Chalabi and the Niger Uranium Forgery- Whodunnit?
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Chalabi and the Niger Uranium Forgery- Whodunnit?
Date: Mar 19, 2010 5:31 AM
I am answering Raimondo (below) on the
Michael Ledeen Niger Stunt, and how the
double-agent Chalabi got the best of the
US-Foreign-Policy-Writing Israelis:
"***What we don’t have is a plan on what we are going to do once
Saddam is out of office. Mr. Chalabi represents our best hopes in that
regard,***"
DINNER WITH AHMED:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20080317_dinner_with_ahmed/
"Within the hour Chalabi returned to his apartment, accompanied by a
tall man in a gray suit, Stephen Rademaker. Rademaker was the husband
of Danielle Pletka, the senior professional staff member for Near East
and South Asia affairs on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
Rademaker was the legal counsel for the House of Representatives
Foreign Affairs Committee and, like his wife, an unabashed member of
the right wing of the Republican Party, along with being a champion of
Chalabi. Rademaker joined Francis Brooke, Chalabi and me in the
comfortably laid-out living room of the town house, where we discussed
not arms control but regime change. I started off with the premise
that the best way to achieve regime change in Iraq was to hold Saddam
accountable for his requirement to disarm, and that the focus of our
discussion should therefore be how to get the U.S. government to take
more seriously the work of UNSCOM, and to put the weight of America
behind such smoking-gun evidence as the VX nerve agent lab report from
Aberdeen. Rademaker interjected at that point. “We agree. But we all
know Saddam is cheating, and that his days are numbered. ***What we
don’t have is a plan on what we are going to do once Saddam is out of
office. Mr. Chalabi represents our best hopes in that regard,*** which
is why we’re delighted that you and he are meeting like this.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20080317_dinner_with_ahmed/
---------
See also, "Cheney-in-the-plot for the
Puppet Government of Syria:"
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3303cheney_bibi.html
"Cheney's war scheme against Syria also implicates Abramoff, according
to a Jan. 11, 2006 story by Justin Raimondi, posted on antiwar.com.
"One investigator, eager to obtain information about the neo-con-
sponsored Reform Party of Syria, led by one Farid Ghadry, the Syrian
version of Ahmed Chalabi" Raimondi wrote, "stumbled on the Abramoff
connection: 'When repeated calls to [Ghadry's] organization went
unanswered, I visited the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the RPS.
***Reform Party of Syria is in the office of super-Zionist lobbyist
Jack Abramoff.*** Middle Gate Ventures, Abramoff's political advisory
company, partners with RPS."
- - -
Follow That Story!
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/03/18/follow-that-story-2/
My favorite dropped narratives
by Justin Raimondo, March 19, 2010
Part of the problem in writing a column such as this, where I have to
write about events as they unfold and at a very rapid pace, is the
danger of going too fast – of failing to follow up on stories that
once seemed of such pressing interest that I devoted 2000-word columns
to the subject, and often a whole series of pieces, only to leave my
readers with a lot of loose ends.
So let’s clean up some of those longstanding loose ends, why don’t
we?
My own favorite is the mystery of the Niger uranium forgeries [.pdf].
Remember that? President Bush’s infamous “sixteen words,” which loomed
so large in the headlines at one point, have faded with the years, and
yet the mystery lingers on. Who fed the White House “intelligence”
based on crude forgeries, which imputed that the Iraqis had tried to
buy uranium from the African country of Niger in an effort to
construct a nuclear weapon?
The forgeries, which somehow made it onto the President’s desk
embedded in a State of the Union speech, were so crude and obvious
that it took IAEA scientists but a few hours to debunk them. So how
did something soobviously fraudulent get injected into the US
intelligence stream in the first place – and by whom?
In their extravagant disregard for the known facts and fondness for
complex narratives, the authors of these forgeries created a typical
example of the sort of “intelligence” that pushed us into a
disastrous, costly, andunnecessary war. One portion of the documents
purported to demonstrate the existence of an international network
linking Iraq with nearly every known terrorist group and a
confederation of Arab states – rather like the worldview propounded by
neoconservative guru and spook-ster Michael Ledeen in his book, The
War Against the Terror Masters. As Ledeen was one of the prime
suspects, according to several reports, in this bit of legerdemain,
the similarities may be far from coincidental.
Yet the media – for a while fixated on those “sixteen words” – never
followed up, and neither did the much-promised investigation into the
intelligence-gathering methods of the Bush administration – the sort
of methods that let the Niger forgeries slip through the net.
The Niger forgeries were pretty clearly part of a highly successful
effort to lie us into war, and the lies, in this case, did not
originate with the White House – which was sorely embarrassed by the
exposure of the fraud. Quite obviously the perpetrators didn’t care
about that. So whodunit? We still don’t know.
My second favorite unsolved mystery is l’affaire Chalabi – the
counterintelligence investigation into the double-and –triple-dealing
Ahmed Chalabi, neocon hero and convicted embezzler. It was Chalabi’s
group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress, that later dubbed
themselves “heroes in error” for having fed the US government and the
New York Times reams of lies about Saddam’s “weapons of mass
destruction” (and were paidby the US taxpayers to do so).
Hailed by the neocons as the George Washington of “liberated” Iraq,
Chalabi enjoyed access to top US government officials and was
portrayed in the media as a staunch US ally, a veritable model of the
kind of Arab leader that would emerge on the heels on George W. Bush’s
“global democratic revolution.” Chalabi was a special guest of the
President at his State of the Union speech, and hobnobbed with the
powerful on his many visits to Washington. In the spring of 2004,
however, the CIA abruptly cut off Chalabi’s subsidy, launched raids on
his Iraqi headquarters, and subjected Pentagon personnel in Washington
to lie detector tests about information they may have passed on to
Chalabi and his people.
The backstory quickly emerged: the US had tapped into the private
communications network used by Iranian government officials and broken
their code, but somehow the Iranians had discovered the break-in, and
hurriedly plugged the giant hole in their security. A senior official
in the Bush administration was cited by Fox News as having said
“"There is no need for an investigation because we’re quite certain
[Chalabi] did it.”
Not long afterwards, Bush’s undersecretary of defense for policy,
Douglas J. Feith, resigned. Feith’s policy shop had been unusually
close to Chalabi. The results of the investigation into penetration of
the Pentagon were never announced.
Today, Chalabi is riding high, having aligned himself with the ruling
party in Iraq: the hero of the neocons is now an open Iranian agent.
He played a key role in disqualifying mainly Sunni parties in the
Iraqi elections, and his connections with militant Shi’ites are
extensive. The question is: who in the Bush administration, among
Chalabi’s many admirers and promoters, gave him access to the tightly-
held highly sensitive information that the US had broken the Iranian
code? If Chalabi is guilty – and he is – then he’s not alone, but who
in our government – and it would’ve had to have been fairly high up –
helped him betray the US? We still don’t know the answer to that
question.
These two stories are at the top of my list of dropped narratives that
seem to have no ending. It’s like reading a murder mystery and
discovering the final twenty pages are missing. The problem is that
the enforcement arm of the US government, especially as regards its
own security, is not always allowed to follow its investigatory
instincts to the end. Politics often gets in the way of sensitive
probes, and in the two above-mentioned cases, that, I fear, is what
happened – US counterintelligence no doubt has some inkling of the
perpetrators, but has been prevented from following the trail of
evidence.
Expecting Congress to investigate these brazen violations of law and
US national security is almost as pointless as waiting for the US
media to pursue the story – i.e., forget it, and down the Memory Hole
it goes. Here at Antiwar.com, however, these stories are still alive,
because that’s why we’re here – to debunk the lies and keep reminding
you of who told them.
-----------------------
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org
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news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci