Another Kind of Evil

A trailer for the upcoming film The Chronicle’s of Riddick has a futuristically bedecked Judy Dench declaring “Sometimes the only way to stop evil is not with good. You must confront it with another kind of evil.” This is the only rationale I can find for the choice to use Ahmad Chalabi in any way at all for the battle to oust Saddam Hussein.

[Officials in] the State Department and CIA…have recently expressed deep concern about a surge in recent intelligence alleging that the INC and Chalabi have been passing on potentially dangerous information to officials in the government of Iran. Though Chalabi has never made any secret of his cordial relations with top Iranian officials—one of his aides claimed that Chalabi had held discussions with most top Iranian officials over the last six months—Bush administration officials say the latest intelligence indicates he may have been supplying the Iranians with information on U.S. security operations in Iraq that could “get people killed.”

Under the lame-at-best excuse that U.S. financial backing of an Iraqi political party had become “inappropriate” with June 30 looming (like that date represents any real Iraqi sovereignty or political integrity), the Pentagon has finally cut off funding for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress ($340,000 a month). But given that the number one item on the requirements for that salary was to provide the US with “the location of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) storage, development facilities and individuals associated with these facilities,” I’d say we we’ve been screwed twice by this con artist.

But that’s not even the lowest this reptile has sunk:

Another top priority for the INC’s intelligence-gathering apparatus was the collection of information on the “fate/whereabouts of U.S. POW Capt Michael Scott Speicher,” a Navy pilot who was shot down over Iraq during the first gulf war. Though the INC and other exile groups stoked prewar rumors among U.S. conservatives that Speicher was alive and being held by Saddam’s regime in a secret Iraqi prison cell, most U.S. intelligence officials, including senior DIA officials, believe that Speicher probably died years ago. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials say that the DIA concluded shortly after major combat operations ended in Iraq last year that Speicher almost certainly was dead and that prewar reports from exiles and defectors that he was still alive probably were hoaxes.

As he’s the Pentagon’s boy, and the CIA and State apparently both hate him, if I were Chalabi, I’d start earning some of that money, if only to help ensure the prison scandal doesn’t shake things up so much that his DoD pals stop caring whether he’s around to see the sovereign Iraq he’s double-crossed us so consistently for.