Goat:
Nobody is speaking on the record yet, but US intelligence officials are making it clear to a variety of preeminent news sources that Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime darling of the neoconservatives who dragged the U.S. into this war, not only fed Western intelligence sources false information about Saddam Hussein's Iraq but is accused of having passed on US secrets to Iran, possibly through his security and intelligence chief, who is now a fugitive.
"This is a very, very serious charge," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on Sunday, noting that his Senate Intelligence Committee will be investigating it. "There were a number of us who warned this administration about [Chalabi].... But the fact is, there were some in this administration, some in Congress who were quite taken with him."
Too harsh? Not by a long shot. The CIA had stopped using Chalabi as a source in the mid-1990s after his political organization of exiles was accused of deception and incompetence. However, over the last four years, Chalabi was shamelessly resurrected inside the Beltway by neoconservatives, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and other Bush officials who were leading the campaign to invade Iraq.
So now we can watch a familiar drama unfold as the United States turns on a lout whom it tried to sell as Iraq's George Washington.
But being a wily survivor, Chalabi apparently decided that after embarrassing his Beltway backers so badly on the question of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and realizing that he was about as popular as the occupation itself, he had better make some new friends. Now he is playing the role of a populist Moses to President Bush's Pharaoh, chanting in Baghdad last week to "let my people go." He says his aides are innocent of spying for Iran but won't turn themselves in because "there is no justice in Iraq. There is Abu Ghraib prison."
But even if this outrage proves true, it is unlikely that anyone high up will be held responsible for coddling Chalabi. After all, nobody of any stature has yet been held accountable for the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prison torture scandal or the poor planning for the occupation. Certainly not President Bush, who is touring the nation bragging that the obvious disaster in Iraq is actually a great victory for the free world.
Goat-you can either accept Reality, or go on believing the clown you voted for didn't send 4100 Americans to die based on pre 9-11 dreams of scooping up all that lovely oil.
