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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (39006)	3/7/2004 7:04:31 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Chalabi Denies Misleading U.S. cbsnews.com <<...“Ahmad Chalabi is not the first person who has tried to sell the United States snake oil,” says former CIA Analyst Ken Pollack, now a scholar at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, and a CNN analyst. He says the intelligence community thought for years that Chalabi’s INC was coaching its defectors. “They believed that the INC was saying to different defectors: ‘You need to pump up your story. You need to embellish. You need to make yourself sound more important to the Americans, give then the kind of information they want, if you're going to get asylum in the United States,’" says Pollack. "And you know what? Unfortunately, they're right. If the U.S. government doesn't get something really juicy from a defector, we tend to turn him out on the street. And that provides a tremendous incentive for all of these defectors to tell us the juiciest stuff, they stuff they think we want to hear.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What galls Chalabi’s critics is that U.S. taxpayers paid for his now discredited defector program. But he argues that it’s absurd to believe the CIA just accepted at face value what his defectors told them. “This is a ridiculous situation. Every story that comes out in the press says, ‘Defectors have an axe to grind. Don't believe them. Defectors have an axe to grind. Don't believe them.’ Before the war, they kept saying that. OK, so why did they believe them so much,” says Chalabi. “They were skeptical. Read the articles that we were unreliable all the time in the press before the war. Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people.” “There were a number of people in this administration, some of the most senior people in this government, who relied on the information that came from Chalabi's group to a greater extent than did the intelligence community,” says Pollack. "You have said that they 'cherry-picked' intelligence to support what they wanted," says Stahl. "What did they mean?" “They were looking at information that seemed to simply confirm a pre-conceived notion of an extremely threatening Iraq, that was deeply in bed with different terrorist groups, and on the cusp of acquiring the most advanced, most dangerous weapons of mass destruction," says Pollack. “And of course, this was very much in accord with what Ahmad Chalabi had been saying for years, if not decades. And so, they were looking through the intelligence and picking out those pieces of intelligence that supported that view, pushing aside the stuff that didn't support that view, doing it without necessarily looking hard at the reliability of the sources.”...>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Check out the 60 Minutes segment tonight -- Kenneth Pollack will be making some comments.