By Arnaud de Borchgrave*

The argument surrounding the decision to go to war in Iraq, Tony Blair said yesterday, is not about trust or integrity but about judgment and intelligence. That is also the case his critics make. In the approach to war, both the US and the UK governments mobilised a mishmash of arguments in a campaign of persuasion that was based not on rigorous analysis of intelligence but on the selective use of data and informants. And in this sorry tale, no one played a more critical role than the man many proclaim the most likely future leader of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

He has been working to take power in Iraq for a long time. The son of a wealthy and influential family in Iraq that lost its place with the fall of the monarchy, Chalabi has a long association with US intelligence. In the early 1990s, he was considered a serious asset by the CIA - but they soon found him to be unreliable. By then, however, he had found other supporters, among them the staff and advisers of one of the neo-cons' favourite thinktanks, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) in Washington. In 1997, Jinsa declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office and a subsequently democratic future for Iraq."

Jinsa describes its mandate as two-fold: "To educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defence capability...and to inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." Their interests, Chalabi persuaded them, coincided: Saddam, the supporter of Palestinian suicide bombers, the strongest and most troublesome leader in the Arab world and a menace to Israel, should be replaced with a friendly government that would make peace with Israel and become the US's best Arab friend.

The advocates of radical action in the Middle East came to power with Bush. The next steps are now well documented. As Richard Perle once complained: "The CIA has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad Chalabi for years now, and it's a disgrace." To bypass such obstacles, an alternative intelligence group - the Office of Special Plans - was created. But there was still a shortage of evidence on two key points: that Saddam had WMD and that he had links to al-Qaida. Step forward Ahmad Chalabi, whose INC benefited from nearly $100m of US taxpayers money, despite Chalabi's conviction for a $300m bank fraud in Jordan. Chalabi, who knows a market when he sees one, claimed his sources inside and outside Iraq could supply the necessary evidence.

In 2001, Colin Powell declared: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction...our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbours of Iraq." Tony Blair told the Commons in November 2000 that, "We believe that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam Hussein." These assessments coincided with the view of the intelligence services and the inspectors.

The alternative intelligence, marshalled to make the case for war, came overwhelmingly from Chalabi's INC and their carefully coached "sources". Among the INC allegations that have not been borne out were that Hussein had built mobile biological weapons facilities, that he was rapidly rebuilding his nuclear weapons programme and that he had trained Islamic warriors at a camp south of Baghdad. Now defence officials acknowledge that the defectors' tales were "shaky" at best.

On whose judgment was this shaky information included in official pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraq's illicit weapons programmes and key statements by US and UK politicians? On September 12 2002, for instance, claims by Iraqi military officers supplied by the INC that Iraq had been training Arabs in "hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage and assassinations" were given uncritical prominence in a White House report. And what is now described as an INC "fabrication" - that Iraq had mobile biological warfare research facilities - was included in Powell's presentation to the UN security council in February 2003.

To give wider credibility to this dubious narrative, Chalabi planted stories in mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times, stories that were then quoted as independent corroborative evidence by administration officials. The paper's now much-criticised specialist on WMD, Judith Miller, has acknowledged her 10-year association with Chalabi.

Chalabi has admitted that the "evidence" he supplied was wrong. Unlike Blair, he is no longer interested in pretending that there are any WMD in Iraq, but nor is he repentant. Bush may lose the election and Blair is trapped in the political minefield of the war's aftermath, but Chalabi is a clear winner. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph. Since Saddam was gone, "What was said before is not important."

When the US flew Chalabi into Iraq by helicopter early in the war, along with 700 friends and supporters, he was not remotely electable. He did, though, look like a man positioning himself to be at the centre of power. This week, Iraq's provisional constitution was agreed. Given Bush's need to create a puppet government in time for the US elections, power will now remain in the hands of the governing council until such time as elections might be held - a promise that recedes into the future with each terrorist outrage. The first drafts of the Iraqi transitional administrative law were written by Chalabi's nephew. The longer elections are postponed, the better for Chalabi, who is now in control of Iraq's finances and of de-Ba'athification.

Perhaps his greatest coup was to gain possession of 25 tonnes of captured Saddam documents that could prove useful in the future. Before the war, for instance, the Jordanian foreign minister criticised Chalabi as untrustworthy. Chalabi then threatened to "expose" documentary evidence of the Jordanian royal family's close relations with Saddam. The public criticisms stopped. Since the war several forged documents have come into circulation. Some have been used to animate dead arguments, others to discredit critics of the war, such as George Galloway.

With power there also come opportunities for enrichment. US authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400m in contracts to a company that has extensive family and business ties to Chalabi. One, for $327m, to supply equipment for the Iraqi armed forces, is now under review after protests to Congress.

If intelligence, Blair tells us, is to be of even greater importance in the future, its reliability is critical - an argument, perhaps, to learn from recent experience. Not for the US Defence Department. It plans to spend $4m over the next year buying intelligence on Iraq. And who does it plan to buy that intelligence from? Step forward Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi Nephew working to try Saddam:

U.S. Team Is Sent to Develop Case in Hussein Trial

NYTimes, 7 March - WASHINGTON, March 6 — Following a White House directive, the Justice Department is sending a high-level team of prosecutors and investigators to Iraq to take charge of assembling and organizing the evidence to be used in a war crimes trial of Saddam Hussein, administration and Iraqi officials said in recent days.

The previously undisclosed directive signed by Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, directs the government to take the initiative in preparing a case against Mr. Hussein that will ultimately be run by Iraqis. The order, issued in January, gives the Justice Department the authority to act as the lead agency in the effort.

The first officials in a delegation of about 50 lawyers, investigators and prosecutors from the Justice Department are leaving this weekend for Iraq, a Justice Department official said. The group will be assigned to a new office called the Regime Crimes Adviser's Office under the American occupation authority.

The office, which is to include legal officials from other countries, will be responsible for sorting through tens of thousands of pages of evidence and preparing a report that will amount to a blueprint for Iraqi prosecutors. Cartons of documents collected by human rights organizations with evidence of atrocities by the Hussein government have been airlifted into Iraq in recent weeks.

For his part, Mr. Hussein, who has been under interrogation by American officials since his capture on Dec. 14, has revealed little that could be used in any trial, government officials said in recent days. He has discussed few specific issues and at times comports himself as a head of state, the officials said.

The effort to develop a case involves a delicate balancing act for the administration, which is trying to turn over as complete a brief as possible for the Iraqis to use against Mr. Hussein without appearing to dominate the process in a way that could undercut the independence of the Iraqi authorities. "We're trying to balance a bunch of interests here," said one senior administration official. "We intend to bring quite a few resources to the table but not too many so it looks like a completely American process."

Any trials of Mr. Hussein and other senior members of his administration could also carry important political implications in an election year. Administration officials say they expect the proceedings to provide graphic and substantial evidence of the horrific nature of Mr. Hussein's government.

Facing wide-scale criticism after no unconventional weapons have been found in Iraq, administration officials have increasingly turned to the evidence of the wide-scale atrocities committed by the Hussein government as a justification for going to war. But inevitable tension between American planners and Iraqis eager to demonstrate their independence may play a role in the way that issue is handled as well. Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi lawyer in charge of the war crimes issue, said in a recent interview that while he understood the administration's political needs, the trials might not occur until late in the year, after the American elections, and that Mr. Hussein might not even be the first defendant.

"We need and welcome the Americans' help and role in this," Mr. Chalabi, nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said in a telephone interview from Iraq. "But no one should misunderstand that this will be an Iraqi process with decisions by Iraqis."

Administration planners had initially intended to turn their energies to the issue of war crimes trials after they reaped whatever intelligence they could from interrogating Mr. Hussein. But officials said the questioning of Mr. Hussein had been largely unproductive and disappointing.

He has given vague responses to questions about whether his country possessed illicit weapons, said one official who described the situation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Mr. Hussein, who is in custody in an undisclosed location in the Baghdad area, often couched his statements about Iraq's international relations as if he were still a head of state. In addition to the realization that Mr. Hussein was not proving a source of information, American officials became increasingly aware of the implications of the scheduled formal transfer of governmental authority to Iraqis on June 30. The senior administration official said the Americans were keenly aware that after that date their authority would be diminished.

M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born international lawyer who is an authority on the Arab legal world, said he believed that the United States was interested in orchestrating a wide-ranging Nuremberg-style war crimes trial against Mr. Hussein. "The administration is looking to have a political vindication of why the U.S. went into Iraq," he said. "With no weapons of mass destruction to be found, the next best thing is to show how bad Saddam was, how his regime was like the Nazis'."

Professor Bassiouni, who has served as a legal consultant for the Americans and the Iraqis, said such a broad approach could backfire because it might give Mr. Hussein an opportunity to grandstand in a way that would win favor with Arab audiences. He recommended a narrower prosecution, with specific offenses and specific acts to be charged.

Mr. Chalabi, who is in charge of the war crimes portfolio, agrees. "We'll tailor the trial procedures in such a way that shows we learned the lessons of the Milosevic trial," he said, referring to how Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader and Yugoslav president, has used his war crimes trial as a platform to justify his actions and to try to put his accusers, the Western governments, on trial. "We don't want the tribunal and people like Saddam to be the principal teller of the history here," said Mr. Chalabi, who was educated at Yale and the Northwestern University Law School. "We want to bring very specific charges. And the defendants would only be allowed to bring witnesses and make their cases in connection with those specific charges."

Such an approach, he said, would block Mr. Hussein from trying to call witnesses like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to testify about the United States' earlier cooperation with the Hussein government.

Mr. Chalabi also said the Iraqis might choose to try lesser-ranking officials before Mr. Hussein. "If you try a smaller-ranking person for a war crime like the attacks on the Kurds and he is found guilty, then all we have to do with respect to Saddam Hussein is show the chain of command," he said.

Mr. Chalabi said the Iraqi Governing Council had assembled a list of about 45 Iraqi judges as candidates for the war crimes tribunals. The statute setting up the tribunals calls for three panels of five judges each to try people, and nine judges to serve on an appellate panel. He said those judges who were believed to have been sympathetic to the Hussein government were not eligible. Those who might be prejudiced because they or their families suffered at the hands of the government could not serve as judges but could only be investigators or prosecutors.

The case that American officials will draft against Mr. Hussein and his aides will come from three caches of documents, administration officials said. The first is from 18 tons of Iraqi government documents seized by Kurds in 1991 when they overran Baathist Party offices in northern Iraq. Those documents were brought out of Iraq by Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia.

A second cache of 22 cartons of documents and testimony of atrocities collected by Indict, a London-based human rights group that is now defunct, was airlifted to Iraq a few weeks ago by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department's special ambassador for war crimes.

The third batch is the collection drawn from hundreds of thousands of documents seized by American forces after Mr. Hussein's ouster.

Iraqi Shiites Fail to Sign Pact After Cleric Balks

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Five Shiite members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, including its acting president and the leaders of three large political parties, holed up in one member's office around noon and refused to attend an elaborate signing ceremony before more than 300 invited guests and a musical ensemble. The Shiite stance forced U.S. officials to cancel the event and prompted urgent negotiating sessions that stretched through the afternoon and into the night, the aides said.

The Shiites' refusal to sign was regarded by some council officials as a stark indication of the deep divisions that exist between rival religious and ethnic groups, suggesting that a consensus on the interim constitution reached earlier this week may not have been as solid as U.S. and Iraqi officials had claimed.

Although the five Shiites had endorsed the document on Monday, they told other members that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had raised last-minute objections to two key elements: a provision that effectively gives minority Kurds veto power over a permanent constitution, and plans for a transitional government with a single president, the aides said. Leaders of Iraq's Shiites, a group long oppressed by former president Saddam Hussein's Sunni Arab-dominated government, want to ensure that Shiites have political clout in the transitional government befitting their majority status.

Despite the lengthy discussions, members could not resolve differences on Friday, and adjourned shortly before midnight, the aides said. The council released a statement early Saturday saying it would reconvene on Monday "to finalize the issue and sign the law."

The delay is another setback to the Bush administration's efforts to transfer power to Iraqis. The administration had set a Feb. 28 deadline for an interim constitution to be completed, a schedule meant to give Iraqi leaders enough time to prepare for a scheduled June 30 handover of sovereignty.

"The consensus has always been very fragile," said an adviser to one of the council's five Kurdish members. If the Shiites succeed in renegotiating parts of the document, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, Kurds and Sunni Arabs would also seek to make revisions, forcing more extensive revisions and delays, the adviser said.

"If they open the discussion on one point, then we'll open the discussion on other points," the Kurdish adviser said.

An adviser to a Sunni Arab member said Kurdish leaders "were not at all pleased" by the Shiite demands.

In Friday's frantic meetings, aides to Kurdish and Shiite members said no concessions were given to the Shiites. Much of the time was spent attempting to convince the five Shiite members of the importance of a single president and Kurdish veto power over the constitution, the aides said.

The five Shiites agreed to discuss the provisions with Sistani and try to persuade him to accede to the agreed-upon document, two council officials said.

"The Shiites said they will go and talk to Sistani again," one of the council officials said. "But what we don't know is whether they will try to convince him or they will just get him to strengthen his resolve."

The delay again demonstrated Sistani's political clout. A reclusive cleric who lives in the holy city of Najaf, Sistani has long vowed to stay away from the day-to-day operations of government, but he has taken a keen interest in the interim constitution because, he has told visitors, he believes it to be central to Iraq's democratic transition and the establishment of religious freedom for Shiites.

Sistani's pronouncements about the need to have elected individuals draft a constitution scuttled the Bush administration's first transition plan. A second plan, to select an interim government through regional caucuses, also was torpedoed by Sistani, forcing the administration to agree to hold elections for a transitional government by early next year.

The council and the occupation authority have not decided what type of administration will run Iraq between the June 30 handover of power and the elections, although Sistani's approval is regarded as a prerequisite, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

"The Shiites won't act without Sistani's blessing," the Kurdish adviser said. "This is very troubling to the rest of the members. While we respect Ayatollah Sistani as a religious man, he should not dictate the terms of our government."

The five who refused to sign the interim document were Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime U.S. ally; Abdul Aziz Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa party; Mowaffak Rubaie, an independent Shiite politician who is close to Sistani; and Muhammed Bahr Uloum, a cleric who is heading the council this month under its rotating presidency.

The five had tried to get the eight other Shiites on the council to join them, but they were unable to do so, council officials said.

The five stayed in Chalabi's council office for much of the afternoon, while the other 20 members met in the official chambers one floor below, aides said. The council did not meet as a whole until nightfall, U.S. officials said.

Chalabi has increasingly allied himself with Sistani in recent weeks in an effort to build popular support among Shiites. When eight Shiite members walked out of a council meeting a week ago to protest the manner in which a vote on women's rights was conducted, they retired to Chalabi's house, located in the city's poshest district.

The Shiites' principal objection involves a clause in the interim constitution that says a permanent constitution would not go into effect if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, even if the document receives a nationwide majority. Because the Kurds control three provinces in the north, the provision would effectively give the Kurds veto power over the constitution. The Kurds make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population.

The Kurds had sought the provision as a bargaining chip to prevent a Shiite majority from dictating the terms of the constitution. The five Shiites want the provision deleted.

"Some of these provinces have only 400,000 or 500,000 people," Hamid Bayati, a senior official with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the Associated Press. "We cannot have that number of people rejecting a constitution for 25 million people."

Kurdish leaders regard the provision as central to a federal system of government. "This whole issue has to do with how much power does the majority get versus how many rights and protections do the minorities get," the Kurdish adviser said. "In any democracy, there has to be the concept of minority rights."

The five Shiites also want the government that takes power after elections to be headed by a five-member presidency instead of a single president and two vice presidents as currently envisioned by the interim constitution. The Shiites fear that under the arrangement in the current draft -- a single president with two powerful vice presidents -- the authority of the president, presumably a Shiite, would be diluted by the two vice presidents, a Sunni Arab and a Kurd. The objectors therefore want a five-member co-presidency that would give the Shiites a clear 3-to-2 majority, sources said.

Daniel Senor, a spokesman for the occupation authority, would not comment on specific areas of disagreement. He called the dispute "a technical matter related to minority rights."

Senor said the provisions in dispute did not affect fundamental elements of the constitution that had been of concern to the U.S. government, such as the role of Islam in government and women's rights. Under the draft interim constitution, Islam is the official religion in Iraq but not the sole source of legislation. "Ninety-eight percent of the document is still unanimously agreed to," he said.

A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer, could have tried to force the process but decided this morning to "let the Governing Council members work this out for themselves." He said Bremer was not involved in mediating the dispute.

"Democracy is an inherently messy process," Senor said.