Our Man in Iraq: The Rise and Fall of Ahmed Chalabi
by Laura Miller
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2004Q2/chalabi.htmlBetween 1999-2003, the INC retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates. Despite restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on to influence public and Congressional opinion, K. Riva Levinson, a managing director at BKSH, did media work and lobbying for the group. According to Brooke, BKSH received $25,000 a month from the State Department.
Some would say the money was well spent. Burson-Marsteller and the INC won PR Week's 2003 public affairs division award for getting the INC's message out and building the its "profile with key political decision makers in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Of particular importance was positioning INC founder Dr Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi opposition spokespeople as authoritative political leaders. With teams working in Washington, New York, London and Europe, B-M compiled intelligence reports, defector briefings, conferences and seminars on the transition of Iraqi society post-Saddam," PR Week wrote.
Same Old Dog, Same Old Tricks
While Chalabi may have failed as an Iraqi opposition leader, he succeeded at spearheading a "sophisticated marketing operation" to topple Saddam. Brooke told the New Yorker, "This war would not have been fought if it had not been for Ahmad."
Brooke may not have been overstating the success of Chalabi. Without his neoconservative supporters in the Pentagon and White House, the INC and Chalabi would not have had an eager, war-hungry audience for the fruits of the group's Information Collection Program. Receiving $340,000 per month - first from the State Department, then from the Pentagon - until May 2004, the program was the source of much of the key intelligence used by the White House to make its case for the Iraq invasion.
The INC's influence, however, remained mostly below the radar until March 2004, when Democratic Senators John Kerry and Carl Levin requested the General Accounting Office investigate the group's use of State Department money between 2001 and 2002. The Senators were concerned about a June 2002 letter from the INC to the Senate Appropriations Committee that took credit for placing a 108 news stories based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program. "The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons," Knight Ridder reported.
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"According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels," Dreyfuss and Vest wrote. Vincent Cannistraro called INC intelligence "propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say,
cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
After the Iraq invasion, the DIA leaked a report that concluded that nearly all of the informants produced by the INC were worthless. Knight Ridder reported that Haideri had returned to Iraq with American officials after the invasion and was unable to locate any weapons production facilities.
Whether it was spoken or unspoken, Chalabi and Brookes came to understand the kind of intelligence their contacts in Washington wanted. "I'm a smart man," Brooke told the New Yorker. "I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy. . . . I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, 'Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on WMD, send it!'"
The critical examinations of Chalabi and the INC come too late. What started out as covert propaganda operation, a decade later was still functioning as covert propaganda operation. The patronage, the agendas and the audiences may have changed, but the anti-Saddam message was the same and Ahmed Chalabi was there to get what he could from it.
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Sick to think a PR firm had influence in giving Chalabi and Brookes to start a war with Iraq.