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Pentagon Pays INC $340,000 a Month for Intelligence
The U.S. Defense Department is paying $340,000 per month for “intelligence collection” to the Iraqi National Congress, a former Iraqi opposition group that has been heavily criticized for providing useless and fabricated information on prewar Iraq’s WMD efforts, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, March 1). A Defense Department official said that the ties between the Pentagon and the INC are even more useful now than before the invasion of Iraq, in part, because the Defense Intelligence Agency has taken new measures to better corroborate information the group is providing. A U.S. official outside the Pentagon also supported continued ties to the group, according to the Times. “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. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes, INC head Ahmad Chalabi defended the information supplied by his organization. He said that U.S. agencies should have done a better job evaluating that information, and that he hoped to defend himself in an appearance before the U.S. Senate intelligence committee. “Intelligence people, who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government, did not do such a good job,” Chalabi said (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, March 11).
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