Chalabi says he'll testify; we say, 'bring him on'

Ahmed Chalabi, long a Bush administration insider on matters Iraqi, has fallen out of favor. Too little, too late, we're tempted to observe.
Chalabi, a convicted embezzler in Jordan, was a darling of neo-conservatives in Washington, D.C., who were eager to hear him tell them how easy it would be to take control of Iraq once Saddam Hussein was deposed.
Chalabi and his acolytes were the source of much of the "intelligence" regarding Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Their misinformation fueled the administration's call to arms in Iraq.
Man of many faces
But while some in Washington saw Chalabi as a possible quick fix for the power vacuum that would develop with Saddam's fall, the Iraqis were less easily fooled. They saw him as a carpetbagger. And U .N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi made it known early on that Chalabi, who sits on the Iraqi Governing Council, would not figure in the Iraqi administration that Brahimi is assembling for a June 30 transfer of power.
So Chalabi is courting new friends. With Iranian backing, he has been putting together a sectarian Shiite bloc that would be quite capable of mounting anti-Sunni demonstrations and further destabilizing an unstable country.
Chalabi, whose compound was raided by U.S. forces last week, says the CIA has falsely accused him of spying for Iran.
So, the man who sat behind Laura Bush when President Bush delivered the State of the Union address to Congress last January, who greeted Bush when the president flew to Baghdad last Thanksgiving and who claims to have met with Bush in the Oval office, is now accused of spying for Iran at a time when Iranian militants are once again marching in Tehran shouting, "Death to America."
The man who has met personally with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, and who until recently received a $340,000 per month subsidy from the Pentagon, appears to be positioning himself to fill not the vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein, but the gap in Shiite leadership that will develop when the Shiite extremist Muqtada al Sadr is eventually killed.
Bold move
But Chalabi is nothing if not bold. And he has said he will cooperate with U.S. investigators on U.S. soil. In a dig at the administration that once paid handsomely for his allegiance, he said in a TV interview, "I will cooperate with any investigation conducted in the United States -- not [in Iraq], where we have Abu Ghraib prison." And he challenged CIA Director George J. Tenet to meet him under oath at a congressional hearing to "resolve this issue."
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence should waste no time in arranging for Chalabi's testimony. While he is a known liar and dissembler, his word was once good enough for an administration that was intent on invading Iraq. The Senate should hear him out.