Ahmed Chalabi's List of Suckers

Hanging out in bad bars waiting for sources to show up is a time-honored tradition in journalism. So I suppose I shouldn't have been too worried by the non-arrival of Entifadh Qanbar, the spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress's Washington office. Still, he had moved our meeting several times and I had a lot of questions to ask him, especially about a lengthy confidential memo he had submitted to Congress in June 2002. The memo outlined something called the Information Collection Program, an INC operation that now appears to have provided bogus information about Saddam Hussein's weapons and terrorist connections to the American government and to the press in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I had never met Qanbar before and couldn't raise him on his cell phone, so I began to worry that he might be, in classic sitcom fashion, in a booth on the other side of the bar. When he walked into the room, though, he wasn't hard to spot. His glossy coif, well-cut blazer, and open-neck black shirt stood out among the khakis-and-cell-phone-holster crowd from the nearby Pentagon.

Qanbar apologized for being late, then ordered a beer and promptly got on his cell phone to Baghdad for an extended conversation in Arabic. I could only pick out a few words, including "Chalabi,' "Aras,' and "Bremer.' The last name was followed by a rough laugh, as if a joke had been told on the other end of the line – and not a nice one. That impression was confirmed when Qanbar got off the phone and began an extended rant about the failings of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, who Qanbar maintained was working with the CIA and State Department to crush the INC at the behest of Arab potentates fearing its political rise. With some difficulty, I managed to steer Qanbar's attention to the memo he had sent to Congress, and to a list it contained of 108 news stories that, the INC said, included "product' supplied by its Information Collection Program. "Yes, this memo has become quite famous,' he said with a wry smile.

Yes it has. In fact, perhaps no list of reporters has commanded such attention in Washington since Richard Nixon compiled his enemies list more than thirty years ago. In the months since the INC list was made public in a story by Jonathan Landay, senior national correspondent for the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder, it has taken on an almost emblematic quality. Reporters appearing on the list rail against the injustice of their inclusion. Those who didn't make the cut congratulate themselves anew for resisting the lure of the INC and revel in the schadenfreude of watching others' once-envied scoops turn to ashes. What few have done, it would appear, is take the time to read all the stories.

I did. The first thing that became apparent was that the list is a bit of a hodge-podge. The 108 stories ran between October 2001 and the end of May 2002, a period when the INC was laboring mightily to make sure that America's burgeoning "war on terror' reached to the heart of Baghdad. Still, about a quarter of the articles have little to do with the INC's agenda of promoting the ouster of Saddam Hussein; some even raise questions about evidence supplied by the INC. The balance of the stories, however, advanced almost every claim that would eventually become the backbone of the Bush administration's case for war, including Saddam Hussein's contacts with al Qaeda, his attempts to develop nuclear weapons, and his extensive chemical and bioweapons facilities – all of which are now in grave doubt. Similar stories appeared earlier and later, but this nine-month period following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was crucial in creating the perception that the Iraqi dictator was a grave threat to the U.S. "The INC's agenda was to get us into a war,' says Helen Kennedy, a reporter for the New York Daily News, whose name appears on the list. "The really damaging stories all came from those guys, not the CIA. They did a really sophisticated job of getting it out there.'