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Child Rapist George Nader Introduced Dick Cheney and Ahmad Chalabi

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Last night, BuzzFeed released the second-to-last dump of 302s in their Mueller FOIA. There’s a ton that’s interesting in it (and I’m just skimming much of it). But — as I said to Jason Leopold — this George Nader interview, by itself, made the FOIA dump worth the price of admission.

There’s a ton of details about how he brokered meetings between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev and lots of significantly redacted discussions of meetings with Don Jr. There’s great theater where, several times, Nader denied something, including meeting “any” Russian government officials at a trip to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2016, only to have Mueller’s team show him a picture (in the case of Putin) or a text (in the case of his denials that he had met Steve Bannon) that forced him to immediately backtrack off his claims. Nader describes how he — a convicted pedophile during this entire period — could get along with all sides: Clinton and Trump, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Everyone’s favorite child rapist.

But by far the craziest part of this amazing interview — the thing that has my brain reeling this afternoon — has nothing to do with Russia.

In describing his background, you see, Nader claimed that he’s the one who introduced Ahmad Chalabi to Dick Cheney.

For those who don’t remember, Chalabi had a significant role in drumming up the Iraq War (here’s what I wrote after he died in 2015, and here’s a piece I wrote about him 10 years earlier, in advance of my book on such things). So by introducing Chalabi to Cheney, Nader played some role — how big, it’s unclear — in perhaps the single greatest American foreign policy debacle of all time.

And now he’s rotting away in prison for trafficking a boy.

AJ Rossmiller: Why Bloggers Are Better Informed than Condi Rice

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still-broken.jpgAJ Rossmiller (of AmericaBlog fame) nailed the results of the 2005 Iraqi election. You might recall that as the election where, after it had long become clear Ahmad Chalabi had little base of support in Iraq, some anonymous sources in the Administration nevertheless had great hopes that somehow Chalabi might end up as Prime Minister.

Though he lacks any mass appeal, some U.S. diplomats even cite the secular Shi’ite as a possible compromise candidate for prime minister in a coalition government.

But Chalabi won just .5% of the vote. Iyad Allawi, in whom the Administration also invested their hopes, won just 8% of the vote. And the Shiite coalition dominated by SCIRI and the Sadrists got 41% of the votes. In his book, Still Broken, AJ describes that he saw this coming.

After Iraq’s winter elections, the results validated the predictions contained in the paper I’d written in the fall. It created something of a stir because the paper turned out to be remarkably accurate, far more so than the forecasts of other agencies and departments. Before the election occurred, a high-ranking official requested a follow-up evaluation of our assessments, and I wrote a memo that described our precision. The memo made its way up through the chain, and a few days later the office got a note from Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, praising both the prediction and the self-evaluation.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the last half of AJ’s book describes how such accurate predictions are generally weeded out by higher-ranking analysts worried that their office’s work product might piss off the Administration. For example, AJ describes some of the conversations leading up to the election (edited to take out classified information), where people argued against his analysis because it didn’t accord with that of other intelligence agencies.

"You’re being too pessimistic. [The secularists] are gaining strength."

"There’s no way Iraqis will vote for [those in power] again. We can’t pass this up the chain."

"[Other agencies] are predicting something totally different and we need to make sure we’re not too far off message with this."

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