All this talk about Barack Obama “palling around with terrorists” gets one thinking — if it’s about spending time on a board full of local high-hats and do-gooders and attending a Hyde Park “coffee” in 1995 hosted by a guy who directed property bombings in protest of the Vietnam War 37 years ago, killing no one (unless you include the three luckless Weathermen who killed themselves making the bombs), then what is it called when your senior campaign advisor not only took money to promote some of the bloodiest dictators, thugs and kleptocrats in the world, but courted for cash the man in many respects responsible for the misbegotten occupation of Iraq and the deaths of 4,186 American servicemen and women?

Do we call it “palling around with prostitutes”? “Mugging it up with mercenaries?”

These days no one calls the relationship between Charlie Black — John McCain’s chief strategy guru, a role he’s been playing on-and-off since the Reagan years — and his various former clients, including Ahmed Chalabi, otherwise known as “The Man Who Pushed America to War” much of anything, because they’re too busy handwringing over former Weathermen Undergrounder Bill Ayers, who is now some fancy-pants professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About the time when Obama was giggling over Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ayers and company were planting home-made explosives on public property such as memorials, the Pentagon and the U.S Capitol. No one got hurt because the group would issue warnings and places would be evacuated ahead of time (The attempted killing via car bombing of Judge Murtagh in New York has been tied by his son to the Weathermen, but none of them were ever charged, and I cannot find any independent verification that Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn ever “took responsibility” for it as right-wing blogs have lately contended).

Meanwhile, less then a decade later, Black’s own public relations and lobbying operation (BKSH & Associates), was driving around Jonas Savimbi in a limo through Washington, getting him invited to the best parties, state dinners and congressional meet and greets. Savimbi was an Angolan rebel leader who many called “terrorist,” and was accused of “burning and raping,” shelling civilians and laying land mines over the scarred landscape of his country when he wasn’t in Washington, paying Black millions to get him aid for guns and to burnish his image among the Republican establishment, including President Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bob Dole and others, who reportedly called him a “a true patriot” as a result of Black’s stellar spinning.

Black has also taken tens of thousands of dollars to represent dictators like Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, Siad Barre in Somalia and Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida. He was hired for $950,000 at one point to improve the image of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos before he was cast out of his country in disgrace for embezzling billions from the treasury.

But this is often dismissed as “ancient history.” What is happening in Iraq today, is not history. The 140,000 U.S troops still there are a testament not only to the razzle-dazzle of PR whizbangers like Black, but to the chumminess he and other operatives created between Chalabi and well-placed Washington politicians like John McCain. President Bush and a fleet of red-faced lawmakers like to say they promoted the 2003 preemptive strike because of “the available evidence,” but as it’s been made all too clear since, they chose to give special access to agenda-driven operators like Chalabi, who had been working Capitol Hill for over a decade and not only provided false evidence of imminent danger to the U.S, but convinced Republican leaders and the White House that the U.S could stage an invasion with a small force and minimal casualties. Besides the flowers and sweets, an insurgency and shadow government were waiting to take down Saddam Hussein once American forces broke in the doors, they said. That never happened, and countless American lives have been shattered — a military strained to a breaking point not seen since Vietnam — because of it.

From Jane Mayer’s “The Manipulator,” in the New Yorker, 2004:

After the attacks of September 11th, many in the Administration began to consider a preëmptive strike against Saddam’s regime, and they eagerly received Chalabi’s intelligence briefings. In 2002, an Information Collection Program for I.N.C. intelligence, which had been funded by the State Department, was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, a division of the Pentagon. “Chalabi was the crutch the neocons leaned on to justify their intervention,” (Former CENTCOM Commander Gen. Anthony) Zinni said. “He twisted the intelligence that they based it on, and provided a picture so rosy and unrealistic they thought it would be easy.”

The C.I.A. remained skeptical of the defectors that the I.N.C. (Iraqi National Congress) was promoting, and insisted on examining them independently. President Bush was informed of the C.I.A.’s view of Chalabi soon after taking office, but he ultimately sided with Vice-President Cheney and the neocons.

Thanks to operatives like Black and BKSH, who represented Chalabi through a tidy $200K-$300K annual State Department contract, Chalabi had enough sway that when 9/11 hit, everyone turned to him for guidance.

From The Nation’s “Chalabi’s Lobby” in April (emphasis mine):

BKSH was the lobbying vehicle of the legendary Republican insider Charles Black Jr., one of “America’s foremost Republican political strategists,” according to BKSH. Black, a former adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is now a senior adviser to GOP presidential candidate John McCain, who was himself an early Chalabi backer with ties to the Iraqi going all the way back to 1991. BKSH, which represented major defense contractors, governments and international corporations, was perfectly situated to leverage its expertise on behalf of the Iraqi National Congress.

In an interview, Charles Black explained that his firm received $200,000 to $300,000 per year from the US government “to promote the INC.” Black, in his pleasant Texas drawl, says the firm did “standard kinds of public relations and public affairs, setting up seminars, helping them get speeches covered by the press, press conferences.” Black said he believes his company can take a lot of pride in a strong campaign. “The whole thing was very successful. The INC became not only well-known, but I think the message got out there strongly.” (snip)

The last week of October 2003 had been particularly gory in Baghdad. Rockets tore into the Al-Rashid Hotel, where Paul Wolfowitz lay sleeping on a rare visit. Terrorists destroyed the International Red Cross compound, and then, on Wednesday, October 29, a land mine gutted a US Army Abrams tank outside Baghdad, killing two soldiers. That was the day BKSH and the Iraqi National Congress were honored for their work in the run-up to the war.

The black-tie award ceremony took place far from the violence in Iraq, in London, where more than 1,000 of the public relations industry elite assembled in a ballroom at the luxurious Grosvenor House Hotel. PR Week hosted the event, its annual awards dinner for public relations companies. Burson-Marsteller, whose subsidiary BKSH had carried out the work, was named the winner in the public affairs category. The “Awards Supplement” of PR Week called BKSH’s work a “solid, disciplined campaign that is totally deserving of this award.” “Of particular importance,” said the citation, “was positioning INC founder Dr. Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi opposition spokespeople as authoritative political leaders.” BKSH “compiled intelligence reports, defector briefings, conferences and seminars…. The PR team also ran a contact-building programme, focusing on the European Union, Downing Street, the Foreign Office and MPs in the UK, matched to a US programme aimed at the White House, the Senate, Congress and the Pentagon.”

After the invasion, about the time when BKSH’s State Department pipeline ran out and more than 500 American men and women had already perished for the cause, BKSH shifted gears.

The business elite was eager for a seat at the table. Corporate executives flocked to conferences, corporations set up divisions to work on developing business in Iraq, consultancies thrived and newsletters proliferated to detail legal niceties and dispense advice. BKSH was going to get in on the ground floor of the industry. Charles Black said it was a busy time. “After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a lot of US companies, some of our long-term clients as well as some people who weren’t our clients, came to us and were looking to do business in Iraq,” he explained. The problem, he said, was that BKSH was not “going to be over there. We didn’t have an office over there or have full-time personnel.”

But the Chalabi operation did. Margaret Bartel, an accountant who had been hired by the State Department to sort out the INC’s books and stayed on to become a key member of the organization’s staff, was taking in Defense Intelligence Agency funds and delivering them to Chalabi’s intelligence operation. Zaab Sethna, Chalabi’s press aide, was also in Iraq. As Black explains it, “Peg was there and Zaab was there, so we just referred business to them.” Bartel and BKSH reached an agreement: in exchange for a referral fee, BKSH would send clients to Bartel’s consulting company, which would set them up with contacts, influence, housing, security and everything else they would need to get themselves started on Iraqi reconstruction. In the gold rush of 1849, they say, it was not the miners who got rich but the operators who sold the picks and the shovels and the wagons and the denim. So it was in Iraq, with the likes of Bartel, the INC and BKSH. The American businessmen would be the miners taking their chances, and the PR operatives and INC loyalists were selling the picks and shovels.

With all of this greasy backstory, it is easy to see why McCain, Sarah Palin and others are fond of dismissing all talk of the run up to Iraq as “finger pointing” and dwelling “on the past,” and why they have cajoled the media, and more importantly, the Republican base, into thinking a “old washed up terrorist” like Bill Ayers was one of the most serious issues to be discussed in the waning days of the campaign. In one way they have been successful — no one seems to care about McCain’s own “pals”: Charlie Black, Ahmed Chalabi or the many lobbyists in his orbit who have prostituted themselves on behalf of foreign dictators, oil sheiks, military juntas and rebel leaders and what this all says about McCain’s own judgment and integrity.

As an aside, McCain and his surrogates have conflated comments that Ayers made in a NYT profile to suggest he felt more violence should have been visited upon New York and the Pentagon on 9/11. In truth, the article, published the day of the attacks — and obviously written before the fact — leads off with with a seemingly unrepentant Ayers: “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” But not only has Ayers disputed repeatedly the juxtaposition of the two comments in that opening suggesting he regretted they hadn’t bombed more, there is no way it could be construed that he was talking about 9/11, nor has he ever said anything to defend the terrorists or suggest the victims of 9/11 deserved their fate on that day.

But Charlie Black is no stranger to making statements that have blown up in his (candidate’s) face, either, though his might be more honest, and telling, than Ayers’ “gotcha” moment:

Charlie Black, a former lobbyist and close adviser to Sen. John McCain, told Fortune that a “fresh terrorist attack ‘certainly would be a big advantage’ ” to McCain politically. He added that the December assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto helped McCain in the Republican primaries.

Spoken like a true mercenary. But after all, he was only thinking the way he was paid to think: the client always comes first.