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Chalabi Denies Passing Secrets to Iran

Ahmed Chalabi made the round of Sunday news shows this morning and denied passing on sensitive U.S. info to Iran.

“It’s not true. It’s a false charge,” Chalabi said on ABC’s “This Week” television program. “It’s a smear.”

Iran also denies the charges:

Iran denies any intelligence sharing Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said suggestions that Chalabi had passed sensitive U.S. intelligence to Iran were baseless. “We have not received any classified information, neither from Chalabi nor any member of the Iraqi Governing Council,” Asefi said.

Chalabi blamed George Tenet for the smear:

Chalabi said the CIA, which had viewed his Iraqi National Congress group with skepticism for years, was trying to discredit him and that CIA Director George Tenet was behind the accusation that he gave American secrets to Iran. “We never provided any classified information from the U.S. to Iran, and neither I nor anyone in the INC. And that is a charge being put out by George Tenet,” Chalabi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Chalabi challenged the Tenet to bring his information before Congress:

“I say, let him bring all his charges, all his documents. We also will bring all our charges and all our documents to the U.S. Congress, and let Congress have hearings and resolve this issue. We believe that the Congress is the place to resolve this issue, and I think our record will be cleared,” he said.

Why is he being smeared?

Chalabi on Sunday said he believed the Bush administration had turned on him because while he had favored the U.S.-invasion of Iraq, he opposed the subsequent occupation. “I have become a person who is calling for complete sovereignty in Iraq,” he said on ABC.

Chalabi also denied giving the Administration false info about WMDs:

We gave no information about weapons of mass destruction, we introduced the U.S. government agencies to defectors at the request of the U.S. government agencies -- three defectors,” Chalabi told ABC. “It was up to them to analyze this (information), and the responsibility for reporting to the president after analyzing the information is not mine,” he said.

Newsweek has this more in-depth article on " the Con man of Iraq," with the lead-in:

Ahmad Chalabi may go down as one of the great con men of history. But his powerful American friends are on the defensive now, and Chalabi himself is under attack.

Update: the LA Times reports Chalabi is believed to have fed disinformation on Hussein's weapons to intelligence agencies in at least eight nations. Here's the New York Post article about the dossier Jordan complied on Chalabi.

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