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Further Reading

Ahmed Chalabi

Ahmed Chalabi is a Shia Muslim born to a wealthy banking family. He left Iraq in the mid-50s and lived in the United States and Britain since then.Ahmed Chalabi is one of the best known Iraqi opposition figures in the West as leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi also is a convicted bank swindler who, we now know, fed the Bush administration false intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and capabilities and Iraq's ties to terrorism.

Chalabi was the chairman of the Petra Bank in Jordan and was eventually convicted (in his absence) of fraud by a Jordanian court. He maintained he was innocent and says the Iraqi government trumped up the accusations. Chalabi, an opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, founded Petra Bank in Jordan in 1977. Over the next twelve years, he grew Petra into Jordan's second-largest bank, with a net worth of thirty million Jordanian dinars or about $42,000,000 at today's rates. As Chalabi's status as an international financier grew, so too did his vociferous criticism of Saddam Hussein and the Jordanian government, which he charged with complicity in Saddam's wrongdoings. According to Chalabi, his political enemies in Jordan returned to power in the spring of 1989 when Mudhar Badran reassumed the prime ministership and appointed Muhammed Saeed El-Nabulsi governor of the central bank. Nabulsi had occupied this position until 1985, having spent the intervening period in Iraq associating with the "notorious" Iraqi security agency known as the "Mukhabarat."

Chalabi alleges that his public criticisms of Saddam and the Jordanian government angered Nabulsi and Badran, leading them to plot a state takeover of Petra Bank under false pretenses. At the same time, one of Nabulsi's deputies delivered an explicit threat, telling Chalabi that Nabulsi's sole purpose in returning to Jordan was "getting" him. Jordan swiftly laid the groundwork for seizing the bank. In June 1989, the government circulated a denunciatory leaflet entitled "Save What Remains of Petra Bank," designed to discredit Chalabi and to undermine the confidence of Petra's depositors. Acting under a martial law decree from Jordan's Economic Security Committee, the state seized the bank by military force. Nabulsi ordered Chalabi to remain in Jordan and to serve on the bank's new management committee, but according to Chalabi, this was a pretext to facilitate his kidnapping by the Mukhabarat. Warned of the plot, Chalabi fled Jordan on August 7, 1989, never to return.

On August 11, 2004, Ahmad Chalabi sued the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in federal court, alleging a civil RICO conspiracy and various torts related to Jordan's seizure of his bank some fifteen years earlier. Finding that Chalabi had alleged facts supporting jurisdiction over a foreign sovereign, the district court dispensed with jurisdictional discovery and dismissed Chalabi's claims as time-barred. Satisfied that Chalabi had alleged - if not shown - facts sufficient to overcome Jordan's sovereign immunity under the "commercial activity" exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1605(a)(2), the district court nonetheless held that the statutes of limitation applicable to Chalabi's claims provided a straightforward, "non-merits ground" for resolving the case. Chalabi missed the deadline by more than a decade: the three-year period for common law torts and the four-year period for civil RICO began running in 1989.

Following the 1991 gulf war Chalabi organized a Kurdish uprising in Northern Iraq. The uprising failed and the INC fled Iraq. Dr. Ahmad Chalabi was leader of Iraqi National Congress until April of 1999, when he was demoted to the rank of an ordinary member. A collective leadership of seven persons, each representing one of the main opposition groups, was established in his place.

For a decade, exiled Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi was America's chosen leader-to-be in a new Iraq. Championed by Pentagon neocons and objected to by the State Department, Chalabi received more than 100 million US taxpayer dollars as America's man designated to be leader of a new Iraqi government. But the State Department finally won out in its struggle with the Pentagon to dump Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, delivering Iraq to a competing exiled group, Dr. Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord.

Chalabi was the man who convinced Vice President CHENEY that the United States would be greeted as a great liberator in Iraq. In February 2003 Chalabi returned to Iraq, first in Northern Iraq and then in Nasiryah. In November 2003, the Supreme National De-Ba'athification Commission replaced the Iraqi De-Ba'athification Council; Ahmed Chalabi, the Shi'a expatriate politician, served as its first chairman. Chalabi was the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq's newly constituted government in 2005.

Chalabi has repeatedly been cited as a source of false intelligence that led the U.S. to invade Iraq. Chalabi fed false stories about Iraq's weapons capabilities to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a story that the Times was later forced to publicly discount.

According to multiple accounts, as the Administration was building its case for going to war in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) provided the Administration with defectors who claimed to be able to confirm the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Information the INC provided repeatedly turned out to be fraudulent or impossible to corroborate with available intelligence, and the credentials of the defectors were exaggerated. According to news accounts, intelligence experts such as the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the CIA had longstanding doubts about the reliability of INC information, but DOD offices embraced INC information and passed it to the White House without traditional layers of review.

The CIA may have questioned the authenticity of Iranian intelligence passed on to the U.S. by Chalabi, yet still this intelligence was used eagerly to promote the pro-war propaganda that so many in Congress and the nation bought into. And now it looks like the intelligence fed to Chalabi by Iran was deliberately falsified, but because it fit in so neatly with the neocon's determination to remake the entire Middle East, starting with a preemptive war against Iraq, it was received enthusiastically.

Chalabi also wAs under investigation by the FBI for allegedly leaking U.S. intelligence information to Iran. He was suspected of telling the Iranians that the US had broken the code by which the US was learning information about their activities. According to former U.S. intelligence officials, this leak "could have caused serious damage to U.S. national seurity." The serious concern is that valuable and top-secret U.S. intelligence may well have gone in the other direction: to Iran with the help of Chalabi. These serious concerns led to the dumping of the heir apparent Chalabi, the arrest of his colleagues, and the raid on his home and headquarters to seize important documents.