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NEW YORK -- US-backed Iraqi political leader Ahmad Chalabi yesterday defended information his group gave Washington on weapons of mass destruction, amid growing questions about intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq. Chalabi said he was aware of media reports suggesting that his Iraqi National Congress had given false information on Baghdad's alleged illegal biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons program, but said he remained convinced they would yet be found. ''We gave very accurate information, and we produced people who we handed over to the United States,'' Chalabi, on a brief visit to the United States, told the Council...

With Iraqi frustration growing over the timetable being used to form a cohesive and effective Iraqi sovereignty a question must be asked. Are the coalition forces led by L. Paul Bremer occupying forces meant to remain in Baghdad to coerce any Iraqi government into an a pro-American way of thinking or are they stabilization forces caught in the middle of a people so divided in their own cause that their extraction would be leaving Iraq in a more lawless state than it was before? The front-runners who have established themselves in the Iraqi power struggle have their good points and...

Donald Rumsfeld has said he does not do diplomacy. But some of his fellow neo-conservatives in the Pentagon, emboldened by victory in Iraq, are attempting to construct an improbable alignment of interests to effect regime change in neighbouring Iran. The defence department is trying to muster support from exiled Iranian fighters of the People's Mujahideen Organisation (MKO) and from Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran who ruthlessly suppressed the MKO before his own downfall. The Pentagon's decision to negotiate a ceasefire with MKO members in Iraq - who were previously designated by the US as terrorists -...

Despite the taint of criminal convictions, Ahmad Chalabi is still being championed by the US as a leader for Iraq. But, as Marian Wilkinson and Peter Fray report, opposition is gaining strength. One of the small but troubling puzzles in the debate about postwar Iraq is why one document that may prove critical to the political future of the country has still not surfaced in Washington. The document is an English-language translation of the 213-page judgement passed by a Jordanian State Security Court in 1992 convicting Dr Ahmad Chalabi, in absentia, in two cases of fraud involving more than $US60...

"Some of the files are very damning" . . . Ahmad Chalabi. Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled financier promoted by the Pentagon as a leader of postwar Iraq, claims to have obtained 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein's relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders. The files, seized by supporters of his Iraqi National Congress (INC) from Baath party offices and secret police stations, may fuel a fresh round of recriminations and score-settling as politicians meeting in Baghdad struggle to agree the terms of an interim administration. In interviews with Abu Dhabi television and Newsweek magazine, Chalabi has...

BAGHDAD - A council of up to nine Iraqis will probably lead the country’s still unformed interim government through the coming months, the American civil administrator said on Monday.Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner also said he expects the newly appointed L. Paul Bremer, former head of the State Department’s counter terrorism office, to take charge of the political process within the US postwar administration.“What you may see is as many as seven, eight, nine leaders working together to provide leadership,” Garner said. He added, though, that he didn’t know how the collective leadership would function specifically.The Iraqi leaders Garner referred...

The Hashemite King, Abdullah II of Jordan, yesterday gave an interview to CNN in which he sneered at the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi. The last time America fought a war against Saddam Hussein, back in 1991, Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, sided with Saddam, refusing to join the coalition assembled by President George H.W. Bush. This time around, the King of Jordan — now Abdullah II — is doing what he can to make sure that America loses the peace, by undermining the one man best able to put Iraq on the course to future of freedom,...

Jordan Warns U.S. on Supporting Chalabi By The Associated Press Jordan warned the United States on Sunday against supporting Iraqi opposition figure Ahmad Chalabi, saying he lacked credibility and support among Iraqis and was a convicted fraud. "We believe that Ahmad Chalabi does not have credibility, either inside Iraq or in the region," Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said on NBC's "Meet the Press." Muasher said Jordan "made it very clear to everyone in the United States government and around the world" that Chalabi is divisive. Chalabi is leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which spearheaded opposition to Saddam Hussein...

Saddam Hussein is likely on the run inside Iraq - armed with suicide vests he obtained from his intelligence agency, an Iraqi exile leader said yesterday. The deposed dictator was trained how to use the bomb-lined vests before the fall of Baghdad and may plan to blow himself up if U.S.-led troops corner him, said Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi. "He has the ability ... to commit suicide or blow people up with him when they come to catch him," Chalabi told CNN. The head of the intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, gave vests to Saddam and his closest aide...

<p>Following is a transcribed excerpt from Fox News Sunday, April 27, 2003.</p> <p>SNOW: Mr. Chalabi, last week you told me you believed that Saddam Hussein is still alive and somewhere in Iraq. Do you still believe that's the case?</p> <p>CHALABI: Yes, I do.</p>

The Jordanian “inconvenience” of US-endorsed Iraqi opposition leader Chalabi Returning to a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq after nearly four decades in exile, the self-appointed US-endorsed Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi is at the center of controversy in his homeland and elsewhere throughout the Arab world. Chalabi, an American-trained mathematician who chairs the Iraqi National Council (INC), an overseas Iraqi resistance movement that emerged in the early 1990s, spent most of his exile years have in neighboring Jordan. Born into one of Baghdad’s elite Shiite families, who have fled the country after the fall of the monarchy in 1958, Chalabi rose...

KARBALA, Iraq (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims flocked to Iraq's holiest city of Karbala in a pilgrimage banned under Saddam Hussein as the United States rebuffed a diplomatic olive branch from France. But the second and last day of the Shiite ceremony, outlawed for nearly quarter of a century under Saddam, failed to ignite large anti-US demonstrations despite appeals by clerics for mass shows of anti-Americanism. Iraq's US civil administrator, retired general Jay Garner, acknowledged Washington was facing "some staged demonstrations" against its rule but insisted most Iraqis "are glad we are here." Garner continued a tour...

America nervous as militant cleric's rallies attract mass support By Julian Coman in Washington and Sean Rayment in Kuwait (Filed: 20/04/2003) Every day, the rallies held by Battle to prevent Chalabi taking power grow bigger. Every day the American marines in the eastern Iraqi town of Kut, close to the Iranian border, become more nervous. Mr Abbas is a militant Shia cleric with an unnervingly fine grasp of the political possibilities of post-war Iraq. Some days ago, he walked into Kut town hall and simply took it over, accompanied by hundreds of supporters, many of whom had crossed the border...

BAGHDAD: Pro-American Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi has said the United States should oversee post-war Iraq and the United Nations lacked the capability and credibility to take a leadership role there. At a news conference in the Iraqi Hunting Club – his first since arriving in Baghdad on Wednesday – Chalabi also said he did not want a post in an interim Iraqi government and would devote himself to developing civil society. But the man seen by many analysts as the US choice to lead Iraq left open the question of whether he would stand as a candidate if the country...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 18 — Western officials working on the reconstruction of Iraq agreed Friday that an interim authority in Baghdad could take over most government functions from the U.S. military in only a few weeks.</p> <p>THE OFFICIALS, who are part of the organization put together by the Pentagon’s administrator in Iraq, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, confirmed statements Friday by Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi that the interim authority would assume power “sooner rather than later, a matter of weeks rather than months.” The officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, would not be more specific, but they said they had no quarrel with the timetable laid out by Chalabi, who said at a news conference that “the Iraqi interim authority will be chosen by Iraqis and will take over the business of government.” Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the most prominent of a quarrelsome collection of exile groups that formed in opposition to the government of deposed President Saddam Hussein, said the first stage would be “reconstruction of basic services, done by Jay Garner.” “I expect this step to take a few weeks,” he said, with a new constitution and general elections two years down the road. Ultimately, Chalabi said, the U.S. military would have just three functions in Iraq: to eradicate any weapons of mass destruction, to dismantle the ousted regime’s “apparatus of terror” and to disarm the previous regime’s army. “The United States of America does not want to run Iraq,” Chalabi said. “That is the policy of the United States. That’s what President Bush has said, and I believe him.”</p>

WASHINGTON: Pro-American Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi returned to the capital Baghdad on Wednesday on his first visit to the city since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, an adviser said. "We've just arrived and we have set up a headquarters in central Baghdad," said Zaab Sethna, who traveled with Chalabi in the motorcade from the southern town of Nassiriya. "His first plan is to go see his old home and then start building democracy in Iraq," added Sethna, speaking by satellite phone from Baghdad. Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress), was the first major exile politician to reach...

Pundits and reporters are being sold on the idea that Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, is largely the creation of American neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Richard Cheney. They miss the point. Chalabi is so prominent in discussions of Iraq's future because for 10 years he has been leading the central organization of Iraqis opposed to Saddam and the Ba'ath regime. The Iraqi National Congress (INC) was founded by Chalabi in 1992 as an all-inclusive democratic opposition movement to remove Saddam and create a united federal government of laws in Iraq. The INC is not a...

Iraqi exiles control southern town -U.S. source NASSIRIYA, Iraq, April 12 (Reuters) - Around 300 fighters, originally Iraqi exiles recruited and trained by the United States, are in control of the southern Iraqi town of Shatra, a U.S. military source said on Saturday. A Reuters photographer saw a convoy of trucks carrying Free Iraqi Forces (FIF) pass through the town of Nassiriya, 375 km (235 miles) southeast of Baghdad, armed with AK-47 rifles and wearing camouflage fatigues bearing FIF initials on their arms. The trucks, bound for Shatra some 50 km (35 miles) north of Nassiriya, were escorted by U.S....

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) - A crowd rushed two Islamic clerics and hacked them to death in this holy city Thursday, witnesses said. An unknown number of people were injured. ``People attacked and killed both of them inside the mosque,'' said Ali Assayid Haider, a mullah who traveled from the southern city of Basra for the meeting.The accounts could not be independently confirmed.The killings took place at the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam, practiced by the majority of Iraqis.Witnesses told reporters visiting the mosque that a meeting was held at 10 a.m. among leading...

The Iraqi opposition, for so many years waiting in exile, was back in central Iraq last night with more than 700 of its fighters, flown in by the US to help the Allied forces with their push to topple Saddam Hussein. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), was reportedly in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, having been flown in with his men from northern Iraq and another undisclosed location. In a statement released in Kuwait, Mr Chalabi urged the Iraqi people to rise up against the regime. "The war of national liberation which Iraqis have...