Hitchens on Chalabi
It has now been replaced with a whole new indictment: that Chalabi tricked the United States into war, possibly on Iran's behalf, and that he has given national security secrets to Iran. The first half of this is grotesque on its face. Even if you assume the worst to be true\ufffdthat the INC's "defectors" were either mistaken or were conscious, coached fabricators\ufffdthe fact remains that the crucial presentation of the administration's case on WMD and terrorism was made at the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting right behind him, after those two men most hostile to Chalabi had been closeted together. Nor does the accusation about an alternative "stove pipe" of disinformation, bypassing the usual channels, hold much water (or air, or smoke). Woodward's book Plan of Attack makes it plain that the president was not very impressed with Tenet's ostensible evidence. The plain and overlooked truth is that the administration acted upon the worst assumption about Saddam Hussein and that he himself strongly confirmed the presumption of guilt by, among many other things, refusing to comply with the U.N. resolution. This was a rational decision on the part of the coalition. After all, German intelligence had reported to Chancellor Schr\ufffdder that Saddam was secretly at work on a nuke again: The French government publicly said that it believed Iraq had WMD, and even Hans Blix has stated in his book that at that point, he thought the Baathist concealment apparatus was still at work. Whoever and whatever convinced all of these discrepant forces, it was not Chalabi's INC or [link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2101294/|Judith Miller's work] in the New York Times.
It sounds conceivable to me that members of the INC were involved in blackmail, etc., in Iraq and that local issues justified the recent raid on Chalabi's home. However, I share Hitchen's skepticism of claims that Chalabi was a Rasputin who duped the US and others about Saddam, thereby somehow absolving Tenet and others (even members of Congress) of responsibility for their analysis, advice and oversight. It doesn't work that way.
Cheers,
Scott.