"We know intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war in Iraq was flawed" begins my essay today in The Star: "Fact-finding or flimflam?". More than enough official and unofficial investigations have proved this point, not to mention that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq. What hasn't yet been investigated is how this flawed intelligence became the basis for President Bush's justifications for invading Iraq.

Enough circumstantial evidence exists to suggest a formal investigation needs to be undertaken to find out who passed along the flawed intelligence and whether some administrations officials might have deliberately twisted it.

With the main reasons for invading Iraq fallen by the wayside, Bush would have us now believe that the sole aim of toppling Saddam Hussein has always been to spread democracy. Yes, bringing democracy to Iraq was one of the minor reasons given as the Bush administration pressed Congress, the American people and the United Nations to accept its vision of the rightness of this war. But had this been used as the main argument during the march to war, no invasion would have occurred, nearly 1,550 of America's armed forces and an untold number of Iraqi civilians and American contract workers would still be alive.

The reason is simple: Democracy is the one political system in the world that cannot be militarily imposed. So, Bush and his neoconservative advisers (who had been pushing to invade Iraq since at least 1997) needed sexier reasons — biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms programs, safe haven for al-Qaida and even complicity in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately, America's intelligence community wasn't giving the administration the right answers, that is, those answers that proved the preconceived notions the officials held about Iraq — that it was an evil place with stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that would soon be used on the United States. When reasons fail to materialize, create your own. In the Pentagon, civilians created their own intelligence-gathering operation — the Office of Special Plans — and demanded to see the raw data that had been collected on Iraq, using that data to make their own analyses. The officials also relied heavily on defectors, even though most intelligence experts find defectors less than wholly useful. While a defector might have some useful information, one can never be sure of the defector's motives. It is possible a defector acts from greed, might be unbalanced, might want to settle a personal score or might be acting as the frontman for an organization or a foreign nation that wants to press an agenda.

Meet Ahmad Chalabi — banker, Saddam opponent, one-time CIA asset, would-be insurrectionist, almost leader of the new Iraqi government, friend of Iran, darling of neoconservatives and, possibly, flimflam man.

Chalabi, who had not lived in Iraq since 1956 except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when he was organizing what turned out to be a failed attempt at Kurdish resistance against Saddam, had long wanted to be a power broker in Iraq. He came to the attention of neocons at least as early as 1997 when, in a speech before the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, he said Saddam could be toppled on the cheap if the U.S. backed a guerrilla force willing to do so, such as the one Chalabi led at the time. His words came to the attention of ardent neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, who would become deputy defense secretary in the Bush administration, and Richard Perle, who would become chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon.

A year later, Chalabi and his friends lobbied Congress for support. There were successful in prodding Congress to pass, with broad support from Republicans and Democrats alike, the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which provided funding for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. (In 1999, he was demoted from leader of the INC to an ordinary member. In his place, the INC established a leadership of seven people, one from each of the main groups opposed to Saddam.) Despite passage of the act, despite support for Chalabi's objectives, despite U.S. funding for the INC, nothing much happened. While President Clinton did believe Saddam was not someone who should remain in power, he was disinclined to go to war with Iraq merely to effect regime change. Bush, too, was disinclined to deal with Iraq during his first eight months in office. (Giving his business pals tax cuts, having his vice president come up with an energy plan based on the wishes of the energy industry, yanking America out of just about every international treaty it had signed and clearing brush from his newly acquired ranch near Crawford, Texas, were much more important for Bush.)

Then Sept. 11 happened. Suddenly, the neocons' day had arrived. They had the administration's ear.

Thus, the relationship Chalabi forged with Wolfowitz and Perle proved to be most beneficial. "Their relationship deepened after the Bush administration took office," Seymour M. Hersh wrote in "Elective Intelligence," published May 12, 2003, in the New Yorker, "and Chalabi's ties extended to others in the administration, including (Secretary of State Donald) Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy; and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff."

So, the timing was right and the gang was all here, so to speak — neocons, lusting for a war to effect regime change in Iraq but lacking the sexy arguments to justify a war, and Chalabi, lusting for an Iraq in which he could become a political powerhouse and who had what the neocons wanted.

We believe what we wish to believe. The neoconservatives believed Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destructions. Even when U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq could not find any before the war, the neoconservatives rejected the inspectors' conclusions. Once again, they were not being told what they wanted to hear, so the inspectors must have been fooled by Saddam. The weapons existed once, the neocons argued; they must still exist because Saddam had not shown any evidence they had been destroyed. If hidden, then it was only a matter of time before they were discovered.

The question that must be asked is, "Who fooled whom?"

The information for this essay comes from Hersh articles "Elective Intelligence" and "The Stovepipe," published in the Oct. 27, 2003, issue of the New Yorker; the May 31, 2004, Newsweek special report "Bush's Mr. Wrong," by Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball; and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's July 7, 2004, "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq," referred to hereafter as either the intelligence report or SSCI report.

The Iraqi National Congress helped Gen. Hussein Kamal, who had been in charge of Iraq's weapons program, and his brother, Col. Saddam Kamal, defect to Jordan in August 1995. They brought with them crates of detailed information. The data provided by the Kamal brothers became key points in Bush's October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, the beginning of his major push for war against Iraq. These brothers' defections, Bush stated with firm conviction, forced Saddam's regime "to admit that it had produce more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents .... This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions."

A few weeks before Bush's speech, Vice President Cheney had declared that the Kamal brother's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself."

By the time Bush and Cheney gave their speeches, the Kamal brothers unfortunately were dead, victims of Saddam's treachery. They had been lured back to Iraq in 1996 with promises of forgiveness, but were killed instead. Had they still been alive, perhaps the brothers could have reminded Bush and Cheney of a very important part of their story.

In an Aug. 22, 1995, interview with Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, Hussein Kamal said that the stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, all manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, many as the result of ongoing inspections.

Thus, the information on biological weapons Bush referred to was based on selectively picked information, ignoring any reference to the fact the weapons had been made at least 12 years before and had been destroyed. Also dismissed was the fact that many of those weapons were destroyed because of the ongoing inspections, but that didn't fit the Bush and Cheney belief that the inspections were useless.

Try as they might, the neoconservatives could not get the intelligence agencies to take the Iraq defectors seriously. Perhaps that was because Abram Shulsky, head of the Office of Special Plans, forgot the lesson written in a 1991 textbook on intelligence that he co-authored. In "Elective Intelligence," Hersh quotes the textbook on the importance of defectors: "It is difficult to be certain that they are genuine .... The conflicting information provided by several major Soviet defectors to the United States ... has never been completely sorted out; it bedeviled U.S. intelligence for a quarter of a century."

The intelligence community was wary of defectors? Sounds like it was doing its job properly, especially since defectors often pass along the information one wants to hear, not the information one needs to hear. Chalabi knew what the neoconservatives wanted to hear.

In December 2001, Chalabi produced Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who fled Iraq with the help of the INC. A civil engineer, al-Haideri told The New York Times that he had seen 20 hidden facilities most likely used for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons production. One of the sites, he said, was beneath a Baghdad hospital.

Defector Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi army captain, told the Times and PBS' "Frontline" in a joint interview aired in November 2001, that Iraq trained people to carry out hijackings in the manner of the Sept. 11 hijackers. That imformation seemed to confirm what another defector, Abu Zeinab al Qurairy, said in 2000. Al Qurairy, a supposed former general in the Iraqi secret police, said he witnessed Arabs being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 at a camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

Neither of these claims panned out.

U.N. inspection teams that returned to Iraq just prior to the war could not find any of the hidden weapons facilities al-Haideri claimed existed. Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix had his teams physically examine the hospital and other sites al-Haideri had named. Not even the use of ground-penetrating radar equipment turned up a shred of evidence to prove al-Haideri's claims.

Khodada's claims likewise came to nothing, as well as those espoused by al Qurairy, whom, according to Newsweek, the CIA considered to be a "bullshitter."

The camp near Salman Pak did exist, but as a counterterrorism training site. It had been there as far back as 1991, one of several such camps the CIA helped establish in the Middle East, to train Iraqis on how to deal with a hijacking. As one former CIA agent told Hersh, "You don't need a real plane to practice hijacking." But, a real plane is necessary to train to learn how to take it back from hijackers.

With America's intelligence community not biting, what next?

Chalabi turned to the Germans, providing their intelligence agency with the infamous "Curveball."

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Curveball, an INC source and two others (blacked out in the report) provided information on Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons labs. The INC source might well have been al-Haideri. Hersh suggested in his "Elective Intelligence" article that al-Haideri was the source of Powell's U.N. presentation on the mobile labs.

But the intelligence report notes there were difficulties with Curveball as an informant.

He "spoke in English and Arabic," the report noted, "which was translated into a Western European language." Presumably, German. A Homeland Security Department officer then "translated the reports back into English before transmitting them to the intelligence community."

If you've ever played the game where one person whispers a sentence to someone, who then whispers it to the next and so on, then you know how horribly skewed the original sentence becomes after being filtered through eight, nine, 10 or more people. Consider what might have been skewed when a combination of Arabic and English are translated into German and then back to English.

The problem of language aside, the intelligence report noted other, more serious considerations. A Department of Defense employee, perhaps the only American to meet Curveball before the war, believed that Curveball might be an alcoholic and believed that Curveball's case officer "had fallen in love with his asset and the asset could do no wrong." (SSCI report, p. 156.) The DoD employee also was told that it was not possible for the United States to have direct access to Curveball, and noted that Curveball's handlers were having major issues with him and "were attempting to determine if, in fact, Curveball said who he said he was." (SSCI report, p. 155.)

To bolster Curveball's story, Chalabi supporters sent another defector to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA labeled that defector a "fabricator."

Despite the dubious nature of the information provided and the defectors' lack of credibility, the information ended up as fact in the White House laundry list of justifications for the war against Iraq. How could this occur?

Hersh suggested one possibility. Chalabi's group had provided a defector who was interviewed overseas by a Defense Intelligence Agency agent. The defector reportedly said he had trained in Iraq with al-Qaida terrorists in the late 1990s and that Iraqis had received instructions in using chemical and biological weapons. The only problem was that the agent used an interpreter provided by Chalabi's people. A month later, a team of CIA agents reinterviewed the defector, using its own interpreters. A vastly different story emerged.

"He says, 'No, that's not what I said,' " a former intelligence officer told Hersh. "He said, 'I worked on a fedayeen camp; it wasn't al-Qaida.' He never saw any chemical or biological training."

The DIA interview with the defector, though classified, was leaked in the summer of 2003, supposedly to bolster administration claims that they had intelligence about Saddam's ties to al-Qaida. The CIA rebuttal also was classified, but it was never leaked. Thus, the mistaken DIA report and the flawed intelligence it provided was never challenged publicly.

As the former intelligence officer told Hersh, "If it doesn't fit their theory, they don't want to accept it."

To be fair, we cannot yet say for certain how much influence Chalabi had over the neocons who vetted intelligence about Saddam. But the preponderance of circumstantial evidence suggests a fuller investigation is warranted. Such an investigation would have to decide not only if Chalabi and his organization duped enough people into believing Saddam needed to be brought down, but whether another player — either at Chalabi's insistence or using Chalabi for its own purposes — had been involved. We don't have to look far to find a potential player: The land of Tehran lurks in the background of Chalabi, weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaida and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

— There has been no love lost between the United States and Iran. We fomented a coup in 1952 after Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq tried to dethrone the Shah of Iran. We supported the shah even as he created SAVAK, the feared and brutal secret security service given to torture and to murder to crush opposition to the shah. We backed the shah as he repressed dissent, as he instituted martial law, as he fled Iran in the face of growing unrest from followers of the Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini. When President Carter invited the shah, no longer in power, to the U.S. for medical treatment, the ayatollah approved demonstrations demanding the shah's extradition to Iran. We didn't. Iranians took over the U.S. Embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

— There was no love lost between Iraq and Iran, either. In the middle of the hostage crisis, Saddam, believing Iraq was a weakened state under the rule of ayatollahs, launched a war that would last for eight years, a war in which Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iranian civilians. The U.S., still smarting from the hostage crisis, sided with Saddam, gave him arms, money and the means to make more chemical and biological weapons.

— Chalabi's former intelligence chief, Aras Habib, had murky ties to Iranian intelligence, Newsweek reported in its May 31, 2004, issue. Conveniently, Habib is nowhere to be found.

— U.S. officials now believe that one-time ally Chalabi, along with Habib, might have passed along classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.

— When Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad were raided lasat year on warrants alleging criminal activity (since dropped), where was Chalabi? Visiting in Iraq.

With Iran so much in the background of Middle East intrigue surrounding Iraq and Chalabi, with reports that it provided safe haven and transit for al-Qaida operatives, and with it now occupying the No. 1 spot on the Axis of Evil hit list, it makes sense to consider whether Iran, through Chalabi, planted the seeds of discord — all that flawed intelligence — that made their way back to the neoconservatives.

Can we say with certainty that Chalabi and the Iranians gamed the U.S. into attacking Iraq and deposing Saddam? No, but someone in our government needs to begin asking these questions and needs to instigate a formal investigation because all the flawed intelligence in the world doesn't mean a thing unless someone uses it.