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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- NY Times Iraqis and G.I.'s Raid the Offices of an Ex-Favorite By DEXTER FILKINS and IAN FISHERPublished: May 21, 2004 BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 20 - American and Iraqi forces on Thursday raided and ransacked the headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader who was a favorite of the Bush administration but who has fallen out with his former patron and become one of the sharpest critics of the occupation. Dozens of Iraqi policemen, backed by American soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothing who Iraqis said were American agents, stormed into Mr. Chalabi's headquarters, carted away computers, overturned furniture and smashed photographs of Mr. Chalabi and his family. They raided another building belonging to Mr. Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress, as well as his house. American and Iraqi officials involved in the action said they were seeking to arrest employees of Mr. Chalabi who they believed were involved in kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and the theft of government property. Officials at the Iraqi National Congress said the target of the raid was Aras Habib, Mr. Chalabi's longtime director of intelligence, who presides over a vast network of agents that had been financed by the American government. Mr. Chalabi is also the target of a government investigation into whether he betrayed American intelligence secrets to foreign governments, including Iran, according to American intelligence officials. A lawyer for Mr. Chalabi said the accusations were false. The information appears to have been so secret that it was known only within a small circle within the government; its loss may help explain why Mr. Chalabi has fallen out of the favor with the Bush administration. The raid was a final rupture in what had been the administration's most important personal relationship in Iraq. It was the intelligence provided by Mr. Chalabi's network, and backed by Mr. Chalabi's ties to high-level Pentagon officials, that helped galvanize support in the Bush administration for an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. But the relationship has markedly deteriorated in recent weeks as Mr. Chalabi criticized Americans for not turning over enough power to the new Iraqi government when sovereignty is formally restored on June 30. He also clashed with American officials over the decision to resurrect members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party in positions of power. Three days ago, Pentagon officials said they were ending the $335,000 monthly payments they had been making to support Mr. Chalabi's intelligence-gathering organization, which has been sharply criticized for having grossly exaggerating the threat posed by Mr. Hussein. Mr. Chalabi, regarded by many Iraqis as an American stooge, seemed to relish his new role as a martyr. Over the last few months, he has repositioned himself here, moving away from the Americans as he has moved closer to the country's Shiite majority. Standing in the ruins of his building, Mr. Chalabi denounced the Coalition Provision Authority and its chief, L. Paul Bremer III, claiming that the Americans had staged the raids to destroy him as a political force. To illustrate what he described as American heavy-handedness, he stood before a roomful of reporters and held aloft the shattered frame of a black-and-white photograph of his father, taken 81 year ago, which he said had been broken during the raid. "The Baathists are here to attack us under American supervision," he said. "It is the penultimate act of failure by the C.P.A. in Iraq." He said the raid was intended to find records related to the United Nations' oil-for-food program. According to a report in March by the General Accounting Office in Washington, Saddam Hussein's government pocketed more than $10 billion from the United Nations-monitored program, which is under investigation. Mr. Chalabi was pursuing his own investigation. Paul A. Volcker, the head of the inquiry into the United Nations' oil- for-food program, conceded Thursday that there was a struggle in Baghdad over access to the program's records, but he said he had no knowledge of the raid and whether it had targeted such documents. The records, he said, "are of interest to a lot of people, and they are of interest to us because we want access to them that is unfiltered and unbiased." "I have no idea what documents were taken from Mr. Chalabi's home," he added, "but if they are relevant documents, we'd like to see them obviously." In the end, the precise focus of the investigation was unclear. American press aides made available to reporters two men they insisted be identified only as "senior coalition officials," neither of whom revealed in a half hour of questioning the specific charges against the suspects. One of the officials did allow that "broadly speaking" the charges related to fraud, kidnapping, torture and "associated matters." The official said as many as 15 people were named in the arrests warrants, though not all were arrested Thursday. Mr. Chalabi's name, he said, did not appear among them. For more specifics, they referred reporters to an Iraqi judge, who also declined to specify charges. The judge, Hussain Muathin, said they concerned kidnapping, car theft and taking over government facilities. He did not answer any questions. Officials at Mr. Chalabi's office said a gun battle had nearly broken out between Mr. Chalabi's heavily armed militia, which was guarding his house, and the American-backed force. Mr. Chalabi said the American soldiers, accompanied by plain-clothes American agents, cordoned off the areas around the three buildings as the Iraqi police searched. The Americans did not enter, he said. Mr. Chalabi's colleagues on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council rushed to his defense and denounced the raids. The council members, worried that their influence will decline in the new United Nations-brokered government scheduled to take over June 30, are still reeling from the assassination of their president, Ezzadine Salim, in a suicide car bombing on Monday. "This is an insult, and it happened, and it could happen to any governing council member," Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, the new council president, told Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. Mr. Yawar called for an "extraordinary session" of the council on Friday. American officials scrambled to portray the raid as having been initiated and directed by the Iraqis alone. Mr. Bremer's chief spokesman, Dan Senor, deflected questions about the raid, saying all questions should be directed to the Iraqi police. "We really don't have anything to do with the investigation or the arrests," Mr. Senor told reporters. He said Mr. Bremer had referred the case to the Iraqi Central Criminal Court for investigation several months ago. But he said Mr. Bremer had not been informed of the raid beforehand. "As to what he knew about the actual operation, he was notified today by an aide, who was notified - I think someone from the Governing Council notified one of his aides to let him know that this operation had occurred - and that's when Ambassador Bremer learned of it," Mr. Senor said. "He was notified after the fact." Many Iraqis said they found it implausible that Iraqi law enforcement officers, who work for the American occupation authorities in the absence of any sovereign government, would have initiated such an operation on their own. "Of course they know," said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. In a telephone interview, Francis Brooke, an American who is a senior adviser to Mr. Chalabi, said that Mr. Chalabi had never shared any secret information with the Iranians. Mr. Brooke characterized the account by American officials as "disgusting nonsense that shows how decrepit our intelligence services" have become. He said the suspicions about Mr. Chalabi were illogical and unsupported by any facts. Mr. Brooke added, "What we are seeing here is the very selective release of information designed to discredit Dr. Chalabi and people with whom they have some disagreement with." He said the United States intelligence might have been confused by a possible intelligence effort by Tehran to test "the extent to which Dr. Chalabi is actually supported by the U.S." Samir Sumaidy, the Iraqi interior minister, sought to portray the raids on Mr. Chalabi's buildings as a routine police matter. He said that the Iraqi police were executing a warrant signed by an Iraqi judge, and that Iraqi officials had asked for American support during the operation because of concerns about Mr. Chalabi's armed militia. "I think maybe people are trying to read too much into this," said Mr. Sumaidy, who is regarded as a rival of Mr. Chalabi's. "We receive orders from the judiciary on the basis of their investigations, and we have to act on them." Still, Mr. Sumaidy said he was "troubled" that the police had pillaged Mr. Chalabi's headquarters, and he said he personally visited the building after hearing the reports. While he said the raid had not been requested by the Americans, he seemed uncertain about other ways in which the Americans might have played a role. "Whether the C.P.A. was involved I really cannot tell you," he said. According to one official of Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, American officials have been trying to link Mr. Habib to allegations of wrongdoing that led to the arrest over a month ago of an I.N.C. member employed by the Iraqi Finance Ministry. That member, Sabah Nouri, was arrested on corruption allegations that include stealing a dozen cars from the ministry, the I.N.C. aide said. He said Mr. Nouri had been accused of involvement in "theft, extortion, kidnapping and murder." He described him as a "low level" member of the Iraqi National Congress. At the State Department, the spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said, "There were legal and investigative reasons for this event today, and not political ones." Within hours of the raid, Mr. Chalabi's lawyers had shot off a letter to the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, condemning what they called a "tawdry action" which they said was "committed by Iraqi policemen under the command of United States soldiers and several men who were identified as part of the F.B.I. and C.I.A." When guards at Mr. Chalabi's office asked for a search warrant, the Iraqi policemen, along with American military police officers and armed civilians identified as F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents "replied by pointing their guns at the I.N.C. guards' foreheads," wrote the Chalabi lawyers, Collette C. Goodman and John J. E. Markham II. In their letter, they demanded that all of Mr. Chalabi's material be returned and that the American authorities pay for damage caused during the raid. In an interview, Mr. Markham, a former federal prosecutor who is a lawyer in Boston, said: "Dr. Chalabi has done nothing wrong, and he has on many occasions happily provided whatever information the Coalition Provisional Authority has requested. The timing of this coincides with Dr. Chalabi's public criticism of the way Bremer is handling the situation." Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has received close to $40 million in American taxpayer financing during the past four years, including almost $33 million from the State Department from March 2000 and September 2003, and at least $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency in monthly $335,000 payments that began in 2002, payments that I.N.C. and Pentagon officials said this week would be ending. A Pentagon official said, "We terminated the relationship basically as part of the process of transitioning to a sovereign government over there." At the United Nations, questions about Mr. Chalabi were raised at a news conference Mr. Volcker had scheduled to update the progress of his inquiry into the oil-for-food program. The two other members of his panel are Richard J. Goldstone, a South African judge, and Mark Peith, a Swiss expert in investigating money laundering. Mr. Volcker said a team of investigators had spent four days in Baghdad seeking to secure documents for their inquiry. He declined to say whether they had seen Mr. Chalabi or Benon V. Sevan, the former head of the program who is accused of receiving illegal oil allotments. He has denied the charge. Richard A. Oppel Jr., Joel Brinkley and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Warren Hoge from the United Nations. www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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