payne-scheunemann-chalabi.thumbnail.jpg A recent New York Times profile casts John McCain as a tough guy for his response to the attacks of September 11. His response was to seize the media spotlight to call for a bunch of unrelated wars. The fact that McCain was duped by the charlatan Ahmed Chalabi doesn't seem to detract from the senator's reputation as a straight talking maverick. For that matter, nobody outside the blogosphere seems terribly concerned that McCain's top foreign policy and national security adviser was one of Chalabi's closest American allies.

McCain initially called for widespread attacks against Al Qaeda and any country that might have harbored or even condoned Al Qaeda:

"In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad! [NYT]

The article doesn't mention that McCain was flat-out wrong. There was Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2001. Ironically, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until after the U.S. invaded the country and overthrew the government. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11.

McCain began plumping for a war on Iraq a full 6 months before the White House dared to float the idea. "The Sept. 11 attacks 'demonstrated the grave threat posed by a hostile regime, possessing weapons of mass destruction, and with reported ties to terrorists,' Mr. McCain wrote--this was in an email to the New York Times last Friday. The factual errors contained in this sentence alone should disqualify McCain for the presidency.

The senator became frustrated when American intelligence agencies were unable to supply evidence of the non-existent link between 9/11 and Iraq. So, he turned to an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi for information. Chalabi had a conflict of interest, to put it mildly, seeing as he was counting on the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install him as the leader of Iraq.

In 2006, the majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Chalabi's organization proffered "false information" in an attempt to "influence U.S. policy towards Iraq" before the Iraq war.

One of Chalabi's closest American associates was none other than Randy Scheunemann, the man who would eventually become the top foreign policy advisor to McCain 2008. Yes, the same Randy Scheunemann who lobbied John McCain on behalf of the Republican of Georgia while he was working on the McCain campaign. Yes, the same Randy Scheunemann who went into business with now-disgraced lobbyist and international influence peddler Stephen Payne.

As a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann wrote the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which gave the Iraqi National Congress $98 million and committed the US to overthrowing the government of Iraq.

Scheunemann founded and lead the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was itself a spin off of the Project for a New American Century. John McCain and Joe Lieberman were honorary CLI co-chairs. CLI lobbied aggressively for the invasion of Iraq.

A former INC staffer told TPM Muckraker that Chalabi and Scheunemann were friends who worked closely together. The INC even shared a Capitol Hill address with Scheunemann's lobbying firm, Orion Strategies.

The following anecdote illustrates the kind of working relationship that Scheunemann and Chalabi enjoyed. In June of 1998, weapons inspector Scott Ritter met with Scheunemann about a discovery that suggested that Iraq might be developing chemical weapons. Scheunemann thought this was something Chalabi should know about. So, he had Ritter driven to Chalabi's Georgetown apartment for an impromptu dinner party and sleepover. (Seriously.)

McCain exhorted the U.S. into an illegal war based on false intelligence from a suspected Iranian agent. Now, five years later, he named one of the chief architects of this debacle, Randy Scheunemann, to shape his foreign policy. When McCain says there will be other wars. If he's elected there will be.