ahmed chalabi Posts

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Now that the evidence is building that the Plame outing was a political dirty trick from one of the top White House aid, should we really be sorry for jailed reporter Judith Miller? Is she really being so righteous in protecting her sources? She knew Karl Rove was using her to discredit an outspoken critic of the Administration's claims on iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Judith Miller was one of the Bush Administration's favorite reporters over the time it was trying to sell a second iraq war to the American people. She never heard an iraqi tall tale that she didn't believe and she frequently regurgitated the outlandish stories not only of White House insiders like Karl Rove but also shady iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi.

Was Judith Miller really so naive? Or was she consciously engaged in selling the war to New York Times readers? Was she being partisan herself? We expect a certain amount of objectivity and critical thinking in the pieces from a paper of the stature of the New York Times but we rarely saw that in Judith Miller's reporting. At what point does a reporter become the mouthpiece of policiticans?

Howard Kurtz at the post compares current events to Watergate:

Unlike Deep Throat, who was risking his FBI career by telling Woodward about the Nixon spying operation and cover-upRove and whoever else leaked Valerie Plame's CIA connection to Novak and other journalists were doing partisan dirty work, and some may have been committing a crime. Cooper and others have argued that they can't make a distinction between "good guy" and "bad guy" sources -- a promise is a promise -- but helping White House officials finger a covert operative is not exactly the kind of work that builds public support for the Fourth Estate.

Judith Miller in cursor.org parody photo referring to her tendency to print dubious WMD intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi, Bush's favorite iraqi exile before the war and allegation he now spys for Iran.

Yesterday the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals about the most important Freedom of the Press case in recent memory. It appears very likely that two reporters, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, are heading to jail for refusing to tell a federal prosecutor who told them that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. The informant was almost certainly a Bush Administration hack trying to smear Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had recently gone public with doubts about iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The cases are ironic to the point of parody. Judith Miller never even wrote an article. Matt Cooper's article in Time criticized the Bush Administration for engineering the leak. These were the responsible journalists and they're the ones going to jail? Robert Novak, the journalist who actually did out Plame's CIA employment, is not under investigation or under threat of jail. Observers think that the federal prosecutor actually knows the identity of the informant but as of this date, this person hasn't been charged.

It's not an easy case. I frequently questioned Judith Miller's shoddy reporting during this time. She relied on shady off-the-record public officials way too much. She never heard a weapons of mass destruction story she didn't believe. She was guilable and time has proven she was wrong. Good reporting consists of more than sitting around a White House water cooler and printing the spin from the bottom-feeding political hacks trying to get a story in the Times. But she is a reporter for a major paper. She's done a lot of good work. She shouldn't go to jail simply for talking to someone. Sometimes those shady conversations in White House basements do lead to important journalism and we need to protect that.

And in all the court manoeuvrings we're forgetting that someone exposed a CIA agent, her undercover assignments and her network of on-the-ground informers, all to play politics in Washington. Someone very near the White House committed treason. Shouldn't that be the big story?

Update:

Apparently Matt Cooper's notes indicate that Presidential right-hand man Karl Rove is one of the sources behind the leak.

When I posted the Slate article last night I missed that the New York Times' From the Editor piece had been published

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into iraq... It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In the last year we've become accustomed to reading newspaper apologies. The medium itself is shifting, in response to 24-hour cable news programs and innumerable news websites. The old newspapers themselves are less about detail and more about context. There's more of an editorial voice coming in and more attention to good writing and story-telling. Papers like the Times are becoming daily magazines. The pressures for good stories has led editors to overlook lapses in the work of star reporters like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This new era of apologies is a correction of sorts, and the major papers' reaffirmation of their strict accuracy standards perhaps signals a commitment to hold the line of newspaper transformation right here.

Perhaps. "From the Editors" doesn't feel honest to me. It's full of details and reads more like an combined "Corrections" piece for the last two years. By nitpicking on each error with such diligence, the message is that the mistakes have been one of details. "From the Editors" talk about the "critics of our coverage" in a way that makes it clear that this piece is a defense, not a mea culpa. The editor's unstated message is that anyone who would critique them is overly obsessed with details.

But we're not talking details. Most Americans have had their post-9/11 worldviews shaped by news organizations that had decided that critical thinking was unpatriotic. The Times coverage has actually been better than most. Watch the unsubstantiated hyped-up garbage that runs of most local TV news and you'll see scare-mongering continuing every night. Even as Americans slowly rethink this war and even as President Bush's polls drop, we can't undo that two major wars have been fought with faulty information.

The mainstream media still aren't asking the right questions, following up the details, asking critical questions or putting the news into larger context. At this point, the Bush Administration's national security credibility has been used up. There were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, Saddam Hussein had no hand in 9/11, opposition iraqi "leader" (and Bush favorite) Ahmed Chalabi is not a trustworthy fellow. Add to that the mess that is the Afghanistan and iraq occupations. The U.S news media shouldn't publish anything coming from the offices of the Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or Attorney General Ashcroft without collaborating evidence from at least three independent sources. The national news media needs more of apology than this if it's going to mollify the critics.

Update May 28:

Today's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, To Tell the Truth, also talks about how the news media protected President Bush and his administration's war claims from any serious questioning:

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness... But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?

The spy in the bespoke suit

Guess who's looking like a spy for Iran? Ahmed Chalabi: the guy who gave President Bush and Vice President Cheney all the false evidence of an iraqi program to build weapons of mass destructions. Without Chalabi, Bush and Cheney wouldn't have had the flimsy evidence and unsubstantiated rumors of a weapons program and would not have been able to sell this war to the American people.

In return for the false information, the Bush Administration's favorite iraqi has been receiving millions of dollars a year from the Bush Administration over the past few years. He's been given access to top-secret intelligence and was hand-picked to essentially run the intelligence unit of the U.S.-installed iraqi National Congress.

But now a source with U.S. Defence Intelligence says Chalabi's been working for the Iran :

Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

So now we have another way of looking at the iraq War. Was the U.S. being played like a patsy by Iranian intelligence? Iran and iraq fought a bitter bloody war back in the 1980s and the Iranians have long wanted Saddam Hussein out of power. If they were indeed the source of the bad intelligence that sent America to war, then this will rank as one of the most embarrasing wars in U.S. history.

We last talked about Chalabi back in November, in Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation, which has some background about him. The very excellent Joshua Micah Marshall is following the current story.

There has been a lot of speculation of the "highly unusual" role of New York Times reporter Judith Miller in Iraq War II. She was particularly cozy with Iraqi dissident leader Ahmed Chalabi, which was the source of many of her often-wrong news reports. She filed a lot of reports about weapons of mass destruction that were later found to be wrong and according to this Washington Post article she even participated in a improper interrogation of a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. She threatened U.S. generals with hostile articles in the Times if the unit she was attached to was pulled out of a good reporting vantage point (the decision to redeploy was rescinded, presumably due to Miller's pressure).
    Since when do U.S. army units base their deployments on reporter's whims and threats? And why are improper interrogations being held for the benefit of a celebrity journalist from a powerful paper? It seems like the Times needs to do some more soul-searching and that it's recent scandals might not be over.