But he lost favour after the invasion when much of his information regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda turned out to be false.
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Ahmed Chalabi with USA officials Jay Garner (right) and Paul Bremer (center) in Baghdad on May 16, 2003.
Democracy Now! closely covered the rise and fall of Chalabi over the past 15 years.
Chalabi was both a mathematician who changed the world, and an Iraqi exile and political activist. Mr. Chalabi was the leading tribune of the idea of a free and democratic Iraq. By April 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was opposed to giving Chalabi a prominent role in Iraq’s new government, seeing him as someone who didn’t have the support of locals.
As recently as June 2014, Chalabi was considered a viable candidate for Iraqi prime minister.
The first deputy speaker of parliament, Sheik Humam Hamoudi, lamented Chalabi’s death as a “big loss” for Iraq, calling him “an example of perseverance and dedication”.
Powell said this was one of the “most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq”.
The State Department in 2002 suspended funding to the Iraqi National Congress because of doubts over the organization’s accounting practices and fears that Chalabi was divisive among opposition groups, the BBC reported.
A colorful and charismatic politician, Chalabi served in a variety of senior posts in the post-invasion Iraqi government.
“It is a very bad day for Iraq”, al-Rubaie told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “They have certainly already found the technology”, Chalabi said. Said Chalabi in a 2004 New Yorker piece, “There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for the liberation of Iraq”. A former top banker, he was convicted of embezzlement by a court in Jordan and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years in prison.
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The bank collapsed in 1990.
