The Knight Ridder news agency is reporting that the Iraqi National Congress routinely fed exaggerated or fabricated intelligence on Iraq to dozens of media outlets in the U.S. and around the world before the Iraq invasion. In June of 2002 the INC sent the Senate Appropriations Committee a list of just over 100 news articles about Iraq that were based on information provided by the INC’s Information Collection Program, which was funded by the U.S. government. The articles asserted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Osama Bin Laden. Most of the information came from the same half-dozen defectors whose information was questioned by the CIA and State Department. Publications and agencies that ran the articles based on the U.S.-funded misinformation included many of the major US newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal as well as Time, CNN, the BBC and the Associated Press.