Ahmad Chalabi's Bay of Goats
by Michele Steinberg
On March 31, Fallujah, Iraq, was a scene out of Hell. Associated Press reported: "Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreign contractors including at least one American through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Eurphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby.... It is reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu...."
This is a Hell that was created by the neo-conservative "Children of Satan," the cabal of Straussian liars in the Bush Administration who launched the Iraq war on false pretenses: lies about the imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, lies about Iraq's connection to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, and lies about the ease with which the "regime change" in Iraq would come about.
An exaggeration? Not at all.
Remember the warnings by Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni (ret.), then Commander-in-Chief of the Central Command, who bitterly battled Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 1999 over the Senators' desire to invade Iraq with a small band of Iraqi exiles? Review General Zinni's speech to the U.S. Naval Institute in March 2000, in which he warned, "There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97 million worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely."
Remember the January 1999 Foreign Affairs article that exposed the Iraqi National Congress (INC) by name, after its head, Ahmed Chalabi, a neo-conservative lunatic, told a U.S. Senate hearing in Spring 1998: "Give the Iraqi National Congress a base protected from Saddam's tanks, give us the temporary support we need to feed and house and care for the liberated population, and we will give you a free Iraq, an Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction, and a free-market Iraq. Best of all, the INC will do this all for free."
Foreign Affairs wrote, "The INC plan is so flawed and unrealistic that it would lead inexorably to a replay of the Bay of Pigs. U.S. officials would ultimately face the choice of intervening directly or watching the [INC] get butchered."
In contrast to these sobering warnings, the following were the ravings of then-Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, a leading Straussian neo-conservative, in an October 2002 interview with PBS's Frontline television magazine, in which he insisted that the war on terrorism would be lost without an Iraq war:
Frontline: Is there any point about Iraq one must understand so that an educated view can be made?
Perle: ... I think there would be dancing in the streets if Saddam were removed from power, and that reaction of the Iraqi people would be reflected in the attitude of the Arab world, generally. So the notion that if we go after Iraq we are somehow going to advance in the direction of a war against Islam that will turn out to be far worse for us, I think is really quite mistaken....
Frontline: If we go into Iraq and we take down Hussein?
Perle: Then I think it's over for the terrorists.
Frontline: Why so optimistic?
Perle: Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. "You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too. Is it worth it?" Of course it isn't worth it. It isn't worth it for any of them.
Perle was not just deluded, he was lying. It was a lie repeated over and over by Vice President Dick Cheney, by the other neo-cons in the Defense Department, such as Kenneth Adelman, a Perle ally also on the Defense Policy Board. They were repeating the fabrications of Chalabi and his INC, to get a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The cost of tolerating their lies is the death count in Fallujah on March 31, 2004, and the many thousands of dead since the United States launched the Iraq war in March 2003. And it is not over.
The following report should be the basis for the U.S. government putting Chalabi in jail—instead of installing him as a corrupt tyrant over the Iraqi population. Investigations by the Senate, the DOD, and the General Accounting Office (GAO) are looking into INC fraud in fabricating reports on weapons of mass destruction, the misuse of U.S. funds, and profiteering from the Iraq war through lucrative contracts doled out by the neo-cons in the Pentagon. But instead of being removed from positions of trust, Chalabi is today virtually running intelligence collection operations in Iraq through the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-administered "Information Collection Program"—and being paid with U.S. tax dollars to do it.
Chalabi's Dance of Death
Perle and Chalabi's "dancing in the streets" has turned out to be a dance of death.
Information provided to EIR by a variety of highly qualified sources, ranging from Arab experts on Islamic fundamentalism, to active and retired military and intelligence personnel, indicates that Chalabi's intelligence role may be directly endangering the lives of American troops, allies, and innocent civilians.
For example, is Chalabi providing false, self-serving, information—as he and the INC did about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi terrorist links prior to the Iraq war? Is Chalabi's INC fabricating reports that point to "foreign terrorists," and not a guerrilla war against the American occupation, because they must maintain the myth of "dancing in the streets"?
One military officer, a Middle East expert, told EIR that "this is an insurgency that opposes occupation, not foreign fighters." He warned that if the Pentagon neo-cons "believe their own propaganda," instead of actual intelligence, then many, many more lives will be needlessly lost.
Chalabi wears many hats, all given to him by the U.S. occupation. Among his positions:
- Chalabi is the most powerful member of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), placed on the body as a spy and U.S. puppet by Dick Cheney's neo-con cabal. According to businessmen operating in Iraq, Chalabi, the bank embezzler and "aristocrat," can be seen ordering around U.S. generals as if they are children. After all, Chalabi, unlike the U.S. uniformed military, has a direct hot-line into the most powerful offices in the United States: Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
- Chalabi has direct access to the Oval Office, through Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council. On Jan. 20, 2004, the day of Bush's warlike State of the Union address, Chalabi visited the President in his office, and was seated next to First Lady Laura Bush in the VIP gallery during the speech. While Chalabi was not chosen by his colleagues on the IGC to be part of the delegation on Jan. 19 to brief the UN Security Council, he travelled with them to the United States and ran things from behind the scenes. With this access and muscle behind him, Chalabi can eliminate the opposition—as long as the U.S. military is there to protect him.
- Chalabi is in charge of the "de-Ba'athification" program, deciding whether Iraqi families can obtain work—a matter of life or death in occupied in Iraq. According to U.S. Sen. Jack Reed (R-R.I.), Chalabi is "most divisive person in Iraq." Reed was one of five Senators who visited Iraq in mid-March 2004, along with Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who warned that Iraq was on the edge of "a civil war." At a March 18 news conference, Reed and Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that there is no justification for the U.S. government appointing Chalabi to run the "de-Baathification." After seeing the conditions in Iraq "on the ground," Reed prophetically warned that he expects that violence will increase and become even "more sophisticated and lethal."
- Chalabi is the de facto "jefe maximo" of the INC, which receives $340,000 each month from the DIA for a so-called "Information Collection Program" that is the main source of intelligence for the Coalition Provisional Authority on the Iraqi resistance. In this capacity, Chalabi runs the debriefing of prisoners arrested or captured by the occupation military and security forces.
Meet the Children of Satan
Ahmed Chalabi is not a slick operator who is defrauding the United States. Rather, he is a member of the inner circle of neo-con imperialists—the majority of whom were followers of the German-born fascist philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The network was exposed in detail for the first time in an April 2003 campaign pamphlet issued by Lyndon LaRouche, candidate for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2004, entitled "Children of Satan: The Ignoble Liars Behind Bush's No-Exit Iraq War."
The Straussian "policy is to permanently transform the United States, from a Constitutional republic, dedicated to the pursuit of the general welfare and a community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation-states, into a brutish, post-modern imitation of the Roman Empire, engaged in murderous imperial adventures abroad, and brutal police-state repression at home," the pamphlet charges.
About Strauss, the pamphlet explains: "Although a Jew, who was active in the Vladimir Jabotinsky-led Revisionist Zionist circles in Germany in the 1920s, Strauss was also a protégé and enthusiastic promoter of the ideas of two leading intellectual figures of the Nazi Party: existentialist philosopher and Friedrich Nietzsche-revivalist Martin Heidegger; and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who wrote the legal opinion justifying Adolf Hitler's February-March 1933 post-Reichstag Fire dictatorial putsch. Schmitt personally arranged for Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1932."
The very dogma of the Straussians is to lie to the public: "For Leo Strauss and his disciples, the ignoble lie—disinformation—was the key to achieving and holding political power. And raw political power was the ultimate goal. For Strauss and the Straussians, there were no universal principles, no natural law, no virtue, no agape, no notion of man in the living image of God."
Indeed, the key players in the Iraq war-drive are all direct products of Strauss' teaching, or were recruited by by Perle and Wolfowitz, more than 30 years ago, from the Senate staffs of Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.), Clifford Case (R-N.J.), and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.). Other members of the Iraq war conspiracy today include: Stephen Cambone, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Abram Shulsky, head of the DOD Office of Special Plans (OSP); Michael Ledeen and Stephen Bryant of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); John Podhoretz, editorial page editor of Rupert Murdoch's yellow tabloid, the New York Post; Attorney General John Ashcroft; I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff and chief National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney; and Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which produced a draft of the "preventive war" doctrine that Cheney put out in September 2002 to justify the Iraq war.
It was this Straussian network that promoted Chalabi and built up the INC, with help from the British Foreign Office and Israeli intelligence, after the CIA discarded Chalabi in 1996 as a fraud.
Around 1997, Wolfowitz and Perle—who have known Chalabi, a fellow graduate of the University of Chicago, since 1985, through an introduction by their common mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, the former Trotskyite-turned-RAND Corporation Cold Warrior—enlisted the help of Gen. Wayne Downing (ret.) and former CIA Director James Woolsey, to promote the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—to be replaced by Chalabi! For Wolfowitz and his former boss Cheney, this was the unfinished business of 1991, when their plan to march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War was rejected by President George H.W. Bush.
In 1998, Perle initiated a campaign, in league with his fellow neo-cons, demanding that President Bill Clinton overthrow Saddam Hussein and recognize Chalabi's INC as a provisional government. When Clinton rejected the policy, the Straussians planted scare stories about Iraq's WMD and mobilized the right-wing Israeli lobby to ram through the Iraqi Liberation Act, which provided their boy Chalabi with $97 million in U.S. funds.
The Iraq Liberation Act was the Americanization of a 1996 policy paper calling for "regime change in Iraq" that Perle had co-authored for Israeli right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entitled, "Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm." Other co-authors included Doug Feith, who became the paymaster of Chalabi's "Intelligence Concoction Program," and David Wurmser, a disinformation specialist in Cheney's office.
Investigating the Fabrications
The Straussian plot to get their Iraq war began the instant that George W. Bush took office, beginning with a Goebbels-style propaganda campaign, planting stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. The sources for these fraudulent scare stories were Chalabi's stable of INC members and their families.
Already, investigative journalists for Knight-Ridder, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and Newsweek have confirmed several instances in which "defectors" paid by the INC were the sole source for information that turned out to be completely specious, but which was played up and repeated by the President and top members of his Administration.
For example, the story of the so-called "mobile bio-weapons" labs came from the brother of an INC leader codenamed "Curveball," who turned up in Germany, and had never been spoken to by any U.S. agency. Yet, this INC hoax is quoted as the Gospel truth by Vice President Cheney to this day. A report of a camp in Iraq using Boeing aircraft for terrorist training was also an INC fake. As to allegations of massive production of weapons of mass destruction, the locations given by an INC defector to Judith Miller of the New York Times at which biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons were allegedly produced, were quickly revealed to be frauds when the UN inspectors were admitted into Iraq and given free rein to inspect everything they requested. (The neo-cons reportedly believed that Iraq would never allow inspectors to return.)
The INC lies have not gone unnoticed, but the investigations so far have been a pale shadow of what should be done, given the the cost in human lives, and the damage to the U.S. Constitution. The investigative steps include the following.
- In late February, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence opened up a full investigation into the role of the INC and Chalabi in providing intelligence that led to Bush's decision to invade Iraq. On March 2, Knight-Ridder newspapers added that "House Democrats have asked the DIA to turn over raw intelligence" supplied by the INC. The Intelligence Committee is demanding documents from the White House as well.
- On March 12, it was announced that the Army cancelled a $327 million contract with Nour USA, a small, newly formed company, whose president, A. Huda Farouki, had close ties to Chalabi. In Feburary 2004, Newsday had reported that Chalabi had received a $2 million fee for arranging the contract.
- The GAO is now investigating the INC for misuse of government funds, Newsweek reported in its April 5, 2004 issue. The probe was requested by Senator Levin and Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Newsweek commented that what is under scrutiny "is not whether Chalabi prodded America into a war on false pretenses, it is whether he used U.S. taxpayer dollars and broke U.S. laws and regulations to do so." The INC claims at least 108 news stories have been the result of the work of its "Information Collection Program."
