Who's kidding who[m]?

The London Guardian (the equivalent to the New York Times if the [London] Times were compared to the Wall Street Journal) has just started a series of articles analyzing whether Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi was Persian spy, essentially conning the US government into getting rid of its biggest enemy: Saddam Hussein.

Ex-US intelligence folks are on CNN and in the articles saying this has all the tell-tell signs of a intelligence operation: befriending heads of state and gaining influence (Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, hard-right members of Congress) and giving them bad intell that would lead them towards deposing Saddam.

The thing is though, Chalabi was pretty open about his friendliness to the Iranian government and intell services, and maybe he was our back channel to their information. Then again, everyone in the intell business knew he was telling us crap, that's why the CIA stopped listening to him since the late-nineties. Ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson proved Chalabi's uranium story was bogus too, but instead of coming to grips with this, the administration simply exposed Wilson's wife to threaten the rest of the intelligence community from coming forward with more stories.

All of this leads one to the conclusion that the Bush administration wanted to be misled into war, they wanted to find evidence, no matter how flimsy, that connected Saddam to an active weapons program, and better still, September 11th. The whole thing is a willing deception, maybe all the way to the top, or to con the top (AKA the President).

In short, the US wasn't conned, the American people were conned, the US soldiers dying in Iraq who think they are avenging 9/11 are being conned, but you, dear reader, wasn't conned. Now we just need to convince the press and the American people, who are about to be duped again. T

his time, we can't let the Bush administration pass the buck by pretending that they didn't know anything about Chalabi and were conned.