KevinNYC
11-03-2015, 09:42 PM
Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi Politician Who Pushed for US Invasion (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/world/middleeast/ahmad-chalabi-iraq-dead.html?_r=0), Dies at 71
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 on Tuesday at his home in Baghdad. He was 71.
The cause was heart failure, Iraqi officials said..
......
His group, the Iraqi National Congress, would get more than $100 million from the C.I.A. and other agencies between its founding in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated 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 in the United States’ march to war, Mr. Cheney as vice president and the others as top Pentagon officials.
Promoted "Curveball" and other defectors peddling tales
....the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.”
Probably the most notorious defector was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, the brother of a Chalabi aide. His false account of mobile bioweapons laboratories was cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the United Nations. But the Senate report found an “insufficient basis” to determine whether Curveball had provided his information at the behest of the Iraqi National Congress.
Mr. Janabi was just one of several defectors whose accounts were promoted by Mr. Chalabi’s group: Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami and Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy claimed that Islamist terrorists had trained in the mid-1990s at a camp in Iraq called Salman Pak; Khidhir Hamza said that Mr. Hussein had tried to build a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s; and Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri told The New York Times that he had visited at least 20 secret weapons facilities in Iraq.
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 on Tuesday at his home in Baghdad. He was 71.
The cause was heart failure, Iraqi officials said..
......
His group, the Iraqi National Congress, would get more than $100 million from the C.I.A. and other agencies between its founding in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated 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 in the United States’ march to war, Mr. Cheney as vice president and the others as top Pentagon officials.
Promoted "Curveball" and other defectors peddling tales
....the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.”
Probably the most notorious defector was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, the brother of a Chalabi aide. His false account of mobile bioweapons laboratories was cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the United Nations. But the Senate report found an “insufficient basis” to determine whether Curveball had provided his information at the behest of the Iraqi National Congress.
Mr. Janabi was just one of several defectors whose accounts were promoted by Mr. Chalabi’s group: Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami and Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy claimed that Islamist terrorists had trained in the mid-1990s at a camp in Iraq called Salman Pak; Khidhir Hamza said that Mr. Hussein had tried to build a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s; and Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri told The New York Times that he had visited at least 20 secret weapons facilities in Iraq.