Will the media nail Bush on Chalabi, or run like hell?

Chalabi Passed U.S. Intelligence to Iran -CBS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ahmad Chalabi, Washington's former top Iraqi ally whose house in Baghdad was raided by U.S. troops on Thursday, passed sensitive U.S. intelligence to Iran that could "get Americans killed," CBS Evening News said.

"Senior U.S. officials told us today that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly classified U.S. intelligence to Iran," the report said on Thursday.

"The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could ... 'get Americans killed.' The evidence is said to be 'rock solid."'

Washington Post: Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons

A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein.

An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?


Newsweek: Rethinking the Chalabi Connection

INC representatives have repeatedly claimed that allegations against the group are the product of a “CIA smear campaign” (the CIA and the INC fell out in the mid-1990s following a failed putsch against Saddam). An INC representative has claimed that the Saddam-era files under the group’s control were acquired under the supervision of both uniformed and plainclothes U.S. personnel. INC officials last week had little response to Pentagon’s decision to cut off the group’s $340,000 monthly stipend, other than to say that U.S. funding should also be withdrawn from any and all Iraqi political parties. Said an INC representative, in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK: “On June 30 Iraq will become a sovereign country and it will be inappropriate, and indeed unacceptable, for Iraqi groups to continue to take covert funding from foreign Intelligence agencies. We expect the CIA to end its funding of Iraqi groups as well.”

According to the terms of a four-page agreement between the DIA and INC, first signed in October 2002 and renewed a year later, the INC’s “information collection program’s” top priorities included collecting intelligence on several issues especially critical to Pentagon hard-liners who campaigned for and planned the Bush administration’s campaign for regime change in Iraq.

First on the list of “requirements” (spy jargon for assignments) laid out in the DIA’s agreement with the INC was “the location of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) storage, development facilities and individuals associated with these facilities,” says the document, according to a text made available to NEWSWEEK by U.S. intelligence sources. Second on the INC’s list of intelligence assignments from DIA was the collection of information on “Former Iraqi regime connections with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups”—a matter that was well-known to be of great interest to the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.