Hillary: 'Pro-Chalabi Supporters' Forced Tenet Out

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she suspected a cabal of "pro-Chalabi supporters" inside the Bush administration forced CIA Director George Tenet to resign.

"I was struck by the timing since the whole controversy around Chalabi is heating up and Chalabi blames the CIA for his problems and there are a lot of pro-Chalabi supporters still at the highest levels of the administration," she told reporters.

Tenet's CIA has long feuded with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who had worked for more than a decade to oust Saddam Hussein from his exile in London. He was considered a key U.S. ally in post-war Iraq until recently.

Chalabi's INC offices in Baghdad were raided two weeks ago by coalition forces and he has been accused of sharing U.S. intelligence secrets with Iran.

The INC chief blamed Tenet for the raid and challenged him to a face-off before Congress in an interview days later on "Fox News Sunday."

Critics blame Chalabi for giving the U.S. inaccurate information on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, but Tenet himself made similar claims, reportedly telling Bush that his WMD evidence was "a slam dunk."

Tenet was appointed to run the CIA by Mrs. Clinton's husband in 1997, and was the most prominent Clinton holdover in the Bush administration.

Republicans have been urging the White House since the 9/11 attacks to clean house at the CIA, charging that the agency was infested with Clinton appointees who were working to undermine Bush's Iraq war policy.

"The entire CIA is still a bunch of Democrats," pollster John McLaughlin told the New York Post on Friday. "Leaving Clinton's guy there was a big mistake no matter how much Bush liked him."

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