Anybody wanna wager that Chalabi...

[King_Crimson]

will be found dead..."executed" by Iraqi police!:think:

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. I will not take a wager

I am sure to loose, unless I am willing to wager that you are right...

Though if they want more mileage, a nice bomb will be the ticket

[ewagner]

2. Something terribly strange

is going on here.........I would have agree with your post completely until I saw Newt Gingrich defend Chalabi on This Week .

Why is that strange, you ask?

Well, the report that came out Friday that concluded Chalabi was/is an agent for Iran, was put out by the Defense Intelligence Agency NOT the CIA and NOT the State Department.

Who is on the DIA? That's right, you guessed it: Gingrich and also Chalabi's best buddy, Richard Pearle, just stepped down from the DIA a month or so ago.

I thought the DIA had turned on Chalabi until I saw Gingrich defending him on This Week . He still has Gingrich's support so why did the rest of the DIA turn on him?

Too many questions to draw any conclusion.

[Stephanie]

4. They are on the Defense Policy Board - an advisory group

It's a defense industry advisory board. Newt & Perle are not DIA. BUT the DPB meetings take place in the Pentagon, so I'm sure it's possible that they were in on it.

[KharmaTrain]

3. Nope...He's Too Hot For Us To Do...

We have proxies...other Chalabis...to do the job.

Chalabi was a dead man walking in Iraq the second he WE flew him in...anyone remember when Rummy sent him in and caught Colin Powell by surprise? That was the first, but not the last time.

We protected him, and as a good con artist, he surely knows how to fight slime with slime. He's gotta have lot of goodies on the BFEE (think BCCI), Chenney and others (why else would they have paid him all that money for nothing) and I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of a game all these snakes are playing as their "end game".

Remember, Chalabi would never get international recognition and in the push to get this tarbay from sticking and stinking so bad, this regime has gone with Ibrahim and their puppet. Part of the game is to "get rid" of Chalabi. Jailing would be preferable, where he could just "vanish"...and not as messy as a hit that would show up in the papers.

However, this guy is just too visible and connected for him to be a real pariah. He served this regime's purpose for propoganda and now I see him being portrayed as a "victim" (look at how Wolfie almost kissed him on CNN today). If he turns out to be a "traitor" then our regime did the "valiant" thing...if he becomes a media darling, then there's sympathy for those who supported him and how could we have betrayed such a good friend.

Either way, Chalabi's gonna be a player in this June 30th fiasco...dead or alive.

[Old and In the Way]

5. You could be on to something.

I've thought that Chalabi has something on these guys. But I hadn't thought of the BCCI angle. Certainly, Chalabi was most likely involved in that somehow....his "banking days" in Jordon and Lebanon would be during that timeframe.

Now I'm wondering if the Chalabi takeover was perhaps to give a massive new way to launder money? Think about it....Chalabi in the driver's seat and the State of Iraq could be the great washing machine for terrorist/drug money. Makes one wonder....

Yup, Google "Chalabi" and "BCCI".....all kinds of stories.

[KharmaTrain]

6. We Never Got To The Bottom Of BCCI...

and many of the characters implicated in that hornet's nest are still going strong today...including the BFEE, Chenney & Rummy.

If my aging memory recalls, this scandal was rooted in the byzantine banking systems of Pakistan...used during the 80's to funnel CIA, drug and other money in and out of Afghanistan and still exists today. I saw a report several years ago (I think Frontline) that showed the loose practices of these banks and how money is easily laundered and embezzeled.

The BCCI web also went into the Russian autocracy, now represented by Putin as well.

Methinks this may be worth spending an evening digging into. Maybe one of the better slueths here with Lexxus/Nexxus and all those search toys could help.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. And who was at the head of the BCCI investigation?

If you said JOHN KERRY, you hit the jack pot.

Makes me wonder, now that it does look like BCCI expert will win the election if the election is clean....

I write for a living and I could not sell this plot, I swear.

[Undercutter]

8. did they

ever figure out who actually ordered that break in? Iraqi police denies responsibility, military denies responsibility, bremer denies any responsibility. it's like a bunch of ghosts did it. it's starting to look like a complete chaos over there.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Reminds me of El Salvador

and the stories we used to hear about it.

Nobody did it, but somebody did... sometimes in full uniform
and with real looking IDs. We may be seeng the begining of the
right wing death squads, and they chose to scare Challabi for a
training run.

:-(

I know if this is the case, thousands will die.

[Undercutter]

10. may be

because chalabi actually had the balls to say that interim government should have more power - like control over prisons, and that the government should ask american troops to get out as soon as possible ?

some say that it could be a plot to build up chalabi's credibility, that's why he is starting to say anti-american things (revealing, isn't it, to actually be a credible politician in iraq you HAVE to be anti-american, apparently). i was laughing at the poll cnn conducted in iraq the other day, they asked iraqi people which political leaders they supported:
saddam hussein - 3.3%
chalabi - 0.2%

[Undercutter]

11. or

it could be because somebody is preparing chalabi to be the fall guy for misleading intelligence on wmds.
anybody else got conspiracy theories to wing

[K-W]

12. He's realized they have no intention of giving him the power.

He sees as well or better than we do that Iraq will stay under the control of the US. Chalabi wants to run the country, not be a puppet. He feels like hes engineered this entirely and now he wants to engineer himself into a soverign Iraq he can control.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. There are way too many balls in play

but BCCI does play a backgrounder here, (and Jordan). So does ideology.

It is still very fluid and he may still wiggle his way out

But add to this the cover of Newsweek, our con man in baghdad.

[punpirate]

13. As mentioned previously...

... there's no need to kill him. If the US actually wanted to be rid of him, they could simply pick him up and deposit him on the Jordanian border, whereupon the Jordanians exercise their longstanding warrant for his capture and drop him in jail.

The interesting thing about the DIA report was that it seems not to have been generated entirely internally. It was, according to one news report a couple of days ago, prompted by a dossier provided by Jordanian intelligence. The Jordanians want him in jail--they absolutely don't want him running Iraq, so the suggestions that he's been playing both sides against the middle with Iran would be consistent with Jordan's intentions for him.

In Iraq, Chalabi has been doing everything he can to mobilize the Shi'ites around him, as a means of generating public sympathy for himself by sympathizing with them, the purported majority in the country. It's a highly political move on Chalabi's part, but it also puts him in good with the Iranians. The Iranian ayatollahs would very much like to see a Sharia law government in Iraq, to which they could readily build alliances. A religious goverment in Iraq would also take off some of the heat internally in Iran for reform, temporarily, anyway.

Chalabi thinks he can get what he wants by using these associations--and it's abundantly clear he wants to run Iraq himself. What he might not realize is that the Shia politicians will use him in whatever ways they find necessary, and then be rid of him.

But, the simple evidence that the US has not picked him up and handed him over to Jordan--the simplest thing and the one requiring the least public explanation ("we have decided to comply with Jordan's request for his extradition")--means that one element in the White House and the Pentagon, the neo-cons, want Chalabi running things.

If Chalabi isn't arrested by the US for spying, isn't turned over to Jordan on the embezzlement conviction, then the neo-cons are protecting him, likely because they are as corrupt as is Chalabi, but also because they are afraid that, if Chalabi sees no opportunity for a place in the permanent government, he'll spill the beans about all the forged documents he was passing to the neo-cons to justify the war, and make it clear that some of those forged documents were supplied by the Iranians.

The neo-cons have always thought they had the inside track on the Iranians, ever since the Iran-Contra deals. If Chalabi suddenly exposes that the Iranians have been playing the neo-cons for fools, making the neo-cons look like bumbling idiots (which, of course, they are) just before the elections, what happens to Bush (and the rest of them) then?

The neo-cons could make the Chalabi problem go away instantly. Simply arrest him and hand him over to Jordan. In jail in Jordan, what little credibility Chalabi has now disappears. But, the neo-cons won't do that, for two very simple reasons--greed and ideology. Chalabi is their privatizer, their route to making lots of money via Iraq when they leave government (the opportunities for legal graft with a completely privatized oil system in Iraq are enormous).

And, their ideological stance toward Iraq would be bolstered by keeping Chalabi in a powerful position, that their intentions were true, their intellectual estimations of how things would go justified, etc., just so long as there were a Chalabi around to repeat the administration message from inside Iraq to the outside world. That situation wouldn't persist forever--eventually there would be wholesale rebellion--but it would last long enough for the neo-cons to escape with the cash and go down in the near-term history books as the liberators of Iraq.

In short, Chalabi is still free because the neo-cons want him to be, regardless of the DIA report or the actual political situation inside Iraq.

Cheers.

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. You have good points

but add to this mix Carlyle... and BCCI....

This is complex

[punpirate]

16. It is indeed complex...

... but massive bank embezzlement always is.... *smile*

I don't know that Chalabi has direct ties with Carlyle. Can't comment on that.

As for BCCI, the answer to that is probably buried in the transcripts of Chalabi's trial in Jordan. Chalabi wasn't directly a part of the BBCI organization, and much of the money that went out of his Petra Bank found its way to financial institutions controlled by other members of his family, but the methods used, particularly unsecured loans, were the same reasons for the fall of BCCI.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Bank of England suit by investors about BCCI, and whether Chalabi figures into that in any way. The British would take note, since he's a more recognizable figure there.

Chalabi, like most of the Bushies, has a large problem with believing that everything should go his way. There was an interesting quote about him in one article recently. The person quoted had known him for many, many years and said of him that he could not stand to lose, and paraphrasing, that if he got a 90 on a test, and someone else got a 100, he would scream and stomp and tear up the test papers.

Chalabi thinks he's the smartest guy around, and as human nature always proves true, the only person likely to outsmart him is himself.

What many other people don't know about him is that his family was well-connected to the Iraqi government, and was incredibly wealthy. Most of that wealth was wiped out in the revolution in 1958, and I think he's got some grand plan to reestablish that great wealth. Hooking up with the neo-cons, who have grand plans along those lines themselves, was a natural extension of that desire for the family's previous grandeur.

Others have said he's the most anti-Arab Arab one could imagine, and that makes him a prime candidate to enable the privatizers and profit from the association. As with so many events in the world, the underlying motive is greed.

Cheers.