No Link Between Iraq and Al-Qaeda?

You know, the 9/11 commission is like the Cheesy Horror Movie That Would Not Die...

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion - long ago I knew it would be gory and turned my head away in digust. But body parts keep flying out of the wreckage long after any reasonable person would have thought they were safe.

First there was the self-serving horror that was Dick Clarke... Then [THUD!] Bob Woodward's ponderous tome (all 587 pounds of it) landed on the commission, smothering several members in juicy imagined conversations as related by various insects cleverly positioned on the wall of the Bush White House.

Splat! Time for some pathos... bring in The Jersey Girls. A little career-building? Let's watch Bob Kerrey audition for the Democratic VP slot on national TV (oh... he was supposed to be running an impartial inquiry?... but he was doing such a good job of badgering Dr. Rice...err...Dr. Clarke...uh...what's her name again???). Some conflict-of-interest and a Clinton-era retrospective all wrapped up in one: Jamie Gorelick. Richard Ben-Veniste grilling various people about plane tickets and then being forced to admit he was an idiot. One began to dread the commission's final verdict - seemingly no one was immune from the microscope... The chain of accountability would be pursued no matter where it took the intrepid commissioners: even if it led to the highest seats of power in the Land.

But the folly wasn't over: the commission had one final task. Not content to fulfill its charter, they felt compelled to answer a question they were not asked: was there any link between Saddam and al-Qaeda? Thank God for Brendan Miniter:

Yesterday, the commission announced there was "no credible evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, there's a wealth of evidence.

And by disputing the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the commissioners are answering a question no one asked them. They were supposed to investigate 9/11, not al Qaeda as a whole. In an election year, this makes them look partisan.

Uh... Brendan, I think they crossed that line a long time ago. I am not going to abbreviate Miniter's points showing the links between Saddam and al-Qaeda because I think they need to be out in front where people can see them... and because I will continue to flog this particular dead horse until it shows no further signs of life:

* Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary.

* Bin Laden met eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and with Saddam's external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid '90s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre."

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to hijack planes with knives — on a full-size Boeing 707.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

* The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Wounded, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When he recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" in Baghdad.

* CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document-forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. . . . This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

- Cassandra