Letters to the Editor
-
@ David Larry D
Why a full-scale invasion of Iraq? Why not a CIA coup to topple his regime?
Arne is mostly right. I think for some, like Cheney and Bush, the oil was just their motivation. A sweetener. Guys like Ledeen don't care about oil.
And Chalabi is also one reason a coup failed. His job (for Iran) was getting America to invade Iraq. These guys are CIA and intel field men. They were there on the ground.
Richard Sale on Chalabi
Reproduced here with the permission of Richard Sale and Milt Bearden. Richard informs me that all of this was "on the record." pl
------------------------------------------------------
"Dear Pat:
I have been busy working on the Balkans, but wanted to provide some data about Chalabi and Iran.
According to more than half a dozen CIA operatives, including former clandestine DO officials, "Agency people became aware that Chalabi had probably been a long-time agent for Iran," in the words of one. These sources, including Whitley Bruner, say that Chalabi was long ago working for Iran in Lebanon, even before the agency recruited him in 1991 and stuck him in as head of the INC. Bruner said of Chalabi: "He never gave the agency any intel on Iran, never submitted to being debriefed.' adding, "He was Iran’s guy."
Bruner and others claim that Chalabi "wanted to start low-intensity war with Iraq. He hoped we would get sucked in." The plan was that the INC would "appeal to US benefactors and we would rescue our proxies."
Former CIA agent, Bob Baer who went into Kurdistan in 1994, said that Chalabi always came into Kurdistan from Iran, where he had a villa. He said Chalabi was very close to Iranians, and covert operators said IRG folk were often at his house in Salauddin.
The INC was totally penetrated by Iranian and Iraqi agents but the CIA didn't care. Chalabi was never entrusted with any secret operations. He was to be the day to day manager of INC which was putting out anti-Saddam gray propaganda. We wanted Saddam to know about the INC just to keep the pressure on him.
In 1996, the CIA was trying to organize a serious attempt to overthrow Saddam using the INA, headed by a former Saddam hit man, Iyad Allawi who had broken with Saddam and walked in to work for MI-6 in the late 1970s. The Brits eventually brought him to the CIA in 1992. Allawi had assets inside Saddam's military but Chalabi betrayed the coup out of jealousy. The INA was the preferred CIA instrument, its intelligence was being checked out by technical means, and its success would have meant the end of Chalabi's funding.
In any case, Chalabi got caught fabricating information and the CIA cut him off. He merely went to the Pentagon and the checks kept coming because his fabricated intelligence on Iraq's WMD was so essential to selling the war, this from a man who had already failed four CIA polygraphs so that the agency had issued a "burn" notice on him by the late 1990s.
In 2004, Chalabi betrayed to Iran the fact the NSA was listening to mail belonging to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Milt Bearden called me in real distress the day the Iranian channel went off the air.
But Chalabi's real goal was to get rid of the Baathists in Iraq, and get rid of the army. In spite of promises we had made to senior Iraqi military, some of whom facilitated our entry into Iraq in 2003, Bremer, Wolfowitz and Chalabi broke all those promises and the Iraqis joined the insurgency.
All the best,
Richard Sale
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/05/richard_sale_on.html
-
Provocateurs working in teams to smear columnists
It works like this : first of all, provocateur #1 posts a remark that actually does tar all Israelis, or even all Jews, with the same brush, as warmongers, then provocateur #2 cites provocateur #1 - not just here, but elsewhere - as proof that "Glenn Greenwald's columns give aid and comfort to anti Semites." It is coordinated smearing, and you won't beat it by trying to deflect it every time it happens. I fear that you have to pay someone to censor the comments threads, if you really want to defeat this tactic.
As to Glenn's original and slightly unhappy phrasing - "It isn't just the American neocons, but also the Israelis, who are escalating the "Attack Iran" campaign. The Jerusalem Post yesterday "reported" that ..." - I think that he would have been wiser to put "It isn't just the American neocons, but also the Israeli neocons, who are escalating ..." since that is what he actually meant, and it is accurate to describe the JPost as an outlet for "the Israeli neocons."
About the question of whether "the neocons" are "fascists," or "trotskyites," or both, I would just point out that Ledeen himself has never been either a fascist or a trotskyite, but he has written on fascism, and it is true that Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist zionism, accepted the support of Mussolini in training his cadres for a period. Given the conditions of the time, this is not as bizarre as it may seem in retrospect, but it does make for some great quotes, like this, from Lenni Brenner:
The March 1936 issue of L'Idea Sionistica, the magazine of the Revisionists' Italian branch, described the ceremonies attendant to the inauguration of the Betar squad's new headquarters: "The order 'Attention! A triple chant ordered by the squad's commanding officer ''Viva L'Italia! Viva Il Re! Viva Il Duce! resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for the king and for Il Duce ... Giovinezza [the Fascist Party's anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm by the Betarim."
-
Please don't believe Bob Baer on Iran (or anything else)
I try to avoid citing my own blog, but in this case the only way to show you how deceptive Bob Baer actually is, is to do so, because it is only there that this marvellous example is carefully isolated by me, from the end of a very, very long essay elsewhere:
http://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/a-little-something-for-fans-of-bob-baer/