Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON, May 28 � Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop what one has called a "smear campaign" against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last week in an American-supported raid.
Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under President Bill Clinton.
Members of the group, who had requested the meeting, told Ms. Rice that they were incensed at what they view as the vilification of Mr. Chalabi, a favorite of conservatives who is now central to an F.B.I. investigation into who in the American government might have given him highly classified information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.
Mr. Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any classified information.
That the neocons would defend Chalabi is no surprise. Chalabi is so deep in the mix that discrediting him would discredit all who took his word as gospel. Propping up Chalabi, getting the spy stuff squashed even if (if?) he doesn't wind up in charge of Iraq, is a self defense move.
No, what is priceless is the nature of Perle's complaints:
"There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. and a gaggle of former intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting these stories, which are accepted with hardly any scrutiny," Mr. Perle, a leading conservative, said in an interview.
Mr. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the campaign against Mr. Chalabi was "an outrageous abuse of power" by United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad.
Talk about being hoist by one's own petard. The Neocons really do argue like Flame Warriors; they have a line and a technique and they stick with it.
For some reason though, this line cracks me up.
"I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied uniquely by anyone brought to us by the Iraqi National Congress," Mr. Perle said.
"Hey, we were no more fucked up than anyone else, why pick on us?"
Posted by P6 at May 29, 2004 07:29 AM
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