RICHARD PERLE'S
COMMENTS AT AEI "IRAQ HAND-OFF" PANEL
June 14,
2004
MR. PERLE: ...How many of you are familiar with the name Zuhair
al-Maliky? Anybody? He's a man of no consequence, except he sits in
Baghdad issuing arrest warrants for people who have for many years been fighting
to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein. So I think you ought to know
something about him.
He has the title of chief investigative
judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, which is an impressive-sounding
title. The Central Criminal Court of Iraq, CCCI for short, was created by
none other than our very own Jerry Bremer. And Mr. al-Maliky was appointed
by Jerry Bremer and made a judge, despite the fact that he has no judicial
experience, and perhaps in recognition of the fact that he was a translator for
the Coalition Provisional Authority until he was elevated into the position of
chief investigative judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.
In that capacity, as I indicated, he
has been issuing arrest warrants for a great many people without anything that
could be called probable cause, as far as I can tell. Or if there is
probable cause, it hasn't been stated in a way that could be properly examined
or investigated. According to reliable reports, his notion of due process
includes threats to the counsel representing some of the accused, that if they
continue to press the concerns of their clients, they themselves can find
themselves under investigation by the Central Criminal Court of
Iraq.
It was a little bit awkward propelling
into that position a man with no judicial experience, since the order
establishing the court required that judges on that court--let alone the chief
judge--should have five years of judicial experience. An order to that
effect was promulgated on the 18th of June 2003. And when it became clear
that Mr. al-Maliky didn't meet the requirement, that order was amended. A
revised and amended order was issued on April 22, 2004, by Ambassador Bremer,
which dropped the requirement for prior judicial experience.
I mention all of this because it would
be a tragedy indeed if we had fought to liberate Iraq only to bring Saddam's
style of justice back to that country. Now happily, Mr. Bremer will be
leaving shortly and the Iraqis will have to make decisions about whether they
wish to continue an institution like the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.
And I hope that they will have gained enough of a sense of proper judicial
practice so that they will disband that court before it can do any more
damage.
The damage it has done is to wage a
campaign against the Iraqi National Congress and against Ahmed Chalabi, who many
of you who have been at prior AEI events have had an opportunity to hear
from. It is clearly an abusive campaign of intimidation. It is
clearly politically motivated. It follows decisions taken, sadly, in this
government to marginalize Dr. Chalabi. But a decision to marginalize
unleashed the most vicious opponents of the Iraqi National Congress--the Central
Intelligence Agency, which has never liked the INC and has its own preferred
methods and candidates, and parts of the Department of State.
I say all of this remorsefully because
we are in the process of depriving, or seeking to deprive, the people of Iraq of
a man of great effectiveness and vision, who deserves nothing more than a chance
to appeal to his fellow Iraqis to play a role in the construction of a secular
and democratic Iraq, which has been his goal and ambition all his life. I
rather suspect that he will emerge despite this campaign if intimidation.
But it's a shameful campaign. And I've been struck by how little people
have inquired into the basis for it.
So let me say a word about the other
half of this campaign of intimidation, which is the suggestion promulgated in a
whispering campaign out of the CIA, the message carried often by former
intelligence officials, at the CIA in some cases, at the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and in the FBI, and that is a campaign that has at its core the
suggestion that Dr. Chalabi was found out to have been advising the government
of Iran in a manner hostile to American interests. I've seen the
suggestion, for example, that he informed the Iranians that codes that they had
been using had been compromised by us and therefore they ought not to use those
codes.
As far as I can tell, there has been
hardly any scrutiny by a willing press corps of these charges. Hardly any
questioning, for example, along the following lines--and I just throw out a few
questions that it would be worth asking:
Is it possible that, if messages were
intercepted to this effect, is it possible that those messages were deliberately
transmitted so that we would receive them, with a view to alienating the United
States from the Iraqi National Congress?
Are the goals and objectives of the
Iraqi National Congress consistent with those of the mullahs in Iran, and might
the mullahs in Iran have a reason for wishing to see the INC marginalized and
Ahmed Chalabi isolated?
What do we know about the other
messages that appeared in the channels that may have brought us this
information? Were these channels from which we obtained actionable
intelligence? Indeed, has there been a serious counter-intelligence
examination of these messages, and if so, who did it and when?
To the best of my knowledge, there's
been no serious analysis of this intelligence. Which raises the
possibility that, if in fact what is going on--and I don't know, I can only
raise the question--if what in fact is going on is a deliberate campaign by the
Iranians to produce a rift between the Iraqi National Congress and the United
States, and if that has been done by allowing us to read messages that would
cause us to take a disparaging view of Dr. Chalabi, what other messages in that
channel need to be reexamined? There is a very substantial
counter-intelligence issue here and, to the best of my knowledge, it is not
being examined. And if it is not being properly examined, it is yet
another demonstration of the woeful incompetence of elements of our intelligence
community.
So I raise these issues in the hope
that some of you who are here today in the press will ask some probing
questions. That normally is thought of, by the press at least, as central
to its responsibility.
By the way, with respect to Judge
al-Maliky, the head of the union of judges of Iraq, a distinguished individual,
has finally spoken out on this subject and has stated flatly that he believes
the Central Criminal Court of Iraq to be unconstitutional, illegal, if you will,
under Iraqi law and practice. And the establishment of it and the way in
which it was established probably violates the Geneva Convention. We're
big into examining the Geneva Convention these days. The establishment of
this court should be looked at against that measure.
Just a couple of other points. The great mistakes of history have often turned on bad judgment about people. Chamberlain didn't really comprehend Adolf Hitler. President Carter didn't have a clue about the Ayatollah Khomeni. The New York Times thought that Fidel Castro was a social reformer. I was woefully wrong about Anwar Sadat, who I thought was a small-time little dictator and turned out to be a great man. And I think we're in the process now of making a mistake, a very large mistake, about Ahmed Chalabi, which is why I'm taking advantage of this opportunity to say that, having looked closely at the charges against him and the circumstances in which he finds himself, my confidence in his integrity and the honorableness of his intentions and his sustained belief in secular democracy in Iraq is undiminished. And frankly, it wouldn't matter to me if all the whisperers at the CIA were of one mind on this, or even the highest levels of our own government.
From Q & A after
the speech
QUESTION: Max Singer from Hudson
Institute. A question for Richard Perle.
I wondered if you could compare this Central Criminal Court of Iraq with the "military tribunal" that convicted Ahmed Chalabi in Jordan.
MR. PERLE: It's actually a
good question because they have a lot in common--both of them wholly
illegitimate, in my view. As I understand it, the judgment against Dr.
Chalabi in Jordan was the product of a tribunal that consisted of a single
military officer who arrived at a "guilty" conclusion in a complicated banking
matter after about a week on the job.
He had been preceded by another
military tribunal that worked for several months and produced thousands of pages
of documents and, in the end, declined to take any action because they didn't
find a basis for action. The man who headed that tribunal was fired and he
was replaced by the man who ultimately rendered this famous judgment against Dr.
Chalabi.
If this was Jordanian justice, there's no Jordanian justice. I believe it was a political act in Jordan. I've been told that by some very senior Jordanians--very senior Jordanians. For reasons having to do with a conception of Jordan's own national interests now, the Jordanian government has found it convenient to repeat these allegations, which I believe to be false and malicious.
