Bring the Troops Home

[Woodpecker]

1,2,3,4, what the hell are we fighting for?
-Wpkr

SHAME OF ABUSE BY BRIT TROOPS
May 1 2004

Daily Mirror (UK)

Rogue British troops batter Iraqis in mockery of bid to win over people

By Paul Byrne
*

A HOODED Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers before being thrown from a moving truck and left to die.

The prisoner, aged 18-20, begged for mercy as he was battered with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth.

After an EIGHT-HOUR ordeal, he was left barely conscious and close to death. Bleeding and vomiting and with a broken jaw and missing teeth, he was driven from a Basra camp and hurled off the truck. No one knows if he lived or died.

URINATED ON: A British soldier urinates on an Iraqi prisoner in a vile display of abuse. The captive was beaten and hurled from a moving truck. Army chiefs are investigating.

The shocking pictures on this page were handed to us by one of the attackers and a colleague. We have agreed to protect their identities as they fear reprisals.

Last night, their damning testimony was in the hands of appalled ministers and Army chiefs who pledged an urgent investigation.

Chief of the General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson said: "If this is proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the Queen's uniform. They have besmirched the good name of the Army and its honour."

No 10 said: "The Prime Minister fully endorses the general's statement."

The outrage, which emerged the day after US troops were pictured torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, makes a mockery of the Army's attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

GUN TO HEAD: The terrified suspect cowers as a gun is placed at his head - then the rifle barrel was forced into his mouth

Army chiefs believe it was an isolated incident involving a few rogue troops. But, it is claimed, officers turned a blind eye. One of the soldiers said: "Basically this guy was dying as he couldn't take any more. An officer came down. It was 'Get rid of him - I haven't seen him'. The paperwork gets ripped. So they threw him out, still with a bag on his head."

Weeks after the pictures were taken, a captive was allegedly beaten to death in custody by men from the same Queen's Lancashire Regiment. It is also alleged a video was found of prisoners being thrown off a bridge.

Soldier A told how the young victim was hauled in suspected of stealing from the docks.

He said: "You pick on a man and go for him. Straightaway he gets a beating, a couple of punches and kicks to put him down. Then he was dragged to the back of the vehicle."

Immediately a sandbag was placed over the man's head and his hands tied behind his back.

Soldier A said:

As we took him back he was getting a beating. He was hit with batons on the knees, fingers, toes, elbows, and head.

You normally try to leave off the face until you're in camp. If you pull up with black eyes and bleeding faces you could be in s**t.

"So it's body shots - scaring him, saying 'We're going to kill you'. A lot of them cry and p*** themselves.

Because it was so hot we put him in the back of a four- tonner truck which has a canopy over it. That's where the photos were taken. Lads were taking turns giving him a right going over, smashing him in the face with weapons and stamping on him. We had him for about eight hours.

BLEEDING: Blood seeps through the mask of battered suspect

You could see blood coming out early from the first 'digs'. He was p****d on and there was spew.

"We took his mask off to give him some water and let him have a rest for 10 minutes. He could only speak a few words, pleading 'No, mister' . No, mister'.

I did less than the others. But I joined in. Me and my mate calmed down. Then two lads come on and it starts again.

"He was missing teeth. All his mouth was bleeding and his nose was all over the place. He couldn't talk, his jaw was out. He's had a good few hours of a kicking. He was on his way to being killed. There's only so much you can take.

After the officer allegedly told the attackers to get rid of the suspect he was driven off.

Soldier A said: "The lads said they took him back to the dock and threw him off the back of a moving vehicle. They'd have freed his hands, but he'd still be hooded. He'd done nothing, really. I felt sorry for him. I'm not emotional about it, but I knew it was wrong."

Referring to the second alleged beating in custody - said to have taken place in September - Soldier B said: "It was only a matter of time.

BUTT IN GROIN: A rifle is cruelly jabbed in the young man's groin as his eight-hour nightmare goes on

"We had one who fought back. I thought 'Don't do that', it's the worst thing you can do. He got such a kicking. You could hear your mate's boots hitting this lad's spine.

"One of the lads broke his wrist on a prisoner's head. Another nearly broke his foot, kicking him. We're not helping ourselves out here. We're never going to get the Iraqis on our side. We're fighting a losing war."

Soldier B claimed after the alleged September beating troops were told to destroy incriminating evidence.

He said: "We got a warning, saying the Military Police had found a video of people throwing prisoners off a bridge. It wasn't 'Don't do it' or 'Stop it'. It was 'Get rid of it.' "

The death is being probed. At least one soldier is expected to be charged with manslaughter.

The two infantrymen claim abuse has started because Iraqi police are powerless to process suspects.

Soldier B said: "There's no point taking them to the police station because they're released within 20 minutes. The coppers don't want any comeback and let them go. All we do is teach them a lesson our way.

"You're knackered and you don't want to be going to a police station and doing statements, just for them to be released. Give them a kicking, then it's done and dusted.

"A lot of the younger ones are worse. It's as though they've something to prove. You've got a gun and you're the law. You can make people do whatever you want."

Both men fear the situation is worsening , with UK troops now seen as the enemy, rather than liberators.

One said: "I can't believe it has taken the Iraqis so long to fight back. If it had been me or my family, I'd have retaliated straightaway.

"They've just got f****d around so much. You can't go in now, and say 'Right, let's forget about what has happened and start again'.

"We're struggling now. There are too many people against us."

The MoD confirmed eight cases of alleged mistreatment of Iraqis by British personnel are being investigated by the army's Special Investigations Branch. A spokesman said: "All allegations will be investigated - and every soldier knows it."

[ May 08, 2004, 01:27 AM: Message edited by: Woodpecker ]

[daniel]

It becomes increasingly clear to me that this war is being fought only because it was in the "programming" of the noosphere - this "clash of civilizations" is necessary to bring the present phase-state of civilization and consciousness to an end. We had to go back to the "cradle" of the present mindset - Uruk, etc. - and lay it waste before we could move on.

As I mentioned in the book, Gurdjieff theorizes that as long as people are not conscious, they are controlled by stellar and planetary influences. The layer of organic life on the Earth is like a film that receives and reflects influences from the cosmos. Certain areas of the Earth demand heightened energies depending on planetary confluences -- these demands for energies can either be released through mindless violence or mindful ritual.

[Woodpecker]

What sort of mindful rituals would you recommend, Daniel? That's a serious question.

[Woodpecker]

By the way:

Useful English Phrases for Iraqi POWs

On May 1, the UK's Daily Mirror printed an article which detailed the torture and possible murder of a young Iraqi by British soldiers. Whether the victim survived is not known, as, near death, he was dumped off the back of a truck. His crime, looting. The only English words he could muster up in his defense were "No, mister." In the spirit of international communication, and assuming it was a misunderstanding on the part of well-intentioned peacekeepers intent on bringing order to a troubled land, we offer the following polite English expressions for other Iraqi prisoners wishing to communicate more fluently with their captors in the international language of freedom and democracy.

Pardon me, but could you not put that hood over my head, please?
Please stop punching me in the face.
Would you kindly refrain from kicking me in the ribs and stomach?
Please be so kind as to untie my wrists, as I have lost the sensation in my hands.
Excuse me, I seem to be bleeding on the inside of my hood.
Would you please stop punching and kicking me?
Terribly sorry, but would you please not rip my shirt?
Would you please keep the barrel of your rifle out of my mouth?
I'd very much appreciate it if you would not urinate on me.
Dreadfully sorry, but I am vomiting, some of my teeth have fallen out, and my jaw is disclocated.
Would it be very much trouble for you to cease hitting me in the groin with the butt of your rifle?
Would you please be so kind as to ask the leaders of your country to bring their troops home?

[daniel]

My thought lately is that what we have to orchestrate if we would like to save our world is a global protest, using Gandhiesque tactics, aimed at ending the military industrial complex. I think it will probably take one or two horrible cataclysms before this becomes self-evident, and the international protests against the Iraq War were a good starting point. But we would really need to see millions of people willing to sacrifice themselves for this cause, recognizing that if they do not do this, there will be no future.

At the same time, we need a positive pro-active philosophy and vision of the world beyond the present one - how it would be organized etc. My own feeling is that the integration of the best aspects of 1960s-style Leftism with the intensified consciousness and "ego-freedom" that should come from shamanic/esoteric disciplines is the form that the new consciousness would take. There is a lot that points to this in the Gebser book on The Ever-Present Origin, perhaps I will post later on it. He notes that the "Left" signifies all of the "uncontrolled intensities" demanding liberation, including the "left-hand path" of magic, the feminine, intuition, and the drives for liberation (liberation from work and conditions that mechanization should have ameliorated), as well as all of the splinters of identity politics that broke off from the 1960s.

Gebser writes that while we have our "rights" (though these are now under assault), we still do not have our "lefts."

Gebser's analysis is very similar to Arguelles especially in Earth Ascending.

[gone]

What do you think about the ‘human shields’ as action? Ken O’Keefe, who organised part of the Iraqi Shield is putting in place something similar for Palestine in September (www.p10k.net). There is, of course, much naivety behind these actions, but they are actually doing something.

I agree with the need for the millions, and this could take the form of physical, spiritual, economic and political action. What worries me is the number of people who seem to go further Right in response to the current madness. Here in NZ there seems to be a very real danger that right-wingers may take power this year. In Europe the left of centre guys look like old Imperialists. You can bet that the left-of-Bush next president will still look like a Republican.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

[sidecross]

The Adventures of Bush the Crackpot

By Carlos Fuentes
Le Monde

Wednesday 19 May 2004

"April is the cruelest month." Here we are; May 1st, just a little over a year ago on the bridge of an aircraft carrier close to the California coast, George W. Bush, dressed up as an aviator declared: "Mission Accomplished." One year later, the famous opening of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland applies. The month of April just past has been the cruelest of a "selected presidency" (to use Susan Sontag's expression) that owes its election more to the Supreme Court than to voters.

While he was governor of Texas, Bush, according to Richard A. Clarke in his best-seller Against All Enemies, declared: "God wants me to be President." Guided by the Almighty from the Highest Heavens, Bush has recently confirmed his Messianism by asserting that he does not obey his father, former president George H. W. Bush, but the Most High: God in person.

Since God has no channel to answer Bush's absurdities in words, He does it through acts. One year after having declared the end of major military operations in Iraq - "Mission Accomplished" -, Bush confronts the brutal and naked reality of the war he on his own initiative needlessly unleashed. Chaos reigns in Iraq. The Bush government was not prepared for the war after the war: the violent peace in an occupied and resistant country.

The North American proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, aggravated the initial mistakes. He dismissed 30,000 officials of the Saddam regime, for the most part members of the official Baath party. So from then on, as long as it was not replaced, the bureaucracy ceased to function, with chaotic consequences for the country's administration.

That was May 16, 2003. On May 22, 2003, Bremer proceeded to dissolve the Iraqi army, persuaded that the "coalition" forces dominated by the United States were going to impose the post-war order he expected. Result: a half-million unemployed Iraqis, armed and ready to fight, should the opportunity arise, on the side of forces recruited against the occupier.

Bremer committed another colossal mistake when he divided the Shi'ite majority's clerics who had opposed Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime.

Such is the summary picture of post-war Iraq: a North American occupation force confronts a tribal and religious insurrection. The technological air war, the master card in the Bush offensive, turned into what we Mexicans, Central Americans, Vietnamese, Algerians, Central Europeans and all people who have suffered the rigor and disgrace of a foreign occupation know well: the street by street, house by house fighting, with growing losses for the invader. Today, gangs occupy whole neighborhoods of Baghdad.

The invaders believed themselves to be liberators, but the occupied people do not want "to be seen as a United States' ally", according to the Polish Defense Minister. This benefits chaos, as those Iraqis who don't join the guerillas also don't fight against them. Under such conditions, the North American political plan has lost all credit.

A man without any local political support, Ahmed Chalabi, a pure United States' marionette, was called back from exile. The real forces on the ground - Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds - didn't put off their demonstration that there would be no new government in Iraq without them. Impotent and pushed to the side, Chalabi has also ended up turning against the United States. The occupation itself has become untenable. The United States can do nothing now but eat its hat; in other words: admit it made a mistake.

Unbridled arrogance, "hubris" in Greek, is expensive. "Take it or leave it," Bush declared as he launched the war against Iraq. "With us or against us. It doesn't matter. The United States can and will act alone." A half-century earlier another rabid imperialist, John Foster Dulles, had said: "The United States doesn't have friends. It has interests." Today, Advisor Condoleezza Rice echoes him. To hear her tell it, the United States looks after its own interests and not those of an "illusory international community." This pride finds expression in acts that are deadly for the "illusory" international community.

The policies aimed at deterrence and containment have been abandoned. The barbarous principle of preemptive attack has been instituted. The competent authority (the UN Security Council) has been treated with contempt. The United States has snapped its fingers at the principle of war as the last recourse by unleashing its Shakespearean dogs without any legal authority whatsoever. The requirement of a just motive has been sidestepped in favor of the oil motive and the contractual largesse showered on friends of Bush.

One reason after another for going to war has melted away. Saddam didn't have, had not had, and would never have weapons of mass destruction. These, as the disconcerting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has admitted, were invoked to go to war for "bureaucratic reasons". Once that pretext was uncovered, a second was invented: to overthrow the infamous Saddam Hussein, the United States' own Frankenstein monster. However, why Saddam and not some other of the dozens of big and little tyrants in our world: Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the Burmese military junta, the Korean despot Kim Jong-Il, the brutal Khadafi, specialist in the art of bringing down airplanes full of civilians and Washington's favorite son today as Saddam was yesterday... ?

It's an oil war in which strategic appetites prevailed over every other consideration. Unsurprisingly, Bechtel, George Schulz's company, obtained the first construction contract in Iraq.

An unjust and unnecessary war has lead to a long and costly post-war: close to 800 Americans dead in battle; 4,000-11,000 Iraqi civilians killed, a monstrous regimen of humiliation and torture practiced by United States' citizens in the prisons that were once Saddam Hussein's deadly jails. I shall evoke Kurtz words in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The horror...the horror."

How to exit this disaster? By eating one's hat. The despised UN offers a new way, uncertain, but unique. France's foreign policy, elaborated by Jacques Chirac and put into motion by Dominique de Villepin, proposed a political way out that is legal and rational. The United States alone cannot assure a political transition in Iraq. This task reverts to the UN and consists in establishing a technocratic provisional government that replaces the present puppet Council, convokes a Constitutional Assembly, and allows the real forces in Iraq, religious and secular, tribal and nationalist, to express themselves.

The Iraqi National Conference proposed by Chirac is realistic. It doesn't exclude the occupying powers. However, it does demand of the United States a high level of that "humility" G. W. Bush made his 2000 electoral slogan. The task is not easy. The unity of Iraq is at stake. In order to save it, the UN as well as the United States must return to the path of international law, so manhandled today, and acknowledge that while there may be military unilateralism, on the legal and economic fronts, there can be no salvation without multilateralism.

This was the message delivered with vigorous clarity by Mexico's former President, Ernesto Zedillo, at Harvard in 2003. This was the message of former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the French National Assembly: terrorism can be vanquished only by a global cooperation sensitive to the wounds that serve as its growth medium. This was the message of Dominique de Villepin, for whom "only respect for the law gives strength legitimacy and legitimacy strength ". This was Harry Truman's message when he founded the UN in San Francisco: "We must all acknowledge that however great our power, we must deny ourselves the freedom of doing whatever we want." This was the Bill Clinton's message in 1999: "Let us abandon the illusion that we may forever reserve for ourselves that which we refuse to others."

And-referring to Pascal's timeless wisdom - incapable of making what is right, strong; let us make whatever is strong, right.

By attacking a tyrant who had no connections to al-Qaeda or bin Laden, Bush put the struggle against the terrorists off for later and gave them the opportunity to grow stronger and to strike Morocco and Spain. He easily conquered a weakened Iraq, brought to its knees by the sanctions and embargo stemming from the Gulf War. Moreover, he allowed Islamic fundamentalists to gain strength even as he pushed them towards the mosques. Because US-backed authoritarian regimes had monopolized local political power, the fundamentalists had few competitors.

The greatest paradox of all is that the North American victory has found expression in a weakening of the United States both inside and outside Iraq. Its most solid alliances have been cracked, its policy has been rejected by a great majority of the world and it will have to pay an enormous economic bill for the adventures of George W. Bush, the Crackpot.

North American military expenditures have risen to 350 billion dollars a year, some 36 % of world military expenses, and more than that of the sum of nine next highest nations on the list. Nonetheless, such sums are insufficient to subjugate and govern one country, Iraq, let alone to open new possible and probable fronts.

Who is paying for the war? A class-based economic policy, according to economist Paul Krugman. A right-wing Keynesianism that converts a surplus into a deficit through an increase in military expenditures, tax reduction, protectionism, and the rescue of failing companies.

Unilateralism damages the United States politically and economically. It hurts the standard of living since the country is too dependent on foreign energy and capital. The society's internal demands are too great to allow endless expenditures for military domination.

The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, tackles these subjects belatedly and slowly only. The Massachusetts senator represents above all a major opportunity for North American diplomacy: to provide the United States with the credibility Bush's mistaken policies have lost it. Who will be able to believe Bush again the next time he cries: "Wolf!"

-------

Carlos Fuentes is a writer.

Carmen Val Julian translated the original (Mexico) Spanish into French.

http://truthout.org/docs_04/052304H.shtml

[daniel]

That was a decent piece from Fuentes, as far as it went. However, it should be clear that for the same reason they entered this conflict the US is not going to leave it. And that reason is oil.

[sidecross]

"…And that reason is oil."

If oil is the reason for war and nuclear power is the last gasp for global warming, our species is finished.

Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'

Leading environmentalist urges radical rethink on climate change

By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor

24 May 2004

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=524313

'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'
'The ice is melting much faster than we thought'
Guru who tuned into Gaia was one of the first to warn of climate threat
James Lovelock: Nuclear power is the only green solution
Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James
Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has
always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the
alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

He was in a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on climate change to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last
report in 2001.

On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations
whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.

He believes only a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces almost no CO2, can now check a runaway warming which would raise sea levels disastrously around the world, cause climatic turbulence and make
agriculture unviable over large areas. He says fears about the safety of nuclear energy are irrational and exaggerated, and urges the Green movement to drop its opposition.

In today's Independent, Professor Lovelock says he is concerned by two climatic events in particular: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will raise global sea levels significantly, and the episode of extreme heat in
western central Europe last August, accepted by many scientists as unprecedented and a direct result of global warming.

These are ominous warning signs, he says, that climate change is speeding, but many people are still in ignorance of this. Important among the reasons is "the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed
to give their climate scientists the support they needed".

He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938, with the Second World War looming, and nobody knowing what to do. The attachment of the Greens to renewables is "well-intentioned but misguided", he says, like the Left's
1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger.

He writes today: "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."

His appeal, which in effect is asking the Greens to make a bargain with the devil, is likely to fall on deaf ears, at least at present.

"Lovelock is right to demand a drastic response to climate change," Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said last night. "He's right to question previous assumptions.

"But he's wrong to think nuclear power is any part of the answer. Nuclear creates enormous problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive emissions; unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack."

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Climate change and radioactive waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them."

[sidecross]

US intelligence fears Iran
duped hawks into Iraq war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html

· Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict
· Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday May 25, 2004
The Guardian

An urgent investigation has been launched in
Washington into whether Iran played a role in
manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on
bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used
the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get
rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a
Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has
hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence
chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to
Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian
agent for several years, involved in passing
intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's
contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC
acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian
hands.

The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr
Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence
on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case
for war.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast,
lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in
Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been
manipulating the US for several years through
Chalabi."

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official
at the state department, said: "When the story
ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of
the most masterful intelligence operations in history.
They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its
greatest enemy."

Mr Chalabi has vehemently rejected the allegations as
"a lie, a fib and silly". He accused the CIA director,
George Tenet, of a smear campaign against himself
and Mr Habib.

However, it is clear that the CIA - at loggerheads with
Mr Chalabi for more than eight years - believes it has
caught him red-handed, and is sticking to its
allegations.

"The suggestion that Chalabi is a victim of a smear
campaign is outrageous," a US intelligence official
said. "It's utter nonsense. He passed very sensitive
and classified information to the Iranians. We have
rock solid information that he did that."

"As for Aras Karim [Habib] being a paid agent for
Iranian intelligence, we have very good reason to
believe that is the case," added the intelligence
official, who did not want to be named. He said it was
unclear how long this INC-Iranian collaboration had
been going on, but pointed out that Mr Chalabi had
had overt links with Tehran "for a long period of time".

An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA
confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered
that a piece of information from an electronic
communications intercept by the National Security
Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The
information was so sensitive that its circulation had
been restricted to a handful of officials.

"This was 'sensitive compartmented information' - SCI
- and it was tracked right back to the Iranians through
Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.

Mr Habib, a Shia Kurd who is being sought by Iraqi
police since a raid on INC headquarters last week,
has been Mr Chalabi's righthand man for more than a
decade. He ran a Pentagon-funded intelligence
collection programme in the run-up to the invasion and
put US officials in touch with Iraqi defectors who made
claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction.

Those claims helped make the case for war but have
since proved groundless, and US intelligence
agencies are now scrambling to determine whether
false information was passed to the US with Iranian
connivance.

INC representatives in Washington did not return calls
seeking comment.

But Laurie Mylroie, a US Iraq analyst and one of the
INC's most vocal backers in Washington, dismissed
the allegations as the product of a grudge among CIA
and state department officials driven by a pro-Sunni,
anti-Shia bias.

She said that after the CIA raised questions about Mr
Habib's Iranian links, the Pentagon's Defence
Intelligence Agency (DIA) conducted a lie-detector
test on him in 2002, which he passed with "flying
colours".

The DIA is also reported to have launched its own
inquiry into the INC-Iran link.

An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI
investigation into the affair would begin with Mr
Chalabi's "handlers" in the Pentagon, who include
William Luti, the former head of the office of special
plans, and his immediate superior, Douglas Feith, the
under secretary of defence for policy.

There is no evidence that they were the source of the
leaks. Other INC supporters at the Pentagon may
have given away classified information in an attempt
to give Mr Chalabi an advantage in the struggle for
power surrounding the transfer of sovereignty to an
Iraqi government on June 30.

The CIA allegations bring to a head a dispute
between the CIA and the Pentagon officials
instrumental in promoting Mr Chalabi and his
intelligence in the run-up to the war. By calling for an
FBI counter-intelligence investigation, the CIA is, in
effect, threatening to disgrace senior
neo-conservatives in the Pentagon.

"This is people who opposed the war with long knives
drawn for people who supported the war," Ms Mylroie
said.