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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.