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Roston began with a description of the complicated financial history of Chalabi and his family. Among these companies to collapse was Petra Bank in Jordan, from which Chalabi took money to give to his other companies. It was this in-trading and alleged embezzling that got Chalabi in trouble with the Jordanian government. Chalabi claimed the collapse of his bank and his conviction was a result of a conspiracy between Saddam Husayn and the Jordanian government to defame him and his company; however, there was little evidence to support that claim.

Around $59 million in US taxpayer funds went to Chalabi through Congress as well as the Department of State and Department of Defense. The visible result, he said, was the propaganda that resulted from it. The money ended up, unintentionally, buying dubious and fabricated stories that were carried by most major US news outlets that served a significant role in altering American public opinion leading up to the Iraq War. In retrospect, it is easy to see the unlikelihood of stories featuring such unlikely topics as a Husayn-sponsored hijacker training camp, a WMD hidden in a Baghdad underground well, and a personal meeting between Husayn and Usama bin Laden that involved an exchange of money.

The question was then asked, how was the media seemingly so easily taken in by essentially a glorified con man? Roston understood that it was Chalabi’s flattery. For instance, British journalist David Rhodes was someone Roston praised highly as a journalist but was also someone who printed and wrote on nearly every Chalabi fabrication that was released. According to Roston, Rhodes has since realized his mistakes, but at the time it was so easy to be taken in by Chalabi’s description of a moral and progressive cause, his praise of Rhodes as a “moral man” for helping him out, and his appeals to the naturally competitive nature of reporters by offering exclusive interviews and playing reporters against each other for them.

Now, Roston said, Chalabi is working his way back up the political ladder as the chair of the extragovernmental “services committee” in Iraq, which was put in charge of major reconstruction of utilities and hospitals in Baghdad — a process that has not gone very well despite the significant amount of money provided to the committee. This followed a failed attempt by Chalabi to secure $64 million to form a committee (Roston noted his fondness of forming committees) to liaise between US forces and Iraqi people after the invasion. This request, Roston said, was one for which Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki laughed in his face.

In the end, Roston viewed Chalabi as being motivated by a desire to see Shi‘a empowerment in Iraq as well as an obsession with revenge against Saddam Husayn in his plan to fool the US government into attacking Iraq. His promises that the Iraqi people would rise up and that the Iraqi army would join the US forces in marching on Baghdad were as much tools as the fabricated and distorted stories he fed the American media to deceive a country to which he had no patriotic ties. By fooling America, Roston said, he got what he wanted.