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Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq, Iran, Espionage, Treason, Pentagon, White House, George W Bush, Israel ?
by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 2 June 2004The New Pumpkin Papers
http://billmon.org/archives/001499.html
I’ve been waiting for someone to get the goods on the Chalabi spy investigation, and the New Pravda has finally delivered - although in this case, the nickname is ill deserved, since the story is by two of the paper’s best reporters:
Chalabi Reportedly Told Iran That U.S. Had Code
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran’s intelligence service, betraying one of Washington’s most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
The details of the crime itself are interesting, but the really burning question - who in the administration leaked the NSA’s family jewels to Chalabi - isn’t addressed until deep in the story:
The F.B.I. has opened an espionage investigation seeking to determine exactly what information Mr. Chalabi turned over to the Iranians as well as who told Mr. Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken, government officials said. The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.
Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi’s strongest supporters and served as his main point of contact with the government, the officials said. So far, no one has been accused of any wrongdoing.
You’ve probably heard some of the names that are allegedly on the FBI’s short list: Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, William Luti, the deputy undersecretary for Near East and South Asia, and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
For the past week, watching the neocons (the ones outside the administration anyway) rally to Chalabi’s cause, I’ve been wondering if our crooked Iraqi will eventually prove to be the right’s version of Alger Hiss, the high-ranking State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet spy - or at least, convicted of perjury for denying he was a Soviet spy under oath.
The Hiss case was an enormous cause celebre in the opening years of the Cold War. The anti-anti-communist left adopted him as a symbol of political persecution and slander - much as the neocons have now done with Chalabi. To the right, Hiss was also a symbol - of everything they detested about the New Deal and the "eastern liberal elite." He was also a useful tool for pinning the loss of Eastern Europe on the Democrats. Hiss had advised FDR at the infamous Yalta conference, where the map of Europe had been divided among the victorious allies. Treason!
Handsome and Harvard educated, well connected in Washington circles, Hiss started out with the media and the weight of "respectable" opinion on his side - particularly since his accuser, journalist Whittaker Chambers, was an eccentric flake. But young California congressman Richard Nixon, newly assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, heard Hiss testify and decided he was lying. Nixon wound up in control of a three-man subcommittee charged with investigating Chamber’s accusations.
Hiss’s story had holes in it, but he might have avoided prison if he hadn’t sued Chambers for slander. As evidence in the case, Chambers produced a roll of microfilm of classified State Department documents allegedly passed to him by Hiss for delivery to the Soviets. Worried that someone might steal the film, Chambers hid it in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm - thus stamping the documents for all time as "the pumpkin papers."
With the production of the pumpkin papers, Hiss’s slander case collapsed. He was enventually indicted for, and convicted of, perjury. He was paroled in 1954. Hiss died, still protesting his innocence, in 1996.
The Hiss case became a subject of endless debate. In his book Blind Ambition, John Dean claimed Tricky Dick once confessed Hiss was framed. (Maybe it was on one of those nights when Nixon was too drunk to take the British Prime Minister’s phone call. On the other hand, there’ve also been claims that evidence of Hiss’s spying was found in the archives of the Hungarian version of the KGB, and that pilfered Soviet cables (the so-called "Venona intercepts" referred to him by the code name "Ales")
Politically, however, the Hiss trial was huge victory for the Republican right - and for Nixon personally. It lent credibility to their charges that the New Deal had been a communist front, and that the Truman administration was riddled with spies. It provided a powerful springboard for Joe McCarthy to launch his own anti-communist witch hunt. It also helped make Richard Nixon a U.S. Senator and, in quick succession, a Vice President.
To the end of his days, Nixon claimed the intense hatred directed at him by the liberal establishment was due to the fact that he’d "proven them wrong" on Hiss.
Now the neocons have gone out on an equally long limb to defend their supposed comrade in arms Ahmad Chalabi. By vouching for him, they risk being exposed as dupes and fools who have helped a dangerous spy betray some of America’s most sensitive intelligence secrets to a charter member of the Axis of Evil.
If the charges are fradulent, as the neocons insist, then their opponents at the CIA and/or the DIA have taken hardball politics to a whole new level - using tactics that would fit in more naturally in a totalitarian police state.
But if the accusations against Chalabi and his associates are true, and can be proven (in the court of public opinion, if not a court of law) then the neocons are really going to be up against it - even their allies on the religious right may be forced to cut them loose. And this time, presidential pardons may not be in the picture. This president tends to be kind of vindicative about these things. (Neocons for Kerry?)
There’s a potential curveball in this game, though (and I’m not talking about the INC’s star misinformer). What happens if the FBI’s investigation can’t avoid running into evidence of potentially incriminating ties between the neocons and another Middle Eastern power - one that seems to have enjoyed extremely intimate access to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (Luti’s domain) during the run up to the Iraq invasion last year? Would the Justice Department be willing to follow that espionage trail no matter where it leads?
Somehow I doubt it. But as long as the focus remains in Iran, and Ahmad Chalabi, then the neocons will be incredibly vulnerable. They just better hope the CIA doesn’t send the New York Times some more gifts - like the names of Chalabi’s sources, stuffed inside a pumpkin.
Raw Source materials and associated links:
Office of Special Plans
(renamed in July 2003 to http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Northern_Gulf_Affairs_Office Northern Gulf Affairs Office)
The http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Special_Plans Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to ’mask’ its true mission."
Also see the RightWeb profile of the http://rightweb.irc-online.org/govt/osp.php "Office of Special Plans"
"As the momentum for war [in Iraq] began to build in early 2002, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric Office of Special Plans, or OSP; the new unit’s director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, David Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department’s disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky’s OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt - who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House."
Background, associated and relayed links:
Rosalinda http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?noframes%3Bread=30922 Chickenhawk Intelligence Agency is Born
Rumor Mill News, April 9, 2003.
Paul Harris, Martin Bright, and Ed Helmore,
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,953604,00.html
US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank: "One key argument for war was the peril from weapons of mass destruction. Now top officials are worried by repeated failures to find the proof - and US intelligence agencies are engaged in a struggle to avoid the blame",
The Observer (in Guardian UK), May 11, 2003.
Seymour Hersh,
http://www.corruption.cc/article.php3?id_article=3790
Selective Intelligence, New Yorker, May 15, 2003.
Al Cronkite,
http://www.etherzone.com/2003/cron051503.shtml
Judeo-Christian Decadence. At the Fount of Power, Etherzone, May 15, 2003.
Tabassum Zakaria,
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wbur/news.newsmain?action=printarticle&ARTICLE_ID=498213
New Pentagon Intelligence Office Not a Run at CIA, Reuters, May 20, 2003.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/22/204919.shtml
Intelligence Community to Get Post-war Critique, NewsMax, May 23, 2003.
Duncan Campbell,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,967736,00.html
Bush special office ’justified war’, The Guardian, May 31, 2003.
Jihad Al Khazen,
http://www.philosophynotes.com/neocon_ascendancy1.html
Neo-Conservative Ascendancy in the George W. Bush Administration: Part 1, Al-Hayet, June 4, 2003.
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030604192146.7ijbjhu3.html
Officials deny misuse of special Pentagon unit to make case for Iraq war, AFP, June 4, 2003.
Lorelei Jackson, http://www.voiceoffreedom.com/archives/deptofdefense/deniesiraqintelligence.html
The continuing Debate over WMD’s and the Denials from top Officials of Intelligence Manipulation, June 4, 2003.
Marc Perelman, http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.06.06/news6.html
Pentagon Team on Iran Comes Under Fire, Forward News, June 6, 2003: "Defense Department spokesmen acknowledge that a small, four-member team is working on Iran policy within the Pentagon’s so-called Office of Special Plans. Critics contend that the office has been distorting intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda in order to strengthen the case for war."
Eric Boehlert, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/16/intelligence/index.html
Rumsfeld’s Personal Spy Ring, Salon.com, July 16, 2003
Jason Leopold,
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/07-16-03Leopold/07-16-03leopold.html
Wolfowitz committee instructed White House to use Iraq/uranium reference in State of the Union speech, Online Journal, July 16, 2003.
Julian Borger,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
The spies who pushed for war, Guardian Unlimited, July 17, 2003.
Jason Leopold,
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold11.html
CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat, Antiwar.com, July 25, 2003.
Jim Lobe,
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19568
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network, IPS, 7 August 2003.
William Rivers Pitt,
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/090803A.shtml
I believe, Truthout.org, September 8, 2003: reporting Kwiatkowski’s remarks.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3403532/
Cheney’s Long Path to War, Newsweek (page 3), November 9, 2003.
Josh Marshall,
http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/111903.aspx
The dubious link between Iraq and al Qaeda, The Hill, November 19, 2003
Robert Dreyfuss,
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9562
Secrets And Spies, TomPaine, December 8, 2003.
Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff,
http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3660169&p1=0
Cheney and the ’Raw’ Intelligence, Newsweek, December 15, 2003: "A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraqi_National_Congress
Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney’s office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq."
William Rivers Ritt,
http://truthout.org/docs_04/011204A.shtml
The Lies for War Unravel, Truthout.org, January 12, 2004.
Robert Dreyfuss, http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9884The CIA Ate My Homework, Tom Paine, February 3, 2004.
Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/2004_03_01_juancole_archive.html#107916178862710617
Red Herrings on Discount at Washington Post, juancole.com, March 13, 2004.
Parody Website:
http://www.officeofspecialplans.com/
The linkage to that Second ME country ?
http://www.etherzone.com/2003/cron051503.shtml
There are several significant characteristics of the OSP. Most importantly it is primarily Jewish and strongly Zionist. It is religiously humanistic but tainted with the Pharisaical Jewish notion of superiority. It is clannish and secretive. It follows a Jewish pattern of being the power behind the throne that was recorded during the Babylonia Empire and in more contemporary times has been repeated in Germany and Russia.
At the root of this effective manipulation of power is the teaching of a man named Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Leo Strauss was a brilliant German Jew who after studying in Europe on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, became a highly paid professor at the University of Chicago. According to Robert Locke who studied under Professor Strauss he was an atheist and the purveyor of an esoteric philosophy, which was critical of liberalism but supported Machiavellian deception and a ruling elite.
Robert Locke lists among Strauss’s students or those influenced by his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; and former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto.
Not included in the list is Abram Shulsky who along with Paul Wolfowitz received a Doctorate in 1972 under Strauss’s tutelage.