Bobert:

Here is your answer contained in some of that fact filled cut and paste that you refuse to read lest it conflicts with your warped opinions.

Yes I agree with you that reading and gathering facts before making a judgement is much harder than just making a judgement based on one's personal feelings but intelligent people take the harder path to the truth and crybabies don't take any path. They already know.

A lot of this is focused on rebutting something Dick Durbin said but it is revealing of the whole of Chalabigate.

Democratic Senator Durbin is blaming Chalabi on the Republicans. He voted in favor of the Iraq Liberation Act, passed with the total support of the Clinton administration in 1998. This act of Congress officially put Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress on the U.S. dole put more than $100 million into his coffers until he was cut off in 2004. It was during the Clinton administration, when the CIA was under leadership of James R. Woolsey, that Chalabi's group really came into its own as a Washington-based lobbyist.

The Iraqi National Congress (INC) originated as a project of the Rendon Group � a public relations firm founded by former Democratic National Committee executive John Rendon � which signed a contract with the CIA to build up the Iraqi opposition. This was under George Herbert Walker Bush but once Clinton got into office the money � and congressional support from liberals like Durbin � began to roll in, and the INC set up a formidable lobbying organization. As Jane Mayer relates in an excellent New Yorker piece:

"In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer, the former CIA 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 CIA. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.'"

We didn't hear from Dick Durbin (or Dianavan) back then. It was okay with him (them) that the U.S. was openly proclaiming its alleged right to engage in a policy of "regime change" in Iraq � and throughout the world, including the Balkans. (Although, to his credit, he did try to limit the Kosovo war by trying to ban the introduction of ground troops.) As Baer puts it:

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing each month 'to this shadowy operator � in cars, salaries � and it was just a Potemkin village. He was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The INC's intelligence was so bad, we weren't even sending it in."

Chalabi's agenda was to convince the United States that Iraq under Saddam was "a leaking warehouse of gas, and all we had to do was light a match." And the Democrats were eager to start the conflagration, including longtime Chalabi booster Peter W. Galbraith, former ambassador to Croatia and one of the main architects of the "humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo that put in power the "Kosovo Liberation Army" � a gang of scamsters, gangsters, and thugs in every way similar to the INC. Says Galbraith:

"Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know. He figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn't get what he wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It's a sign of being effective. It's not his fault that his strategy succeeded. It's not his fault that the Bush administration believed everything he said. Should they have? Of course not. They should have looked critically. He's not a liar; he believed the information he was purveying, and part of it was valuable. But his goal was to get the U.S. to invade Iraq."

Upon passage of the Iraq Liberation Act into law on Halloween 1998, Chalabi issued a statement, which said in part:

"Today, October 31, 1998 is a great day for the Iraqi people. Today President Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. The American people have given their support for the end of dictatorship and for democracy in Iraq. The INC welcomes this courageous and historic action by President Clinton and thanks him for it. I will begin immediate consultations with leaders in the INC and others to work for a united response on how best to take advantage of the provisions of the Iraq Liberation Act. We will present a united front to maximize the chances of success. We look to President Clinton to support and work with a united INC to achieve our common goals."

Bill Clinton was unequivocal in his support for a change of regime in Iraq, and asked Americans to "just consider the facts":

"We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them."

Clinton's former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, took up the cause of Chalabi some years later, serving as a pro bono lawyer for INC members � including Aras Habib Karim, Chalabi's intelligence chief and known to be on the Iranian payroll for years. These INC members were in trouble with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was trying to deport them as likely Iranian agents. Woolsey said:

"Aras was known to have seriously irritated a senior CIA official who resented Aras' and Chalabi's disinclination to follow orders. It was indeed possible, Woolsey speculated, that Ali had simply been the victim of a private CIA 'jihad' against his cousin and ended up spending three years in jail."

Steve Clemons reports:

"Woolsey's client Ahmed Chalabi secured Woolsey's services in 1998 clearing from an INS detention center in Guam six Iraqi National Congress associates of Chalabi that the INS (and CIA) believed to be threats to American interests. As it turned out, the INS and CIA were right as one of the detainees, Aras Habib Karim, became Chalabi's Chief of Intelligence and was a sieve of sensitive and classified American information to Iran, now under investigation by the FBI. "

The INC propaganda machine enlisted politicians in both parties in an effort to free these "political prisoners," who were supposedly victims of CIA "persecution". Congressman David Bonior (D-Mich.), Senators Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) participated in a campaign to "free the Guam Six" (as they were known).

The Chalabi-Aras-Iranian connection was confirmed by the Jordan last year, which, in tandem with the discovery that Chalabi had passed highly compartmentalized secret US information to the Iranians, was a pivotal factor in turning Washington against him.

If the Congress launches "phase two" of the SSCI investigation into the Bush admistration "misused" intelligence and perhaps even fabricated the rationale for war with Iraq, they are going to be investigating themselves. The Iraq Liberation Act passed the Senate unanimously.