New book: Were Iraqi defectors coached to embellish?
By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
Former top aides of Ahmad Chalabi now admit in a new book that they believed that the defectors who Chalabi and his group introduced to Western media and to U.S. intelligence agencies were in some cases providing misleading information about Saddam Hussein and his access to weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi, the charming Iraqi exile who became the darling of American neo-conservatives, helped convince the Bush Administration that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and should invade Iraq.
The new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” was written by NBC News Investigative Producer Aram Roston. Roston chronicles how Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), provided sketchy defectors to news media organizations and to US intelligence agencies who embellished their accounts of life under Saddam or lied for dramatic effect. "Chalabi's INC, even where it did not directly plant false information about Saddam's links to terrorists and WMDs, believed that, in many cases, it was false," Roston writes.
