Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Tenet on Saddam and Al Qaeda

Tenet offers little real evidence to support his contention. 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.

There was more. Tenet says that his analysts found evidence of a relationship spanning more than a decade. He explains:

In the laborious exercise undertaken by analysts to understand the history of a potential Iraq-al Qa'ida relationship, they went back and documented the basis of a variety of sources--some good, some secondhand, some hearsay, many from other intelligence services. There were, over a decade, a number of possible high-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida, through high-level and third-party intermediaries. Our data told us that at various points there were discussions of cooperation, safe haven, training, and reciprocal nonaggression.

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