You probably heard about that fusillade from the McCain campaign earlier this week, when his surrogates used a press conference call to call Obama “naïve” and “delusional” on terrorism.

But let’s take a moment to look at the names of those leveling these charges. None other than Randy Scheuneman and Jim Woolsey.

Both were supporters of disgraced charlatan and accused Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Woolsey, in addition to being one of Chalabi’s top D.C. confidants, was actually his de facto lobbyist. Woolsey was barred from directly representing Chalabi under a 1993 executive order governing incoming appointees of the Clinton administration. (He was Clinton’s first CIA director.) So the firm used a workaround to allow Woolsey not to register directly.

Needless to say, Scheuneman and Woolsey were also big advocates of the most lurid and farfetched claims about Saddam’s phantom WMDs. And not just the stocks of mustard gas and botulinum toxin that a lot of people in D.C. believed Saddam had. But truly loopy stuff.

I remember numerous panels I attended at the American Enterprise Institute from the early part of this decade when Woolsey, to eager gasps and awws, would describe some ingenious concoction of this or that chemical agent that would not only kill you but do so in some deeply lurid and improbable way. One has to be generous and conclude he was just wholly taken in by Chalabi & Co.’s elaborate fibs and deceptions.

Delusional and naïve? When you check back through Google and see Woolsey repeatedly vouching for Chalabi as a patriot, a truth-teller and a “class act,” I’d say he’s overdrawn in that department. These two simply have too much egg on their faces to be hurling those claims at anyone else.

And that’s not all from Jim Woolsey in the “delusional” and “naïve” department. Don’t forget his freelance James Bond mission to England back in 2001 to prove Laurie Mylroie’s crackpot theory that Saddam wasn’t just behind the Sept. 11 attacks but was actually behind the original attack on the Twin Towers back in 1993.

Mylroie’s theory was that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing who is now in the federal supermax facility serving a life sentence, was actually a covert Iraqi intelligence agent sent to America by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center. Woolsey and Mylroie’s idea was that the Iraqi intelligence agent had stolen the identity of a man named Abdul Basit. In the weeks just after Sept. 11, Woolsey went to England to check fingerprints on documents Basit had handled in the U.K. back in 1988 and 1989 and then compare fingerprints of Basit and Yousef to see whether they were, in fact, the same person.

Woolsey didn’t go in any official capacity but Doug Feith gave him the thumbs-up. According to subsequent reports, Woolsey led the Brits on to believe that he actually was in the country on a secret mission from Washington.

If that’s not enough for you, just consider that Woolsey has even suggested that he believes Saddam Hussein was behind the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1994.

Not everyone can get everything right every time. I certainly haven’t. But some people show a propensity to get conned by the most nonsensical foreign policy ideas and the most transparent and predictable charlatans. And Scheuneman and especially Woolsey fall right into that category. Perhaps McCain can make a credible case that Obama is too naïve and delusional to confront the great national security threats of the day. But he’d probably do better not to pick surrogates who can fairly be labeled poster-boys for those two derisive adjectives.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com . His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it