Sources not the best but there's some good info if true and we're back to Iran-Contra again.
The Crimes of Iran-ContraHave Never Ended
This article appears in the June 4, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Crimes of Iran-ContraHave Never Ended
by Jeffrey Steinberg
It is no secret that the Jordanian government has had deep misgivings about Chalabi's prominent role in the postwar Iraq occupation government. Chalabi has a 22-year jail sentence awaiting him in Jordan, as the result of massive fraud at his Petra Bank in the 1990s. The Jordanian Ambassador in Washington and King Abdullah II have both publicly accused Chalabi, and his INC, of being behind the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in August 2003.
The dossier, provided by King Abdullah, checked out, and, as a result, the White House ordered Coalition Provisional Authority boss Paul Bremer to raid Chalabi's home, and the INC offices. That raid occurred on May 20, catching both Chalabi, and some of his neo-con allies in Washington, flatfooted.
Among the leading candidates to join convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard in the hoosegow, or at least, in the hall of shame, are: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Near East South Asia/Office of Special Plans head William Luti; Feith deputies Harold Rhode, Abram Shulsky and Michael Rubin; Office of Special Plans staffer Col. Bill Brunner; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. All have been known to maintain intimate ties to Chalabi. Another Irangate "veteran" and Chalabi booster, Elliot Abrams, who was convicted of perjury (and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush), was named the top NSC official on the Middle East in late 2002, a post he still holds
It Didn't Stop With Iran-Contra
Beyond the latest falling out among neo-con thieves and the bizarre resurfacing of John Markham, lies a much deeper scandal: The Iran-Contra crimes of the 1980s never ended. The usual suspects—in Washington, in Israel and in Iran—just merely went underground, for much of the Clinton era, only to resurface, with a vengeance, under the Cheney-Bush regime.
In December 2001, Ledeen first moved to revive the Reagan-Bush era Iran connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer, whom the CIA denounced as a criminal and a liar. Three days of meetings took place in Rome, involving Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Ghorbanifar, and two still-unidentified officials of the Iranian regime. According to an Aug. 9, 2003 Washington Post account, the Iranians were offering to help the United States in the war on terror. Citing an official Pentagon statement the previous day, the Post reported, "The first contact, in late 2001, had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism."Word of those meetings with Ghorbanifar got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who reportedly hit the ceiling, and went to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condi Rice to demand that all contacts with the discredited Ghorbanifar be severed.
Ghorbanifar had been used by Reagan-Bush National Security Council staffer Oliver North, as the intermediary between the Iranian government and Israel. Ledeen, then a consultant to the NSC, had promoted Ghorbanifar as a trustworthy asset. As part of an elaborate scheme to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon, Ghorbanifar had brokered the secret sale of 508 TOW missiles to Iran. Proceeds from the missile sales were illegally funneled to the Contra rebels, waging a U.S. and Israeli-backed insurgency against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. In October 1986, a plane carrying arms to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua, and an American crew member was captured, along with documents and other evidence of the American covert backing for the rebels. This began what became the "Iran-Contra scandal."
By the time the 2003 schemes came to light, Ghorbanifar was also peddling a different tale about his dealings with Pentagon officials Rhode and Franklin. No longer was he a broker of "war on terrorism" collaboration between Tehran and Washington. According to Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball, who interviewed Ghorbanifar in Paris in Nov. 2003, "Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-contra affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris last June with only Rhode), was regime change in Iran. Ghorbanifar says there are Iranians capable of organizing a peaceful revolution against the ruling theocracy. He says his contacts know where Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash. With American help, he says, this money could be retrieved and half of it could be used to overthrow the ayatollahs. (The other half would be turned over to the United States.) Ghorbanifar says he told his U.S. interlocutors that ousting the mullahs would be a breakthrough in the war on terror because top al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are in Iran."
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http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3122chalabi_ghorbanifar.html THE MANIPULATOR
After Chalabi arrived in England, he claimed that the Petra affair had been a political frameup. He said that he was targeted because he had been an outspoken critic of Saddam (an assertion that is not unlike his recent defense in Baghdad), and claimed that he was indicted because the Jordanians were beholden to Saddam for oil and other economic aid. Chalabi, like many Iraqi exiles living in Jordan, had indeed opposed Saddam openly. However, a well-informed American friend of Chalabi’s could not recall other instances of Saddam forcing Jordan to clamp down on his critics there.
John Markham, a lawyer representing Chalabi, recently forwarded to me a previously undisclosed letter, which Chalabi claims is “the smoking gun” that proves his accusers are lying. During the trial proceedings, the Jordanian military prosecutor wrote to the country’s authorities that “the method of dealing with the Petra Bank and its liquidation was the result of personal hatred and envy.” The prosecutor blamed Said Nabulsi, the head of Jordan’s Central Bank. According to Markham, Nabulsi was complicit with Saddam.
In Jordan, banking officials scoff at Chalabi’s claims of innocence. Petra had opened a subsidiary in Washington, D.C., in 1983, and after the bank’s collapse, according to a top Jordanian finance official, investigators combed America for forty-five days, trying to locate the bank’s hidden assets. Almost all the assets listed on the books, the official said, were worthless, except for an auxiliary office that was listed as a repository for valuable bank records. The investigators soon discovered that the “office” was a country estate with a swimming pool, in Middleburg, Virginia. It belonged to the Chalabi family, which was charging the bank a monthly rent. “There was not one business record in the whole place,” the official said. “This man is a vicious liar. There is no end to it. It’s like you find someone killing with a gun in his hand, and he says he’s innocent. He just wears you down.” The official declined to be named, because he feared Chalabi’s influence. “He has more powerful friends in Washington than you or me,” he said, adding, “Really, some of your people are such suckers.”
By 1993, with the C.I.A.’s support, Chalabi had solidified his role as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Before long, however, financial questions arose. A former I.N.C. associate said, “The agency didn’t know how he spent his money. All transactions were cash.” Kurds who had joined the I.N.C. complained that Chalabi wouldn’t tell them anything about the group’s finances. A Kurdish leader said that Chalabi “snapped” when asked about debts that were still owed to Kurds, and argued that he couldn’t disclose funding details because his financing was “covert.” A former C.I.A. officer said that successive audits identified no wrongdoing. But the I.N.C.’s finances weren’t easy to inspect. At one point, he said, I.N.C. officials “refused to coöperate with an audit because they argued that it would breach the secrecy of the operation.” On one occasion, a team of government auditors was spirited into the offices of the I.N.C. at night. “It was a real headache,” he recalled. The auditors found that the books were in order, but that many expenditures were wasteful.
Some observers of the I.N.C. wondered what return the U.S. government was getting for its multimillion-dollar investment. In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. officer, met Chalabi several times in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, an autonomous area protected from Saddam by the United States. Chalabi had established an outpost in Kurdistan. “He was like the American Ambassador to Iraq,” Baer recalled. “He could get to the White House and the C.I.A. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.” But Baer added that Chalabi’s long absence from Iraq diminished his power there, and his ineffectiveness made him a useful foil for Saddam. “If he was dangerous, they could have killed him at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader,” he said.
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http://www.masnet.org/articleinterest.asp?id=1251 
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