NEW YORK, MARCH 29 US Congress investigative arm — General Accounting Office — is opening an inquiry into whether the Iraqi National Congress, led by controversial financier Ahmad Chalabi, used US taxpayers money and broke the law to prod US into war on false pretenses, a media report said today.

The GAO inquiry was requested by Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and another critic of the Iraq war, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan. A March 3 letter from the Senators, obtained by Newsweek says the INC’s use of US money is ‘‘troubling’’.

Under a written agreement examined by Newsweek, the INC had to abide by certain conditions for use of State Department funds. The group was permitted to use the money to ‘‘implement a public information campaign to communicate with Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq and also to promulgate its message to the international community at large’’.

But the grant terms would ‘‘strictly exclude’’ activities ‘‘associated with, or that could appear to be associated with, attempting to influence the policies of the US government or Congress or propagandising the American people’’.

In 2002, the INC — in an apparent effort to get Congress to continue its funding — submitted to the Senate Appropriations Committee a list of 108 news stories published between October 2001 and May 2002. The document said these stories ‘‘contained product’’ from an INC ‘‘information collection programme’’ financed by the State Department. The stories included allegations about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes and links to terrorism, as well as INC material supporting innuendo that linked Saddam to the 9/11 attacks.

Late last year Chalabi’s Washington representative, Francis Brooke, told Newsweek that State Department money had been used to finance the expenses of INC defectors who were sources for some of the listed news stories. Brooke said there were ‘‘no restrictions’’ on the use of US government funds to make such defectors available to the news media.