From John Marshall's Talking Points:


Newsday, which continues to be one of the two best papers on the entire Iraq-intel story (along with related matters), has a new
article out this morning following up on the Chalabi revelations and his multiple appearances yesterday on the Sunday talk shows.

But the big story is contained in this sentence: "An intelligence source confirmed to Newsday reports in Time and Newsweek that the FBI had launched an investigation into who in the administration had passed the classified material to his Iraqi National Congress."

Perhaps we'll find out that Chalabi got his classified info from some obscure analyst at DIA or a Colonel in the field. But both of those possibilities seem highly unlikely.

Chalabi's interlocutors in the US government were a fairly small and well-known group, stacked heavily toward the top of the totem pole and very much on the appointive, civilian side -- start with the acronyms OSD and OVP. For those who know the nature of the relationship it would, quite frankly, be hard to imagine that they weren't sharing highly sensitive information with him.

If one of those guys gets pegged for giving Chalabi info that later ended up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, everything up till now will seem like it was a breeze.




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