For all of his protestations about Obamas willingness to talk to Iran, it is becoming more apparent with each passing week, that the Arizona Senator has been engaged in a back door conversation with Iranian intelligence for years. It is a dialogue that has adversely influenced US foreign policy by dragging this nation into a war and enhancing Iranian influence throughout the Middle East.
A recent story in Newsweek by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosendall "Your Fired (Again)"
detailed the latest hijinks of the duplicitous Ahmad Chalabi and his repudiation by the Iraqi government. Chalabis ongoing contact with Brig. Gen. Foruzandah of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qud Force, has finally proved too much for even Prime Minister Maliki to stomache.
Chalabi, it will be recalled, was promoted by Bush and the neocons as a pro-western Iraqi who they hoped would lead a post-Saddam Iraq. His most
faithful and vehement supporter was John McCain.
http://www.newsweek.com/...
And on November 24, 2003, Sally Quinn, on the pages of the Washington Post, quoted McCain as saying:
"He's a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart," says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Six months later, the Pentagon cut off funds to Chalabi, arrested Chalabi's aides, and raided Chalabi's house....as part of an investigation into the complete compromise of virtually all U.S. intelligence networks in Iran. Some patriot, huh? Chalabi sold us out....and he's the guy McCain--with all his "National Security" experience--went and championed.
Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it became 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.
"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."
A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. "It's safe to say he tried to game the system," the official said.
Even the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lester Kelb, conceded that Chalabi "played us like the proverbial violin."
The relationship between McCain and Chalabi is long and deep. In the early years of the war, McCain lobbied heavily to fund Chalabi and his group, to the tune of 97 million dollars of taxpayers money. At least three hundred thousand dollars a year went to pay a Washington lobbying firm to promote Chalabi and the IRC. That firm was BKSH headed by famous lobbyist Charles Black, who is now senior advisor to John McCains Presidential bid.
The bottom line is a line of communication that can be traced from John McCain to Charles Black, to Ahmed Chalabi to Gen. Fouruzandah of the Quds Force. It is a line of communication that is still being investigated by the FBI in an open case that stems from 2004.
as Sidney Blumenthal informs us:
"At a well-appointed conservative think tank in downtown Washington and across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S. government and military?"
This information, says Vince Cannistraro, formerly at the CIA and the Pentagon, was so "very, very sensitive" that only a few U.S. government officials had access to it:
"The evidence has pointed quite clearly, not only the fact that Chalabi might be an agent of influence of the Iranian government and that [Chalabi's intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib] may be a paid agent of the Iranian intelligence service, but it is shown that there is a leak of classified information from the United States to Iran through Chalabi and Karim and that is the particular point that the FBI is investigating. In other words, some U.S. officials are under investigation on suspicion of providing classified information to these people that ended up in Iran."