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From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 1:30 PM
Subject: [unioNews] For your attention
> Malik Al-Arkam spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you
should see it.
>
> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site,
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>
> Discredited Iraqi exiles still land US spy funds
> Questions over $340,000 per month payouts
> Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters in Washington
> Thursday March 11 2004
> The Guardian
>
>
> Washington is paying the Iraqi National Congress exile group headed by
Ahmad Chalabi about $340,000 (£190,000) a month for intelligence about
insurgents and other matters, US officials said yesterday.
>
> Mr Chalabi, a former exile and now a member of the Iraqi governing
council, pushed for years for the US to topple Saddam Hussein.
>
> Before the war, his group directed numerous Iraqi defectors to the US to
provide intelligence from inside Iraq that critics now say was largely
spun to alarm Washington into taking action against Baghdad.
>
> Internal reports revealed that much of the information from the INC was
either fabricated or useless.
>
> But now, even with American forces on the ground in Iraq after toppling
Saddam last April, the US government is still paying Mr Chalabi's exile
group for information.
>
> "We're still getting good information from them," one US official said.
"There are a lot of insurgents that are doing bad things, and the INC has a
lot of contacts and making better ones every day."
>
> Mr Chalabi's group had provided information that had helped prevent
attacks by insurgents, the official said.
>
> "If we stop an attack and it saves one soldier's life or 100 soldiers'
lives or 100 Iraqi lives, is that worth the price you pay?" the US official
said. "Yes, they have been very helpful."
>
> At a Senate armed services committee hearing this week, Senator Hillary
Clinton, a New York Democrat, asked CIA director George Tenet about the
continued payments. Mr Tenet replied: "We're not paying them."
>
> She then asked Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence
Intelligence Agency. He replied: "Senator, you have me in a situation where
this would be best dealt with in closed session. I could give you detail."
>
> Mr Chalabi, asked about the payments in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes
on Sunday, said: "It's a very small programme in terms of cost."
>
> Congress authorised the funds for the "Intelligence Collection
Programme", which was transferred to the Defence Intelligence Agency from
the state department about two years ago and mainly pays for intelligence
gathering by the INC, officials said.
>
> The CIA has been more wary of Mr Chalabi and his group than the Pentagon
has.
>
> The Senate intelligence committee, as part of its review of pre-war
intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, is looking at how
intelligence agencies used INC information.
>
> No banned weapons have been found in Iraq and it has become a key
political issue heading into the presidential election in November, with
Democrats claiming the White House exaggerated the threat to gather support
for war.
>
> US officials said last month that a major in the Iraqi intelligence
service - who was a source for a pre-war US intelligence claim that Iraq had
mobile biological weapons labs - had been labelled a fabricator. He was
introduced to the Defence Intelligence Agency by the INC. Reuters
>
> Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
>
>
> lllll
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empire, so strong and powerful as to compel the respect of mankind, but we
in our lifetime can so work and act as to make the dream a possibility
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Marcus Mosiah Garvey <i>(1887 - 1940)</i></A></html>
> llllllllll
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