George Tenet on Al Qaeda and Iraq: What the mediots won’t tell you

What we’ve heard so far is a mixed bag on Tenet’s book, which hit the shelves yesterday. Conservatives and others who worked with Tenet are disputing some of his accounts, while the media, of course, is obsessively focusing on anything in the book that paints Tenet’s relationship with the administration as ‘strained.’

With that said, Thomas Joscelyn writes in today’s Weekly Standard on some of the real meat from Tenet’s book, namely, regarding interesting information he wrote regarding the connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq:

But it is worth noting what he does not claim: that the Bush administration cooked up the connection between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda in its entirety. In fact, Tenet concedes that there was evidence of a worrisome relationship. For example, Tenet explains that in late 2002 and early 2003:

There was more than enough evidence to give us real concern about Iraq and al-Qa’ida; there was plenty of smoke, maybe even some fire: Ansar al-Islam [note: Tenet refers to Ansar al-Islam by its initials “AI” in several places]; Zarqawi; Kurmal; the arrests in Europe; the murder of American USAID officer Lawrence Foley, in Amman, at the hands of Zarqawi’s associates; and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad operatives in Baghdad.

On Ansar al-Islam, Zarqawi, and Kurmal, Tenet elaborates further:

The intelligence told us that senior al-Qa’ida leaders and the Iraqis had discussed safe haven in Iraq. Most of the public discussion thus far has focused on Zarqawi’s arrival in Baghdad under an assumed name in May of 2002, allegedly to receive medical treatment. Zarqawi, whom we termed a “senior associate and collaborator” of al-Qa’ida at the time, supervised camps in northern Iraq run by Ansar al-Islam (AI).

We believed that up to two hundred al-Qa’ida fighters began to relocate there in camps after the Afghan campaign began in the fall of 2001. The camps enhanced Zarqawi’s reach beyond the Middle East. One of the camps run by AI, known as Kurmal, engaged in production and training in the use of low-level poisons such as cyanide. We had intelligence telling us that Zarqawi’s men had tested these poisons on animals and, in at least one case, on one of their own associates. They laughed about how well it worked. Our efforts to track activities emanating from Kurmal resulted in the arrest of nearly one hundred Zarqawi operatives in Western Europe planning to use poisons in operations.

Read the rest here.

Speaking of Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are unconfirmed reports that AQ in Iraq ‘leader’ Abu Ayyub al-Masri is dead from an ‘inter-terrorist’ battle. Read the latest developments on that here.