In the years before the war in Iraq, an exile group set up a team of analysts in Washington, underwritten by United States government funds, to distribute a steady stream of reports on Saddam Hussein to the government and the news media, according to government officials and a document the group submitted to Congress. In a June 2002 memorandum to a Senate committee, the group, the Iraqi National Congress, described its “information-collection program,” and detailed how it had been able to provide reports on Iraq to the Bush administration, with which it developed close ties, and to the media. “Defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed,” Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the Iraqi National Congress’s Washington office, wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff. The memo, dated June 26, said “the results are reported through the I.N.C. newspaper (Al Mutamar), the Arabic and Western media and to appropriate governmental, nongovernmental and international agencies.” Full Story