Drinking buddies

The AP's John Solomon offers one of those handy AP stories summarizing what others have been reporting about our well-paid friend Ahmad Chalabi's leak of classified information to the Iranian government. (Bonus points to Solomon for citing The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CBS and NBC News, all in one article. He seems to be auditioning for Eric Umansky's job.)

From Solomon:

American officials quoted in the news reports said Chalabi told the Baghdad chief of the Iranian spy service that the United States was reading its communications and that the Iranian spy described the conversation in a message to Tehran, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

The New York Times account said Iranians in Tehran then sent a bogus message to Baghdad purportedly disclosing the location of an important weapons site, in an apparent attempt to test whether what they were hearing from Chalabi was true.

The idea was that if the United States was able to intercept such transmissions, Americans would react by going to the weapons site. They intercepted the message, according to the Times, but did not take the bait by going to the weapons site.

The big questions here is who passed this classified information on to Chalabi in the first place?

Josh Marshall yesterday provided a bit of insider speculation from the very-insidery Nelson Report:

… it is the CIA's conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only "a handful" of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney and Cheney's consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

Cross-reference that short list with one other nugget from Solomon:

Chalabi reportedly told the Iranian he had he had gotten the information from an American who had been drunk.

This raises two more questions: Which of these five — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney and Libby — is known to tip back a few? And which seems likeliest to have gotten sloppy with Chalabi?

It is also possible, of course, that the circle is wider than the CIA sources cited by the Nelson Report believe. But that might also mean that the classified information had already been leaked to someone else who shouldn't have had access to it.

This line of speculation also suggests that the GAO and the Sierra Club may have been pursuing the wrong strategy by trying to get a court of law to make public the records of Vice President Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They might've had more success with a bottle of Glenfiddich.