Odierno: Chalabi, Lami Tied to Iran
Wed Feb 17, 2010
The Nation -- Yesterday, during his appearance at the Institute for the Study of War, I had a chance to ask General Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, about the role of Iran in the recent purge of nearly 500 Iraqi candidates on trumped-up charges that they are Baathists. Odierno avoided diplomatic niceties and blamed Iran, Ahmed Chalabi, and Ali al-Lami by name.
Lami is the executive director of the de-Baathification commission in Iraq, now reemerged as the Accountability and Justice Commission, overseen by Chalabi. On January 14, the AJC ruled that hundreds of Iraqi candidates would be barred from running for office, including some very prominent secular politicians opposed to Iran. I asked General Odierno to clarify Lami's ties to Iran, and why he'd been arrested by US forces in 2008.
From the transcript:
DREYFUSS "I'm Bob Dreyfuss with The Nation magazine. [I want to ask about] Ali al-Lami, who was arrested by the U.S. a year and a half ago. And I was wondering if you could kind of clear up who this guy is and what his connections to Iran are and why he was arrested and why he was freed."
ODIERNO "Al-Lami is a Sadr'ist by trade. He was arrested after an operation in Sadr City where both Iraqi security forces, U.S. civilians, and U.S. soldiers were leaving a meeting that they had with the local government in Sadr City, and their vehicles were attacked with IEDs as they left the meeting.
"There were some accusations. We had some intelligence that said that al-Lami was the one who directed these attacks on these individuals. He was released in August of '09 as part of the drawdown of our detention facilities because we did not have the actual prosecutorial evidence in order to bring him in front of a court of law in Iraq. All we had was intelligence that linked him to this attack. So, as we had some others, we had to release him. He has been involved in very nefarious activities in Iraq for some time. It is disappointing that somebody like him was in fact put in charge or has been able to run this commission inside of Iraq, in my opinion.
"He is -- him and Chalabi clearly are influenced by Iran. We have direct intelligence that tells us that. They've had several meetings in Iran, meeting with a man named Mohandas, which is an ex-council representative member -- still is a council representative member -- who was on the terrorist watch list for a bombing in Kuwait in the 1980s. They are tied to him. He sits at the right-hand side of the Quds Force commandant, Qassem Soleimani. And we believe they're absolutely involved in influencing the outcome of the election. And it's concerning that they've been able to do that over time.
"Chalabi, who -- you know, has been involved in Iraqi politics in many different ways over the last seven years, mostly bad."
I also asked Odierno whether Lami is tied to the League of the Righteous, a Shiite terrorist group that is widely seen as an arm of Iran's Qods Force, the branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for the IRGC's external operations, including Iraq:
ODIERNO: "Yeah. I'm not going to -- it's not clear, so I won't comment on that."
As I've noted recently in this blog, the AJC's anti-Baathist purge, which has struck hundreds of Iraqis with only tenuous connections to the former regime, has threatened to unravel the entire Iraqi political fabric and restart sectarian violence. The Iranians aren't shy about taking credit for it, either, linking the United States to the Baath as part of some (nonexistent) anti-Iran plot. Last week, for instance, in his speech on the anniversary of Iran's 1979 revolution, President Ahmadinejad said:
"Why do you [United States] want to impose your will and Baathists on Iraq and regional nations?"
Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice president of Iraq and a leading Sunni politician who has joined with the campaign of Iyad Allawi, wrote a protest to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq about the speech by Ahmadinejad and Iran's blatant interference in Iraqi affairs.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20100217/cm_thenation/1096530944
Wed Feb 17, 2010
The Nation -- Yesterday, during his appearance at the Institute for the Study of War, I had a chance to ask General Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, about the role of Iran in the recent purge of nearly 500 Iraqi candidates on trumped-up charges that they are Baathists. Odierno avoided diplomatic niceties and blamed Iran, Ahmed Chalabi, and Ali al-Lami by name.
Lami is the executive director of the de-Baathification commission in Iraq, now reemerged as the Accountability and Justice Commission, overseen by Chalabi. On January 14, the AJC ruled that hundreds of Iraqi candidates would be barred from running for office, including some very prominent secular politicians opposed to Iran. I asked General Odierno to clarify Lami's ties to Iran, and why he'd been arrested by US forces in 2008.
From the transcript:
DREYFUSS "I'm Bob Dreyfuss with The Nation magazine. [I want to ask about] Ali al-Lami, who was arrested by the U.S. a year and a half ago. And I was wondering if you could kind of clear up who this guy is and what his connections to Iran are and why he was arrested and why he was freed."
ODIERNO "Al-Lami is a Sadr'ist by trade. He was arrested after an operation in Sadr City where both Iraqi security forces, U.S. civilians, and U.S. soldiers were leaving a meeting that they had with the local government in Sadr City, and their vehicles were attacked with IEDs as they left the meeting.
"There were some accusations. We had some intelligence that said that al-Lami was the one who directed these attacks on these individuals. He was released in August of '09 as part of the drawdown of our detention facilities because we did not have the actual prosecutorial evidence in order to bring him in front of a court of law in Iraq. All we had was intelligence that linked him to this attack. So, as we had some others, we had to release him. He has been involved in very nefarious activities in Iraq for some time. It is disappointing that somebody like him was in fact put in charge or has been able to run this commission inside of Iraq, in my opinion.
"He is -- him and Chalabi clearly are influenced by Iran. We have direct intelligence that tells us that. They've had several meetings in Iran, meeting with a man named Mohandas, which is an ex-council representative member -- still is a council representative member -- who was on the terrorist watch list for a bombing in Kuwait in the 1980s. They are tied to him. He sits at the right-hand side of the Quds Force commandant, Qassem Soleimani. And we believe they're absolutely involved in influencing the outcome of the election. And it's concerning that they've been able to do that over time.
"Chalabi, who -- you know, has been involved in Iraqi politics in many different ways over the last seven years, mostly bad."
I also asked Odierno whether Lami is tied to the League of the Righteous, a Shiite terrorist group that is widely seen as an arm of Iran's Qods Force, the branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for the IRGC's external operations, including Iraq:
ODIERNO: "Yeah. I'm not going to -- it's not clear, so I won't comment on that."
As I've noted recently in this blog, the AJC's anti-Baathist purge, which has struck hundreds of Iraqis with only tenuous connections to the former regime, has threatened to unravel the entire Iraqi political fabric and restart sectarian violence. The Iranians aren't shy about taking credit for it, either, linking the United States to the Baath as part of some (nonexistent) anti-Iran plot. Last week, for instance, in his speech on the anniversary of Iran's 1979 revolution, President Ahmadinejad said:
"Why do you [United States] want to impose your will and Baathists on Iraq and regional nations?"
Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice president of Iraq and a leading Sunni politician who has joined with the campaign of Iyad Allawi, wrote a protest to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq about the speech by Ahmadinejad and Iran's blatant interference in Iraqi affairs.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20100217/cm_thenation/1096530944
2008 article ~
Chalabi ally arrested by US military at Baghdad Airport returning from Lebanon - responsible for Sadr City bomb that killed 12 including 4 US staff
Ali Faisal al-Lami, a senior Shiite Iraqi government official who works for the de-Baathification council headed by the oleaginous but well connected (in Arlington VA) Ahmad Chalabi stepped off a plane from a family holiday in Lebanon at Baghdad International airport yesterday.
Ali Faisal al Lami, is a Shiite Muslim official and a member of the Sadrist Party and currently serves as an executive of the Justice and Accountability Committee, which Chalabi heads. The Justice and Accountability Committee screens former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who are applying for jobs in the government.
Ali Faisal al Lami's first day back home started badly as he was arrested by US forces as he stepped off the plane..
Apparently they think he was responsible for the excellently targeted June 24th bombing of a district council meeting in Sadr City, which killed six Iraqis, two Americans employed by the State Department and two American soldiers.
The bombing was evidently based on very accurate and detailed inside information about the meeting @ 9.30 am local time, inside a district council building involving the 4 dead US personnel six Iraqis, and an Italian citizen employed by the Department of Defense According who had gathered to discuss (and no doubt rig) the election of senior local council members.
US Ambassaador Ryan Crocker, identified one of the victims as State Department employee Steven Farley from Oklahoma who was working with a provincial reconstruction team. (Steve's Guest Book Memorial here) Brian Conklin in Camp Tarji wrote ..."The last time I saw Steve was on Friday night. He came out to a little coffee house called the Mud House to hear a friend and I play some live jazz. He had that enthusiastic smile and energy about him. I only had a few months left and was feeling tired and burned out. I asked Steve about his decision to come back and the challenges of working in Sadr City. "
These deaths follow an incident on in a village in SE of Baghdad in which a security guard for an Iraqi politician grabbed his Kalashnikov automatic rifle and opened fire on at least a half-dozen American soldiers, killing two of them.Mr. Chalabi was once the pal of Dick Cheney who fell in love with Mr Chalabi's Iraq National Council and showered them with the tax payers money ( the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was paying Chalabi’s organization $350,000 a month to provide information. ) , said in a statement after the arrest , “We condemn firmly this action against one of the high officials of the council.” ..."Chalabi condemned the arrest. “This incident shows the need for an end to the random arrest of Iraqis by the American forces, which are against the human rights outlined in the constitution. It proves for a fact that each Iraqi might be arrested or put in prison without knowing the reasons,”
In his book, "At the Centre of the Storm" (Amazon )former CIA Director George Tenet wrote ...
You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.
The multi faceted, multi friended Chalabi is now said to be a close ally of Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, who was involved in arranging the recent cease-fire between Iraqi forces and Sadr’s militia in Basra.
Representatives of the two Iranian-backed parties that anchor Iraq’s ruling Shiite bloc — the Dawa Party of Prime Minister al Maliki and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq — went to Iran for talks with high-level Iranian officials. They met Suleimani in Tehran, according to two insiders’ accounts, and then with Sadr himself in the holy city of Qom.
“A delegation went to speak to the officials in Iran in the name of the alliance, to ask them to encourage these groups to stay within the boundaries of the law,” said Ammar al Hakim, the son and senior aide of the leader of Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. “They met with a number of officials, and Mr. Suleimani was one of them.”
At the same time Iraqi President Talabani, a pro-American Kurd on the weekend of March 28-29, a higher-level meeting took place at the Iran-Iraq border crossing at Mariwan. Talibani delivered to Suleimani what one Iraqi politician, speaking on condition of anonymity, called a plea: “Stop the fighting.”
The U.S. Treasury Department has placed Suleimani on a terrorism watch list of individuals with whom Americans are barred from doing business. In October 2007, Treasury named the Quds Force as a supporter of the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and “other terrorist organizations.” U.N. Resolution 1747 of March 2007 ** put Suleimani on a watch list of Iranian officials associated with the country’s nuclear program.
"Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, (this in 2004 Ho.Ho.Ho.) a former law partner of Douglas Feith, who was for some time undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another."
Footnote ~
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps key persons named in UN resolution March 2007
1. Brigadier General Morteza Rezaie (Deputy Commander of IRGC)
2. Vice Admiral Ali Akbar Ahmadian (Chief of IRGC Joint Staff.)
3. Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi (Commander of IRGC Ground Forces)
4. Rear Admiral Morteza Safari (Commander of IRGC Navy)
5. Brigadier General Mohammad Hejazi (Commander of Bassij resistance force)
6. Brigadier General Qasem Soleimani (Commander of Qods force)
7. General Zolqadr (IRGC officer, Deputy Interior Minister for Security Affairs)
plus ~
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps entities
1. Qods Aeronautics Industries (Produces unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), parachutes, paragliders, paramotors, etc. Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has boasted of using these products as part of its asymmetric warfare doctrine)
2. Pars Aviation Services Company (Maintains various aircraft including MI-171, used by IRGC Air Force)
3. Sho’a’ Aviation (Produces micro-
Qods force - not a pantomime act ...
