- Information from Iraqi defectors made available by Ahmed
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress before the US invasion was of little
or no use, a Pentagon intelligence review shows.
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- The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) said defectors
introduced to US intelligence agents by the organisation invented or exaggerated
their claims to have personal knowledge of the regime and its alleged weapons
of mass destruction. The US paid more than $1m for such information.
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- In 1998, Congress provided $97m to the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), the London-based group that claimed to be an umbrella organisation
for Iraqi interests. Its chairman, Mr Chalabi, is president of Iraq's Governing
Council.
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- The defectors were interviewed before the warin various
European capitals and the Kurdish-controlled city of Arbil in northern
Iraq. Defectors were also made available to newspapers and magazines which
reported stories about the cruelty of Saddam's regime and his efforts to
develop nuclear weapons.
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- But the DIA review, mentioned in a leaked letter to Stephen
Cambone, the under secretary of defence for intelligence, makes clear that
no more than a third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts
to explore even these leads were generally unproductive.
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- Opinion about the INC in the Bush administration was
already divided. The Pentagon and those pushing for war against Iraq were
quick to cite the information it provided and to promote the cause of Mr
Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department were much more cautious about
the organisation's reliability.
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- "The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all,"
Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism
expert, said before the war. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it
is telling the Defence Department what they want to hear. And much of it
is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction
between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors
who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that
goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
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- Information provided by Mr Chalabi was used extensively
by the administration and US journalists. Surces said The New York Times
reporter Judith Miller relied on the INC for many of her stories about
Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Most of the claims in those
stories have since proved unfounded but in an e-mail to a colleague she
wrote: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done
most of the stories about him for our paper. He has provided most of the
front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper."
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- A DIA spokesman, Ken Gerhart, said yesterday he "would
not comment on classified information". Mr Cambone was unavailable
for comment.
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- The INC angrily dismissed the suggestion that its information
was of no use. A spokesman, Ahmed al-Chalabi (no relation) said: "That
is bullshit. That means there was nothing of use from any of the Iraqi
groups because we are an umbrella organisation made up of seven or more
groups. Any of the information going to the US was not just from Ahmed
Chalabi."
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- The congressional intelli-gence committee concluded in
a recent report that the CIA's information about Iraqi weapons was "outdated,
circumstantial and fragmentary".
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- ð The White House has denied that President George
Bush's leading political adviser, Karl Rove, was behind a leak of secret
information apparently aimed at discrediting a vocal critic of pre-war
intelligence on Iraq, and has rebuffed Democratic calls for an investigation
by a special counsel.
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- The controversy is pinned on the public disclosure that
Valerie Plame, the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, was
an undercover CIA operative specialising in weapons of mass destruction.
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