Former CIA director George Tenet reveals in his own autobiography, At the Center of the Storm, some of the intelligence that backed up PowellÂ’s presentation. More than one dozen other al Qaeda terrorists had joined Zarqawi in Baghdad. One of them was an Egyptian known as Abu Ayyub al Masri, who had served Osama bin LadenÂ’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, since the 1980s. After Zarqawi was killed in 2006, al Masri took his place as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Masri himself was killed earlier this year, and his widow confirmed that they had moved to central Baghdad in 2002.
Zarqawi and al Masri led a campaign of spectacular terrorist attacks against the Iraqi people, security personnel, and coalition forces. It was their savagery that, to a large extent, brought Iraq to the brink of total chaos—and ultimately provoked the Anbar Awakening. It is crucially important, then, that Zarqawi and al Masri were operating inside Iraq before American or British forces ever set foot there. They were clearly preparing for war.
In Baghdad, Tenet says,
Zarqawi’s cell found “a comfortable and secure environment” to funnel supplies and fighters to “up to two hundred” al Qaeda fighters who had relocated to camps in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq beginning in late 2001. The camps were run by an al Qaeda affiliate named Ansar al Islam (AI), which would later play a significant role in the Iraqi insurgency. The CIA found that AI was experimenting with poisons on animals and, “in at least one case, on one of their own associates.”
Prior to the war, the CIA got much about Iraq wrong. But here is an instance where the agency got something right.
Less than one week after Secretary of State Colin Powell made the case for war with SaddamÂ’s Iraq based on the CIAÂ’s intelligence, Osama bin Laden decided to make his own case for war. Bin Laden, however, was on SaddamÂ’s side.
In an audiotape released on February 11, 2003, bin Laden explained why. “It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but the solution is not to be found in moving the government of Iraq from a local thief to a foreign one,” bin Laden argued. “There is no harm in such circumstances if the MuslimsÂ’ interests coincide with those of the socialists in fighting the Crusaders, despite our firm conviction that they are infidels.  .  .  .  There is nothing wrong with a convergence of interests here.”
Bin Laden’s message was clear. Saddam may be a socialist “infidel,” but he is preferable to the United States and Britain.
The terror master called on Muslims to fight alongside Saddam’s forces. And Saddam himself clearly saw a “convergence of interests” as well.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse in 2004, Hudayfa Azzam said that Saddam had welcomed al Qaeda “with open arms” and “strictly and directly” controlled their activities inside Iraq. Azz
am was in a position to know. He is the son of one of al QaedaÂ’s earliest and most influential leaders, Abdullah Azzam, and maintained extensive contacts with al Qaeda leaders inside Iraq.
Muhammad al Masari, a Saudi who operates a known al Qaeda front in London and has helped recruit suicide bombers to fight in Iraq, has offered a similar account. In his book The Secret History of al Qaeda,
Abdel Bari Atwan recounts a conversation he had with al Masari. Saddam “saw that Islam would be key to the formation of a cohesive resistance in the event of invasion,” according to al Masari. Thus, Saddam funded the relocation of al Qaeda operatives to Iraqi soil. Al Masari says that Saddam also ordered officers in the Iraqi military to purchase “small plots of land from  .  .  .   farmers in Sunni areas” and then bury “arms and money caches for later use by the resistance.”
There is much more evidence in this vein, including, for instance,
Iraqi intelligence documents recovered after the fall of Saddam. Some of the documents demonstrate that Saddam called on hundreds of terrorists from around the Middle East to come to Iraq in the months leading up to the war. Many of them had been trained by Saddam’s regime beginning in the late 1990s. In early 2003, Saddam opened his border with Syria to allow this stream of terrorists in. In one recovered document, Saddam ordered his military to “utilize” Arab suicide bombers against the invading forces. This was almost certainly a reference to al Qaeda.
All of this may sound like a belated attempt to relitigate the case for war. It is not. Reasonable people can differ on how to handle Saddam’s prewar sponsorship of terrorists, including al Qaeda. Tony Blair does not present Saddam’s terrorist ties as a major justification for war. By the same token, it is simply false to claim, as Obama and the Democrats have, that Al Qaeda in Iraq “didn’t exist before our invasion.”
Al Qaeda in Iraq | Foundation for Defense of Democracies
These facts remain UN reported by most because of the time line
Most of this was not confirmed until 2010
