the next necon war
James Bamford writes about the neocons’ next war in Rolling Stone. Amid tales about eavesdropping going on in the FBI’s Washington field office and overseas intrigue with shady Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar—of Iran/Contra infamy—Bamford serves up some devastating data about Ahmad Chalabi:
The FBI suspected that Chalabi, a Shiite who had a luxurious villa in Tehran and was close to senior Iranian officials, was actually working as a spy for the Shiite government of Iran. Getting the U.S. to invade Iraq was apparently part of a plan to install a pro-Iranian Shiite government in Baghdad, with Chalabi in charge. The bureau also suspected that Chalabi's intelligence chief had furnished Iran with highly classified information on U.S. troop movements, top-secret communications, plans of the provisional government and other closely guarded material on U.S. operations in Iraq.
This, of course, means that the Pentagon had been duped:
If true, the allegations meant that they had just launched a war to put into power an agent of their mortal enemy, Iran. Their man—the dissident leader who sat behind the first lady in the president's box during the State of the Union address in which Bush prepared the country for war—appeared to have been working for Iran all along.
Oops.
(Thanks to Cenk Uygur at HuffPo for the tip.)