[Media-watch] US Chalabi supporters pressure Bush - NYTimes/SF Chronicle - 29/05/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/29/MNG4A6U3D61.DTL

U.S. supporters of Chalabi pressure Bush
Delegation protests change of heart regarding Iraqi politician


- Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times
Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times

Saturday, May 29, 2004


Washington -- Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who
support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi are pressing the White House to
stop what one has called a "smear campaign" against Chalabi, whose Baghdad
home and offices were ransacked last week in a U.S.-supported raid.

On May 22, according to several of these Chalabi supporters, a small
delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice to complain about the administration's abrupt
change of heart about Chalabi and to register their concerns about the
course of the war in Iraq. The group included Richard Perle, the former
chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R James Woolsey, the director of
central intelligence in the Clinton administration.

Members of the delegation, who had requested the meeting, told Rice that
they were incensed at what they view as the vilification of Chalabi, a
longtime favorite of neoconservatives.

Chalabi has been a divisive figure for years in Washington, where top
officials at the Pentagon favored him as a future leader of Iraq while top
State Department officials distrusted him as unreliable. Either way, Chalabi
and his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed intelligence to the
Bush administration about Iraq's unconventional weapons that helped drive
the administration toward war.

Intelligence officials now argue that some of the intelligence was
fabricated and that Chalabi's motives were to push the United States into
toppling Saddam Hussein and pave the way for his installation as Iraq's new
leader.

The FBI is investigating who in the U.S. government may have given Chalabi
highly classified information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.
Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any classified information.

The session with Rice was one sign of the turmoil that Chalabi's travails
have produced within an influential corner of Washington, where Chalabi is
still seen as a potential leader of Iraq.

"There is a smear campaign underway, and it is being perpetrated by the CIA
and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and a gaggle of former
intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting these stories, which
are accepted with hardly any scrutiny," Perle, a leading neoconservative,
said in an interview. Perle added that the campaign against Chalabi was "an
outrageous abuse of power" by U.S. government officials in Washington and
Baghdad.

"I'm talking about Jerry Bremer, for one," Perle said, referring to Paul
Bremer, the top U.S. administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in
charge of the occupation of Iraq. "I don't know who gave these orders, but
there is no question that the CPA was involved."

In Baghdad, coalition authorities vigorously denied Perle's assertion.
"Jerry Bremer didn't initiate the investigation," Dan Senor, the spokesman
for the CPA, said in a telephone interview.

Similarly, Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, called Perle's allegation that
the intelligence agency was smearing Chalabi absurd. A defense official who
asked not to be named said that Perle's allegations against the DIA had no
foundation.

Although Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been caustic
in their comments about his treatment, there has been relative silence so
far from Chalabi's supporters within the administration. Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in Iraq and was a patron
of Chalabi, did not respond to numerous requests this week for an interview.

Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-mail that Wolfowitz
believed that Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress "have provided
valuable operational intelligence to our military forces in Iraq which has
helped save American lives." Cooper added that "Wolfowitz hopes that the
events of the last few weeks haven't undermined that."

The current views of Vice President Dick Cheney and Lewis Libby, Cheney's
chief of staff, are not known. Both strongly supported Chalabi before and
during the war in Iraq.

Participants in the May 22 meeting with Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley,
said Rice told them she appreciated that they had made their views known.
But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and made no
concessions to their point of view.