Where Are They Now?

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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby conniption » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:24 pm

aha!! I knew I had a bookmark by that title...

unz
(embedded links)

Where Are They Now?


The trillion dollar a year war on terror is a witness protection program for government felons

Philip Giraldi
July 7, 2015

• 136 Comments

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The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior bureaucrats who have long believed that their status makes them untouchable, giving them license to steal and even to kill. The sad fact is that while whistleblowers have been imprisoned for revealing government criminality, no one in the federal bureaucracy has ever actually been punished for the crimes of torture, kidnapping and assassination committed during the George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama presidencies.

Why is accountability important? After the Second World War, the victorious allies believed it was important to establish responsibility for the crimes that had been committed by officials of the Axis powers. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia, including several guilty of waterboarding. Those who were not executed for being complicit in the actual launching of war were tried for torture of both military personnel and civilians and crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians as well as of soldiers who had surrendered or been captured.

No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2015, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after 1946. High level US government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States but they nevertheless described an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones flying across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. The precedent of Iraq, even though it was an abject failure, has led to further military action against Libya and Syria to bring about “regime change” as well as a continuing conflict in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been waging a largely secret “long war” against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the U.S. government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler’s government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington?

Many Americans would now consider the leading figures in the Bush Administration aided and abetted by many enablers in congress from both political parties to be unindicted war criminals. Together they ignited a global conflict that is still running strong fourteen years later with a tally of more than 7,000 dead Americans and a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Somalis and Syrians.

War breeds more war, due largely to the fact that guilty parties in Washington who piggyback on the prevailing narrative move onward and upward, rewarded in this life even if not necessarily so in the hereafter. A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and “teaching” positions at prestigious universities. Though not 100% accurate as I know at least a couple of honorable former senior officials who wound up teaching, it would seem to be a generalization that has considerable validity. The implication is that many senior government officials ascend to their positions based on being accommodating and “political” rather than being honest and they continue to do the same when they switch over to corporate America or the equally corrupted world of academia.

I thought of my friend’s comment when I turned on the television a week ago to be confronted by the serious, somewhat intense gaze of Michael Morell, warning about the danger that ISIS will strike the U.S. over the Fourth of July weekend. Morell, a former senior CIA official, is in the terror business. He had no evidence whatsoever that terrorists were planning an attack and should have realized that maneuvering the United States into constantly going on alert based on empty threats is precisely what militant groups tend to do.

When not fronting as a handsomely paid national security consultant for the CBS television network Morell is employed by Beacon Global Strategies as a Senior Counselor, presumably warning well-heeled clients to watch out for terrorists. His lifestyle and substantial emoluments depend on people being afraid of terrorism so they will turn to an expert like him and ask serious questions that he will answer in a serious way suggesting that Islamic militants could potentially bring about some kind of global apocalypse.

Morell, a torture apologist, also has a book out that he wants to sell, positing somewhat ridiculously that he and his former employer had been fighting The Great War of Our Time against Islamic terrorists, something comparable to the World Wars of the past century, hence the title. Morell needs to take some valium and relax. He would also benefit from a little introspection regarding the bad guys versus good guys narrative that he is peddling. His credentials as a warrior are somewhat suspect in any event as he never did any military service and his combat in the world of intelligence consisted largely of sitting behind a desk in Washington and providing briefings to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which he presumably told them what they wanted to hear.

Morell is one of a host of pundits who are successful in selling the military-industrial-lobbyist-congressional-intelligence community line of BS on the war on terror. Throw in the neocons as the in-your-face agents provocateurs who provide instant intellectual and media credibility for developments and you have large groups of engaged individuals with good access who are on the receiving end of the seemingly unending cash pipeline that began with 9/11. Frances Townsend, who was the Bush Homeland Security adviser and who is now a consultant with CNN, is another such creature as is Michael Chertoff, formerly Director of the Department of Homeland Security, who has successfully marketed his defective airport scanners to his former employer.

But the guys and gals who are out feathering their own nests are at least comprehensible given our predatory capitalist system of government. More to the point, the gang that ordered or carried out torture and assassination are the ones who should be doing some hard time in the slammer but instead they too are riding the gravy train and cashing in. To name only a few of those who knew about the torture and ordered it carried out I would cite George Tenet, James Pavitt, Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez from the intelligence community. The assassination program meanwhile is accredited to John Brennan, currently CIA Director, during his tenure as Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor. And then there are Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with John Yoo at Justice and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice at the White House, all of whom outright lied, dissimulated and conspired their way to bring about a war of aggression against Iraq.

There are plenty of nameless others who were “only carrying out orders” and who should be included in any reckoning of America’s crimes over the past fifteen years, particularly if one also considers the illegal NSA spying program headed by Michael Hayden, who defended the practice and has also referred to those who oppose enhanced interrogation torture as “interrogation deniers.” And then there are Presidents Bush and Obama who certainly knew what was going on in the name of the American people as well as John Brennan, who was involved in both the torture and renditions programs as well as the more recent assassinations by drone.

So where are they now? Living in obscurity ashamed of what they did? Hardly. Not only have they not been vilified or marginalized, they have, in most cases, been rewarded. George W. Bush lives in Dallas near his Presidential Library and eponymous Think (sic) Tank. Cheney lives in semi-retirement in McLean Virginia with a multi-million dollar waterfront weekend retreat in St. Michaels Maryland, not too far from Donald Rumsfeld’s similar digs.

George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his “slam-dunk” comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the Iraq war possible to curry favor with the White House, has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ, and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been described as a “self-justifying apologia,” in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the U.S. invaded Iraq for no good reason.

James Pavitt, who was the point man responsible for the “enhanced interrogation” program as Tenet’s Deputy Director for Operations, is currently a principal with The Scowcroft Group and also serves on several boards. Cofer Black, who headed the Counter-Terrorism Center, which actually carried out renditions and “enhanced interrogations,” was vice chairman of Blackwater Worldwide (now called Xe) and chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-off. He is now vice president of Blackbird Technologies, a defense and intelligence contractor. Rodriguez, who succeeded Black and in 2005 illegally destroyed video tapes made of Agency interrogations to avoid possible repercussions, is a senior vice president with Edge Consulting, a defense contractor currently owned by IBM that is located in Virginia.

John Yoo is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley while Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of mushroom clouds and is widely regarded as the worst National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history, has returned to Stanford University. She is a professor at the Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is occasionally spoken of as either a possible GOP presidential candidate or as a future Commissioner of the National Football League. Her interaction with students is limited, but when challenged on her record she has responded that it was a difficult situation post 9/11, something that everyone understands, though few would have come to her conclusion that attacking Iraq might be a good way to destroy al-Qaeda.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the “intellectual” driving force behind the invasion of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and advises Jeb Bush on foreign policy. A bid to reward Wolfie for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair. His chief deputy at the Pentagon Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith’s acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01 plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01.

The over-rewarding of former officials who have in reality done great harm to the United States and its interests might well seem inexplicable, but it is all part of a style of bureaucracy that cannot admit failure and truly believes that all its actions are ipso facto legitimate because the executive and its minions can do no wrong. It is also a symptom of the classic American character flaw that all things are of necessity measured by money. Does anyone remember the ancient Roman symbol of republican virtue Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm after being named Dictator in order to defeat Rome’s enemies? He then handed power back to the Senate before returning to his plowing after the job was done. The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing “It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story.” George Washington was America’s Cincinnatus and it is not a coincidence that officers of the continental army founded the Cincinnati Society, the nation’s oldest patriotic organization, in 1783. It is also reported that Edward Snowden used the alias “Cincinnatus.”

Lord Acton once observed that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” More recently essayist Edward Abbey put it in an American context, noting “Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.” That senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds is a fault that is perhaps not unique to the United States but it is nevertheless unacceptable. Handing out a couple of exemplary prison sentences for the caste that believes itself untouchable would be a good place to start. An opportunity was missed with David Petraeus, who was fined and avoided jail time, and it will be interesting to see how the Dennis Hastert case develops. Hastert will no doubt be slapped on the wrist for the crime of moving around his own money while the corruption that was the source of that money, both as a legislator and lobbyist, will be ignored. As will his molestation of at least one and possibly several young boys. One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you’re sorry.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Elvis » Wed Oct 21, 2015 4:35 am

Good rundown, Conniption, too bad we're not privy to their cocktail parties and whatever secret committees some of them might be forming. That is to say, though 'retired' or holding professorships etc., I expect some of them may be quite active in formulating and implementing the present crises in Ukraine and the Mideast.

The article offers some details on Feith, mentioned by Zangtang:

zangtang » Mon Oct 19, 2015 2:27 pm wrote:in that milieu, Feith & Wurmser ?


Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith’s acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01


Overpriced.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby lucky » Wed Oct 21, 2015 7:59 am

Thought Shayler was rocking a ladies 'look' now
There's holes in the sky where rain gets in
the holes are small
that's why rain is thin.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Oct 27, 2015 8:14 pm

Elvis » Mon Oct 19, 2015 4:17 pm wrote:Thanks, SLAD -- Perle was another one I've wondered about. He's been too quiet.


Perle is quiet, the Prince of Darkness is really staying in the shadows. Here's an article from last year that mentions what he's doing in the darkness:

Bilderberg’s current chairman is Henri de Castries, a French aristocrat. Castries lives in Paris, spends his weekends in a castle, and one week a month in the United States. He served in the French treasury, and participated in the weaning of France from a mixed economy influenced by socialism to a more purely capitalist one. He is chairman and CEO of something called AXA Group, a global conglomerate involved largely with investments, insurance and healthcare. Its subsidiaries are around the world. In the United States, those include Equitable Life and MONY. The largest ownership stake is held by Americans; the government of Qatar has a piece too.

CaptureOthers on the steering committee are from familiar names like Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Alcoa, and the corporate law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, as well as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the neocon former Bush official Richard Perle, along with an amalgam of public and private officials from a host of countries and entities, including a Dutch economics professor, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the CEO of the European aerospace giant Airbus, and a vice president of the conservative Hudson Institute.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 27, 2015 8:47 pm

Neocons Launch 2016 Manifesto

by Jim Lobe

A mostly neoconservative group of national-security analysts have published perhaps the first comprehensive outline of what they believe a Republican foreign policy should look like as of Inauguration Day 2017. It’s titled “Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World.” Although it concedes that “there are limitations on American power,” according to the book’s “Forward” by former George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Wehner, all of the contributors

…understand, too, that with the right leadership and policies in place, the United States can once again be a guarantor of global order and peace, a champion of human rights, and a beacon of economic growth and human flourishing. There is no reason the 21st century cannot be the next American Century. …Choosing to Lead offers perspectives and recommendations on how to make the next American Century happen. In doing so, we believe it will serve the world as well as the United States of America.[Emphasis added.]

If you sense a rebirth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), you’re probably not far off, although Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, who co-founded PNAC, are not among the large number of contributors. PNAC published two volumes, Present Dangers and Rebuilding American Defenses, that together formed a neocon manifesto for the Republican presidential candidate in the 2000 election in which the organization initially backed John McCain.

John Hay Initiative

The new compilation is the product of the John Hay Initiative, named after Theodore Roosevelt’s chief diplomat, and brings together many of the foreign-policy advisers to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The Initiative is co-chaired by Eliot Cohen (a charter member of PNAC), former Romney adviser Brian Hook, and Eric Edelman (who succeeded Doug Feith as undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush and has since served as co-founder and director—with Kagan and Kristol—of PNAC’s lineal descendant, the Foreign Policy Initiative). The 200 “experts” connected to the Initiative have reportedly advised almost all of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates.

The Initiative has made no secret of its hope that a successful Republican presidential candidate will appoint many of its members to senior policy-making positions (much as PNAC’s charter members, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams, were all rewarded with senior posts under George W. Bush. Cohen positioned himself for an appointment in that administration by writing the perfectly timed book, Supreme Command, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion about how the best wartime presidents ignored the more cautious advice of their generals. A faithful signer of PNAC’s letters, Cohen was named counsel to Condoleezza Rice in Bush’s second term.

In a chapter entitled “Rebuilding American Foreign Policy,” Cohen, Edelman, and Hook offer the predictable Republican/neocon critique of current U.S. foreign policy. They describe what they are against and hint—albeit not explicitly—that maybe the Bush administration may have made some mistakes.

U.S. foreign policy today is failing every test that a great power’s foreign policy can fail. Today, America’s enemies do not fear the United States and America’s friends doubt that they can trust it. Neither the American people nor the world-at-large understands anymore either the purposes of American power or even, in some respects, the principles that shape them. Indeed, after a decade and a half of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, some Americans have concluded that the best thing to do is to pull back from the world and its troubles. Some argue that America’s role as guarantor of global order is no longer necessary, history having ended with the Cold War; there are also those who think the United States is too clumsy and incompetent to do much of anything right; and there are, finally, those who think that “nation-building at home” is some kind of alternative to engagement abroad.
We disagree. We believe that a strong United States is essential to the maintenance of the open global order under which this country and the rest of the world have prospered since 1945; that the alternative is not a self-regulating machine of balancing states but a landscape marked by eruptions of chaos and destruction. We recognize the failures as well as the successes of past policies, because to govern is to choose, and to choose in the world as it is, is necessarily to err. But while we believe that we must understand those failures and learn from them, we also believe that American power and influence has, on the whole, served our country and the world far better than American weakness and introversion.[Emphasis added.]
In the same essay, the authors also assert that “the first principle of American foreign policy…should be prudence” given the fact that, among other things, the U.S. economy is not nearly as dominant in relative terms as it was after World War II. “Our resources will be finite, and so will be the ability of our leaders to focus on more than a few problems at a time.” It’s somewhat refreshing there’s no more talk here about being mightier than the Roman or British Empires. But they still believe that the U.S. should be the “guarantor of global order.”

Thus, they deem Beijing’s aspirations unacceptable and decry “replac[ing] the American-shaped order that enabled China’s ‘peaceful rise’ with a system in which we are only one of multiple, equal participants.” Russia, Iran, North Korea and “non-state actors—most notably, jihadi movements of several stripes”—also qualify as key threats. Unlike the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and most other nuclear proliferation experts, the authors also believe that Iran’s “nuclear ambitions will not be blocked and, indeed, may even be eased by the Obama Administration’s misconceived deal with it.”

Although the authors do not believe that this is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany, they don’t hesitate to invoke the 1930s—the neocon touchstone for understanding just about any challenge to American power and prestige—to depict the present moment and the consequences that may be drawn from it:

We do not yet face a cataclysm like that of the late 1930s. But it is fair to compare our era to that of the early 1930s, when the democratic powers seemed to have lost much of their military edge and, equally important, their self-confidence and will to use their power. At the same time, pitiless dictators and virulent ideologies were making use of new technologies to threaten, in ways previously inconceivable, the international order.
A New Generation

Most of the book’s contributors, unlike Cohen, were not associated with PNAC in its early years. This is a somewhat younger generation.

Nonetheless there are some golden oldies, too, most noteworthy Elliott Abrams who wrote the chapter 16 years ago on “Israel and the ‘Peace Process'” in Present Dangers. Abrams had the opportunity to put his ideas about the “peace process” (his quotation marks) into practice when he served as George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide on the on the National Security Council, and we can all see how that turned out. In light of his outstanding achievements in that position, the John Hay Initiative awarded him responsibility for writing the chapter on the entire “Middle East.” And, surprise, surprise, his views correspond almost precisely with those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly in how to deal with Palestinians and on the overriding necessity of “defeating Iran’s regional ambitions.” Abrams, who was also in charge of democracy promotion under Bush, believes in establishing an alliance between the U.S., Israel, and Sunni-led (authoritarian) Arab states in an echo of the elusive “strategic consensus” sought 35 years ago by Alexander Haig after the Iranian revolution.

Another Present Dangers contributor and PNAC alumnus, Aaron Friedberg of the American Enterprise Institute, reprises his role as the Paul Revere of the China threat in a chapter entitled “A New China Strategy.” He served as Cheney’s top Asia adviser.

I couldn’t find any reference to “climate change” in the main chapters, which is consistent with Republican orthodoxy, but a more careful reading may find a reference.

If you want to see the likely foreign-policy worldview of a Republican administration, should one take office in 2017, Choosing to Lead offers a pretty reliable guide.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Grizzly » Wed Oct 28, 2015 1:46 am

I couldn’t find any reference to “climate change” in the main chapters, which is consistent with Republican orthodoxy, but a more careful reading may find a reference.


I wonder why? Maybe it will draw attention to, 'Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025'.
hxxtp://csat.au.af.mil/.../vol3ch15.pdf

Most of you know this, but for those whom, do not ...



*note I didn't link to it, but if you replace the x's with t's, in the addy, it will get you the paper/pdf.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Joao » Wed Oct 28, 2015 8:55 pm

Cheers Grizz but ain't no way I'm clicking on a .mil link and directly informing them of my interest in this topic. (G**gle bot and the NSA can figure it out from this post, instead.)

Attaching that document as obtained from another source, in case anyone's interested.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 03, 2015 9:54 am

Ahmad Chalabi ....in the ground

Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi Politician Who Helped Persuade U.S. to Invade, Dies at 71
By SEWELL CHANNOV. 3, 2015


Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who from exile helped persuade the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, and then unsuccessfully tried to attain power as his country was nearly torn apart by sectarian violence, died at his home in Baghdad on Tuesday. He was 71.

The cause was heart failure, Iraqi officials said.

Mr. Chalabi is the Iraqi perhaps most associated with President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and topple its longtime dictator, Saddam Hussein. A mathematician with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Mr. Chalabi, the son of a prominent Shiite family, cultivated close ties with journalists in Washington and London; the neoconservative advisers who helped shape Mr. Bush’s foreign policy; American lawmakers; and a wide network of Iraqi exiles, many of whom were paid for intelligence about Mr. Hussein’s government.

Mr. Chalabi’s relationship with the Americans stretched over decades. In 1998, he helped persuade Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which was signed by President Bill Clinton and stated that it was the position of the United States to replace Mr. Hussein’s government with a democratic one.


His group, the Iraqi National Congress, would get more than $100 million from the C.I.A. and other agencies from its founding in 1992 to the start of the war. He cultivated close friendships with a circle of hawkish Republicans — Dick Cheney, Douglas J. Feith, William J. Luti, Richard N. Perle and Paul D. Wolfowitz — who were central participants in the United States’ march to war, Mr. Cheney as vice president and the others as top Pentagon officials.

Mr. Chalabi’s contention, broadly shared by United States intelligence agencies, was that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Hussein had fatally gassed Kurds and slaughtered Shiites and other Iraqis, and he had refused to fully cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. But most of the case for war was predicated on faulty intelligence, including the testimony of defectors. As it became clear that Iraq did not have an active chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program and as the occupying American forces did not receive the welcome that the Iraqi opposition had predicted, the Bush administration distanced itself from him.

One year after the invasion, American special forces raided his home in Baghdad, apparently searching for evidence that he was sharing intelligence with Iran. (Although Mr. Chalabi kept close ties to Shiite Iran’s clerical leadership, no such evidence was found.)

He was the target of an assassination attempt at least once, in 2008, when a suicide bomber narrowly missed him, killing six of his bodyguards. Spurned by the Americans, Mr. Chalabi allied himself with Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader and ally of Iran whose Mahdi Army led two bloody uprisings, and who remains a significant force in Iraqi politics.

“Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration,” Dexter Filkins wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2006, after interviewing Mr. Chalabi at his home in London, where he was on vacation. “Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster.”

As recently as last year, Mr. Chalabi’s name was floated as a candidate for prime minister, and at the time of his death he was the head of finance committee in Parliament.

On Tuesday, Iraqi leaders issued statements that emphasized Mr. Chalabi’s role in ousting Mr. Hussein, who was captured in 2003 and executed in 2006.

“We mourn regretfully the death of Dr. Ahmad Chalabi,” President Fuad Masum said in a statement. “Chalabi had a pivotal role with many Iraqi leaders in fighting the dictatorship.”

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, “He dedicated his life to opposing the dictatorial regime, and he a great role in building a democratic process in Iraq.”

Ahmad Chalabi was born in Baghdad in October 1944. His family was part of a tiny, secular Shiite elite that had prospered under the Ottoman Turks and then, after World War I, the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British. Mr. Chalabi attended an elite Jesuit high school, Baghdad College, where his schoolmates included fellow Shiites like Ayad Allawi, who would later become a relative by marriage and serve as an acting prime minister, and Adel Abdul Mahdi, who would later become a finance minister, a vice president and, now, the oil minister.

In 1958, the same year that army officers overthrew the monarchy, the Chalabi family went into exile. Mr. Chalabi studied math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before studying for his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He later taught at the American University of Beirut and published several mathematical papers. During his time overseas, the Baath Party staged a coup, in 1968, and by 1979, Mr. Hussein had managed to consolidate power.

The disastrous Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the American-led war that ousted his forces from Kuwait in 1991 galvanized Iraqi exiles. In 1992, Mr. Chalabi and other exiles founded the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella coalition for groups seeking to oust Mr. Hussein.

By now, Mr. Chalabi was in regular contact with the Americans, though his interventions were often unwelcome. In 1995, while receiving pay from the C.I.A. in the Kurdish city of Erbil, Mr. Chalabi began an unauthorized — and unsuccessful — attack on Mr. Hussein’s forces.

The fiasco led to nothing except a decision by Turkey to send troops into northern Iraq. The next year, Mr. Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Mr. Hussein. The coup attempt failed, about 150 fighters for the Iraqi National Congress were killed and Mr. Chalabi’s relationship with the C.I.A. never recovered.

In 2001, Mr. Chalabi again came under fire. A State Department audit found that the group had misspent $113,794, including $2,000 on membership fees for a Washington gym and $6,314 for oil paintings to decorate its offices. (A follow-up audit last year found that the group had made considerable progress in tightening controls.)

The American-led overthrow of Mr. Hussein’s government in 2003 gave Mr. Chalabi a chance to re-enter politics. The Americans named him to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. But images of toppled statues and cheering Iraqis quickly gave way to scenes of violent resistance to the occupying authorities, led by former members of the government, and to increasing sectarian violence.

Within a year of the war, the Americans cut off Mr. Chalabi. In May 2004, they stopped $335,000 monthly payments to the Iraqi National Congress, and days later they raided his Baghdad home.

Mr. Chalabi, for his part, attributed the problems in Iraq to the Americans for staying too long and for failing to immediately turn over power to Iraqis — even though most observers doubted that exiles like Mr. Chalabi, who had been away for 45 years, could have kept the country together on their own.

Moreover, Mr. Chalabi never developed a significant political base. In the December 2005 parliamentary elections, the first held under the country’s new Constitution, his Iraqi National Congress received about 30,000 votes, one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million ballots cast — not enough to put even a single lawmaker in the new Iraqi Parliament.

Mr. Chalabi was never widely trusted nor liked by ordinary Iraqis, for whom it was common knowledge that he had been convicted in absentia for fraud in Jordan in 1992, and sentenced to 22 years in prison, for embezzling almost $300 million from Petra Bank, which he had founded. (Mr. Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, said the charges were concocted by the Jordanian government under pressure from Mr. Hussein.)

Mr. Chalabi may be remembered above all for a certain quality of relentlessness. As the Times journalist Michael R. Gordon and a retired general, Bernard E. Trainor, related in a 2012 book, members of the Iraqi Governing Council traveled to Washington in January 2004 for Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address, his first since the invasion. Seated in the Senate gallery, near the first lady, Laura Bush, was Mr. Chalabi.

The next morning, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Mr. Bush turned to Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and asked how Mr. Chalabi had managed to get in. No one could say
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Nov 03, 2015 12:34 pm

seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 03, 2015 8:54 am wrote:The next morning, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Mr. Bush turned to Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and asked how Mr. Chalabi had managed to get in. No one could say


Image
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-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby zangtang » Tue Nov 03, 2015 1:09 pm

who gets whats left of the 300 million?

or would that be the Swiss?
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Searcher08 » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:18 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:34 pm wrote:
seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 03, 2015 8:54 am wrote:The next morning, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Mr. Bush turned to Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and asked how Mr. Chalabi had managed to get in. No one could say


Image


<CondoLeeeeeeza sez>
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take a Chalabia and slam it into the National Security Council, then take another Chalabia and slam it into Iraq; that they would try to use a Chalabia as a missile, a hijacked Chalabia as a missile..."
</>
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Elvis » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:47 pm

seemslikeadream wrote:Ahmad Chalabi ....in the ground


Funny we had the same reaction to this story: "in the ground." I came on this morning to post the story here with that exact comment. At least we've got attrition working for us.

I'll never forget this image:

Cheney approached Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, “If you hadn’t opposed the I.N.C. and Chalabi, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”


Powell probably got off easy; a bitter Cheney poking you in the chest strikes me as something like Il bacio della morte -- the Mafia "kiss of death."

The funny part is, when they trotted Chalabi around Iraq to drum up support, nobody wanted anything to do with him. For all the realpolitik, these guys seem to exist partly in a fantasy world.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 03, 2015 5:58 pm

it's just that sweet flat American sense of humor :P
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Grizzly » Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:21 pm

Turbulent Velvet, of ufobreakfast.com

Anyone here remember that erudite blogger and his stimulating blog? I oftentimes wondered/ thought he was a pseudonym of Jeff wells.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Where Are They Now?

Postby Elvis » Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:59 pm

Grizzly » Tue Nov 03, 2015 8:21 pm wrote:Turbulent Velvet, of ufobreakfast.com

Anyone here remember that erudite blogger and his stimulating blog? I oftentimes wondered/ thought he was a pseudonym of Jeff wells.


I've not heard of him, nor ufobreakfast, but I was never a wide reader of blogs. "Turbulent Velvet" would be a good band name. :coolshades
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