New York ? Iraqi political leader Ahmed Chalabi on Tuesday denied allegations that he supplied the United States with flawed intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, biological and chemical-warfare programs.

Chalabi’s comments came in his first U.S. appearance since questions have arisen about President Bush’s charges that Saddam hid stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and a program to develop nuclear warheads.

Those allegations were Bush’s main justification for invading Iraq. But American forces haven’t uncovered any unconventional weapons there in two months of searching.

Some current and former American military, diplomatic and intelligence officials have identified Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of exile groups that opposed Saddam, as sources of flawed intelligence that administration hard-liners used to justify war. They also dispute information provided by INC-supplied defectors about Saddam’s alleged cooperation in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

“We gave very accurate information, and we produced people who we handed over to the United States who told them very significant things,” Chalabi asserted.

The CIA, which distanced itself from Chalabi in the mid-1990s after a failed INC-sponsored coup against Saddam, spurned the group’s information. But Chalabi’s allies in the Pentagon, who distrusted the CIA and funded the INC’s information-gathering activities, created a special Pentagon office in which INC information was melded with raw intelligence from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The resulting assumptions and analyses were used by Vice President Dick Cheney and other pro-invasion officials to bolster the case for toppling Saddam.