Those charming Chalabis (contd.)

Douglas McCollam has a pretty well-researched piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review titled “How Chalabi played the press”. His focus is, not surprisingly, on the run-up to the war, and way that everyone’s (then-)favorite snake-oil salesman worked assiduously and successfully to plant in the western press the kinds of stories that would jerk western governments–but especially the US!–into launching the war that he sought against Saddam.
From a quick read of the piece–and from what one knew already–the way it seemed to work was this: Chala got gobs of money from various US government agencies to run something called the “Information Collection Program” (ICP).
Collection?? Well, that was the easy part… He would just groom a few alleged “defectors” from Iraq who would tell their tales to selected journalists. The part that Chala really focused on, however, was information dissemination. And in that department, he found many, many journalists whom he played like fine violins.
(So we taxpayers here in the US found ourselves paying money to someone who then used it to try to sell his lies to us.)
McCollam writes that he thinks the strong focus on Judy Miller in the whole journo community is not totally fair. He seems to give his own “Golden Gull” award to someone called David Rose. In a piece in the May 2002 issue of Vanity Affair, Rose recounted many stories from Mohammed Harith, a former Iraqi “Mukhabarat ” (intel) officer, who claimed to have personal knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs.
According to McCollam, in Rose’s article, Harith claimed that, in addition to those (now-discredited) “mobile labs”,

    Hussein was close to building a new long-range missile. He also told of a trip to Africa to buy radioactive materials for a dirty bomb from renegade Russians. He spoke of a chemical weapons factory in Samarra and a bioweapons lab in the suburbs of Baghdad. And so on. In the piece, Rose effusively praised the INC’s defector operation, going so far as to say it resembled ‘nothing so much as the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network which rescued slaves from the American South before the Civil War.’

Oh, gimme a break.
As McCollam notes,

    To date, none of the things [Harith] described have been found in Iraq nor does anyone think they will be, and in May Vanity Fair issued a half-hearted retraction of the story. Of all the reporters I spoke with for this article, none seemed as devastated by the INC’s fall from grace as Rose. Perhaps that’s because no one, not even Judith Miller, swallowed and regurgitated more ICP hogwash. Rose concedes that he fell victim to a misinformation campaign and says he wishes he’d been more circumspect. ‘I feel profound regret over that piece,’ Rose confesses.

There’s a lot more good reporting in McCollam’s piece. I particularly liked the things he had to say about influential WaPo mover/shaker Jim Hoagland, who has to bear a lot of the responsibility for having cheerled for the the inside-the-Beltway chickenhawks in the run-up to the war.
But I also just wanted to mention a little gem of breathless first-person reporting from Chala’s daughter Tamara.
Maybe you’ve seen it before. It was a piece she wrote for an online forum in February 2003 called Journey to a liberated Iraq. Okay, I realize I’m just a little behind the curve here… That was 17 months ago, I realize.
I can skip over her sophomoric little indtroduction… “a number of determined activists have independently taken their quest to their embattled land, via Iran. I had the privilege (!) of accompanying this group, and in the process witnessed the forging of alliances on the path to making a liberated Iraq a reality…”
H’mmm, “forging”. Not a bad word to use since at the head of the delegation was her Daddykins.
Then we get down to meat of things:

    The sense in the delegation is that a US-led war against the Iraqi regime is imminent. The possibility of a US military occupation is a real one, according to the various declarations made in Washington. This is a central point of our discussion with the highest Iranian authorities, those responsible for the country’s ‘Iraq file’.

So the intrepid Chala-led delegation stayed in Iran for a full week of meetings before proceeding into “liberated” (i.e. Kurdish-held) Iraq. This was part of Tamara’s description of the teheran/Qom meetings that caught my eye:

    our hosts listened politely to our frank advocacy of democracy in Iraq, blunt rejections of an Iranian-style government, and elaborate renditions of meetings with high-ranking US officials that reflected a good relationship with the Iraqi opposition.

Well, there we have it. Out of the horse’s mouth. Or anyway, out of his daughter’s.
Such charming people, the Chalabis, don’t you think?

26 thoughts on “Those charming Chalabis (contd.)”

  2. Chalabi did what any exile will do. What he said would make little difference, were it not for listeners with credulous ears and other motives to believe what he said.
    Dislike of Saddam or suspicions of WMD were never enough, by themselves, to inspire Americans to make war against Iraq. It had to be a War Against Terror. A 9/11 link had to be put in people’s minds.
    You blame a David Rose article in Vanity Fair for disseminating INC WMD hype, then note that Rose concedes that Rose now feels profound regret. At least VF and Rose recognized and retracted their errors. Did anyone else?
    Bush and Cheney have scarcely changed any of their views. Americans seem to like decisive leaders who, like Gary Cooper or John Wayne, “stick to their guns.” It matters little that the disengagement from Iraq become rough or violent. Perhaps this will only convince voters of the need for “strong leadership” and repel them from a Kerry-Edwards ticket that seems too “wishy-washy” or “soft on terror,” with “terror” meaning just about any jihadi, insurgent, or perfidious liberal malcontent whose fuzzy views detract from the great verity of Good America versus the Evil Other.
    Does anyone remember the 1984 GOP campaign ad about the bear? It effectively ridiculed people with revisionist views about the Soviets and championed steadfast vigilance. Might Rove think up a new “post 9/11 world” version of the same bear ad?
    I doubt Neocons or lawmakers knew or cared about Rose’s article. Bush, the Pentagon, Perle, ex-CIA chief Woolsey, or the other pivotal “get Saddam” advocates have yet to retract any of their views. There is also the case of Laurie Mylroie, whom they did hear and read, and who believes more than ever in a Saddam – 9/11 connection. She and Judith Miller collaborated in a 1990 book about Iraq. Strange that Miller has never commented on any of Mylroie’s subsequent works, the latest of which insists that there is a bureaucratic conspiracy to hide Iraq’s role in 9/11. Did Miller herself ever write any retraction of her 2002-3 articles on Iraq’s WMD?
    What about NYT

  3. “Chalabi did what any exile will do.”
    I am sorry for being so blunt, but that is simply nonsense. Only a person who was driven by unbridaled personal ambition and a lust for power and prestige, and who is utterly bereft of anything resembling honor or integrity would do what Chalabi did.

  4. In The News Today

    Defectors’ Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts “They intentionally exaggerated all the information so they would drag the United States into war,” a field leader in the exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi said. Helena Cobban has…

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