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<p>WASHINGTON — A senior Defense official placed under investigation by the FBI (news - web sites) on allegations that he tried to steer Iraqi reconstruction contracts toward friends has been removed from office, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials confirmed Friday.</p>

Liberals on Capitol Hill and in the media are screaming, "Where are the weapons?" Since the White House had argued that disarming Saddam was the main reason for going to war, not finding his forbidden weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) all lined up like prizes at a seaside shooting gallery has excited the president's political enemies to cry foul. Ewan Buchanan, spokesman for chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, assures Insight that "it's far too early to tell" whether forbidden weapons remain in Iraq or where they might be. "It doesn't surprise me that U.S. forces haven't found anything yet....

The State Department and the CIA seem to have grabbed the wheel at the New York Times, with successive front-page stories last week on Wednesday and Thursday, first smearing Iraqi Governing Council member and longtime U.S. ally Ahmed Chalabi, then his allies in the administration.Perhaps it sacrificed its journalistic integrity in exchange for the first pass at leaks from State and CIA, or perhaps the paper and the paper-pushers united because of a common goal: the defeat of George W. Bush this November.To appreciate how surreal the Times’ stories were last week, consider the underlying facts.  Chalabi is accused of...

THE MANIPULATOR Date Posted: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- by JANE MAYER Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the United States and its history. “I know quite a lot about it,” he told me not long ago. It was after midnight in Baghdad, but he was still in his office in the new headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile opposition group that Chalabi helped found in 1992. As a young man, he said, he spent several years in America,...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday he did not know if Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi told Iran that Washington had broken Tehran's secret communications code. Rumsfeld also said he was unaware whether the United States was investigating the matter or if any Defense Department officials had been questioned about who might have told Chalabi that the code was broken. "I just don't know," Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him to Singapore for an Asia security conference. Officials in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Chalabi was alleged to have told Iran that the United States had...

WASHINGTON -- The FBI has launched an investigation into who disclosed that the United States had broken an Iranian communications code--information Ahmad Chalabi then reportedly passed on to the Iranian intelligence service. Federal law enforcement officials confirmed Wednesday that the FBI's counterintelligence division was investigating the reported leak to Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and until recently the Pentagon's favorite to rule Iraq.

Tampa, Fla. - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday he has long had misgivings about Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, now under suspicion for passing secret U.S. government information to Iran, while the Bush administration "bought into Mr. Chalabi hook, line and sinker." On the same day Kerry told Associated Press Radio that significant gaps remain in the nation's preparations for bioterrorism, he answered several foreign policy questions during a campaign stop in the state that held the decisive recount in the 2000 election. He said President Bush's description of Iraq as a main front on the war on terror...

WASHINGTON - The U.S.-backed investigation into alleged abuses of the United Nations' Oil for Food program in Iraq has already collected more than 20,000 files from Saddam Hussein's old regime and hired an American accounting firm to conduct the review. Documents obtained by The Associated Press show the U.S.-backed, Iraqi-run Board of Supreme Audit selected the Ernst & Young firm this week to oversee the audit of the documents gathered from at least 16 former ministries of Saddam's government. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority also is trying to head off a separate investigation launched by former Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi,...

WASHINGTON — How fares the multination cover-up of the richest rip-off in world history? Obstruction of justice has never had it so good. Last month, after some badgering in this space and elsewhere, the House International Relations Committee announced it would look into the $5 billion kickback scandal in the United Nations' six-year Iraqi oil-for-food program, the largest humanitarian aid effort ever undertaken. Our State Department, eager for U.N. help in Iraq, wants no revelations of U.N. ineptitude and corruption. It waltzed the committee staff around. Senate Foreign Relations, however, not wanting to be upstaged by its House counterpart, called...

<p>The most ominous harbinger for the future of Iraq to emerge from the week of bloodshed that has engulfed parts of the country is the collapse of the indigenous Iraqi security structures put in place by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Few of the police resisted Muqtada al-Sadr's activists while some joined his militia and many simply ran away. Half of the army mutinied. The intelligence service did not produce accurate or useful intelligence, and elements of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), which is designed to be a national paramilitary force, also mutinied and may be implicated in the murder and mutilation of the four Americans which touched off the siege of Fallujah.</p>

WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) -- With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi pro-consul baton for beachwear and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well positioned to become prime minister. Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents....

Washington-AP -- The man who'd led many Iraqi defectors to the C-I-A says he's being unfairly attacked for the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq. The Bush administration largely used information from the defectors to build a case for invading Iraq, even though the C-I-A continually questioned their credibility. Now Ahmad Chalabi (AHK'-mahd SHAH'-lah-bee), a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, says he wants to testify in an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee to make his case. In an interview on tomorrow's "60 Minutes" on C-B-S, Chalabi blames the C-I-A for the lack of weapons so far,...

AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — The wild gray beard was gone, and he sat on a metal army cot, just awake from a nap, in socks and black slippers. He was not handcuffed. He did not recognize all his visitors, but they recognized him. That was the purpose of the visit: to help confirm that he was, in fact, Saddam Hussein. What came next in the Sunday afternoon meeting, according to people in the room, was an extraordinary 30 minutes, in which four new leaders of Iraq pointedly questioned the nation's deposed and now captured leader about his tyrannical rule....

STATEMENT BY AHMAD CHALABI, HEAD OF THE IRAQI DELEGATION, TO THE 58TH UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2 OCTOBER, 2003 (Please check against delivery) In the name of God, the merciful and benevolent. Mr. President, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: I stand in front of you today representing the voice of the Iraqi citizen who has long suffered from cruelty within and outside his homeland. Those within his country have inflicted on him the worst kinds of torture: they have attacked his honour, betrayed his family, humiliated him, enchained him and thrown him into miserable wars. His brothers and friends in the...

Ahmad Chalabi, the head of Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council, hopes to score a diplomatic victory by taking over Iraq's seat at the United Nations. Aides said Mr Chalabi would not wait for formal recognition, instead attempting a fait accompli at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. He will be helped by the remaining Saddam Hussein envoys, who are still formally accredited at the UN, but have no voting rights because Iraq has not paid more than £8 million of subscriptions. "Nobody knows what Iraq's status is," said one Iraqi official. "The delegation will occupy its seat. If there are any...

Saddam Hussein has been removed from power, yet he continues to inflict terror on the Iraqi people. There is no question that his network of loyalists carried out the car bomb attack that killed Ayatollah Syed Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim and scores of others in Najaf on Friday. By assassinating this respected Shiite religious leader, Hussein has succeeded in inflaming the country. Southern Iraq is in turmoil, and the people's shock, sadness and anger risk boiling over. The Iraqi people are overwhelmingly grateful to President Bush and the American people for helping us liberate Iraq. We have great respect for...

<p>BAGHDAD--Ahmad Chalabi, my father, is here in Iraq, sitting on the Governing Council of Iraqi nationals that will help ours become a free country. Iraqis from all regions and religions line up daily to meet him at his home. They know his lifelong cause is democracy for all Iraqis, not just a chosen few. To them he is a good man, and an attractive leader.</p>

JERUSALEM: A leading candidate to head a caretaker government in Iraq has told Israel Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres that Iraq would likely make peace with Israel if it gives the Palestinians control over 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, Peres said Monday. Peres told Israel Radio he had met over the weekend with former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi, 80, at a Rome conference organized by the Socialist International. A Sunni Muslim with a secular outlook, Pachachi is favored by many American officials to head an Iraqi caretaker government during the post-Saddam Hussein transition period. According to...

The head of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), Ahmad Chalabi, said Thursday that he put US officials in contact with three Iraqi defectors who provided detailed information about Saddm Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program. "We ... introduced them to three defectors on the weapons program," Chalabi said after a briefing here with about 30 US lawmakers on a range of postwar issues, including the pace of Iraqi reconstruction and the prospects finding Saddam. "One of them was an engineer," Chalabi said. "We believe that he had valuable information about sites. He did not have any operational information...

The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, says he believes there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that U.S. and coalition forces will be able to find them. In recent days, Mr. Chalabi has been making speeches and appearing on television news programs saying former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is alive and in hiding, and is financing efforts to de-stabilize the U.S.-led coalition. The former exile opposition leader, who was flown into Iraq in the early days of the coalition advance on Baghdad, says coalition forces will eventually find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr....