Nobody is claiming some shadowy conspiracy. This was a coordinated, well planned, and executed disinformation campaign. The planiting of false stories, the promotion of rumor to fact, the circular sources, and especially the passing of "intelligence" that is false info dressed up to look like fact, accepted as such by an eager-to-believe-anything-that-confirms-my-theory intellegence apparatus, all right out of a John Le Carre novel. The Vice President Who Came in from The Cold.

If your looking for conspiracies, you might find one when you look at the fact that Chalabi was probably the tool Iranian intellegence used to help Cheney get us into the war. After all, Cheney and the Iranians all had the same goal, which was toppling Saddam, and there are a lot of players on the DOD staff who were involved in Iran/Contra. I wonder if guys like Eliot Abrams and Poindexter still had their old contacts with Iranian intelligence. I bet the Iranians played like a bunch of riverboar rubes. And who gave Chalabi information that he passed on to the Iranians "that could get Americans killed"? Now there's a conspiracy theory in the making.