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archived: 13 - 19 Nov, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: November 15, 2005 AHMAD CHALABI’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE Veteran CIA asset, Ahmad Chalabi is back in America. Last week, Chalabi met with Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the president’s National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley. Chalabi is now deemed to be the primary candidate for Prime Minister of US-Occupied Iraq, an office to which he will ascend after the next month’s elections. In spite of his impeccable neoconservative credentials, Chalabi has a chequered background. He is from a prominent family of Islamic bankers in pre-Saddam Iraq. He left Iraq in 1956 and studied mathematics at the University of Chicago at the same time as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Avram Shulsky, who now heads the Office of Special Plans in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. At the University of Chicago, Chalabi became closely associated with Albert Wohlstetter, the closest friend of Leo Strauss, the founding father of neoconservativism. Subsequently, all of the leading lights in the Strauss circle became members of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a prominent neoconservative think tank. Even though he is a Shiite Muslim, Chalabi also joined the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), an organization that promotes the integration of the national security agendas of Israel and the United States. Other neoconservative members of JINSA include: Hamid Karzai (President of Afghanistan), Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad (US Ambassador to Iraq), Michael Ledeen, Jack Kemp, Steve Israel (D-NY), Connie Mack (R-FL), Jeanne Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey. Chalabi lectured on the crucial dual role of Iraq and Israel in the Middle East for JINSA. In international circles, it is common knowledge that JINSA is an incubation chamber for American-approved heads of state in George Bush’s vision of the neoconservative reconstruction of the Middle East. In both JINSA and the AEI it is now common knowledge that Chalabi has promised his neoconservative colleagues that he will reopen diplomatic relations with Israel and re-activate the oil pipeline to Haifa if he becomes Prime Minister of Iraq. This prospect now seems very likely. Chalabi is heading a ticket of secular Shiite candidates in next month’s election. His recent visit to Washington was a thinly disguised series of negotiations aimed at setting policy for the post-election period. The outcome of Iraqi’s “democratic” elections would now appear to be pre-determined. It must be noted that Ahmad Chalabi has some very curious associations for a potential leader of the “democratic” reincarnation of Iraq. In Baghdad, he commands a private army with its own private internal security force. The head of Chalabi’s security force is one, Araz Habib. Curiously, Ahmad Chalabi’s nephew, Salem Chalabi, was the Chief Prosecutor of Saddam Hussein. However, that prestigious appointment was brought to an abrupt end when he was sacked following his arrest for the murder of Haitham Fadhil, a government official who was investigating his linkage to fraud and other suspicious financial dealings. While those circumstances are curious, it is even more curious that Salem Chalabi, a man now accused of murder, is a legal associate of Zell & Feith, the Tel-Aviv law office of Douglas Feith, the former Under-Secretary of the Pentagon and a stalwart proponent of aggressive neoconservative interventions in the Middle East in order to reshape the region along lines acceptable to the most extreme Zionists inhabiting Israel’s right wing party, Likud.
After his arrest on a separate murder charge, Salem Chalabi’s alibi for two subsequent murders of his legal opposition was that the homicides were, “political.” (Getty image) The conventional wisdom would be that Chalabi’s Zionist credentials would not find favor in a “democratic” Iraq, but the opposite is apparently the case. While Chalabi’s official relationship with the CIA is a matter of public record, any official association between Chalabi’s private security operations and the state national security services of Israel such as Mossad have never been made public. During Chalabi’s brief visit to Washington, he has lectured to the AEI and met with top-ranking officials in the Bush government. At the same time, there has been yet another high-level assassination in Baghdad killing Adel al-Zubeidi, one of the leading attorneys for the group of defendants in the trial of Chalabi’s dire political enemy, Saddam Hussein. The murdered attorney was working in direct opposition to Salem Chalabi until his arrest for murder. This assassination was the second to strike down an attorney representing a co-defendant of Saddam Hussein. Last month, Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, an attorney representing a co-defendant of Saddam Hussein, was abducted and murdered by a group of ten masked gunmen before his corpse was dumped at a mosque in Baghdad. Who is behind this disturbing sequence of political assassinations in US-Occupied Baghdad? At the same time as his high profile visit to Washington, there were a series of terrorist attacks in Jordan, where Chalabi first rose to financial notoriety by founding the Petra Bank. In 1989, Chalabi was convicted of massive bank fraud involving over $160 million that disappeared into numbered Swiss bank accounts. He fled the country. While the hotel bombings in Amman are being treated as a terrorist atrocity in the western press, international observers are describing the atrocity as a thinly disguised targeted assassination of three senior officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Brigadier General Bashir Nafi, head of the PA Military Intelligence for the West Bank; 'Abd 'Alloun, PA Minister for the Interior (Police) and Jihad Fattouh, PA trade chief for Egypt (Palestine's number one trading partner) were all murdered in the blasts. Commentators throughout the Middle East, Asia and Russia are now accusing Israel of engineering targeted assassinations and disguising them as a garden variety Al-Qaeda atrocity perpetrated by Zarqawi’s demented minions. Shortly after the accusations of Israeli involvement were published in the international press, a mild-mannered Iraqi woman named Sajid al-Rishawi was placed in front of television cameras in Amman to model her suicide bomb and to confess to her role in the atrocity. Her story sounds suspiciously dubious. She told the press that her suicide vest did not detonate. Is she a “Patsy” or not? What motivated her? Who was her husband, and why did he launch the atrocity? Who was in command of the operation? It does seem strangely coincidental that all of these simultaneous disasters would befall Chalabi’s enemies at precisely the same time that he was publicly lobbying the Bush government in Washington. Throughout his lengthy career, Ahmad Chalabi has persistently advocated a fundamental realignment of the Middle East that would reshape the region to conform to the strategic agenda of the most conservative and militant elements in Israel. Chalabi’s vision of the Middle East is a product of his classical neoconservative ideology. It cannot be disputed that Chalabi has consistently represented the geopolitical agenda articulated by radical elements in Israel in his long-standing associations with senior neoconservatives and their prominent counterparts in the Likudnik faction of the Bush government. Today, there can be no serious doubt that Chalabi is brazenly positioning himself to succeed to the Prime Minister’s office in US-Occupied Iraq. From the perspective of the Bush White House, Chalabi’s solid credentials as a stalwart Muslim proponent of Likud’s extremist agenda are now the strongest arguments in his favor. From another perspective entirely, Congressman John Conyers has sent a letter to Ahmad Chalabi politely requesting a meeting with him during his sojourn in Washington. In the letter, Congressman Conyers explains his desire to discuss Chalabi’s role in the manipulation of the bogus intelligence that drove the US into war with Iraq. In the text of the letter, Congressman Conyers makes it clear that he is particularly keen to interrogate Chalabi about the intelligence provided from his undercover source known mysteriously as, “Curveball.” It now seems inevitable that the erstwhile promoter of both “Curveball” and the geopolitical realignment of the Middle East to conform to a radical Zionist agenda will soon be holding court at the former palace of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad as the fully empowered American proconsul and Prime Minister over US-Occupied Iraq. Sources
Conyers Wants to Talk
to Chalabi
Saddam trial lawyer is
shot dead
Abducted Saddam trial
lawyer found dead
Salem Chalabi: murder
charge politically motivated
Failed bomb attacker
confesses live on air __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
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