US/IRAQ: The Pentagon has stopped funding Mr Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile it once hoped might help lead Iraq but whose intelligence reports and motives were doubted elsewhere in Washington, US officials said yesterday.
The Pentagon had been giving Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress roughly $340,000 a month. A US defence official said the Pentagon made its May payment to the INC, and that it was the final one.
Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, said cutting off money to the INC "was a decision that was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people".
"We felt it was no longer appropriate for us to continue funding in that fashion.
"There's been some very valuable intelligence that's been gathered through that process that's been very valuable for our forces. But we will seek to obtain that in the future through normal intelligence channels," Mr Wolfowitz told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
US officials for weeks have said the US government was debating cutting off the INC, saying they had questions about the intelligence it provided as well as about whether Mr Chalabi was motivated chiefly by a desire for power.
Mr Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi National Council, has pressed recently for full Iraqi control over the country's security forces and criticised US tactics.
An exile who lived abroad for more than four decades, Mr Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in 1992 by a military court in Jordan, where he had founded a bank that failed. He says the charges were politically motivated.
In its prewar role, Chalabi's INC directed numerous Iraqi defectors to the U.S. government to provide intelligence that critics now say was largely spun to prod the United States into taking action against Baghdad.