Let's go back, way back to 2003 when the case was made to go to war with Iraq.
It is now known that Dick Cheney's office was instrumental in the effort, as he is now pushing to go to war with Iran.
His evidence, testimony, and key information came from who? Remember?
Cheney and company built a plan around Ahmed Chalabi, their primary source for pre-war information about Iraq, the man on whom they pinned the hopes of the new Iraq, the man they intended to install as the new Prime Minister of Iraq once Saddam was outsted.
Their respect and appreciation of Chalabi's contribution was so great, according to a Think Progress summary of Tenet's book You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush. Tenet wrote.
And what happened?
THEY WERE PLAYED BY IRAN and now Dick wants retribution. Oddly (or not), this is not at all reported by the media when reporting about the Iranian threat. The monster created by our own Vice President Cheney.
In all the blunders that have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. went in De-baathification has been cited as the greatest (aside from going in at all.)
According to Larry Diamond, former Senior Advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority (early 2004), in a piece in Foreign Affairs Magazine: "And the most aggressive and politically ambitious advocate of radical de-Baathification, the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, was put in charge of the program."
In June 2004, it was reported that Chalabi gave U.S. state secrets to Iran in April, including the fact that one of the United States' most valuable sources of Iranian intelligence was a broken Iranian code used by their spy services.
Chalabi reportedly learned of the code through a drunk American involved in the code-breaking operation but has has denied all of the charges, and nothing has ever come of the charges.
CBS News confirmed they caught wind of this story as well and went further, saying that civilian Pentagon employees were given lie detector tests to determine who had given Chalabi the information about US Ability to break Iran's codes.
According to Counterpunch's Andrew Cockburn, there is a direct link from Chalabi to Iran. "When I met him in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence," recalls Scott Ritter, the former high profile UN weapons inspector. "He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence."
Had Ritter made the trip (the CIA refused him permission), he would have been dealing with Chalabi's chums in Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence,
Newsweek, in a May, 2004 Profile on Chalabi, only lightly touches upon the Iran connection:
"American intelligence is particularly concerned with Chalabi's former top intelligence chief, Aras Habib, who seems to have disappeared from Iraq. Habib has murky ties to Iranian intelligence; the FBI, NEWSWEEK has learned, is investigating whether Chalabi and his aide passed classified information to the Iranian government, as well as who in the U.S. government might have leaked it. A few American spooks even speculate that Habib has been working for Tehran all along—to the point of spreading disinformation about Saddam's WMD stockpiles to help lure the Americans into toppling Saddam, Iran's bitter enemy in a long and losing war during the 1980s."
Interestingly, according to a June 2004 Newsweek article, Last week, U.S. intelligence officials requested that NEWSWEEK and several other media organizations refrain from publishing some details about what kind of intelligence information Chalabi and the INC were alleged to have given to the Iranians.