An important new development.

According to an article in the New York Post, of all places, the Bush administration's dramatic turn against Ahmed Chalabi and the INC was precipitated by a dossier which King Abdullah of Jordan brought with him on his recent visit to the White House.

The dossier, writes Niles Lathem, included details of INC "Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran."

This provides a key piece of background information on the reports from last night that the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Chalabi's INC 'intelligence operation' was in fact a front for Iranian intelligence, filtering the US WMD disinformation prior to the war and sending highly classified American military intelligence to the Iranians since the beginning of the occupation. The charges center on Aras Karim, Chalabi's intelligence chief.

As we noted last night, the CIA has apparently believed Aras Karim was an Iranian agent since the middle 1990s. It was, says the Post, this Jordanian dossier which confirmed already existing suspicions of Chalabi in the US intelligence community and led to the termination of his monthly American subsidy of $340,000 use to spy on us, it would seem, for the Iranians.

The enmity between the Jordanians and Chalabi is both primal and mortal. And as I've told you a few times recently, late last year, Abdullah brought the US reputedly incontravertible proof that Chalabi had had advance warning about the bombing of Jordan's embassy in Baghdad at the end of last year.

(The Chalabis are an old family; the Hashemites, much, much older.)

Also, see this post from last night for an important note of caution about all this new stuff we're hearing.