Oh, that

Perhaps you’ve heard that former CIA Director and Clinton-era holdover George Tenet is flogging his auto-hagiography this week. The news media is certainly hyping elements within it which fit their carefully constructed narrative: That President Cheney and the neo-con crowd bustled us into the war in Iraq not because – having graphic evidence of the kind of destruction that could be born out of impoverished Afghanistan and visited upon the homeland – the notion of a modern, industrialized Arabic state that had sought weapons of mass destruction and whose leadership was implacably hostile to the US potentially allying itself with the Islamist terror axis was intolerable (nor for any of the 20 other publicly enunciated reasons), but rather, you know: Because.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the administration shared what they knew about the relationship Iraq and al-Qaeda – not much more than there apparently was one, that al-Qaeda operatives existed in Iraq, operating freely and unmolested in one of the most viciously repressive police states in a region where the competition for such a title is stiff. Using the “when did you stop beating your wife” brand of investigative journalism, the administration was often criticized for having fabricated an operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, including ties to 9/11 – a strawman critique, since no one in the administration actually made that claim but one which stuck in the minds of all too many who received their information filtered through the approved political lens.

Perhaps they should have. As the Weekly Standard points out there’s quite a bit more inside Tenet’s self-indulgent reconstruction which doesn’t quite fit the approved talking points, and is therefore emended:

GEORGE TENET’S JUST released book, At the Center of the Storm, has created quite a stir. Over the past few days, a myriad of news accounts have referenced various snippets of the former director of Central Intelligence’s self-serving collection of remembrances. But here is something you probably have not heard or read about Tenet’s book: it confirms that there was a relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. And, according to Tenet, “there was more than enough evidence to give us real concern” about it too.

And what’s the effect of all this, both the evidence of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddamite Iraq and the media’s obdurate, pugnacious refusal to report on it? Ask Jeff Goldstein:

Of course, to the liberal Democrats,

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