Thursday, September 09, 2004

Chalabi worse than Uday and Qusay?
To some this is because Chalabi "misled us." Toby Young has a review of Graydon Carter's new anti-Bush book in the New York Observer.
This volte-face must have been fairly sudden, since in that very same issue there was another David Rose piece, this one based on interviews with a series of Iraqi defectors, in which he detailed the appalling crimes committed by Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, including torture, rape and murder.

Mr. Rose’s meetings with these defectors, as well as Mohamed Harith, were arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi’s outfit, which has subsequently been exposed as a fount of pro-war misinformation. All the so-called intelligence passed on by these "defectors" is now regarded as unreliable, even by the C.I.A. If Graydon was opposed to the war in Iraq, why did he allow the imprimatur of Vanity Fair to be used to lend credibility to Mr. Chalabi’s anti-Saddam propaganda? Perhaps he changed his mind about the war in the interval between commissioning the Uday and Qusay article and sitting down to write his "Editor’s Letter." (emphasis added)
So Uday and Qusay weren't that bad in Young's view.... It's common knowledge the C.I.A. has hated Chalabi ever since he publically faulted them for screwing up a military coup attempt against Hussein in 1996. He had warned them that the coup plotters had been infiltrated and compromised but they didn't listen. Many, many Iraqis better than Uday and Qusay - not hard to find - died because of the C.I.A.'s ineptitude and arrogance. And people think Chalabi is arrogant.

William Safire's take on the C.I.A is unique. He bashes the intelligence agency constantly, and rightly so, but doesn't think it should be abolished as Senator Roberts has proposed.

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