Alex Constantine - January 10, 2025
Ahmed Chalabi was instrumental in fabricating the justification for war in Iraq, but the press has never had much to say about his past. He made his appearance in headlines after neoconservative DCI James Woolsey flew off the the UK at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld in search of information linking Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 flying death squad.
Antiwar.com's John Taylor recounts, "Woolsey came back with a story alleging that Mohammed Atta had met a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague shortly before Sept. 11. Never mind that only the most slender evidence supported the tale and that the FBI soon determined that Atta had been in Virginia Beach on the day in question; the story was told and retold, especially by Vice President Cheney, and believed by a significant segment of the American public."
But Woolsey already had a relationship with Chalabi that began well before he set off for the UK. "In 1998 Woolsey and his law firm, Shea & Gardner, were instrumental in obtaining $100 million from Congress to fund the Iraqi National Congress, a group of refugees, opportunists, and political hangers-on dedicated to regime change in Iraq. The INC was led by master fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, who, before he became a favorite of Congress and the vice president's office, had been convicted in absentia of embezzling $230 million from Petra Bank in Jordan. Chalabi's objective was not only to use Uncle Sam to remove Saddam from power but also to get himself appointed in Saddam's place."
But Chalabi's ties to the high-brow ferrets of the Bush administration go way back. His champion James Woolsey was at home with Bush neocons who cut their teeth at the University of Chicago -- where Ahmed Chalabi taught mathematics.
Albert Wohlstetter
As Robert Dreyfuss wrote in The Nation (February 9, 2010), in a scathing critique of American Enterprise institute neocon Michael Rubin: "Rubin was not the only neoconservative whose heart fluttered when Chalabi walked into the room. Many, including ringleader Richard Perle, supported Chalabi since the 1980s, and even earlier Chalabi was a protégé of ALVERT WOHLSTETTER, the eminence grise of the neoconservative defense and national security movement for whom the AEI's 12th floor conference room in grandly named the 'Wohlstetter Conference Center.'
"Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in the early 1970s at the University of Chicago's math department, introduced Chalabi to Perle in the mid-1980s – and the rest, as they say, is history. Even when concrete evidence emerged about Chalabi's perfidy – that is, after Chalabi was caught leaking ultra top secret information to the Iranian ambassador about U.S. eavesdropping on Iran's representatives in Baghdad – Perle and others doggedly defended Chalabi as a poor, misunderstood Arab neocon, in the mold of their favorite Arab, Fouad Ajami."
The allegation that Chalabi was an Iranian spy comes from Chalabi himself. Dreyfuss reported: "Even at the beginning, even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Chalabi made no secret of his ties to Iran. Indeed, in the hallway outside AEI's very Wohlstetter Conference Center, during the run up to the war in late 2002 and early 2003, Chalabi himself talked to me openly about his links to Iran."
Not easy to keep first-degree treason under wraps. Dreyfuss wrote, "Rubin remained faithful to Chalabi even after the April, 2004 incident in which Chalabi was accused of passing secret U.S. intelligence to Iran. The inside story of that scandal has not been reported in depth by the mainstream media, but according to U.S. intelligence sources, here's what happened: Chalabi, once in Baghdad, began having regular meetings with the Iranian ambassador to Iraq. During those meetings, Chalabi blabbed to the Iranian ambassador about U.S. policy in Iraq and other matters, and the ambassador duly wrote detailed cables to his bosses in Tehran about information gleaned from Chalabi. However, what Chalabi didn't know is that the National Security Agency had broken the Iranian diplomatic code, and it was reading the texts of cables from Baghdad to Tehran from the ambassador – including the ones that involved Chalabi. Lo and behold, back at the Pentagon, Chalabi's friends such as Feith and Wolfowitz read those transcripts, and they were horrified to see their friend Chalabi in deep exchanges with the Iranians. Someone – whether it was Feith or Wolfowitz, or even Rubin himself, we'll never know – warned Chalabi to stop blabbing to the Iranians. But Chalabi, ever irrepressible, told the Iranians that the U.S. had broken their code! That, too, found its way back to Washington, and Chalabi was exposed."
Newspapers still refer to Chalabi as a "senior Iraqi politician." And now you know ... the rest of the story! -- AC