Inside al Qaeda

Nic Robinson, CNN:

Four years ago a video of a puppy killed in a chemical gas test at one of al Qaeda's secret training camps in Afghanistan shocked the world.

Now a man who says he was an Islamic holy warrior -- a Jihadi -- at the camp is ready to reveal its dark secrets.

But Omar Nasiri -- a pseudonym -- is unlike other holy warriors. In his new book "Inside the Jihad," released on Monday, he claims he was a spy, used by French, British, and then German intelligence agencies. He's says he's lied to stay alive and even today fears he'll be killed.

In his book Nasiri says he was born in Morocco in 1967. But in an interview with CNN he admits that "almost nothing" of what he writes about his identity is true.

Still, his account reveals so much about al Qaeda, terrorism and even Iraq that experts are taking him seriously.

Ten years ago former CIA station chief Michael Scheuer, now a CBS terrorism analyst, headed the agency's hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. That's when Nasiri claimed to have attended an al Qaeda training camp in the country.

"For this to be a fabrication would be beyond my imagination," said Scheuer, who was asked to review the book for accuracy prior to publication.

"It's really the most detailed first hand account into al Qaeda. I wish I'd had it at the CIA," Scheuer told CNN.

Scheuer says Nasiri's inside information helps to explain how the U.S. got into the war in Iraq.

In the book, Nasiri claims al Qaeda wanted the U.S. to attack Iraq in order to expand their own holy war.

When the U.S. captured his former camp commander Ibn Sheik al Libi in Afghanistan, he did what he'd trained Nasiri and other recruits to do, lying to his captors that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and al Qaeda was going to get there hands on them.

When asked by CNN whether he believed al Libi had lied to the Americans, Nasiri says: "I'm sure of it... Let's say by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear."

...

But how do we know he is not telling Robinson and the anti war media what they want to hear in order to undercut the war effort? Isn't he telling them exactly what they want to hear in order to stop the destruction of al Qaeda's operations in Iraq? That hypotheses makes as much sense as the one he is give and probably even more. What he leaves out of his Libi scam theory is that Iraq and Saddam failed to account for the WMD they had earlier declared they had. More than anything Libi told the US this failure to account , and accounting required by his cease fire agreement in the first Gulf War and by 16 UN Security Counsel resolutions, is what really precipitated the war.

What Robinson and his buddy Omar are engaging in is a another dishonest attempt to say the war was caused by dishonest and incompetence on the part of the US rather than putting the responsibilty where it belongs on Saddams willful failure to account for his WMD. The left in this country has been willfully avoiding the real reasons for the war in order to discredit it and the Bush administration and this is just another example of how they embrace theories that are intended to achieve that objective.

It is possible as Michael Scheuer says that there is useful information in the book about the operations of al Qaeda, but we should also be aware of the manipulation that may be inteded by the book.