11/7/2005 Statement by Congressman George Miller Regarding Ahmad Chalabi

11/7/2005 Statement by Congressman George Miller Regarding Ahmad Chalabi:

Many Americans remember Mr. Chalabi as a man who convinced Vice President Cheney that the United States would be greeted as a great liberator in Iraq. Some have even said it was Mr. Chalabi who promoted the false story about Iraq's attempted purchase of nuclear material in Niger. Chalabi fed false stories about Iraq's weapons capabilities to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a story that the Times was later forced to publicly discount.

Mr. Chalabi, who supplied information to the White House Iraq working group, a mysterious cabal, as Colin Powell's former chief of staff recently said, that hijacked U.S. foreign policy and hyped the case for war in Iraq. The bottom line is that Mr. Chalabi played a central role in the orchestrated deception leading to the invasion of Iraq.

After the administration discovered that Mr. Chalabi provided false intelligence, instead of investigating, the Department of Defense attempted to prop Mr. Chalabi up as a candidate of choice in the post-war Iraq.

Keep in mind what Mr. Chalabi did next. He was suspected of leaking classified information about U.S. intelligence capabilities to Iran. He was suspected of telling the Iranians that we had broken the code by which we were learning information about their activities.

The statement goes on to quote the Wall Street Journal:

The handling of the Chalabi investigation so far stands in contrast to the aggressive inquiry conducted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of intelligence agent Valerie Plame's name, which led to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff.

Questions about the progress of the Chalabi investigation also follow the FBI's disclosure last week that it had closed an investigation into forged documents purporting to show Iraq had sought uranium ore from Niger. The Niger claim set off an intense intelligence debate, which was at the center of the leaking of the intelligence agent's identity.

Whitley Bruner, a former longtime undercover Central Intelligence Agency official in the Middle East who has followed Mr. Chalabi's career closely since 1991, said that, in contrast to Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation, the Chalabi leak inquiry ``just sort of disappeared.''

If I were a suspicious kind of person, I might take this information about the FBI and Rice as evidence of collusion between Chalabi and the administration. I might indeed.