The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69077   Message #1168494
Posted By: freda underhill
22-Apr-04 - 08:23 PM
Thread Name: BS: Iraqi Puppet leader embezzled millions
Subject: BS: Iraqi Puppet leader embezzled millions
The 'top' Iraqi leader who has no credibility; from Sydney Morning Herald; By Alan Ramsey; April 21, 2004


The ABC's Barrie Cassidy seems better able to spot a headline than a political spiv. Three days ago Cassidy's Sunday morning television chat program Insiders broadcast an "exclusive" interview with Ahmad Chalabi, one of the Bush White House's more coddled members of its puppet Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad.

Chalabi obligingly offered the comment that the Howard Government's tiny noncombatant military commitment should stay in Iraq "until the end".

Most newspapers, including the Herald, reported the interview next morning, variously describing Chalabi as a "key" Iraqi "leader", a "prominent" Iraqi leader or simply a "top" Iraqi. But, like Cassidy, none bothered to make even the most cursory of references to Chalabi's grubby background. To have done so would have destroyed all pretence at credibility.

Yet the material is there in volume.

In November 2002 Robert Dreyfuss wrote, in part, in the liberal US quarterly The American Prospect: "If T.E. Lawrence had been a 21st-century neo-conservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmad Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress, is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neo-conservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops - and American oil companies - in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony.

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None of this, of course, was reflected in last Sunday's ABC interview, nor in the next day's newspaper reports. Like sheep, they all just sucked up, without question, what Chalabi had to say. Yet the ABC's Peter George nailed Chalabi as the self-serving carpetbagger he is in a Four Corners program in September 2002. Everyone else obviously was just too lazy to look.