Bush Speechwriter, David Frum: I Met Ahmed Chalabi At Christopher Hitchens's Apartment

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from Tom Kludt at TPM:


In a piece published Monday, David Frum, former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, recounted meeting Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi for the first time at the apartment of late polemicist Christopher Hitchens.

Frum's article in The Daily Beast is a rumination on his role in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He details his encounters with Chalabi, who provided woefully inaccurate intelligence to the Bush administration before the war: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/18/the-speechwriter-inside-the-bush-administration-during-the-iraq-war.html

The first time I met Ahmed Chalabi was a year or two before the war, in Christopher Hitchens’s apartment. Chalabi was seated regally at one end of Hitchens’s living room. A crowd of nervous, shuffling Iraqis crowded together at the opposite end. One by one, they humbly stepped forward to ask him questions or favors in Arabic, then respectfully stepped backward again. After the Iraqis departed, Chalabi rose from his chair and joined an engaged, open discussion of Iraq’s future democratic possibilities.

The last time I saw Chalabi was in his London apartment, on the very eve of war. My little group arrived past midnight. Chalabi was listening to the evocative strains of Sufi music. He showed me a black-and-white photograph of seven men, wearing the clothes of the 1940s. They were the board of directors of a company his father had founded: a mixed group of Sunni, Shiite, and Christian, and even a Jew. Chalabi remarked that this picture was taken while Europe was tearing itself apart in genocidal violence. He didn’t add that it was taken shortly after British forces defeated a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad—but failed to prevent a murderous pogrom against Baghdad’s Jewish population.

I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.

read: http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/bush-speechwriter-i-met-ahmed-chalabi-at-christopher

[Berlum]

1. Dickie "Five-Military-Deferments" Cheney (R)

greedily sucking up lies so he can re-spew...

Republican chickenhawk War Profiteering Punks and their deliberate lies have led to vast devastation in Iraq, in America, and further afield.

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2. suckered

MARTIN SMITH: Many people that supported the war no longer do.

AHMAD CHALABI: Yes.

MARTIN SMITH: They feel that they were suckered.

AHMAD CHALABI: Yes, probably.

MARTIN SMITH: They say so.

AHMAD CHALABI: OK. I mean, I don't-- you know, I'm not a--

MARTIN SMITH: Well, I mean, the-- you know, half the people now feel that the war wasn't justified on the grounds that it was argued for.

AHMAD CHALABI: OK.

MARTIN SMITH: Do you feel any discomfort with that?

AHMAD CHALABI: No. We are in Baghdad now.


read more: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5315832

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Chalabi was convicted in the 90s of a massive bank fraud in Jordan

But allegations of financial impropriety linger over Mr Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, the most important of which concern a $200m (£127m) banking scandal in Jordan.

In 1992, Mr Chalabi was tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years' jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.
...
Reports compiled at the time by investigators in London and Jordan, including investigations by the accountants Arthur Andersen, describe how millions of dollars of depositors' money was transferred to other parts of the Chalabi family empire in Switzerland, Lebanon and London, and not repaid.
...
It accused Mr Chalabi of being the man directly responsible for "fictitious deposits and entries to make the income ... appear larger; losses on shares and investments; bad debts ... to Abhara company and Al Rimal company".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/apr/14/iraq.davidleigh

As far as I know, he would still be put in prison if he visited Jordan. That the USA put so much trust in a known conman was always amazing. And Hitchens should have known better. He wrote an article in May 2004 trying to excuse his relationship with Chalabi, in which he claimed:

I do not know what happened at the Petra Bank, and not even Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, who have done the most work on the subject, can be sure that Saddam Hussein's agents in Jordan were not involved in the indictment of Chalabi by a rather oddly constituted Jordanian court. It could be, for all I know, that he was both guilty and framed. The litigation and recrimination continues, and it ought at least to be noted that Chalabi still maintains he can prove his case.

But that is basically a lie. What Andrew Cockburn wrote just a few days earlier was:

The Arthur Andersen audit was commissioned afterthe Jordanian central bank, ignorant of the real and disastrous situation inside Petra, accepted full responsibility for the bank’s debts and deposits. The accountants’ confidential report, delivered in January 1990 and as thick as a phone directory, showed that Petra was rotten to the core in large part because of "transactions with parties related to the former management of the Bank (ie the Lebanese and Swiss banks managed by Chalabi’s brothers, which had already gone broke.) Overall, instead of the $40 million or so net balance depicted in Chalabi’s version of the books, Petra had a deficit of over $215 million, which the accountants indicated had "the potential" to grow to $350 million.

This was a total catastrophe for the cash-strapped desert kingdom, especially as the government had committed itself to paying off the depositors. "For two years, all the aid we got from Saudi Arabia and other arab countries," recalls a former Jordanian diplomat, "went into settling the Petra mess." Despite this, Chalabi actually boasted to me that "after the takeover, all depositors were paid in full," a statement of amazing chutzpah, given that he skipped town and left others to clean up the mess and pay the bills. A seventeen page summary of the investigation by the military prosecutor’s office, dated April 30 1990, lists various "fictitious accounts", ie money that Petra claimed to have in accounts with other banks that did not in fact exist. These included the $7 million allegedly held on December 31, 1988, in Bankers Trust, New York, or the $21 million that was supposed to be in Wardley Ltd, but wasn’t, or the 19,196,404 Deutschmarks that was supposed to be deposited with Socofi, the Chalabi bank in Geneva. Overall, at that date, the "fictitious" figure came to $72 million and counting. Elsewhere, money had been diverted to private Chalabi accounts, or had evaporated in bad loans to other Chalabi- owned companies, such as the $15 million that disappeared with the Rimal company, or the roughly $14 million that had been spent on "personal expenses" for Dr. Chalabi and various members of his family. Among the non performing loans of the Petra subsidiary in Washington was $12 million owed by Abdul Huda Farouki. He had pledged his house as security, but as liquidators moved to seize it, he produced a letter from his friend Ahmed claiming that Petra had released him from that obligation before the crash. In September 2000, just over eight years after Ahmed Chalabi’s conviction in Jordan, his brothers Jawad and Hazem were convicted and sentenced (in absentia) by a Geneva court for creating fake documents. The statute of limitations had run out on other charges.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/05/20/what-he-did-as-a-catspaw-for-teheran-how-he-nearly-bankrupted-jordan-the-billions-he-stands-to-make-out-of-the-new-iraq/

[choie]

4. what the hell was Chalabi

doing at Hitchens' apartment one or two years prior to the war?