Richard Perle chauffeured him around Washington, promoting him as the George Washington of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz feted him as the future leader of a free Iraq. Congress funneled tens of millions of dollars into his bank accounts. President George Bush sat him next to First Lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union and led an ovation in his honor. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich still defended him May 23 on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, but Ahmad Chalabi is now widely discredited, called a thief, a liar, even a spy. Tragically, the harm has been done. Together with his American sponsors he pulled off one of the greatest cons in American foreign policy history: helping to convince the majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein had massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and operational ties to Osama bin Laden. Little of what he said was true. Most of it was believed.

Fool Them Once
The best investigative reporting on Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress has been done by a team of reporters at Knight Ridder, including Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Tish Wells. They reported on March 16 that Chalabi's group "gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq" and also fed the same false stories to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia. They detailed over 100 articles based on Chalabi's information. "The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons," they said. "Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden. In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, were not confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals."

Many of these false claims are still widely repeated by many conservatives, who apparently are unaware that there is little or no evidence supporting these claims outside of Chalabi's defectors. These include the claim that Saddam collaborated for years with bin Laden and was complicit in the September 11 attack; that the Saddam trained Islamists in the same hijacking techniques used in Sept. 11; that Iraq had mobile biological warfare labs on trucks; that Saddam hid chemical and biological weapons production labs underneath hospitals, schools, and inside lead-lined wells and rooms in his palaces; that Iraq could launch Scuds with biological warheads at Israel; and that he had restarted his nuclear weapon program and was closing in on a bomb.

No evidence has been found to substantiate any of these claims. None are true. Yet all were reported without serious question in the news media, either directly from defectors provided to journalists or through administration officials who repeated the claims as facts.

Fool Them Twice
Only recently have officials backed off the Chalabi material. Secretary of State Colin Powell recently recanted his speech to the United Nations that convinced many that war was necessary to disarm Saddam. Much of his evidence, particularly the spectacular claim of biological weapons labs, came from Chalabi. The secretary said May 16 on NBC's Meet the Press:

"When I made that presentation [to the UN] in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully. We looked at the sourcing in the case of the mobile trucks and trains; there was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate, and so I'm deeply disappointed. But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community; but it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and, in some cases, deliberately misleading, and for that I am disappointed and I regret it."

More officials need to recognize their responsibility for spreading false information. More journalists need to go back to their stories, understand their mistakes and correct both the record and their methods.

We must not leave U.S. national security vulnerable to the next grifter that slinks into town.

Additional Resources:

• "Officials Investigate How INC's Chalabi Obtained U.S. Intelligence," by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 21 May 2004
• "Iraqi Exiles Fed Exaggerated Tips to News Media," by Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 16 March 2004
• "Officials: U.S. Still Paying Millions to Group That Provided False Iraqi Intelligence," by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 21 Februay 2004
• "U.S. to Review Intelligence From Iraqi Exile Group," by Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 19 February 2004

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