You thought I was just being a paranoid lunatic-fringe guy back when I was going on about the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and I’m okay with that. It turns out that I was wrong. Or, more specifically, I wasn’t right. And by “not right,” I mean that the true nature and complexity of the situation hadn’t occurred to me. It still hasn’t. There are still many questions to which I’d like answers, but an article that appeared in today’s Washington Post stops just shy of making some pretty hefty accusations.

Perhaps you’ve been following the story on Lawrence A. Franklin, the Defense Department analyst under investigation for allegedly passing secrets to Israel through AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. Perhaps you haven’t. I’ll leave it up to you to do the background research if you’re not familiar with the story. The interesting part to me about today’s article was the revelation that the discovery of Franklin happened quite recently in what turns out to be an investigation that dates back at least two years, an investigation about which Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, was briefed in 2001, according to this article in USA Today.

The overarching investigation was being conducted by the FBI into alleged spying on behalf of Israel by AIPAC, but was broadened after the seizure of documents from the home of Ahmed Chalabi, who for a while was the White House’s favored candidate for the Iraqi presidency, until it turned out that he most likely was in possession of a huge wad of counterfeit Iraqi currency (confirmed) and had been passing and/or selling sensitive US intelligence to Iran (alleged but probable). Had the administration known how dishonest he was, maybe they wouldn’t have pushed so strongly for his presidency.

Chalabi had been head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group which had been receiving large amounts of cash from the U.S. government for years. The placement of many INC members on the Governing Council caused a stink in Iraq, as they were seen largely as U.S. stooges and most hadn’t set foot in the country for 20 to 40 years. The big stink about Chalabi, on the other hand, was that he had been sentenced in absentia to jail in Jordan for bank fraud. As MSNBC put it, “A Newsweek investigation, with which Chalabi cooperated, shows that his own and his family’s financial institutions were shut down by authorities in Switzerland, Lebanon and Jordan because of questionable practices and unsecured loans. The cost to investors and depositors was tens of millions of dollars.” So the administration did know how dishonest he was. And they still pushed for his presidency. What’s up with that?

MSNBC again: “Some American officials, particularly leading Pentagon hawks, regard him as a true democrat and a paragon of Iraqi patriotism, an aristocrat who gave up a potential life of comfort and ease to fight against Saddam at a time when few others dared.” Jim Lobe, published in AlterNet, gave more specifics about Chalabi’s relationship with the “Pentagon hawks” (keep these names in mind, we’ll see them again soon):

Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neoconservatives close to Cheney and Rumsfeld—Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Feith’s office was home to the Office of Special Plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were given the task of reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case for war. OSP also worked with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neoconservative hawks, which was chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend.

DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.

The OSP, by the way, has since been disbanded. It was highly controversial, having been accused by many of being Rumsfeld’s own personal intelligence agency, whose mission was to twist and torment old intelligence until it seemed to suggest that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. It figured heavily in the “politicization of intelligence” problem in the 9/11 Report. Much of the intelligence that Bush cited in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq came by way of the OSP, some of it from Chalabi himself.

When it came to light, a surprisingly frank interview with Chalabi was published in the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, which quoted his reponse when asked about providing false intelligence to the Americans.

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

”As far as we’re concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants.”

Lobe commented at the time: “It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false.” Either way, Chalabi’s family has extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than $400 million in reconstruction contracts, so he’s not hurting, despite his fall from grace.

But enough about him. I’m more interested in the “Pentagon hawks” mentioned above. For in today’s Washington Post article, we discover that “FBI counterintelligence investigators have in recent weeks questioned current and former U.S. officials about whether a small group of Iran specialists at the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office may have been involved in passing classified information to an Iraqi politician [that’s Chalabi] or a U.S. lobbying group allied with Israel [that’s AIPAC].” And who are they asking about?

Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues, including [Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy] Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode and others at the Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney’s office.

Richard Perle, incidentally, was formerly the chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, until this article in the New Yorker forced him to step down amid accusations of conflict of interest (though he remains on the board). The meeting you may have heard about—the one days after September 11, 2001 made famous by Richard Clarke’s testimony, the one when the topic turned on how to use the WTC attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq—was a DPB meeting. Curiously enough, Chalabi was there as well.

Maybe these names don’t mean much to you. If we check the PNAC website, we find the “Statement of Principles,” which dates from 1997, where we find the following among the signatures (click the colored names for interesting anecdotes about their personal histories):

• Dick Cheney (currently Vice President)
• Donald Rumsfeld (currently Defense Secretary)
• Paul Wolfowitz (currently Deputy Defense Secretary)
• I. Lewis Libby (currently Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff)
• Jeb Bush (currently Governor of Florida)
• Elliott Abrams (currently Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council)
  “He was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony about his role in illicitly raising money for the Contras but pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants in 1992.”—tompaine.com)
• Steve Forbes (currently publisher of Forbes magazine)
• Francis Fukuyama (Professor of International Political Economy at John’s Hopkins)
  Curiously, I just discovered but have not yet read a paper he wrote on social capital and civil society, a couple of ideas I’ve played with before in this forum.)
• Dan Quayle

It’s long past my bedtime, so I have to leave you to fill in the rest of the gaps. The point I wanted to make was not just that the same people who have been driving America’s recklessly hellbent foreign policy for the past four years are the same ones who signed onto a self-avowedly imperialistic policy advocacy group, because that’s old news. When Bush was looking for appointees in 2000, it’s as if he just skimmed through the roster of PNAC members to find himself a cabinet. What gaps were left he filled with oil company executives (Condoleeze Rice, for example, sat on Chevron’s board of directors). My point tonight is that, as if the first weren’t bad enough, the FBI are now apparantly asking questions about whether those same people, or others affiliated with them, might not have conflicting loyalties. Their ties to Chalabi certainly raise some good questions, and today’s Washington Post article raises other questions regarding Israel: “The officials whose names came up during questioning have strong ties to Israel. They also share a long-standing position on Iran and other radical regimes. Wurmser, Feith and Perle were co-authors of a 1996 policy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.’ It called for removing Hussein from power in Iraq as part of a broad strategy to transform the region and remove radical regimes.”

So my big question is simply how wide the divide is between all this "freedom is on the march" talk and the real motives of the architects of the war. My preliminary guess is that it’s pretty damn wide. It would be bad enough if it were hypernationalism misleading our leaders into thinking that they can spread democracy militarily, when all it actually does is inflame the young, angry, unemployed Muslim men whose parents, siblings, and friends are dying in the crossfire. It would be far worse if what appears to be hypernationalism is actually a rhetorical device that obfuscates misplaced loyalty to another country or cause, or the exploitation of a tragedy and a national feeling of vulnerability to advance a years-long agenda, both of which, sadly, are within the realm of possibility.

The other question that I’d really like to ask, though, even if it makes me sound like I’m confusing reality with the X-Files, is why the same names keep popping up over and over again, with different affiliations, different job titles, different loyalties, different companies, but always the same names in power, making decisions that benefit each other and the people or companies they work for at our expense, appointing each other to various positions of power, pardoning each other when they get caught, and so on. It sort of makes a mockery of democracy and public accountability, doesn’t it?

Need more? The Christian Science Monitor has a Neocon 101 page just for you.

OK, truly, at 3:08am on a Saturday morning, shouldn't you be sleeping rather than trying to 'out' the Illuminati?