So we pay Chalabi nearly $350,000 per month to provide us with intelligence that even HE admits can't be fully verified...? This must be a part of the Bush plan to improve our intelligence gathering agencies.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/po...rint&position=
March 11, 2004
Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of Incorrect Spy Data
By DOUGLAS JEHL
ASHINGTON, 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."
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