THE CHALABI FACTOR….Economists for Dean ? which, peculiarly, failed to change its name to Economists for Kerry or Economists Against Bush and keep up the good fight ? has been abandoned and founding member Lerxst is now blogging over at Kautilayn. Yesterday he pointed to a fine piece of public service from Knight Ridder:
The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.
A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC’s Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.
….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.
Indeed it did. And while this probably won’t do you much good unless you have access to Lexis/Nexis, they also obtained the list of 108 INC-planted stories, which included such august publications as Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and, of course, the New York Times.
Here’s the list in all its glory.
POSTSCRIPT: And yes, even though INC head Ahmed Chalabi has admitted that he’s willing to say pretty much anything to string the United States along, we’re still paying these guys several million dollars a year for “intelligence” assistance.
