Randy Scheunemann, now Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy aide, was a key member of the circle of advisors around Ahmad Chalabi, the now-discredited Iraqi exile who used false intelligence to sell the war.
Our friends over at TalkingPointsMemo have been hammering away at his connection to Chalabi for some time, raising questions about Scheunemann’s judgment and by inference, McCain’s.
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Josh Marshall writes that Scheunemann was “a core participant in the lobbying, plotting and organized campaigns of deception that led America to war in Iraq.”
As far back as the 1990s, while working for then-Senate GOP Leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann helped draft the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made the toppling of Saddam Hussein an official U.S. policy goal and authorized $98 million for the Iraqi National Congress, a loose grouping of Iraqi dissidents led by Chalabi.
In a recent interview with TalkingPointsMemo, Entifadh Qanbar, who worked for Chalabi’s group in 2001 and 2002, described Scheunemann as a “close friend…We exchanged thoughts, exchanged ideas. We would often meet, go for lunch.” He said he was also close to Brooke and Chalabi.
Qanbar said he believes it was Francis Brooke, Chalabi’s chief lobbyist and spokesman in the U.S., who first brought Scheunemann and Chalabi together.
A testament to the closeness of those ties is that Scheunemann took over the Capitol Hill office space of the Iraqi National Congress at Qanbar’s suggestion, after the group moved. To this day Orion Strategies, the lobbying shop which Scheunemann founded (and is now on leave from while he works for McCain’s campaign), is based at 918 Pennsylvania Ave SE.
That was also the address that Scheunemann used for the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
During this same period, Scheunemann was a director of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, which was beating the drum to topple Saddam. Scheunemann signed Kristol’s letter to President Bush, sent nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks, asserting that failing to go after the Iraqi dictator would “constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
At the start of the Bush administration, Scheunemann had signed on as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s consultant on Iraq at the Pentagon. But he left in 2002 to form the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which led the lobbying campaign in favor of an invasion.
Even after U.S. forces found no weapons of mass destruction, Scheunemann continued to defend Chalabi.
He appeared on PBS’s NewsHour in 2003, for instance, promoting Chalabi as a beacon of hope for secular democracy in Iraq. Asked about Jordanian charges that Chalabi was a convicted bank embezzler, Scheunemann suggested “there are far more politics behind this than any financial irregularities.”
Scheunemann dismissed concerns about Chalabi’s reliability as a matter of institutional and ideological bias.
A year later, Chalabi had his home and offices raided by US forces, following allegations he was passing classified US secrets to Iranian intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in 2004 that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” Chalabi has denied those charges.
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