This is coolbert: This recent incident with the Iraqi Achmed Chalabi shows one of the two difficulties in trying to develop intelligence about an adversary. One difficulty of course is that your potential foe or target is taking active measures to prevent you from finding out what you want to know. And, secondly, at the same time, the adversary is feeding you disinformation intended to fool and confuse you. Trying to separate valid from non-valid and what is true and what is not is very hard.

The contention with Chalabi is that his "chief of intelligence" seems to have been working for the Iranians or had close contact with their "master of the dark side" for some time. When we say dark side we mean the secret services. It seems this chief of Chalabi's may have been in cahoots with the Iranians and was passing on disinformation and doing so as if it was the real thing this chief had obtained from an Iraqi source. This disinformation evidently was accepted by U.S. intelligence services and policy makers as being true and was used as evidence by the policy makers to demonstrate to the whole world, and even more importantly, to convince themselves that Iraq presented an imminent danger to the U.S.

And the Iranians would have good reason for passing on such disinformation and deluding our policy makers as to the true situation with Saddam and Iraq. To eliminate the Iraqi threat, a threat the Iranians could not do on their own, they needed the U.S. to act. By passing on this disinformation through a source that the U.S. believed and wanted to believe, the dark side of the Iranians may have convinced U.S. policy makers that they needed to act. They did act, but on faulty information. By doing what they presumably did, the Iranians got the U.S. to do what they could not do. Eliminate Iraq and Saddam as threats to them and create chaos that they could then exploit.

If this is true, it would cast more serious doubt about the abilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies. They will be further seen as not only bumbling and incompetent, but as a serious liability, and at a time when a liability is not needed. This is the eyes and ears of the planners and decision makers. If the eyes and ears are bad, the brain cannot decide correctly, the body will just flail around, hoping to hit the target but probably failing to do so.

coolbert.