Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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May
19, 2004
Elizabeth
W. Corrie
Caterpillar Should Do the Right Thing,
Now
Bill
and Kathleen Christison
The US Can't Win
Vijay
Prashad
For Whom the Polls Toll: the Indian Elections of 2004
Ray
Hanania
Israeli War Crimes: Who to Believe, AIPAC or Amnesty Intl.?
Greg
Moses
Man President Kisses Up at AIPAC
Michael
Gillespie
Who is Kenneth deGraffenried?
Josh
Frank
Homes Destroyed; Death Toll Mounts: But Where's John Kerry?
Gary
Corseri
Out of Iraq and Plato's Cave
Kevin
Alexander Gray
If Malcolm Were Alive
May
18, 2004
Neve
Gordon
The Gaza Debacle
Doug
Stokes
Imperial Policing: Why Abu Ghraib
Shouldn't Surprise Us
Bob
Wing
The Color of Abu Ghraib
Vanessa
Jones
Man on a Leash
Thomas
P. Healy
Chemical Trespass: the Body Burden
Zeynep
Toufe
Torture and Moral Agency: the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
Kenneth
Roth
Mistreatment of Detainees in US Custody: a Letter to Bush
Elaine
Cassel
Pre-empting the Bill of Rights: The Other War, One Year Later
Website
of the Day
Truth Against Truth
May
17, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The John-John Ticket: Kerry Woos McCain
Laura
Santina
Military Conditioning and Abu Ghraib
Mickey
Z.
With Friends Like These: More Election 2004 Madness
Frederick
B. Hudson
Police Terror: Three Mothers Search for Justice
Shakirah
Esmail-Hudani
Inside Abu Ghraib: the Violence of the Camera
Boris
Leonardo Caro
The Revelations of Mr. W.
Alex
Dawoody
Iraq: From Saddam to Occupation
Victor
Kattan
On Watching the Execution of Nick Berg
Ron
Jacobs
Rumsfeld's Sovereignty Shell Game
May
15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
Valentine
ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
Stanton
Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
Tripp
Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
Cloughley
Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
Act
Justin
E. H. Smith
Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
Baker
Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
Surkiewicz
Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
Whitlow
Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
Basement
Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
May
14, 2004
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's POW Porn
Ron
Jacobs
Secret History of the War on Drugs
William
Blum
God, Country and Torture
Michael
Donnelly
The People v. Corporate Greed: A Victory on the North Coast
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Stephen
Gowans
Building Democracy in Iraq and Other
Absurdities
May
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Where is Kerry?
Colm
O'Laithian
Torture and Degradation: Revenge American Style?
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassan
Wal-Mart: Scrooge with Hi-Tech Accounting
Practices
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush on the Inhumane Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners
Willliam
James Martin
Deir Yassin Massacre Recalled
Marc
Salomon
Reality TV Bites
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
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Operation Phoenix & Iraq
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Wendell
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Small Destructions Add Up
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WMD: Who Said What When
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A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
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The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
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|
May
20, 2004
***
CounterPunch Exclusive ***
The Truth About
Ahmed Chalabi
Why the US Turned
Against Their Former Golden Boy -- He was Preparing a Coup! What
He Did as a Catspaw for Tehran: How He Nearly Bankrupted Jordan;
the Billions He Stands to Make Out of the New Iraq
By ANDREW COCKBURN
In dawn raids today, American troops
surrounded Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters and home in Baghdad,
put a gun to his head, arrested two of his aides, and seized
documents. Only five months ago, Chalabi was a guest of honor
sitting right behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union. What
brought about this astonishing fall from grace of the man who
helped provide the faked intelligence that justified last year's
war?
The answer lies in Chalabi's
reaction to his gradual loss of US support in recent months
and the realisation that he will be excluded from the post June
30 Iraqi "government" being crafted by UN envoy Lakhdar
Brahimi.
Lashing out against his exclusion
from power, he has in effect been laying the groundwork for
a coup, assembling a Shia political coalition with the express
aim of destabilising the "Brahimi" government even
before it takes office. "He has been mobilising forces
to make sure the UN initiative fails," one well connected
Iraqi political observer, who knows Chalabi well, told me today.
"He has been tellling these people that Brahimi is part
of a Sunni conspiracy against the Shia."
This scheme is by no means
wholly outlandish. Chalabi has recruited significant Shia support,
including Ayatollah Mohammed Bahr al Uloom, a leading member
of the Governing Council and two other lesser known Council members.
Significantly, his support also includes a faction of the Dawa
Party that has been excluded from the political process by the
occupation authority and which also supports rebel cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr. Other recently recruited allies include Iraqi Hezbollah.
All are joined in a Chalabi dominated Supreme Shia Council,
similar to a sectarian Lebanese model. "Sooner rather than
later," the Iraqi observer, a close student of Shia politics,
points out, "Moqtada al Sadr is going to be killed. That
willl leave tens, hundreds of thousands of his supporters looking
for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim, he can
take on that role. His dream has always been to be a sectarian
Shia leader."
Given the imminence of the
announcement of the post June 30 arrrangement, the stakes are
very high for the US. The occupation command in Baghdad well
understands that Chalabi has the resources and skills to wreck
the all-important arrangements for the official handover of
power. "People realise that Ahmed is a gambler, prepared
to bring it all down," I was told today, "and this
raid may not be at all to his detriment."
US disenchantment with the
man who has received $27 million of taxpeyers' money in recent
years has been gathering pace in recent months. "You can
piss on Chalabi" President Bush remarked to Jordan's King
Abdullah some months ago. "Ahmed is on good terms with
many people," a senior Iraqi politician told me waspishly,
"and on bad terms with a great many more."
Meanwhile the star of the octogenarian
politician Adnan Pachachi, foreign minister forty years ago in
the revolutionary government of General Abdul Karim Qassim, and
now a hot tip for post June 30 president, is rising fast. Chalabi
despises Pachachi as a tiresome old codger with no place in today's
Iraq. "He should go home and play bridge," he snaps
at mention of the rival's name. Pachachi indulgently dismisses
Chalabi as "articulate, but not wise -- I've told him to
his face, 'Ahmed, you're too clever by half.'"
Distrust him as they may however,
Iraqis suspect that Chalabi will be a looming presence in Iraq
for years to come. Since he returned to Baghdad just over a year
ago he has succeeded in building a financial powerbase both in
business and key sectors of the fledgling Iraqi administration.
His prescient seizure of Saddam's intelligence files a year ago
has equipped him with a useful tool to intimidate opponents.
In politics, despite his apparent lack of general appeal, he
has been carving out a role as the Ian Paisley of the Iraqi Shia,
fomenting sectarian assertiveness and brokering deals. At the
same time, he has maintained his foreign alliances, not merely
with the neo-conservatives in the Pentagon and right wing Washington
think tanks, who are still insisting that he should have been
installed in power in Baghdad by the US a year ago, but also
in Tehran. Chalabi's connections to the most hardline elements
in Iran, particularly the intelligence officers of the Revolutionary
Guards, are longstanding and still flourish today.
Chalabi's fusion of business
and politics is very much in the family tradition. Until the
1958 military coup swept away the monarchy that had ruled Iraq
under British direction since the 1920s, the Chalabis were probably
the richest family in the country. The founder of the family
fortunes, Ahmed's great grandfather, had been the tax "farmer"
(ie he collected taxes at a profit) of Kadimiah, a town near
Baghdad. The Iraqi historian Hanna Batatu describes him as "a
very harsh man, (who) kept a bodyguard of armed slaves and had
a special prison at his disposal. When he died the people of
Kadimiah  heaved
a sigh of relief." His son flourished in the good graces
of the British, while the next in line, Ahmed's father, prospered
by bailing out the racing debts of a powerful member of the royal
family, earning high political office thereby, and leveraging
that position into lucrative business arrangements. Ahmed's uncle
meanwhile rose to be the most powerful banker in the country.
As Batatu notes: "..by translating economic power into political
influence, and political influence into economic power, the Chalabis
climbed from one level of wealth to another."
However, when the 1958 revolution
swept their Iraqi wealth away, the Chalabis quickly put down
roots in Lebanon. Ahmed and his brothers married into powerful
families in the Lebanese shia community. "They become so
Lebanese that they started pronouncing their name Shalabi instead
of Chalabi," remarks another former Iraqi exile. "Lebanese
don't pronounce a hard Ch sound." Initially, Chalabi himself
seemed destined for an academic career. No one has ever denied
he is extremely smart, as well as intellectually competitive.
"When he was at primary school," recalls one of his
innumerable cousins, "if he got nine marks in a test and
someone else got ten, he would tear up the papers and run around
in a tantrum."
By 1970 he had graduated from
MIT, collected a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago
and returned to teach at the renowned American University of
Beirut, where he attracted attention as "a walking encyclopedia."
In 1977 he moved to Jordan and founded the Petra Bank. A decade
later, Petra had grown to be the second largest bank in the country,
with links to other Chalabi family banks and investment companies
in Beirut, Geneva and Washington. The bank introduced Visa cards
to Jordan, along with ATMs and other innovative technology. Ahmed
himself was one of the most influential businessmen in the country,
esteemed by local entrepreneurs for his readiness to issue credit,
and enjoying close links to powerful members of the royal family.
As long as no outsider got to look at the books, everything was
fine.
On August 2, 1989, however
the Jordanian banking authorities took over Petra on the grounds
that when all Jordanian banks were told to deposit 30% of their
foreign exchange with the central bank, Petra had failed to come
up with the money. Ahmed left the country two weeks later, announcing
that he was going "on holiday", although rumors persist
in the middle east that he had crossed the Syrian border in the
trunk of his friend Tamara Daghistani's car. Meanwhile his brothers'
banks in Geneva and Beirut had already gone under.
In April, 1992, Chalabi was
tried in his absence (along with 47 associates), found guilty,
and sentenced to 22 years jail on 31 charges of embezzlement,
theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation. However,
because the trial had been in front of a military court under
Jordan's martial law, international law prevented his extradition.
For anyone who asks, Chalabi
has always had a ready explanation for Petra's collapse, one
that his daughter Tamara was still loyally repeating in the Wall
Street Journal as recently as last August: "Petra Bank was
seized and destroyed by those in the Jordanian establishment
who'd become willing to do Saddam Hussein's bidding. That Jordan
has branded my father as an 'asset diverter' would be comic,
were it not for what it says about that kingdom's servile complicity
with Saddam." Saddam, according to this version, got his
Jordanian lackeys to move against Petra because Ahmed Chalabi
posed a threat to the Iraqi leader. The bank was basically in
fine shape and would have survived if the government hadn't intervened
and panicked bank customers. The prosecution, conviction and
sentencing of Ahmed Chalabi was an act of political spite.
Chalabi's claim that he was
framed reduces Jordanian officials to choleric fury. "The
collapse was due to Chalabi's mismanagement of the bank and the
misuse of its assets," responded one senior banking official,
when I relayed Chalabi's excuse of injured innocence. "He
ran it as his private piggy bank."
There may be a particle of
truth in this -- the prime minister at the time of the takeover
was known for his deep and profitable relationship with Saddam,
and Chalabi was indeed a critic of the Iraqi dictator -- but
it is also beside the point. Behind all the bluster--"Petra
was solvent and growing," he insisted in an e-mail to me--the
numbers laid out in the (pre-Enron) Arthur Andersen "Petra
Bank balance sheet--August 2 1989" speak for themselves,
as do other reports, mostly in Arabic and rarely examined by
outsiders, from liquidators and other investigators.
The Arthur Andersen audit was
commissioned after the Jordanian central bank, ignorant of the
real and disastrous situation inside Petra, accepted full responsibility
for the bank's debts and deposits. The accountants' confidential
report, delivered in January 1990 and as thick as a phone directory,
showed that Petra was rotten to the core in large part because
of "transactions with parties related to the former management
of the Bank (ie the Lebanese and Swiss banks managed by Chalabi's
brothers, which had already gone broke.) Overall, instead of
the $40 million or so net balance depicted in Chalabi's version
of the books, Petra had a deficit of over $215 million, which
the accountants indicated had "the potential" to grow
to $350 million.
This was a total catastrophe
for the cash-strapped desert kingdom, especially as the government
had committed itself to paying off the depositors. "For
two years, all the aid we got from Saudi Arabia and other arab
countries," recalls a former Jordanian diplomat, "went
into settling the Petra mess." Despite this, Chalabi actually
boasted to me in a recent email that "after the takeover,
all depositors were paid in full," a statement of amazing
chutzpah, given that he skipped town and left others to clean
up the mess and pay the bills. A seventeen page summary of the
investigation by the military prosecutor's office, dated April
30 1990, lists various "fictitious accounts", ie money
that Petra claimed to have in accounts with other banks that
did not in fact exist. These included the $7 million allegedly
held on December 31, 1988, in Bankers Trust, New York, or the
$21 million that was supposed to be in Wardley Ltd, but wasn't,
or the 19,196,404 Deutschmarks that was supposed to be deposited
with Socofi, the Chalabi bank in Geneva. Overall, at that date,
the "fictitious" figure came to $72 million and counting.
Elsewhere, money had been diverted to private Chalabi accounts,
or had evaporated in bad loans to other Chalabi- owned companies,
such as the $15 million that disappeared with the Rimal company,
or the roughly $14 million that had been spent on "personal
expenses" for Dr. Chalabi and various members of his family.
Among the non-performing loans
of the Petra subsidiary in Washington was $12 million owed by
Abdul Huda Farouki. He had pledged his $1,7 million house in
Maclean, Virginia as security, but as liquidators moved to seize
it, he produced a letter from his friend Ahmed claiming that
Petra had released him from that obligation before the crash.
In September 2000, just over
eight years after Ahmed Chalabi's conviction in Jordan, his brothers
Jawad and Hazem were convicted and sentenced (in absentia) by
a Geneva court for creating fake documents. The statute of limitations
had run out on other charges.
"Ahmed thought he would
never be tried and convicted," one former associate recalls.
"I remember him saying 'they don't dare sentence me, I've
got members of the royal family on the payroll.'"
"The simple fact is that
the bank was insolvent when we took it over" insists former
Central Bank governor Dr. Said Nabulsi. "I can't see why
so many people can't understand that." They look at the
figures and then go away and write things like this." Gloomily,
he dipped into a pile of clippings on his desk and held up a
recent full page article in the Financial Times headlined "Man
with a Mission" extolling Chalabi's current activities in
Baghdad. Tossing it aside, he rifled through further tributes
to Chalabi, who still has a jail cell awaiting him in Jordan.
Jordanian investigators, aided
by sleuths from the Kroll detective agency, looked long and hard
for where all the money had gone -- one estimate puts the total
losses of the Chalabi family empire at nearly $1.5 billion. "We
followed some of the cash as far as the British Virgin Islands"
says one, lamenting that the ironclad bank secrecy laws prevented
them following the trail any further.
Chalabi took partial revenge
on his Jordanian tormentors by fomenting a December 1991 "60
Minutes" story accusing King Hussein of colluding with Saddam,
but by now he was immersed in politics carving out a leading
role in the anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition. "Ahmed once said
to me 'I built up an empire of 44 companies around the world
with my brain,'" recalls an associate from that period.
"He said 'that was very difficult. Politics is very easy.'
He believes that politics is about money, that politics is a
business."
Shaking the dust of Amman from
his heels, Chalabi soon scented new opportunities in Washington.
"The United States is prepared to allocate substantial sums
for the Iraqi opposition," he confided to an opposition
activist soon after the 1991 war. "We should go for that
money." Before long, he had secured CIA funding for a new
opposition group: the Iraqi National Congress (INC) The INC was
in theory an umbrella organisation with a collective leadership,
but Chalabi, those who have worked with him agree, is not a team
player. "He always has to be in charge," one powerful
Iraqi politician told me in Baghdad. " I remember a meeting
in London where Hani Fekaki (one of the founders of the Baath
party who later fled into exile and opposition) told Chalabi:
"Ahmed, in your heart, there is a little Saddam."
The spooks found much to like
in the dynamic ex-banker. They liked his talents as an organiser,
and they especially liked the fact that he had no power base
inside or outside Iraq. Hence, as Frank Anderson, then head of
the CIA's operations directorate's near east division, once told
me , Chalabi "was not a threat to anybody. He was acceptable
as an office manager. So his weakness was a benefit."
Another benefit was his money.
One former covert operator happily recalled the inaugural meeting
of the Iraqi National Congress in Vienna, Austria in June 1992,
which was wholly, if secretly, funded by the CIA: "There
wasn't a single person there who didn't believe he was paying
for it all out of money he had embezzled from the Petra Bank!"
(I asked one investigator who had spent years probing the Petra
wreckage if anyone from the US government had ever queried him
on the true facts of the fraud. "No", not once,"
he answered, adding that journalists had also steered clear of
the ugly truths about Chalabi's banking career.)
"He doesn't want colleagues,
only employees," says one former INC associate sadly. "And
he prefers to bring in outsiders who can't work independently
of him." As example, this Iraqi opposition veteran cites
INC official Zaab Sethna, an American of Pakistani origin, and
Francis Brooke, Chalabi's Washington lobbyist. During last year's
war, Brooke, a fundamentalist Christian, told Harper's Magazine
that he would support the elimination of Saddam, "the human
Satan," even if every single Iraqi were killed in the process.
Other key aides who have stuck
by him over the years include Nabil Mousawi, a former Leeds pizzeria
manager who first attracted Chalabi's notice when he volunteered
to work the copy machine at the INC's inaugural meeting. Entifadh
Qamber, now the INC spokesman in Baghdad, has been similarly
loyal. Known for his verbal and physical aggressiveness, Qamber
once punched out an elderly Iraqi critic live on television.
Aras Karem, a Shi'ite Kurd
who has supervised Chalabi's security and military operations
since 1992, is probably the most formidable member of this inner
circle,. Once pegged by the CIA as an Iranian agent (the agency
consequently had several of his relatives jailed without charge
for years in the US) Aras played a major role in managing the
production of useful defectors in pre-war days, and still today
supervises the INC's "Intelligence Collection Program."
His direct contacts with U.S. defense intelligence make him perhaps
the only member of Chalabi's coterie to have any kind of an independent
base.
It took a few years for the
CIA high command at Langley to grasp the fact that their "office
manager" was not so easy to control. Funded by the agency,
Chalabi ensconced himself in the segment of northern Iraq that
was controlled by the Kurds, together with a small staff and
recruited an armed militia. In March 1995 he concocted an elaborate
scheme to bribe tribal leaders in and around the northern city
of Mosul into rebelling against Saddam. "That's the way
Lebanese politics works--through bribery and corruption,"
says Bob Baer, who, as CIA station chief in northern Iraq at
the time, supported the plan. "People forget that Ahmed's
really a Levantine, he learned business and politics in Beirut."
In the event, the plan fizzled.
The tribal leaders pocketed Chalabi's money and stayed home.
His friends in Iranian intelligence, whom he was hosting in Kurdistan,
had promised a simultaneous offensive in southern Iraq, but they
stayed home too. A military offensive by Chalabi's small militia
and some Kurdish allies petered out after a couple of days.
Back in Washington, the CIA
was furious that Chalabi had acted without orders, and spitefully
leaked the news that he was on their payroll, causing a furor
in northern Iraq. The following year, a quarrel between the two
main Kurdish parties led to an appeal by one side to Saddam for
help. As Iraqi forces entered the Kurdish city of Irbil, they
hunted down and massacred INC supporters who had been left in
the city. Those who managed to escape were eventually brought
to the US.
Discarded by his old patrons
at the agency, Chalabi found new allies among the right wing
neo-conservatives, for whom the destruction of Saddam and the
co-option of Iraq in a reordered Middle East emerged as a major
objective in the mid-1990s. "Of course they liked him,"
says yet another of long list of veterans of the Iraqi opposition
who now, in Baghdad, nervously entreat interviewers not to quote
them by name. "He is the quintessential anti-Arab, anti-anything
that the Arab world believes in." Chalabi's willingness,
unique among Arab politicians, to seek Israeli support -- further
bolstered his position on Capitol Hill.
Lately, Chalabi watchers have
been interested to note familiar faces from the Petra era popping
up in Baghdad in the wake of Ahmed's return in the wake of the
American tanks a year ago. Ali Saraf, for example, formerly head
of the foreign exchange department is working with Chalabi, and
there are rumors that Taj Hajjar, former proprietor of a Malaysian
shrimp farm (Jordanian banking investigators sigh nostalgically
at mention of the shrimp farm, into which so much Petra money
vanished) has been in town.
One frequent visitor from Washington
has been Chalabi's old friend Abdul Huda Farouki, who owed Petra
$12 million at the time of the collapse.
Last year Farouki's newly founded
security firm Erinys won a plum $80 million contract to guard
Iraqi oil installations, employing members of Chalabi's private
militia for the purpose, as well as the son of a close Chalabi
confidante as chief executive and his nephew Salem Chalabi as
firm's counsel. Erinys' sister concern Nour USA meanwhile garnered
$327 million deal to equip the new Iraqi army, (at least one
Kuwaiti businessman anxious to get an army contract was told
by an American official at the CPA that he would have to go through
Ahmed Chalabi) but outraged protests from the losing bidders,
coupled with the odor of the Chalabi connection, eventually forced
cancellation of the deal.
Loss of the Nour contract may
be an embarrassment, but the sums at stake in that enterprise
are dwarfed by the rewards to be reaped by anyone with the right
connections from Iraq's $16 billlion annual oil exports. It is
an area in which Chalabi has not been idle. Last November, for
example, he demonstrated his influence and connections by orchestrating
the removal of Mohammed Jibouri, executive director of the state
oil marketing agency (SOMO), a key position that controls Iraq's
oil sales. Jibouri's offense had been to inform the giant oil
trading firm Glencore that it could not trade Iraqi oil due to
its behavior while trading oil with the former regime. Within
days, the official had been placed on an enforced year's leave
of absence and ordered to vacate both his office and his apartment
in the oil ministry complex.
"Chalabi was absolutely
responsible for getting rid of Jibouri," says a well connected
oil trader. "Now Nabil (Mousawi, Chalabi's proxy on the
Governing Council) travels with the minister to Opec conferences
and is trying to make oil deals."
"I asked Ibrahim Bahr
Uloom (the oil minister) why he was taking Mousawi to Opec,"
says an old friend of Uloom. "He said, 'Ahmed forced me.'"
Several well placed oil industry sources have confirmed to me
that Mousawi has approached at least two international oil companies
with offers to represent them in Iraq (the offers were rebuffed)
and has himself been trading Iraqi oil.
"Believe me, no,"
said Mousawi when I asked him about these offers.
"Not that I would not
do it if I was not connected to the Governing Council (but) it's
quite difficult to carry on both sides...There'll be a lot of
money to be made (in Iraq) for many years to come." He also
denied that he has been trading oil, and insisted that Jibouri
was dismissed after an investigation by the finance committee
of the Iraqi Governing Council (Chairman: A. Chalabi) for giving
contracts to firms who had flouted sanctions, rather than the
other way round. Chalabi on the other hand denied to me that
the Governing Council, let alone he himself, had anything to
do with the matter.
Chalabi also told me flatly
that he is not presently engaged in any private business dealings
in Iraq. Many in the region have a different impression, including
oil traders using unofficial ports that have sprung up down the
Shatt al-Arab from Basra.
Oil minister Ibrahim Bahr Uloom
is considered a close ally of Chalabi's, but he is only one of
a number of key officials widely regarded by Iraqis to be in
the INC chief's pocket. Finance minister Kamil Gailani, formerly
a waiter in the Sinjan restaurant in downtown Amman, is viewed
as another Chalabi acolyte, as is the head of the central bank
and the bosses of the two leading commercial banks. Nephew Salem
Chalabi, who has nworked closely with free market fundamentalist
fanatics from the CPA on framing crucial occupation edicts, is
now overseeing preparations for the trial of Saddam Hussein.
These connections, together
with Chalabi's own chairmanship of the Governing Council's finance
committee, facilitate such maneuvers as Gailani's current efforts
to recruit a western law firm to advise on renegotiating Iraq's
overseas debt. British and American lawyers mulling a bid for
the contract are in no doubt that it is Chalabi who will be supervising
the renegotiation, nor are they unaware of the moneymaking potential
of the process. Some officials in Washington are no less perturbed
by his efforts to get what one calls "his grubby little
hands" on pools of cash secretly stashed abroad by Saddam
Hussein. "That money belongs to the Iraqi people,"
says the official, "not Ahmed Chalabi. (Chalabi is also
recruiting law firms to investigate the UN oil-for -food scandal,
which, like Saddam's intelligence files, should provide him with
a trove of useful information.)
This is not the first time
that Chalabi's sources of finance have attracted attention in
Washington. In 2002, US State Department auditors probing what
had happened to a US subsidy of Chalabi's INC queried the lack
of accounting for the large sums spent on an "Intelligence
Collection Program." Chalabi refused a more precise accounting
on the grounds that his agents' lives were at stake. But according
to one former Chalabi associate, at least some of the intelligence
money had actually been spent in Iran, which would have been
a good reason for keeping the accounts a little fuzzy. This former
associate recalls, that, in the late '90s, "Ahmed opened
an INC office in Tehran, spending the Americans' money, and he
joked to me that 'the Americans are breaching their embargo on
Iran.'"
At the time, Chalabi let it
be known just who his friends were in Tehran. "When I met
him in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with
Iranian intelligence," recalls Scott Ritter, the former
high profile UN weapons inspector. "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."
Had Ritter made the trip (the
CIA refused him permission), he would have been dealing with
Chalabi's chums in Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence,
a faction which regarded Saddam Hussein with a venomous hatred
spawned both by the bloody war of the 1980s and the Iraqi dictator's
continuing support of the terrorist Mojaheddin Khalq group. They
had a clear interest in fomenting American paranoia about Saddam,
which makes them the most likely authors of at least one carefully
crafted piece of forged intelligence regarding Saddam's nuclear
program -- an operation in which a Chalabi-sponsored defector
played a central role.
Early in 1995, an "Action
Team" of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency descended on the offices of the Iraqi nuclear program
in Baghdad. They had with them a 20 page document that apparently
originated from inside "Group 4," the department that
had been responsible for designing the Iraqi bomb. The stationary,
page numbering, and stamps all appeared authentic, according
to one senior member of the Iraqi bomb team. "It was a 'progress
report,'" he recalls, "about 20 pages, on the work
in Group 4 departments on the results of their continued work
after 1991. It referred to results of experiments on the casting
of the hemispheres (ie the bomb core of enriched uranium) with
some crude diagrams." As evidence that Iraq was successfully
pursuing a nuclear bomb in defiance of sanctions and the inspectors,
it was damning.
The document was almost faultless,
but not quite. The scientists noticed that some of the technical
descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian.
"Most notable," says one scientist, "was the use
of the term 'dome'--'Qubba' in Iranian, instead of 'hemisphere'--'Nisuf
Kura' in Arabic." In other words, the document had to have
been originally written in Farsi by an Iranian scientist and
then translated into Arabic.
Tom Killeen, of the Iraq Nuclear
Verification Office at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, confirms
this account of the incident. "After a thorough investigation
the documents were determined not to be authentic and the matter
was closed."
Asked how the IAEA obtained
the document in the first place, Killeen replied "Khidir
Hamza." Hamza was the former member of the Iraqi weapons
team who briefly headed the bomb design group before being relegated
to a sinecure posting (his effectiveness as a nuclear engineer
was limited by his pathological fear of radioactivity and consequent
refusal to enter any building where experiments were underway.)
In 1994 he made his way to Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters in Iraqi
Kurdistan, and eventually arrived in Washington. where he carved
out a career based on an imaginative claim to have been "Saddam's
Bombmaker."
As late as the summer of 2002
Hamza was being escorted by Chalabi's Washington representative
Francis Brooke to the Pentagon to brief Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz on details of Saddam's allegedly burgeoning nuclear
weapons program. There is no indication that he himself ever
visited Iran. Asked by e-mail whether he had been receiving intelligence
from the Iranians, Chalabi, despite his 1997 assertion to Scott
Ritter, rejects the charge as "an absolute falsehood."
Judging by his frequent visits to Iran, and the warm manner in
which his underlings discuss the ayatollahs' regime, Chalabi
links with Tehran are still strong. No less important are his
ties with the neocon gang in Washington, who still maintain that
the big mistake of the occupation was not putting Ahmed in charge
right away, Simultaneously, his championship of Shi'ite groups
in Iraq becomes ever more assertive -- his newspaper has recently
been campaigning against Adnan Pachachi for allegedly excluding
Moqtada al-Sadr from the Governing Council!
One well connected Iraqi told
me recently, "he will play the Shia extremist card for all
it is worth. He's quite prepared to break Iraq apart if it serves
his purpose. He's really dangerous now."
Andrew Cockburn is the co-author of Out
of the Ashes: the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein and a contributor
to CounterPunch's hot new history of the last three US military
operations, Imperial
Crusades. He wishes to acknowledge the generous support of
the Graydon Carter Foundation in the preparation of this article.
Weekend
Edition Features for May 15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
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ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
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Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
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Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
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Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
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Justin
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Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
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Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
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Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
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Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
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Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
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