached by six outraged JAG officers last year, told the Chicago Tribune. "One of them said he calls it 'law in the service of terror.'"

Whatever the Defense Department's outlook, it is clear that Feith has held a grudge against the Geneva Conventions for a long time, and most certainly would never have been confused with someone who was "pro-Geneva." It is fairly clear by any standard that the US is bound by not only the Geneva Conventions but numerous other treaties and mandates entered into of its own volition and prohibited from engaging in the torturous interrogations Feith and his cohorts actively supported.

Far from saying Feith supported Geneva, one could easily make the case that Feith acted as a pro-torture activist.

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