IRAQ/THE US: The White House refused to say yesterday if it still regarded Mr Ahmed Chalabi as a credible figure, but US officials have clearly washed theirs hands of the former Iraqi exile who, a year ago, was the Pentagon favourite to lead a liberated Iraq. Conor O'Clery in New York reports
"It is up to the Iraqi people to decide who it is that represents them," the White House Press Secretary, Mr Scott McClellan, said when pressed on Mr Chalabi's standing after yesterday's raid on his premises in Baghdad.
The raid follows hard on an announcement by the Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, that the Defence Department would cut off funding of $340,000 a month to Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
Asked yesterday why Mr Chalabi was being paid this money, the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, said that a number of entities in Iraq got money under the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act.
However, the payments to Mr Chalabi came from the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's intelligence arm, and were not authorised under the 1998 act, which is administered by the State Department.
The White House reportedly ordered the Pentagon to cut off the payments after corruption charges were made against the INC and Mr Chalabi allegedly gave information about US operations in Baghdad to the Iranian government, which Mr Chalabi has denied.
An exile since 1958, Mr Chalabi was regarded by US top officials, especially the US Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, and Mr Wolfowitz and Mr Douglas Feith at the Defence Department, as a valuable source of intelligence before the war on the location of weapons of mass destruction.
On Tuesday Mr Wolfowitz told the Senate that Mr Chalabi had provided "some very valuable intelligence" to the US government.
However, the State Department and the CIA regarded Mr Chalabi's information with deep suspicion.
This proved justified when his information about weapons and assurances that US soldiers would be greeted with flowers turned out to be untrue. Another claim, that a US navy pilot missing since the Gulf War was not dead but a prisoner, also proved to be false.
After he was flown into Iraq at the head of his "Iraqi Free Forces", Mr Chalabi seized thousands of Saddam Hussein's intelligence files in Baghdad and earned his Pentagon payments by dribbling out information from the documents, according to Newsweek's website.
The INC is now being investigated in Washington for the alleged pre-war misuse of US funds to pay for Iraqis posing as defectors to provide fabricated information about WMD to the Bush administration and to the US media, most notably the New York Times.
For a time Mr Chalabi had control of the finance ministry in Baghdad but his influence declined after it became clear he was unpopular with most Iraqis.
Recently he infuriated his neo-conservative patrons by switching his attention to Iran and abandoning the goal of a democratic pro-Israel Iraq while building a Shia power base.
UN envoy Mr Lakhdar Brahimi has made it clear that Mr Chalabi will not be a member of the post-June 30th caretaker government.
Mr Chalabi also antagonised US administrator Mr Paul Bremer by comparing his decision to rehabilitate some former Baathists to allowing Nazis to return to office.