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NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

By Jerry Ghinelli

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

The Real Friends of Terror

Documentary Report By Ted Honderich

"Do Americans share with "Bin Laden" some of the moral responsibility for the attack?"

"What is the difference between the horror and the violence created by suicide bombers and the horror and the violence created by bombs dropped from 30,000 feet by airplanes?"

Can suicide bombers ever be justified? Professor Honderich, Britain's leading moral philosopher, is unafraid to tell the truth as he sees it. Taking what he says is the betrayal of the Palestinian people as his starting point, Ted reveals who shares moral responsibility for recent acts of terrorism, and points a finger at the politicians. Video provided by "The Dossier"

09/24/06 Broadcast on Channel 5 UK - Runtime 40 Minutes

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NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

Ali is a painter and a student at the academy of art in north Baghdad. A few years ago he moved to the Baghdad suburb of Karrada, where many artists live because of its art market.

When I meet him, Ali is limping slightly. A white bandage protrudes from the sleeve of his striped jumper, and he frequently drops his left shoulder so that his arm rests on his thigh. These are the only outward signs of the injuries he sustained in the previous week.

In a shy, soft voice Ali tells me how he had been standing with a friend in Karrada when a bomb went off at the side of the road. "I heard an explosion very close by," he says. "I saw smoke and chaos and people screaming. I saw my friend Hassan, who was running and carrying a child who had lost an arm. I saw a nice-looking girl - the Karrada girls, you know how beautiful they are. She was dead. And I saw a girl who had only one eye.

"I couldn't bear it," he tells me. "I started to scream and cry.

"Then suddenly there was another explosion. This time, you know, I didn't hear much, I just saw a tall column of orange fire a few metres away from me and then smoke. I didn't know what had happened, but the people who had run over to tend the injured from the first bomb were now lying on the street screaming.

"I stood there in the middle of it all. I saw people picking bodies up and carrying them. A police car arrived and the police started to fire bullets in the air. I ran away and hid at the entrance of a shop. When a woman saw me, she started screaming. There was blood on my arm and on my leg." A friend of Ali's stopped a passing ambulance and helped him into it. Inside, he found a man whose face was black from burns and whose shoulder was covered with blood. A younger man was bleeding from his legs. "When he tried to lift one of them it bent not at the knee but from the middle of his thigh," Ali says. "He was screaming, 'Fix my leg! Fix my leg!' "

At the hospital, Ali and the others sat in a corridor waiting to be treated by the overstretched medical team. "There were children there who were all red," he remembers. "It looked as if they had no faces, they were so covered with blood."

After waiting a while he was transferred to another hospital, where a doctor examined him. "The doctor told me I just had two bits of shrapnel in my arm and leg," Ali says. "He asked me why I was crying. I told him it wasn't for myself but for all the boys and girls around me."

The doctor took out what looked like pliers and asked Ali to look away. "He got the first bullet out, but the second didn't come so easily and I screamed."

After Ali has finished telling me this story I look around at his immaculately clean apartment. On one side of the room are a pile of paintings. He points at three small ones hanging on the wall, a mixture of orange and red splashes. "These are my attempts at surrealism," he says.

"Immediately after the war, I had a strong feeling of optimism. I was sure the Saddam era wouldn't come back, we had money and were spending all the money.

"But then the conspiracy theories started. I began hearing my brothers and friends say the Americans were here only for the oil, and after that I would go to bed and lie awake thinking how much oil they were stealing from me. Now I don't care if they steal the money, I am so tired."

"I ask myself why life in Iraq is so cheap. We are living in a nightmare. It is like there is a camera recording us and by its light we see images of death and carnage everywhere. The Iraqi have good hearts, but we are living in a state of hysteria."

This is Ali's second apartment. His first was blown up. On a mobile phone he shows me grainy video footage of smoke mixed with broken furniture. There are some muffled sounds and then I make out someone shouting: "Are you OK? This is a mortar. We're getting shelled."

In fact it was a car bomb, Ali says.

He shared that flat with two other friends, Mamdouh and Sarmad. "They were the best people in the world. Mamdouh and I would listen to [the Arab singer] Fairuz and paint all night.

"The night before that bomb, Mamdouh told me he felt guilty he hadn't done any work for so long. He told me he would go out for breakfast early in the morning.

"I stayed in the flat, sleeping. Then I heard the first explosion. It was at the end of the street. I went to the window to look, and then as I was walking back the second bomb went of, just under my window."

Emotional

As Ali ran down the stairs, he saw someone who lived on the first floor wrapped in a blanket. He was dead. "I asked if anyone had seen Mamdouh and Sarmad. They told me no one had seen them. I was crying in the street . A few hours later a friend called me and told me that Sarmad was dead and Mamdouh was in hospital."

Ali went to the hospital. His eyes and voice are calm - as usual - while he recounts the scene. "He was lying on a bed there in the Kindi hospital, there was a filthy smell all around, the smell of urine. He looked like Mamdouh, but he was like someone else ... he smiled and I smiled back, but I felt a great pain in my heart." Two days later, Ali tells me, Mamdouh died.

"We came, his friends, me and Hassan and Hadi, and washed him and put him in a shroud. You know I am too emotional. I cry very quickly. For six months I didn't talk to anyone, I was just sad and silent.

Ali loves Arabic calligraphy and has studied it for many years. Now, he says, all he writes are the black mourning signs for his dead friends, which, according to Iraqi custom, he hangs in the street.

Cheney Backs Israel Over "Security"

Mr Cheney said the US was dedicated to the peace process
US Vice-President Dick Cheney has given strong backing to Israel ahead of talks with Palestinian leaders.

By The BBC

23/03/08"BBC" ---- Mr Cheney said the US would never put any pressure on Israel over issues he said would threaten its security.

Speaking in a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he described America's commitment to Israel's security as "unshakeable".

Mr Cheney will visit the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday for talks with Palestinian leaders.

"America's commitment to Israel's security is enduring and unshakeable, as is our commitment to Israel's right to defend itself - always - against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats from forces dedicated to Israel's destruction," Mr Cheney said.

"The United States will never pressure Israel to take steps to threaten its security."

Peace efforts

Mr Cheney reaffirmed Washington's commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state and said Palestinian leaders could be "certain of America's goodwill".

"We want to see a resolution to the conflict, an end to the terrorism that has caused so much grief to Israelis, and a new beginning for the Palestinian people," he sa

Mr Cheney said history had shown that "Israelis are prepared to make wrenching national sacrifices on behalf of peace" when encountered by Arab partners "who accepted Israel's permanence and are willing and capable of delivering on their commitments".

The vice-president attended an Easter Mass in Jerusalem and met more Israeli officials before his visit to Ramallah.

In a meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres, he reiterated Washington's commitment to the Middle East peace process.

"We're obviously dedicated to doing all we can as an administration to try to move the peace process forward and also obviously actively involved in dealing with the threats we see emerging in the region," he said.

In Ramallah, Mr Cheney is due to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

'Darkening shadows'

US President George W Bush has said he hopes for a peace deal before he leaves office in January.

Both Mr Cheney and Mr Olmert referred to regional tensions in the Middle East.

"We must not, and will not, ignore the darkening shadows of the situations in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran and the forces there that are working to derail the hopes of the world," Mr Cheney said shortly after landing in Israel.

Mr Olmert said that there were "many items on the common agenda" of the US and Israel including Iran and carrying on peace negotiations with Palestinians.

"We are watching very carefully the northern front, the behaviour of Syria, and Hezbollah," he added.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum called Mr Cheney's comments "completely biased in favour of the Israeli occupation".

He said they confirmed that the US "is a partner to Israel in its war against our people and against the Gaza Strip".

The BBC's Tim Franks in Jerusalem says Israelis and Palestinians are sceptical about the chances for peace.

Opinion polls suggest that most people doubt that the current talks, given an extra push by the Americans at the end of last year, will lead to a deal any time soon, he says.

Mr Cheney will visit Turkey before returning to Washington.

Six Questions for Aram Roston

Author of ‘The Man Who Pushed America to War'

By Scott Horton

This week we mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. The perfect book for the week is NBC reporter Aram Roston's deep probe into the life of Ahmad Chalabi and the role he played in making the case for an invasion of Iraq and in directing the early stages of the occupation, which by consensus is now viewed as disastrous. Roston has worked at NY1 News as a police reporter, as a correspondent at CNN, and most recently has been a producer for the investigative unit at the NBC Nightly News, where his work has been honored with two Emmys. He has published investigative stories in a number of major magazines.

19/03/08 "Harpers" -- - 1. It's common to see Chalabi linked closely to the Neocons who played key roles in the Bush Administration's national security and defense establishment, but you make clear that his key ties with the Republicans lie elsewhere. You write:

"One of his key backers has been John McCain, who was one of the first patrons of Chalabi's grand-sounding International Committee for a Free Iraq when it was founded in 1991. McCain was Chalabi's favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, but held up by the Clinton State Department."

Do Chalabi's relations with John McCain continue? Would you expect him to wield influence in a McCain administration?

I really don't know where McCain and Chalabi stand these days, or in the future.

Right now, in spite of everything that has happened, Chalabi is making something of a comeback in the current Iraqi government. It is no surprise to anyone familiar with his persistence and his gifts for survival. It's also no surprise because even his detractors say he's a competent and vigorous organizer, even if they suspect his motives.

It is a bit of a surprise, perhaps, that Chalabi deals so closely with American military and civilian officials. It was just September 2006 when the majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Chalabi's organization provided "false information" to the US in an attempt "to influence United States policy on Iraq" before the war.

As for McCain's support for Chalabi, no doubt it was strong before the war. And indeed, that's why, in the 2000 presidential primary, Chalabi's people initially rooted for McCain. But as I pointed out in the book, too, if Al Gore had won in the 2000 election, Chalabi's people believed they would have had a very strong supporter right in the White House too: Joe Lieberman. Lieberman's advocacy for Chalabi was perhaps just as strong as McCain's. Or it was close anyway! It's almost as if in the election that came before preceded the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi couldn't lose.

2. You unfold Chalabi's checkered history as a businessman, and particularly his central role in a failed banking operation in Jordan. You track down Chalabi's role in the Jordanian bank, checking Chalabi's claims about it against the reports of Jordanian authorities, which make Chalabi out to be a confidence artist. It's amazing that someone who has been involved in financial services fraud can talk his way out of it and have the charges dismissed by so many seemingly sophisticated players-particularly by the intelligence community and the media. Tell us how you think Chalabi pulled this off?

It is a bit of a mystery really, isn't it? Basically, Chalabi's business background was one of the few things that could have been used to weigh his ability and his character, and people chose not to look too closely at it.

His explanation of his business career and the failure of his bank, and his criminal conviction, has been that it was a fairly extensive conspiracy by Saddam Hussein in collusion with the government of Jordan. He says his Jordanian bank (Petra Bank) was functionally sound when it was taken over by the Jordanians, he says. He says he had to flee not to escape justice, but to evade being handed over to Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. And when he was convicted, it was in absentia, (because he would not return) and by a military court, which he maintains made it unfair.

Most of his American admirers believe his story and they take his explanation at face value. One can easily see how the papers described it. As early as 1991, a New York Times columnist described Chalabi as "an international banker who fled Jordan for London after learning that King Hussein [of Jordan] was preparing to turn him over to the Iraq police." People were quite willing to accept Chalabi's story, and it really was no easy task to get hold of the audits and investigations and records that would have cast doubt on his story.

Since then, his supporters in the press and in think tanks and in the government just repeated what he'd said. Some are quite angry at what they believe to have been the wrongs done to an innocent man.

He never really tells them that his bank, Petra Bank, was part of a chain of family banks that collapsed as well in Switzerland and in Lebanon.

They easily just dismissed an audit that was quite damning in 1990 by the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson. They accepted his explanation that the audit had been rigged. Some Chalabi admirers told me they actually went to Jordanian government insiders with access to royalty, who confirmed Chalabi's story. I heard that from at least three people, but they would never say exactly how this worked.

And the issue of his business conduct matters to some of his friends They refuse the idea that he may have been, say a bad businessman, who then fell afoul of aggressive regulators, or some explanation like that. It is all part of a package to some of his most dedicated supporters.

If he was in fact involved in chicanery, they will not hear of it.

And then there are others, who simply don't care what happened in Petra Bank. Their point is that, well, in that part of the world, things happen.

3. Chalabi's relationship with the media seems to have been charmed from the start. You tie him with Steve Kroft at 60 Minutes, Flora Lewis at the New York Times, Peter Jennings at ABC, David Hirst at the Guardian and a long list of others. Each seems to have accepted Chalabi as a highly-reliable source. This again raises questions about Chalabi's background and his ability to sell himself as an objective analyst, when in fact he was a man on a mission. Did any of these reporters ever come to think that they had been had by Chalabi? Did they ever attempt to correct or supplement their Chalabi-based reporting?

There are some reporters who confronted their relationship with Chalabi in a very serious and profound way. And others who simply trudged on. And then there are those who are simply his friends, who say that they believe that Chalabi never did lie to them anyway. They may be right too.

One journalist I describe at length in the book, who certainly believes he was lied to by Chalabi, is David Rose, who met Chalabi after 9/11 and quickly became one of the journalists to spread the INC's stories. He became a powerful, if naïve, ally. The book describes how Rose, a very sincere and talented journalist, now says he was charmed by Chalabi, manipulated by him, and "used" by him.

Rose believes that the INC researched him to learn more about him, to flatter him and play to his vanity. After a story or two, he became convinced that Chalabi and his associates were incredible sources. He wrote various stories that firmly linked Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 911, to al Qaeda, and to weapons of mass destruction programs.

Rose' stories had tremendous public relations impact, apparently linking Saddam to immense threats against the West, and seeming to back the call for war.

And after the war started, he had an incredible crisis of conscience once he realized how wrong he was, and tried to investigate his own reporting. I honestly found his story a harrowing tale for a journalist.

One thing that he, and other journalists did not ever realize or report at the time was that all the false information given to them by Chalabi's INC was basically paid for by the United States State Department, which was unwillingly funding an INC "intelligence" program.

4. In your recounting, Chalabi also develops a key relationship with Congressional staffers that facilitates his rise. In particular you talk about Danielle Pletka and her husband Steven Rademaker, key staffers in the Congressional foreign policy apparatus, who seem almost to have been able to run their own independent foreign policy and to have advanced Chalabi tremendously. Explain how you think this happened, and how Congressional staffers were able to help Chalabi achieve his objectives?

Well, as the former Democratic Senate staffer Peter Galbraith, a friend of Chalabi, says in the book, Chalabi understood that to get what he wanted from Capitol Hill, he needed to befriend not just legislators, but their staffers. Most good lobbyists know this. And Chalabi was quite good at befriending people. I'm not sure it's fair to say that they ran their own independent foreign policy. Certainly they helped push the US in a direction that differed from the Clinton policy, and often saw foreign policy partly in political terms, and as a tool to use against Clinton. But it would be wrong to imply they did not believe, ideologically, in what they were doing.

Pletka saw Iraq as a key issue, and she told me that she believed it was a case where the CIA and State Department, which she is not fond of institutionally, were simply coddling a dictator. She says she believes that the State Department simply likes Middle Eastern dictators.

She clearly liked Chalabi and his message: which was that he and his little group could coalesce into a strong force against Saddam.

Her husband, Steve Rademaker, who was a staffer in the House Internation Affairs Committee had a slightly different ideological reason for supporting Chalabi. (It was interesting, as I researched this book, to learn how people could support Chalabi for so many different reasons, sometimes contradictory ones.)

Rademaker had worked with the contras (as a lawyer in the State Department) and believed that the old "Reagan doctrine" of using small indigenous armies and political groups to fight communism was a good one. He meant the wars fought during Reagan's time: the Contras in Nicaragua, the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Russians, or Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, against the communists in Angola.

Rademaker thought that old anti communist strategy of Reagan and long dead CIA director William Casey could be pivoted, or adapted, in this case to target Saddam Hussein. So Rademaker saw Chalabi as potentially a kind of Adolfo Calero/Jonas Savimbi figure.

Some other republicans saw Chalabi as just a useful figure they could use to basically bash Clinton. Some were clearly inspired by him.

But it is a mistake to see him only as backed by Republicans. He had some bipartisan support. Not just Joe Lieberman, but even then Senator Bob Kerrey supported the Iraqi Liberation Act, which greatly benefited Chalabi, as a way to move against Saddam.

5. The Central Intelligence Agency, you write, fueled Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress with millions, and enabled Chalabi personally to continue in the lifestyle of a wealthy businessman-which in fact he was not. But most importantly, the CIA appears to have pushed Chalabi forward as a credible figure and to have suppressed, or perhaps not even to have known, about the dark chapters in his past that undermined his credibility. Wasn't this an intelligence failure by the CIA? Has there been any attempt by the CIA to deduce some "lessons learned" from it?

There's a term: blowback. I wonder if that could be applied here. The point is that Chalabi's "Iraqi National Congress" which pushed and lobbied the US government so hard for war in 2001 and 2002 was a reincarnation of a group that the CIA had actually created in 1992 and then abandoned after it lost control.

I quote one former officer describing how Chalabi's INC, which was created by the agency, "morphed and morphed and morphed. We cocked this up," he said. "The agency really made a mess of this whole INC stuff."

In the early 1990s, the CIA invented and paid for the Iraqi National Congress with US taxpayer money, built up Chalabi as its leader and let him spend that money, and then in the mid 1990s, it cut him off. By then, he used the credibility and the organization they helped him found, and heading to Washington DC to lobby for money overtly, bypassing the CIA completely. By then he was basically was at war with them. And that animosity proved useful because they had bureaucratic enemies in DC.

6. The consensus of most students of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq is that the first six to eight months of U.S. management on the ground consisted of a series of almost unimaginably stupid misjudgments on critical issues. Certainly the single most tragic misassessment was the decision to turn to "de-Baathification" by shutting down the Iraqi Army and other vital state structures. You put Ahmad Chalabi right at the decision-point, pushing aggressively for the decision that was taken and effectively overriding career U.S. intelligence, foreign affairs and military personnel. Is it really credible to think that a non-American confidence artist could have wielded such critical influence at such a vital juncture? If so, what does that tell you about the management of the occupation in Iraq in its early phase?

I don't know that you can blame Chalabi for all the post-invasion blunders. In fact you probably can't. One can say that the infighting over him was responsible for a lot if it though.

The whole thing at the beginning of the war was that the administration really did not make a decision. Remember, the thinking at the time was kind of divided between two camps. On the one side were the Chalabi loyalists in the US administration who believed that simply installing Chalabi and an "interim government" would solve everything. On the other side, well, there was an effort to come up with a long-term plan.

One thing that struck me as I researched the book was that it seemed no decisions were ever made. It was a debate that continued: an "exile" government versus some other form of government. It got confusing, and Chalabi's role was not always simple. Certainly General Jay Garner had planned to put in at least a government nominally run by Iraqis, but he was also no fan of Chalabi. But he was then replaced by Ambassador Paul Bremer, and there was a state of immense confusion.

Chalabi did get his de-Baathification, under Bremer, but he did not get much else. Soon Bremer and Chalabi were clashing.

In fact one can say that Chalabi did always argue that a long term "occupation" government such as the one that was installed was bad mistake. It may have been self serving but he did say it and he was not the only one.

Buy a copy of ‘The Man Who Pushed America to War' at your local bookseller, or purchase a copy online here.

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

Dinner With Ahmed

By Scott Ritter

19/03/08 "TruthDig" -- - As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I find myself thinking back on how we got ourselves into this predicament. Like many who played a direct role in the issues surrounding Iraq in the years leading up to the decision to invade, I have wrestled with the demons of history, wondering about the specific impact my actions (or inaction) may have had on the course of human affairs. I've also wondered whether or not I have been witness to any events that, if more fully reported, might enable others to have a better understanding of the events that shape our world today, for better or for worse. As I examine where we are today and contemplate our future and those who are positioning themselves to play a role in Iraq, it seems to me that there is at least one such incident, a dinner party I attended at the home of Ahmed Chalabi in June 1998 that is worthy of a more public illumination.

During my time as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), I frequently traveled to Washington, D.C., for liaison purposes. The usual customers, so to speak, included the State Department, the CIA and the Department of Defense. All such meetings were conducted in accordance with instructions I had received from the executive chairman of UNSCOM (from 1991 until July 1997 this post was held by a Swede named Rolf Ekéus and after July by an Australian, Richard Butler) and as such were considered "official business."

I strayed from the umbrella of "official business" only once during my tenure as an inspector, when, in June 1998, during a scheduled official trip to Washington, D.C., I ventured out into the shadows of back-bench domestic American politics. Bill Clinton was president then, and there was a growing undercurrent of neoconservative ideology that was gripping the nation's capitol as the right wing of the Republican Party, frustrated by its inability to outmaneuver the president on the domestic front, chose to instead do battle on matters pertaining to foreign policy and national security. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein was deeply entrenched in Baghdad. Economic sanctions, which served as the primary vehicle for containing the Iraqi dictator by denying him markets for his oil-based economy, were collapsing amid international concern for the humanitarian toll that such sanctions took on the people of Iraq, and in the face of old-fashioned greed. U.N. weapons inspections were floundering and the Clinton administration seemed to lack any coherent plan on how to bring order from the foreign policy chaos that was Iraq.

In early June 1998, UNSCOM weapons inspectors received a technical report from a U.S. military laboratory in Aberdeen, Md., which specialized in chemical and biological agent analysis. In March 1998, UNSCOM had retrieved from Iraq several fragments of ballistic missile warheads from a site that had been used by the Iraqis in their program of unilateral destruction of WMD in the summer of 1991. The Iraqis, in an effort to clarify glaring discrepancies in the accounting of their weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles, had admitted that a certain number of these warheads had been filled with chemical and biological agent, in particular nerve agent, and anthrax and botulinum toxin biological agent. In an effort to verify the Iraqi claims, UNSCOM had excavated warhead fragments from the declared destruction sites and sent them to the U.S. military laboratory in Aberdeen for analysis.

By early June 1998 the results were back, and they were, on the surface, stunning: Rather than finding evidence of the declared chemical or biological agent that the Iraqis had admitted placing in the warheads, the Aberdeen lab results showed trace evidence of the chemical degradation byproduct of stabilized VX nerve agent, one of the most deadly substances known to man. The Iraqis had admitted trying to produce VX nerve agent in the past, but denied that they had ever succeeded in stabilizing the volatile chemical (i.e., preventing the agent from deteriorating over time and becoming useless as a weapon), let alone filling any warhead with VX. The lab results from Aberdeen, if correct, dramatically contradicted the Iraqi claims and potentially turned the entire disarmament effort of UNSCOM in Iraq on its head.

Butler, the Australian diplomat who headed UNSCOM at the time, was arriving in Baghdad when the Aberdeen lab results were released. Inspectors in New York were able to transmit a copy of the report to Baghdad, and the senior UNSCOM chemical inspector in Iraq at the time was able to meet Butler at plane-side to personally brief him on the dramatic news. Butler was in Baghdad to undertake a delicate negotiation with the Iraqi government on a so-called road map that would serve as the basis upon which UNSCOM and Iraq would seek to work together to clarify outstanding issues, and seek verification for declarations made by Iraq, such as its stance on VX nerve agent, which UNSCOM was unwilling to take at face value. The Aberdeen lab report threw a monkey wrench into Butler's tightly scripted plan, and he decided to keep the report under wraps for the time being in order to let diplomacy take its course.

The UNSCOM chemical inspectors were furious. Over the years they had uncovered one lie after another about Iraq's VX nerve agent program. Initially, the inspectors proved that a VX program existed when Iraq claimed it did not (in order to prove that point, inspectors had to burrow down inside bombed-out buildings to recover buried documents the Iraqis thought lost). Later, the inspectors were able to force the Iraqis to admit that the VX nerve agent effort was in fact larger than the laboratory-scale research and development program they tried to peddle once their denials had been proved false. The chemists had already contradicted the Iraqis on the issue of stabilized VX, by finding traces of VX stabilizer in VX agent recovered from containers the Iraqis had thought had been thoroughly sanitized. This discovery forced the Iraqis to admit having attempted VX stabilization. But in the end, the Iraqis maintained that all of their efforts had failed, and that VX agent had never been "weaponized," or loaded into a warhead or shell. Now, with the Aberdeen lab report, this last lie seemed to have been uncovered.

Over lunch in the U.N. cafeteria, I listened while the UNSCOM chemical weapons inspectors vented their anger and frustration. Butler was selling out, they speculated. Why else wouldn't he make use of this material? I asked the chemists how certain they were of the lab results. One hundred percent, they said. The lab results had discovered incontrovertible proof of the existence of specific chemicals on the warhead fragments, which could be explained only as the result of the degradation over time of VX stabilizer. "What would be the ideal situation vis-à-vis this information?" I asked. Everyone at the table believed that Butler was being pressured by the Clinton administration not to provoke a major crisis with Iraq over the issue of disarmament, so as not to break the existing Security Council consensus on maintaining economic sanctions. As such, the best scenario would be to have this information made public, published in the press so that neither Butler nor the Clinton administration could ignore it. Several of the inspectors around the table had served as background sources for some of the world's leading journalists. "Why not slip a copy of the report to one of these press contacts?" I asked. The lab report, they responded, was tightly held. If it was leaked out of New York, suspicion would automatically gravitate toward them, a situation none of the inspectors wanted to deal with. "What if," I asked, "I could get the lab report released in Washington, D.C., with no UNSCOM fingerprints?" The chemists liked this idea, and slipped me a copy of the lab results.

I was scheduled to fly down to Washington to meet with the CIA about ongoing intelligence support programs then underway. In my desk I had a business card for Randy Scheunemann, the national security adviser to Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who was at that time the Senate majority leader. Scheunemann had been part of a congressional staff delegation that had visited the United Nations earlier in 1998, and had met with Butler and some of the UNSCOM inspectors to discuss the situation in Iraq. I dialed the number listed and told Scheunemann I would like to meet with him while I was in Washington to discuss some new developments. He agreed to the meeting and threw in a twist of his own: Would I mind meeting with Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate who headed an opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress, or INC? Chalabi maintained offices in London and Georgetown, Va., and he shuttled back and forth between the two carrying out his various political intrigues. He was, at the time, in residence in Georgetown, and Scheunemann thought that Chalabi might be of assistance in any matter regarding Iraq.

I had previously met Chalabi in January 1998 in London, where we had discussed various matters pertaining to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and how the INC might be able to assist UNSCOM in gaining access to new sources of information about Saddam's past proscribed programs. Butler had authorized the London meeting, so I justified any subsequent meeting organized by Scheunemann as a legitimate follow-up. Scheunemann said he would have someone meet me at the airport in Washington.

I landed at National Airport early in the morning. In the terminal I spotted a man in a black suit holding a sign with my name on it. I assumed he was a driver of a car sent to take me to the Senate offices of Scheunemann. I was partly right. The driver was for me, but my destination was not Capitol Hill. "Mr. Chalabi sends his greetings," the driver said as he ushered me to an awaiting town car. "I will take you to meet Mr. Chalabi now." Ahmed Chalabi's Washington headquarters was in a posh red-brick Georgetown town house. Chalabi himself was there to greet me.

I was ushered into Chalabi's home, where he set out an ambitious program, including briefings to senators and their staffs. The meeting went on well into the next day. I had an open return air ticket but had not planned on spending the night, and as such had not made any hotel arrangements. "Not to worry," Chalabi said. "You are welcome to stay with me as my guest. We'll have dinner here tonight, and you can sleep in one of my guest rooms."

Chalabi's driver, who turned out to be a Shiite refugee from southern Iraq, drove me to the State Department, where my meeting with the CIA was held. Afterward, I took a cab to Capitol Hill and then made my way to the Senate office building where Randy Scheunemann had his office, right across from Sen. Lott's. Once there, I got down to business. I handed Scheunemann a copy of the Aberdeen lab report and explained the background of the document. He immediately grasped the importance of what he was holding in his hand. "What would you like me to do with this information?" he asked. I explained the desire to get this data into the public eye, which meant bypassing both Richard Butler and the White House because I and the inspectors I had met with believed that both were seeking to suppress the data. "If it could find its way into the press in a way that removed any UNSCOM fingerprints, this would be ideal. That way the data remains uncompromised, and yet politically Butler and the White House can't ignore it." Scheunemann was smiling. "I think we can manage that."

I thought my mission complete, but Scheunemann picked up the phone, speaking in hushed tones to someone on the other end. Hanging up the receiver, he rose. "Please follow me. Sen. Lott would like to have a chance to speak with you." We made our way across the hall and into the Senate majority leader's suite. Lott was meeting with constituents but broke away and ushered me into a side conference room, where we sat around a large wooden table. Scheunemann briefed Lott on the nature of the information I had provided, but withheld any suggestion of leaking it to the press. Lott thanked me for my "service." "I understand you will be in town for a little while, and that you're staying at the home of a mutual friend." Neither Scheunemann nor I had mentioned my arrangements with Chalabi to the senator. "I hope you take some time to talk with him, and some other interesting people I think you will be meeting with. Exchange ideas. See if you can help him in any way. We're all on the same side here, and we have to start finding ways to break down some barriers others have constructed between us." I told the senator that I had met with Chalabi previously and saw no reason why we couldn't engage in an exchange of ideas.

Scheunemann and I left Lott's office, and I took a cab back to Chalabi's town house in Georgetown. Chalabi was out when I arrived, but I was met at the door by Francis Brooke, an American from Atlanta who was Chalabi's principle adviser. Brooke was also a guest at Chalabi's apartment. I changed out of my suit and made my way downstairs to relax while I waited for dinner. No sooner had I sat down than the doorbell rang. Brooke answered it, and in walked Dr. Max Singer, a noted independent consultant on public policy and a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute who specialized in what was known as "political warfare." Singer was a busy man, but he had been asked by Scheunemann to prepare a paper titled "The Chalabi Factor," which outlined the importance and viability of Chalabi and the INC as a realistic opposition to the rule of Saddam Hussein. "Ahmed asked me to drop this off for you to look at," Singer said, handing me the document. "I will be interested in what you think of it."

Singer left and I sat down with his paper. The document outlined a political scenario that had Chalabi and the INC exploiting the weakness of the regime of Saddam in northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and southern Iraq, among the Shiites, to install himself as a viable political alternative to the Iraqi dictator. The main thesis centered on gaining a physical foothold in southern Iraq and taking control of the oil fields surrounding Basra, enabling the INC to become economically viable, which in turn created the conditions for political viability. Chalabi, the paper held, was ideally suited for this role since he already had a large following inside Iraq and was widely recognized outside Iraq as a legitimate contender for the helm of post-Saddam Iraq. I was somewhat taken aback by the content of the Singer paper. I was on dangerous political ground here, a U.N. weapons inspector charged with the disarmament of Iraq, suddenly dabbling in the world of regime change. Far from advising me on issues of intelligence regarding Iraqi WMD, Ahmed Chalabi had turned the tables and had me advising him on how to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

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."

The discussion moved on to the matter of Singer's Chalabi paper. In the kitchen, Chalabi's driver had put on an apron and was busy putting together plates of appetizers and beginning preparations for dinner. I had spent the better part of the last three years investigating the inner workings of Saddam's government, and how the Iraqi president shaped his internal domestic constituencies. "The premise of gaining support among the Kurds and Shi'a I can't take issue with," I said, "except to note that my experience with both groups is that neither represents a homogeneous movement that can be treated as a singular element. Things will be much more complicated than that. The key to me is what is missing here: any discussion of the Baath Party or the Sunni tribes. The Baath Party is the only vehicle that exists in Iraq today that unites Sunnis, Shi'a and Kurds alike. It makes modern Iraq function. How do you plan on dealing with the Baath Party in a post-Saddam environment? And what is your plan for winning over the Sunni tribes? How will you bring the tribes that represent the foundation of Saddam's political support into the fold with your Kurdish and Shi'a supporters?"

Steve Rademaker and Francis Brooke stared blankly. Chalabi was grinning ear to ear. "We have a plan. First, we will do away completely with the Baath Party. Those minor members who were forced to join out of survival, of course, they will be allowed to retain their jobs. But anyone who profited from Baathist rule will be punished. As for the Sunni tribes, we are already in contact with their representatives. We feel that the best way to negotiate with them, however, is to make them realize that there is no future with Saddam. Once they realize that, they will come over to our side." Chalabi's "plan" struck me as simplistic at best, and entirely unrealistic.

"What about defeating Saddam's military?" I asked as the hors d'oeuvres were laid out. "Not just the Iraqi army, but the security forces closest to Saddam, the Special Republican Guard and others?" Chalabi said a few words to Brooke, who got up and returned with a three-page paper entitled "The Military Plan." Chalabi handed me the document. "This was written for me by Gen. Wayne Downing. I believe you know him from Operation Desert Storm." Downing commanded U.S. commandos operating in western Iraq who were tasked with interdicting Iraqi Scud missile launches against Israel. I had participated in that effort.

Downing's paper outlined a plan that had the U.S. military training and equipping a force of several thousand INC soldiers who would operate out of bases in western Iraq. These forces would be equipped with light vehicles armed with anti-tank missile launchers, which Downing believed would be more than a match for any armored force the Iraqis might muster. The plan postulated support from the local tribes in western Iraq, especially the al-Duleimi in and around Ramadi and Anbar. I thought this somewhat fanciful, since the al-Duleimi were among the tribes that provided manpower for some of Saddam's most elite units. I said as much, but Chalabi dismissed my concerns with a flick of his wrist. "My people have already had discussions with the tribal leaders of the al-Duleimi, who are ready to join us once we get situated on the ground."

Downing's plan called for the presence of U.S. military advisers on the ground and U.S. warplanes overhead. "We don't operate like that," I said. "If we have forces on the ground, then we'll need to have a base, with a base support element, and base security, and a quick-reaction force in case some of our boys get in trouble. The U.S. presence would have to be much greater than what you're saying here." Again, Chalabi smiled. "That may be so," he said. "But we don't have to highlight it at this time." The "Downing Plan" was a nice bit of trickery, plotting what was ostensibly an Iraqi opposition military force with minor U.S. military involvement, but masking what was in reality a much larger U.S. military effort with a minor role played by Chalabi's INC "army."

There was a knock at the door, and Chalabi's butler answered. In walked Rademaker's wife, Danielle Pletka, accompanied by none other than James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA. They found seats around the table, and it became clear that this was where we would be eating. The discussion moved from the flawed military planning evident in Gen. Downing's paper and onto the issue of Chalabi's political future. Jim Woolsey was an unabashed supporter of Chalabi, something I found strange since Chalabi and the CIA were at odds over many aspects of the INC's past operations. "This [criticism] is all bunk," Woolsey said. "Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot and visionary who intimidates many lesser thinkers in Langley [CIA headquarters]. My friend Ahmed is a risk taker who understands the reality of Iraq, unlike the desk-bound analysts and risk-averse operators at the CIA. Chalabi scares these people, so they have created false accusations in order to denigrate him and ultimately destroy him." Danielle Pletka chimed in. "We cannot allow this to happen. Ahmed Chalabi has many friends in Congress, and it is our goal to make sure Ahmed Chalabi gets the support he needs to not only survive as a viable opposition figure to Saddam Hussein but more importantly to prevail in Iraq."

And so the night went. Dinner with Ahmed had turned into a political strategy session, the primary topic of interest being how to breathe new life and legitimacy into Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress so that a viable, and thus politically supportable, opposition to Saddam Hussein might be formed. According to Chalabi, this viable opposition already existed; all that was needed was funding and political support (not to mention military assistance in the form of advisers on the ground and fighter-bombers overhead). Personally, I doubted whether Chalabi could muster the forces he claimed inside Iraq. But my doubts were not shared by my dinner companions that evening, and as we sat afterward, sharing drinks and conversation, it was clear that Chalabi was being groomed for another run at power.

He had been embraced by the CIA in the early 1990s, only to be abandoned following halfhearted coup attempts the U.S. government failed to support, and accusations of financial mismanagement. But Trent Lott and the Republican Party were gunning for Bill Clinton and the Democrats, and they believed that with Iraq they had discovered a chink in Clinton's armor. Chalabi was being resurrected before my eyes. They had picked their cause and selected their champion. Now all they needed was a springboard issue from which to launch their program. And that, apparently, was where I came in.

I rose early the next morning and went downstairs for breakfast before heading back to Capitol Hill and another round of meetings with senators that Pletka had arranged. Chalabi was already up, and we chatted a bit while I ate. "You see, Scott," he said, "I have many friends here in Washington. With what you know about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, you can be of invaluable assistance to our cause. The VX story is but the tip of the iceberg." I was taken aback, as I had not shared the VX lab report information with Chalabi. Clearly, one of our co-diners of the previous evening had spoken out of school. "Well, I am just a simple weapons inspector," I replied. "In any event, it wouldn't go over well back at the U.N. to have an UNSCOM inspector plotting regime change down in Washington, D.C." I looked at Chalabi directly. "This is why you must be very discreet about the VX lab report. It simply won't do for you to have your fingerprints on this information."

Chalabi smiled and nodded. "I understand completely. As for your status as a weapons inspector, you must understand that those days are nearly gone. The inspection process has run its course. You need to think about what you are going to be doing in the future. I would like you to work for me." I looked over at him. "How would that work? As an American citizen I can't be working for you while planning the overthrow of Saddam. I believe there are laws against that." Chalabi laughed. "Of course. You wouldn't be working for me, but for the U.S. Senate. My friends would create an advisory position for you, and you would in turn advise me. It wouldn't pay much upfront," he said. "But don't worry. One day I will be the president of Iraq, and will be in control of Iraq's oil. When that day comes, I will not forget those who helped me in my time of need. Let's just say that my friends will be given certain oil concessions that will make them very wealthy." I remained silent.

Chalabi's butler drove me to the Senate office buildings, where I met up with Pletka. She escorted me to the office of Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican. He had been fully briefed on the VX story. He was also interested in my description of how the Clinton administration was balking at fully supporting the work of the UNSCOM inspectors. "This will not stand," he said when I was finished. "Believe me when I say you and your colleagues have friends here in the U.S. Senate who will make sure America honors its commitments and obligations, especially when it comes to disarming a cruel tyrant such as Saddam Hussein."

Afterward, Pletka and I met with her husband, Steve Rademaker, in the Senate office building cafeteria. Rademaker had been hard at work briefing influential congressmen, especially Ben Gillman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, about the VX lab report. "We've got their attention," Rademaker said, "and I think you'll find that serious pressure will be brought on the Clinton administration to better support your work." Pletka then took me back to where I had started, the office of Randy Scheunemann. Once again I was ushered in to see Sen. Lott, who thanked me for my service. "This is very important, and we're very glad you brought the lab report to our attention. Be assured that this matter will be handled with the utmost discretion." As I got up to leave, Scheunemann brought up the issue of future collaboration. I said that my being a weapons inspector made such collaboration difficult. Lott intervened. "Well, maybe we can find a way to bring you down here working for us. That might be the most useful thing to do." Chalabi's schemes seemed to have some substance behind them.

Armed with that potential job offer, I left Washington and returned to New York. Richard Butler was due back at the U.N., where he was planning to announce a "major breakthrough" regarding Iraq's approach to disarmament. There was to be no mention of the specific details of the VX lab report findings, although Butler had alluded to their existence, and the Iraqi rejection of these findings. Butler was to make a presentation to the Security Council on June 25th. However, my visit to Washington produced results that dramatically altered his planned presentation.

On June 23rd, The Washington Post published a front-page story headlined "Tests Show Nerve Gas Agent in Iraqi Weapons." The article made the main gist of the Aberdeen lab results public. It also reported on the political work undertaken by Lott and the Republicans based on that information. According to the Post story, "The new indications of Iraqi deception also are likely to reverberate in U.S. politics, where conservative Republicans are increasingly critical of what they see as a failure by the Clinton administration to support strongly either aggressive UNSCOM inspections for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or efforts to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein."

Senate Majority Leader Lott was quoted in the article as being "deeply disturbed" by reports that the administration had not acted on the VX information. "The latest example of a failed policy toward Iraq will not be swept under the rug," the Post quoted him as saying. I was just about to conclude that my visit had been a tremendous success when I caught a line in the middle of the article. "The Washington Post obtained a copy of the U.S. Army lab report from officials of the Iraqi National Congress, the principal Iraqi exile opposition group." After watching the Republicans build up Chalabi, I should have known that they could not have passed up this opportunity to interject his name into the limelight. "This is a smoking gun," Chalabi said to The Washington Post. "It shows that Saddam is still lying, and that this whole arrangement based on his turning his weapons of terror over to the United Nations is not workable." The Post then quoted a "Republican Senate source" who echoed Chalabi's concern: "This report means that they have VX out there now, and can use it. They have lied from the start."

Today, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, I think back on my visit to Washington and my dinner with Ahmed Chalabi and his friends. The ramifications of that visit were many.

Butler's report to the Security Council, delivered in late June of 1998, was dramatically revamped in order to take into account the need to discuss the VX findings. The "major breakthrough" in disarmament work with the Iraqis was, as a matter of course, pushed to the sidelines. The Clinton administration, caught off guard, had to come out with public statements proclaiming its support for the work of UNSCOM at a time when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger were lobbying hard behind closed doors for the U.S. to pull back from blanket support of the inspection process.

The Republicans, led by Lott, had a new cause around which to rally in their effort to confront the Democrats: the failure of disarmament and the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Randy Scheunemann used the impetus created by the VX nerve agent scandal to draft legislation, the so-called Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate in October 1998. This legislation solidified regime change in Iraq as the official policy of the United States, and certified Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress as the American choice for replacing Saddam. The Chalabi machine was on a roll, and was not to be stopped until the overthrow of Saddam in April 2003.

Ahmed Chalabi remains a controversial figure today. The U.S. case for war with Iraq was built around the notion of Iraq retaining stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Much of the case was built around so-called intelligence provided by Chalabi's INC. All of this intelligence proved flawed. Chalabi and the INC have been singled out as the scapegoats for this failure, accused of deliberately misrepresenting data and even fabricating intelligence reports to shore up the U.S. government claim that Iraq did indeed possess proscribed weapons.

As for the Aberdeen VX lab report, the Iraqi government in the end had been telling the truth. It had not succeeded in stabilizing VX nerve agent, and it had never filled any weapons with the agent. Far from representing "incontrovertible evidence" of Iraqi duplicity, the Aberdeen lab results were flawed. Even under ideal circumstances, laboratory analysis conducted at approved facilities operating under strict protocols established in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention had an incredibly high rate of misidentification, and this occurred in known test samples. Detection of a specific chemical agent simply wasn't a slam-dunk proposition. The Aberdeen samples were taken from metal fragments that had been subjected to explosive demolition and buried in the ground for many years. Subsequent retesting done by French and Swiss labs proved inconclusive. In the end, I was wrong to have pushed so hard to have the lab results made public.

Chalabi's bid for the leadership of post-Saddam Iraq has stalled, but not stopped. In the aftermath of the Jan. 30, 2005, elections in Iraq, a new Iraqi government was formed, and Chalabi emerged as deputy prime minister responsible for energy policy. In this role, he was given interim responsibility for overseeing the Iraqi Ministry of Oil in April-May 2005 and December 2005-January 2006, which meant he had control over Iraq's vast economic resources. Chalabi had told me that this had always been his goal. He also told me that he would use his access to Iraq's riches to "take care" of those of his friends who had supported his rise to power.

Exploiting Iraq's oil resources for his own benefit has always been a Chalabi goal. Prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Chalabi took a leading role in planning how the Iraqi oil sector would be managed in post-Saddam Iraq. He chaired a meeting of oil executives at London's prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs, the title of which was "Invading Iraq: Dangers and Opportunities for the Energy Sector." Chalabi also took a leading role in advising the State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group; in a conference of the group held in December 2002 he pushed for using a revitalized Iraqi oil industry to pay for the cost of the U.S. invasion (former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz relied heavily on Chalabi's input when he testified to the U.S. Congress that Iraqi oil would more than offset the cost of invading Iraq). Chalabi argued that the best way forward for Iraq's oil industry was to privatize as quickly as possible, and seek to free it of OPEC-imposed production quotas. Many of Chalabi's policy positions are reflected in the stalled National Oil Law of Iraq, still pending ratification by the Iraqi parliament.

Chalabi no longer sits as Iraq's oil czar. In the twists of fortune that mark the instability inherent in the disastrous American occupation of Iraq, Chalabi was compelled to step aside from the Oil Ministry in January 2006, replaced by former nuclear weapons scientist Hussein al-Shahristani. Chalabi's political aspirations had fallen short in Iraq's national elections, with his party failing to win even one seat in the Iraqi parliament. Down but not out, Chalabi continues to this day to operate on the fringes of Iraqi politics. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to be the chair of a so-called services committee, helping coordinate the provision of health care, electricity, education and other governmental services to Baghdad neighborhoods in coordination with the American military "surge." Chalabi's link to the ongoing "surge" is no accident, since it maintains the connection between him and those in the neoconservative establishment in American politics who have consistently advocated for him in any post-Saddam Iraq.

One of the most visible, and vocal, of these advocates was Randy Scheunemann, the former national security adviser to Trent Lott, who left his job as a Senate staffer. In 2000 he served as the foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain's unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2001 he served a short stint as a consultant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In November 2002, Scheunemann helped form a political advocacy group known as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, whose membership included McCain, who was an honorary co-chair. With Scheunemann guiding him, McCain said in 2003 that Ahmed Chalabi was "a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart." Scheunemann is a key figure behind McCain's unabashed support for staying the course in Iraq, and helped shape the "surge" strategy currently being pursued in Iraq. Today, once again, he serves as a senior foreign policy adviser to a McCain presidential campaign.

Danielle Pletka left her job with the Senate to take a position as vice president of the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, where she continues to be a vocal and unapologetic advocate of Ahmed Chalabi. In 2006, Pletka helped form AEI's Iraq Planning Group, which authored a report released in January 2007 that advocated surging 50,000 troops into Iraq as a remedy to the ongoing impasse. This report took precedence over the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group findings, which articulated a more nuanced approach inclusive of diplomacy and reduction of forces in Iraq. She is an avid supporter of Sen. McCain's presidential aspirations. Pletka's husband, Stephen Rademaker, served in the Bush administration as an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation and disarmament issues before leaving in 2006 to join the high-profile Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, where he actively operates in support of undermining the current Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki and advocating for Iraqi Kurdish oil autonomy. Another Pletka associate, former CIA Director James Woolsey, has been the pro bono counsel for Chalabi over the years. Woolsey, who openly advocated for the invasion of Iraq prior to March 2003, today is an adviser to McCain's election campaign, with a primary focus on oil security policy.

Ahmed Chalabi no longer directly controls Iraq's oil. But at one time he did, and it will be interesting to see how he chose to distribute this largess to his friends and allies. Even more interesting will be how Chalabi leveraged his control of Iraq's economic wealth to support his continuing claim to the ultimate position of power in Iraq. With the Shiite fundamentalists in Baghdad stumbling in their effort to form a stable government, and with the U.S. balking at Maliki's theocratic tendencies, rest assured there are many in Washington who continue to look upon Chalabi as the go-to guy to bring secular stability to Iraq. Whether he can accomplish this task is questionable. But, in the meantime, Chalabi is in a position to write many checks, a factor that today makes him so attractive to so many, especially those in the neoconservative establishment with whom he has maintained a relationship over time. Just how attractive will be determined once there is a better understanding of when, and to whom, Chalabi writes his checks, or, more important, who is writing the checks on his behalf.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, "Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books, April 2007).

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

By Robert Fisk

19/03/08 "The Independent" -- - Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry - but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people - the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world - not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning - of which more later - but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror - I recommend the Battle of Borodino - along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia - "Mission Accomplished" - and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians - ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents - annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair - as we should always have called this small town lawyer - should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war - and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper - daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us - be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism" - are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".

Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved - even just a few tears for a minute or so - for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies" - they did, by the way - and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders - Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States - had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen - Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz - have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today - after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago - we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq - 176 - is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq - 29,395 - is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead - they range from 350,000 up to a million - these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom - 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded - from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or - more terrible still - two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.

America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto - in Afghanistan - unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror - yes, our terror - of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.

©independent.co.uk

Invisible Faces...

By Layla Anwar

19/03/08 "ICH