Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of Incorrect Spy Data

WASHINGTON, March 10 — The Pentagon is paying $340,000 a month to the Iraqi political organization led by Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi government who has close ties to the Bush administration, for "intelligence collection" about Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.

The classified program, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency since summer 2002, continues a longstanding partnership between the Pentagon and the organization, the Iraqi National Congress, even as the group jockeys for power in a future government. Internal government reviews have found that much of the information generated by the program before the American invasion last year was useless, misleading or even fabricated.

Under the unusual arrangement, the Central Intelligence Agency is required to get permission from the Pentagon before interviewing informants from the Iraqi National Congress, according to government officials who have been briefed on the procedures.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been working with another Iraqi group, the Iraqi National Accord, to help establish an independent Iraqi intelligence service. The relationship between the C.I.A. and Mr. Chalabi's group has been strained for years.

An American intelligence official said the maintenance of the separate, exclusive channel between Mr. Chalabi's group and the Defense Intelligence Agency is not interfering with the C.I.A.'s effort to set up the new Iraqi service.

Among several defectors introduced by Mr. Chalabi's organization to American intelligence officials before the war, at least one was formally labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Others were viewed as having been coached by the Iraqi group to provide intelligence critical of Saddam Hussein's rule. Internal reviews by the Pentagon agency and the National Intelligence Council this year concluded that little of the information from the group had any value.

The payments to the group as part of an "intelligence collection program" was authorized by Congress in 1998 under the Iraq Liberation Act. The fact that the arrangement has continued since the war was first reported last month by Knight-Ridder newspapers.

A Defense Department official who defended the continuing ties with the Iraqi National Congress said the arrangement was proving more useful now than it had before the war, in part because the agency was taking new pains to corroborate the intelligence provided.

In the days after Mr. Hussein's government fell in April, congress officials took a vast quantity of secret government documents, and the group has kept custody of them, to the dismay of some at the C.I.A., according to government officials. Defense Department officials said the Pentagon agency had been permitted to review the documents but not to take custody of them.

Another government official outside the Pentagon who has been critical of the earlier relationship said he believed that the current partnership might be valuable. "This is an organization that has a lot of access, and people who know the country and speak Arabic, and we ought to take the information as long as we're careful about it," the official said.

But the arrangement is drawing some criticism on Capitol Hill. In a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, pointedly asked Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of defense intelligence, to confirm that the payments were continuing. Admiral Jacoby declined to discuss the matter in open session.

In a television interview broadcast Sunday by CBS on "60 Minutes," Mr. Chalabi defended the quality of information provided by his group. He also said American agencies should have done a better job filtering out the good from the bad, and did not acknowledge personal responsibility for the incorrect information. He said he hoped to appear before the Senate intelligence committee to clear his name.

"Intelligence people, who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government, did not do such a good job," Mr. Chalabi said.

The C.I.A. severed its ties with Mr. Chalabi's group in 1995, in part because of doubts about the quality of information it was providing. Asked Tuesday by Senator Clinton about Mr. Chalabi's comments, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, chose his words with care.

"Mr. Chalabi's an interesting man," Mr. Tenet said slowly. "He's got an interesting history, and I think hearing him would be interesting, but you know, I guess I don't have much of a response to it, Senator. We'll just leave it at that."

Admiral Jacoby told the Senate committee that the value of information provided by the Iraqi defectors had been mixed.

"There are some situations where the information has been verified and corroborated through multiple sources," he said. "There have been other situations where we believe that information was either fabricated or embellished. And just — it's a situation that we have in other human operations, where the information spans a pretty broad range of veracity, and we need to go into the situation very much like we do in any human situation: our eyes very wide open."

This is a perfect example of the purity rule. Not accepting intelligence from people who may or may not be criminal elements. Could the FBI have ever busted Gotti given those constraints? Never. Every informant used was just as bad a guy as the mob king himself.

As for the convictions you are speaking of, those were in a Jordanian court, If i am not mistaken, and there is some question about them.

Furthermore, Chalabi was not the source of the information, he put those with the information in touch with intelligence agencies. Some of the information provided by the Iraqi National Congress has proved very good, some has been so-so, and some has been either worthless or yet to be borne out.

Using your reasoning, we should turn away offered intel because chalabi was convicted of a crime in an arab court (the epitomy of justice applied), and remain completely ignorant, rather than try and make use of what information is available.

Interestingly enough, a lot of what the Iraq National Congress said jived with what the U.N. and other sources had.

All of the stories of atrocities that Chalabi's group told have been proven in spades. Evidence has been found to support much of what they provided concerning WMD's (mobile labs have been found, as well as several "dual-use" facilities capapble of producing WMD's, and just a few days ago several soviet missles with dirty bombs were found).

Hiding and destroying evidence of chemical and bio weapons is quite easy, and Saddam had plenty of time to do it.

Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History.

Since you refuse to address what I've said about intelligence gathering (without offering the alternative), and refuse to acknowledge that the Iraqi National Congress has provided any accurate testimony, you are not going to be convinced by anything I say. You've made up your mind.

As for the "winnebegoes of death" as you deridingly reffered to them, those in our military familiar with chemical weapons usage said that they had been scrubbed so clean that no determination could be made of what they had been used for (a fact unusual in itself). But that they certainly appeared to be specially constructed for chemical testing and/or small scale production of chem/bio.

Hans Branscheidt a chemical expert said (in 2003), that Iraq purchased eight mobile chemical laboratories from the Federal Republic of Germany. He also said that the construction of an Iraqi research center for missile technology "became almost exclusively the work of German companies." This report wass confirmed by the head of Germany's intelligence service, August Hanning.

The vehicles of which I speak were confirmed to fit the descriptions provided by the Germans. The Iraqi National Congress reported on this also. Both sources said he had them. They were found. But, as with most "dual-use" technology, the mobile labs are easily fobbed of as innocent by those with an agenda.

But if they were just just part of a soil-testing program, as claimed by Saddamites, why clean them so thoroughly? Why go to such lengths to hide them? We all know why. But I'm sure you have some pat answer all ready for that, too.

This is why the US government is paying the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi....despite what the NYT reports.

DOD weighs future of INC-fed intel group

By Pamela Hess
Pentagon correspondent

WASHINGTON, March 3 (UPI) -- The Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency are trying to determine whether an intelligence collection unit fed by the controversial Iraqi National Congress will continue beyond July 1, when Iraq is scheduled to re-assume its sovereignty.

The intelligence community last month recommended the Iraqi National Congress' Information Collection Program continue at least until July 1 but has specific concerns after that date if the program is either continued or disbanded, according to government officials and documents.

However, the organization is also under scrutiny on Capitol Hill for its central pre-war role in producing questionable intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

If the Information Collection Program is abandoned by the U.S. government, officials warn INC sources may continue their work but refuse to share information with U.S. intelligence agencies. Instead, they may continue their work and take their information directly to the media, something that is prohibited under the current agreement between DIA and the INC.

If the ICP continues after sovereignty, it is unclear exactly what form it would take. President Bush has directed the CIA to create a new Iraqi intelligence service, an administration official said. If the ICP is not embraced by the new Iraqi government and the U.S. government wants to maintain its support, the Pentagon may face legal hurdles in continuing to sponsor and fund it.

The CIA has more latitude than the Defense Department to fund foreign interest groups and intelligence operations in other countries, so the program could be transferred there. The New York Sun reported Monday the CIA is making a bid to do just that.

However, a government official told UPI the CIA is not interested, as it and the State Department have long regarded the INC and its controversial leader Ahmad Chalabi -- now on the Iraqi Governing Council -- with suspicion.

Government officials say there is no doubt that since the war ended the Information Collection Program has proved extremely valuable. ICP members -- who generally speak Arabic as their first language -- conduct a large portion of interviews of Iraqi prisoners which have yielded actionable intelligence about the Iraqi insurgents. Approximately one-fifth of the verbal debriefings of sources in Iraq are carried out by the ICP, according to administration officials and military documents.

"The INC/ICP provided the entire personnel list for the Iraqi Intelligence Service," a government official told UPI. "There's enough data that puts to rest the lie this program is not productive."

Moreover, the group has turned over reams of Iraqi government documents, a higher proportion of which turn out to be more valuable than those provided by other sources in Iraq, according to U.S. intelligence sources. Several of the most interesting documents regarding pre-war intelligence and connections between al-Qaida and Iraq are still being analyzed for authenticity and accuracy.

The relationship goes both ways: the INC has access to the information revealed in debriefings by the DIA with ICP-generated sources. Initial debriefing are handled jointly. If the DIA deems the source to be of value, it takes over handling of the source.

But the Iraqi National Congress's pre-war work is raising serious questions on Capitol Hill.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last month expanded its investigation into the accuracy of pre-war intelligence specifically to look at the use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress. At issue is whether the intelligence community checked the information for accuracy or accepted it at face value.

An administration official said the INC produced three defectors with information about Iraq's weapons programs before the war. One of them was the source of so-far unsubstantiated pre-war intelligence reports Saddam Hussein had created mobile biological weapons labs, one of the main rationales for the war cited by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

An administration official said the defector was initially believed to be credible but was later discredited by the DIA. That news did not make it up to Powell's level until after his speech, and into the public domain until after the war.

"This isn't to say they (the ICP) aren't getting some good stuff now, because it's being vetted much more carefully as it should have been before," a government official told UPI.

It is possible Saddam Hussein planted some Iraqi defectors to spread disinformation and to discredit other sources

An administration official said the media and the intelligence committee's emphasis on the information provided Chalabi-led INC distorts the scope of what went wrong with U.S. intelligence leading up to the war. The intelligence agencies have combined annual budgets of nearly $40 billion, compared to the $4 million annual budget of the ICP. ICP used that money only to produce potential intelligence sources, not to guarantee their accuracy and reliability. That was up to their DIA handlers.

The Senate intelligence committee is also trying to determine whether anyone in the administration pressured the intelligence community to generate information specifically to support the case for war and whether pre-war public statements on by U.S. officials were substantiated by intelligence information.

The panel is also trying to determine if the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counter-terrorism Evaluation Group carried out intelligence activities, and particularly if they received raw intelligence directly from the INC, bypassing professional analysis altogether.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied this in 2002, characterizing their task as informed scrutiny of available intelligence.

"People are doing that all over town. They do it at the State Department. They do it in my office. I do it," he said. "Any suggestion that it's an intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think, would be a misunderstanding of it."

A government official this week flatly denied a connection between the INC informants and the two Pentagon groups, saying that since 2002 all contact with INC intelligence sources were handled by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Human Intelligence Service (DHS).

"That (charge) is patently false," he said.

The INC Information Collection Program was begun four years ago and is now primarily a vehicle for interviewing Iraqi nationals for useable intelligence. Before the Iraq war most of those interviewed were defectors. Since the U.S. occupation the ICP has been working closely with the Iraq Survey Group, the team of about 1,000 intelligence analysts and military personnel searching for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The ICP receives $340,000 a month from the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to government sources. Prior to its 2002 assignment to DHS the ICP was loosely managed by the State Department's Near East bureau funded out of the annual $200 million appropriation set aside in the Iraq Liberation Act.

INC/ICP members and the sources they provide to the DIA are all subjected to polygraph tests, and are contractually prohibited from communicating in any way about their activities and operations with anyone other than the Defense Intelligence Agency without prior written consent from the DIA. All the members consent to surveillance and the DIA is required to ascertain none has been involved with human rights abuses.

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