Iraqi judge orders arrest of American aide to Chalabi

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/06/wirq06.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/06/ixworld.html

An arrest warrant has been issued for Ahmed Chalabi's right-hand man in Baghdad, the American consultant Francis Brooke, who tried to stop the recent raid on the politician's headquarters in the Iraqi capital.

In the latest in a series of damaging blows for Mr Chalabi, an Iraqi judge said that Mr Brooke had obstructed the Iraqi police. He is believed to have returned to Washington, leaving his former master to tackle claims that his Iraqi National Congress passed American secrets to Iran.

"He stopped the raid by telling the police they didn't have the legal power to do it because he was an American and they were Iraqis," said Judge Zuhair Al-Maliky, of the central criminal court in Baghdad. " snip

Mr Brooke, who is an evangelical Christian, has worked with Mr Chalabi since 1990 - first as a consultant paid by the CIA and most recently as a consultant for BKSH and Associates, a company run by Charlie Black, a Republican Party veteran.

more

[thebigidea]

1. muahahahhah

oh, what tainted love...

[truthisfreedom]

2. i gotta remember that one.

you can't arrest me. i'm an american.

[Mokito]

7. When arrogance reaches new heights!

"He stopped the raid by telling the police they didn't have the legal power to do it because he was an American and they were Iraqis,"

[readmylips]

3. Interesting....

From the article:
Mr Brooke, who is an evangelical Christian, has worked with Mr Chalabi since 1990 - first as a consultant paid by the CIA and most recently as a consultant for BKSH and Associates, a company run by Charlie Black, a Republican Party veteran.

Reports from Iran suggest that Mr Brooke acted as an intermediary between Washington and Teheran, passing letters between the two governments, which do not have bilateral relations.

.... Mr Brooke could not be reached for comment, although a colleague in Baghdad said that the arrest warrant was part of a politically-motivated campaign to discredit Mr Chalabi and his followers.

Mr Brooke has boasted of engineering the war on Iraq by providing America the evidence it was seeking on weapons of mass destruction. "I'm a smart man," he told The New Yorker magazine last week. "I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy."

WHAT A BUNCH OF CON ARTISTS....FIGURES...ONLY A FOOL LIKE BUSH WOULD HAVE LISTENED TO THESE CHARLATANS.

[FormerOstrich]

4. Brooke must not have read the memo....

it seems his "master" says the Tenet did it all:

(from another post)

“He continued attempting to make a coup d’etat against in the face of all possible evidence that this would be unsuccessful,” Chalabi said. “His policies caused the death of hundreds of Iraqis in this futile efforts.”

Chalabi also accused Tenet of providing “erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country.”

...more

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=605974&mesg_id=605974

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5115567/

[salin]

6. Didn't Brooke play a starring role in a recent New Yorker

article that was looking at Chalabi. Starts as Cia moves into private sector to promote chalabi, to get a law passed to recognize and fund the INC (and Clinton's freeze the money - but it is released to chalabi's group as soon as bush is elected), he is the key promoter and go between for chalabi and the neocon power cabal.

[maddezmom]

5. more background info on Brooke from The New Yorker

~snip~

Brooke, who is a devout Christian, has brought an evangelical ardor to the cause of defeating Saddam. “I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do,” Brooke said. “I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor is in a ditch, God means for you to help him.”

~snip~

The genesis of Brooke’s assignment was the decision not to unseat Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Gulf War. In May, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed a covert “lethal finding” that authorized the C.I.A. to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.” Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer who was assigned to Iraq at the time, said that the policy was all show, “like an ape beating its chest. No one had any expectation of marching into Baghdad and killing Saddam. It was an impossibility.” Nonetheless, the C.I.A. had received an influx of cash, and it decided to create an external opposition movement to Saddam.

The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”

From an office near Victoria Station, the Rendon Group set out to influence global political opinion against Saddam. Given Saddam’s record of atrocities against his own people, it wasn’t a hard sell. “It was a campaign environment, with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy,” Brooke recalled. “It was great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns.” The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the London press. Occasionally, he said, the company would be reprimanded by project managers in Washington when too many of those stories were picked up by the American press, thereby transgressing laws that prohibited domestic propaganda. But, for the most part, Brooke said, “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.”

~snip~
more: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

8. delete

[Just Me]

11. That is one helluva read! Thanks,maddezmom!!! n/t

[maddezmom]

9. WaPo- Chalabi Aide Denies Obstruction (eager to answer allegations)

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 7, 2004; Page A17


A top American aide to controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi said yesterday that he is eager to answer allegations that he obstructed Iraqi justice by interfering with a police raid on the headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress in Baghdad.

~snip~

U.S. and Iraqi officials were unable to confirm the Telegraph report, and the Iraqi judge who is said to have issued the arrest warrant for Brooke could not be reached.

Brooke, who returned to Washington from Baghdad over the weekend, said that he found it difficult to believe that an Iraqi judge could issue a warrant for his arrest without the approval of the U.S. occupation authorities. If the report turned out to be true, he said, he would fight to clear his name.

"I am not guilty," Brooke said. "But if this is true, I hope to have a fair venue to defend myself."

~snip~

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20783-2004Jun6.html

[Barrett808]

12. Josh Marshall's take

The real nugget, however, is this passage tucked down at the bottom of the article ...

Last night, it emerged that on the same day as the raid, computer files belonging to the British consultant investigating the oil-for-food scandal were destroyed by hackers and a back-up databank in his Baghdad office wiped out.

Claude Hankes Drielsma, a British businessman and long-time acquaintance of Mr Chalabi, accused America and Britain of mounting a "dirty tricks" campaign to obstruct his inquiry. "I think you have to expect this to happen with events of the magnitude of those we are dealing with," he said.

His report on oil-for-food, written for the international accounting company KPMG, was due to be released in three weeks but its publication has been delayed for at least three months, he said.

"This report would have been even more damning than anticipated. This would not sit comfortably with the political agenda in Washington or London.

"I believe that what Washington wants is to keep the lid on things until after the presidential election. The White House believes that the report will be detrimental to President Bush's re-election campaign."

...

In any case, basing an international scandal on documents which Ahmed Chalabi assures you he has but for some reason won't show you would seem a rather dubious proposition in the first place. But, if I read that passage from the Telegraph article correctly, Hankes Drielsma seems to be saying, in essence, that both his hard-drives exploded, that for some inexplicable reason it's America's fault, that the report was going to be incredibly damning, but now all the data is gone so it's going to be months, if not longer, till he can pull the evidence back together.

Am I missing something, or is this the dog ate my homework?

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003044

[yellowcanine]

10. Will the new Eyeracki guvment have extradition rights on U.S. civilians?

If so, this could blow up in Shrub's face just as the campaign is heating up. What a tragedy that would be for the boy king.