Gross Incompetence

Last July, I wrote:

Granted, Chalabi can be convincing. He did, after all, manage to successfully embezzle millions fom the bank he once owned in Jordan, slipping away to London just as the Jordanians caught on. If he ever sets foot in Jordan again, he'll begin serving the 32-year prison sentence they handed down in absentia. And he did manage to get Dick Cheney to restart the federal dollars flowing to his Iraqi National Congress after the State Department discovered that 2 of the 4 million they'd already received had vanished into thin air.

But given that track record, and the wealth of inside info the president has at his fingertips, if Bush hadn't wised up to Chalabi by then, I might just feel safer knowing Dubya was simply insane, because otherwise he's the biggest, easiest mark in world politics today.

Chalabi, of course, was Rumsfeld and Cheney's man, the one who gave them so much intelligence that turned out to be just flatly wrong. The one to whom we have paid $40 million over the past four years. The one standing behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union address. The one who was going to run Iraq for them. Well, looky here.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years. An administration official confirmed that "highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel."

It is amateur hour in our foreign policy ranks right now. This is just embarrassing. Oh, and Denny Hastert, you owe Nancy Pelosi an apology.