What's this? An ex-CIA chief and the Prince of Darkness defend Chalabi?
Why?

Looks like once again there's something Bu$h isn't being honest about...

Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT

WASHINGTON, May 28 - Influential outside advisers to the Bush
administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are
pressing the White House to stop what one has called a "smear campaign"
against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last
week in an American-supported raid.

Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small

of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the

security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of
heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of
the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the former chairman
of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey, director of central
intelligence under President Bill Clinton.

Members of the group, who had requested the meeting, told Ms. Rice that
they were incensed at what they view as the vilification of Mr. Chalabi, a
favorite of conservatives who is now central to an F.B.I. investigation
into who in the American government might have given him highly classified
information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.

Mr. Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any classified
information.

The session with Ms. Rice was one sign of the turmoil that Mr. Chalabi's
travails have produced within an influential corner of Washington, where
Mr. Chalabi is still seen as a potential leader of Iraq.

"There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being perpetrated by the
C.I.A. and the D.I.A. and a gaggle of former intelligence officers who

succeeded in planting these stories, which are accepted with hardly any
scrutiny," Mr. Perle, a leading conservative, said in an interview.

Mr. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Defense Intelligence Agency, said the campaign against Mr. Chalabi was "an
outrageous abuse of power" by United States government officials in
Washington and Baghdad.

"I'm talking about Jerry Bremer, for one," Mr. Perle said, referring to L.
Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in charge of the occupation of Iraq. "I don't know
who gave these orders, but there is no question that the C.P.A. was
involved."

In Baghdad, coalition authorities vigorously denied Mr. Perle's assertion.
"Jerry Bremer didn't initiate the investigation," Dan Senor, the spokesman
for the Coalition Provisional Authority, said in a telephone interview.

Similarly, Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, called Mr. Perle's
accusation that the agency was smearing Mr. Chalabi "absurd." A Defense
Department official who asked not to be named said that Mr. Perle's
accusations against the D.I.A. had no foundation.

Mr. Chalabi has been a divisive figure for years in Washington, where top
Pentagon officials favored him as a future leader of Iraq and top State
Department officials distrusted him as unreliable. Either way, Mr. Chalabi
and his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed intelligence to the
Bush administration about Iraq's unconventional weapons that helped drive
the administration toward war.

Intelligence officials now argue that some of the intelligence was
fabricated, and that Mr. Chalabi's motives were to push the United States
into toppling Saddam Hussein and pave the way for his installation as
Iraq's new leader.

Although Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been
caustic in their comments about his treatment, there has been relative
silence so far from Mr. Chalabi's supporters within the administration.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in
Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to numerous requests
this week for an interview.

Mr. Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-mail message that
Mr. Wolfowitz believed that Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress
"have provided valuable operational intelligence to our military forces in
Iraq, which has helped save American lives." Mr. Cooper added in the
message that "Secretary Wolfowitz hopes that the events of the last few
weeks haven't undermined that."

The current views of Vice President ***** Cheney and his chief of staff, I.
Lewis Libby, are not known. Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and
during the war in Iraq.

Last Saturday, participants in the meeting with Ms. Rice and her deputy,
Stephen Hadley, said Ms. Rice told them she appreciated that they had made
their views known. But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants
said, and made no concessions to their point of view.

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, also
attended the meeting. A larger meeting later that day, with Mr. Hadley
alone, included Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the American
Enterprise Institute, a research institution in Washington.

In an interview, Ms. Pletka said that Mr. Chalabi had been "shoddily"
treated and that C.I.A. and State Department people had been fighting "a
rear guard" action against him.

"They've been out to get him for a long time," Ms. Pletka said. "And to be
fair, he has done things and the people around him have done things that
have made it easier for them. He is a prickly, difficult person and he
drives them crazy. He never takes no for an answer, even when he should."

Ms. Pletka added: "There are questionable people around him - I don't know
how close - who have been involved in questionable activities in Iraq. He
is close to the Iranian government. And so all of these things have lent
credence to the accusations against him."

Mr. Perle said the action against Mr. Chalabi would burnish his anti-
American credentials in Iraq and possibly help him to be elected to
political office. "In that regard, this clumsy and outrageous assault on
him will only improve his prospects," Mr. Perle said.

Mr. Perle said that he had no business dealings with Mr. Chalabi, but that
he believed the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were spreading false information that he
did. He also said that Mr. Chalabi was not alone in supplying intelligence
to the United States government that turned out to be false.

"I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied uniquely by anyone
brought to us by the Iraqi National Congress," Mr. Perle said.



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