Feith, Iran, Israel, Turkey and Chalabi

* clemons:

"The night that the FBI raided Lawrence Franklin's office was August 27th, my birthday, and I recall that Josh Marshall (who was over) and I both looked at each other when we heard the news and said it must be Larry Franklin. In an email exchange later that night, CNN's David Ensor and I traded communications that it appeared Franklin was the target of the FBI investigation.

We would not have suspected Franklin, in my view, if he was not quite visibly engaged in relationship building with an oddball roster of players in the Middle East. Douglas Feith, in my view, had created a culture where this exchange of information, including quid pro quo deals, were part of the way he and his team operated. After all, Feith -- who had deep and broad relationships with the senior echelon of Israel's defense and intelligence bureaucracies -- had also housed the Iraqi National Congress in his pre-DoD legal office. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress Chief of Intelligence Aras Karim Habib was apparently a sieve of information from Feith's activities and operation to Iranian intelligence.

In fact, one interesting question that few have seriously explored is whether Iran, Israel, Turkey and Chalabi were essentially colluding via Douglas Feith's operation for some time -- both before Feith went into government and after. (I will be writing more about this in a future post.)"

paging Sibel.