The friend we betrayed

We don't keep people unless they are producing for us. I have no idea who determines who goes and who stays but "loyalty" has little relevance.

I suppose the reasons for dismissal can be any one of many. Usually the one getting his walking papers goes quietly, politely. Some do not and this is not good since it can raise doubts from all quarters. U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter is one of these, supporters of Chalabi are vocal.

From my viewpoint, Scott Ritter made a fool of himself, he has no credibility with anyone and watching him on his rare television appearances, he looks to be emotionally disturbed.

Chalabi struck me as a man with his own agenda from the beginning. I believe he simply became too demanding and he was not worth the trouble and we let him go.

More questions than answers attend Chalabi. He may not be the devil incarnate, but I really doubt he's an angel either. I would be pleased to see the allegations against him and defenses of him resolved, one way or the other. I don't expect to be pleased in that regard in the foreseeable near term.

These are answers you may find in books with varying degrees of validity but the government has no reason or need to explain these things to anyone officially.

Hmmm:

"But Boot's argument is self-contradictory. If the CIA were attempting to "scapegoat Chalabi for its own failures," why would the "CIA's postwar investigation" have concluded that Chalabi's INC "had a minimal impact on prewar assessments"?

In fact, the commission did not "determine" that Curveball "was not influenced" by the INC; rather, the report simply repeated the CIA's own conclusions about suspected INC influence on Curveball. Boot quoted only the last half of a key sentence from the report. Here's the full quotation:

Despite speculation that Curveball was encouraged to lie by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the CIA's post-war investigations were unable to uncover any evidence that the INC or any other organization was directing Curveball to feed misleading information to the Intelligence Community. Instead, the post-war investigations concluded that Curveball's reporting was not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to, the INC.

The CIA's conclusion, which the Robb-Silberman report repeated, was apparently based solely on the agency's inability "to uncover any evidence" that the INC had directed Curveball. But it is well-known that Curveball "was introduced to German intelligence [which later passed his claims on to U.S. intelligence] by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress," as The New York Times reported in July 2004. (Newsweek has also reported Chalabi's role in providing Curveball to the Germans.) And the report noted that "[t]he CIA concluded" that one of its other INC sources "was being 'directed' by the INC to provide information" to U.S. intelligence.

Given that the 618-page report is largely devoted to excoriating the CIA for its myriad failures, it's far from clear that the Robb-Silberman report's authors have full confidence in the CIA's assessment of possible direction of Curveball by the INC, or, if they do have such confidence, why this should be so. The footnotes accompanying the report's description of this CIA assessment (notes 403 and 404) indicate that the report's description of the CIA's conclusion is based only on the panel's interviews with various CIA personnel, not on the panel's examination of any formal written assessment of the INC's involvement with Curveball that the CIA may (or may not) have conducted.

Finally, it's unclear how definitive evidence of the INC's "direction" to Curveball could ever emerge. For obvious reasons, the INC is unlikely to admit to "directing" Curveball, if it indeed did so, and, as the commission report notes, Curveball himself is a serial liar.

Boot's willingness to trust the CIA's assessment of Chalabi's influence (and to partially conceal this willingness from readers) contrasts sharply with the acute distrust of the CIA he expressed later in the same column. Discussing leaks by "anonymous U.S. spooks" in the intelligence community indicating that Chalabi had allegedly informed Iran that U.S. intelligence had broken one of its secret codes, Boot wrote: "Guess we're supposed to take the U.S. intelligence community's word for all this, even though its judgment has been discredited in every outside inquiry." "

http://mediamatters.org/items/200504070003

Apart from squawks about the source - anyone able to rebut this factually?