corrente

Too, too delicious. Almost too rich: If it weren't for the cost in treasure and lives of Bush bungling that Chalabi enabled.

Ahmed Chalabi, the one-time White House favourite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs.

US investigators are now seeking to determine if the effort was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush Administration to oust the Baghdad regime, Tehran's long-time enemy.

US officials say the INC may have been acting on its own, rather that at Iran's behest, when it sent out a steady stream of defectors between 1998 and 2003 with apparently co-ordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.

Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants, or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has become clear only in recent months that Mr Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy...

Hmmm... Remember the "crude forgeries" from the Italian service on the yellowcake story?

....France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the US, the officials said.

In some case US intelligence analysts used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence sources" to corroborate their own assessments of Saddam's suspected illegal weapons. Few of the CIA's pre-war judgements have been proved accurate so far.

"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior US intelligence official.

"They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."

(via The Age)

Looks like the entire Bush foreign policy apparat were just babies by comparison to the Iraqi intelligence service.

Gee, I wonder if anyone in the administration will take responsibility for this?