Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of Incorrect Spy Data

The Pentagon is paying $340,000 a month to the Iraqi political organization led by Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi government who has close ties to the Bush administration, for "intelligence collection" about Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.

The classified program, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency since summer 2002, continues a longstanding partnership between the Pentagon and the organization, the Iraqi National Congress, even as the group jockeys for power in a future government. Internal government reviews have found that much of the information generated by the program before the American invasion last year was useless, misleading or even fabricated....

Glad to see this in The New York Times, but, y'know, Lesley Stahl reported this on 60 Minutes four days ago (as I told you at the time), and by Knight-Ridder a month ago (as the Times acknowledges).

The Paper of Record does add this interesting detail:

Under the unusual arrangement, the Central Intelligence Agency is required to get permission from the Pentagon before interviewing informants from the Iraqi National Congress, according to government officials who have been briefed on the procedures.

Not that we didn't already know that Rumsfeld's Pentagon wears the pants in Bush's foreign-policy family....