May 24, 2004

• What lies beyond the registration?
• bugmenot to the rescue! nopass/nopass
• Oh... so it was... *organ music blares* IRAN all along! What, were they paying informants and spies with coupons and peanuts? How can they think it's believable that the most advanced surveillance and investigation agencies were fooled by some pathological liars? Note to self: never believe anyone called "Curveball".
• oh christ, registration problems even on the printout version??? ARG!!! so sorry. here's the bestest part: WASHINGTON
• Christ, this is embarrassing. It makes me wonder, though; did this administration deliberately fuck up absolutely everything about Iraq on purpose? Incompetence can only explain so much, and if Bush meant to fail so miserably, then I say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
• ..and it gets worse! Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has only in recent months become clear that Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the United States, the officials said. sheesh.
• Kautilyan has a theory that the now infamous Nigerian document (that Joe Wilson dubunked) came from Iran. It seems the Iranian passed bogus WMD documents in the 90s.

  The links between the Iraqi National Congress and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992, when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military operations. Indications that Iran, which fought a bloody war against Iraq during the 1980s, was trying to lure the United States into action against Saddam Hussein appeared many years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that ousting Hussein was a national priority. In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclear inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape. The documents, which referred to results of experiments on enriched uranium in the bomb's core, were almost flawless, according to Andrew Cockburn's recent account of the event in the political newsletter CounterPunch. But the inspectors were troubled by one minor matter: Some technical descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian. They determined the original copy was written in Farsi by an Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic. And the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded the documents were fraudulent.

• I was laughing about this all yesterday. In a bitter "WTF kind of idiots are running this show?" sort of way, but laughing nonetheless. For which my sorely limited gratitude.
• *Takes lame executive branch out behind barn, puts it out of its misery*
• The Chalabi effect. very very sorry
• Bay of Goats
• Kevin Drum posted a timeline of Chalabi. Lots of good links.
• "Iyad Allawi, the new choice to lead Iraq, isn't Ahmed Chalabi -- but that's about the only thing to commend this wily member of the old-boy, CIA-sponsored exile club."
• Intel: The Hunt for the Iranians' Informer
• Breaking Iranian Codes
• Chalabi Returns as Shiite Populist
• An Iraqi judge says he has issued two arrest warrants for former Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi and his nephew, Salem.
• Well, I fucked that up. Look here for the story
• dng scoops the h-dawg! Yeah and I heard they found out about these arrest warrants in Iran where they're staying currently. Iran??
• Fun days in Iraq: arrest warrants for the Chalabis (Salem Chalabi's in London now, it seems), reintroduction of the death penalty, al Jazeera shut down, and the Iranian consul still kidnapped, a police chief kidnapped, fighting still going on unabated in Najaf and Baghdad... phew.
• And Umurkah is safer. Watch Fox.
• But what have they done about the smurfs? er..wrong thread!