"The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia," Knight Ridder reports.
"A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program [3], a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.
The Information Collection Program was financed out of the at least $18 million that the U.S. Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress [4], led by Ahmed Chalabi [5], now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, from 1999 to 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.
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."