Kevin Williamson -- who in typcial right-wing fashion betrays his authoritarian bias by being simply unable to suppress his fear and loathing of Hillary Clinton -- persists in peddling the republican delusion that Saddam Hussein "cooperated" with al-Qaeda. I can imagine how desperate the jingos must be to assure themselves that 3000+ Americans and a half-million Iraqis did not die for a lie; but alas, the reality is there was no connection to 9/11, no matter how indirect, and no WMD.

In Powell's fraudulent presentation at the U.N. in February 2003, the only "evidence" proffered linking Saddam's regime to al-Qaeda was the alleged existence of a terrorist training camp "in a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam" run by a guy who had once been in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda, and who at one time received some sort of medical treatment in Baghdad. That was it. (I can't remember if Powell also mentioned the meeting-that-never-was in Prague, or if that particular lie already been discredited by February 2003.)

As it turned out, the camp "in a part of Iraq not under Saddam's control" referred to the Kurdish area under the northern no-fly zone -- indeed beyond Saddam's reach -- and the guy who ran it was Zarqawi, later responsible for killing Americans. All of which makes even more reprehensible the fact that Bush-Cheney chose to hold up photos of the camp at the U.N. as part of their case against Saddam -- thus warning any terrorists there and giving them plenty of time to escape -- instead of, oh I don't know, maybe attacking said camp and capturing the terrorists, this being after 9/11 and the U.S. supposedly being at war with al-Qaeda.

The Bush-Cheney case for breaking off the war against al-Qaeda and bin-Laden in favor of invading Iraq in 2003 and "disarming Saddam" was a complete fraud from top to bottom. The assertions so fervently made by republicans, then and now, were all lies, including but hardly limited to the fantasy that Saddam "cooperated" with the terrorists responsible for 9/11, Osama bin-Laden or al-Qaeda.

Contrary to your assertions, the Bush-Cheney apologists have been forced to look most diligently to come up with ANY evidence, no matter how flimsy, that might support their very specific (and thoroughly discredited) claims of WMD, or their vague (yet equally discredited) claims of a connection to 9/11. Last year, it was decrepit relics of artillery shells circa the Iran-Iraq War found buried in the desert that, according to Santorum, vindicated the many extravagant claims of WMD. Before that, it was something about an airplane fuselage in the desert at Salman Pak. The trick, it seems, is to always have some new morsel of hope for the faithful to chew on with Rush and Sean and Ann; and by the time it is thoroughly discredited by credible sources, the jingos will be sure to come up with something else in order to avoid having to admit that it was all a bright shining lie.

So what have we this time? Hmm, a photo in an Iraqi "pre-war" newspaper with a caption indicating "coordination" with al-Qaeda? OK, Kevin, I'll bite: please provide the cite where one can find the newspaper, or the photo, or even an English-language story about the photo and caption. In the meantime, I wonder what the Arabic word for "coordination" is, and if that word might have other meanings in English. And who translated it? (Someone working for Michael Ledeen?) You see, Kevin, foreign language skills really are helpful in trying to understand foreign issues -- as opposed to simply selling a new war with lies.

At Kevin's direction, I found the article on Antiwar.com concerning the list of names of Saddam's inner circle that supposedly appeared in an Iraqi newspaper in November 2002, just as Bush-Cheney were selling their invasion. It's not a photo; but one of the names supposedly has a caption describing him as "an intelligence officer assigned to coordinate activities with the bin-Laden group in Pakistan." I say "supposedly" because the original list is (presumably) written in Arabic, while the information comes to us via a non-Arabic speaking Tennessee judge working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad during the occupation. (And we can assume, based on what we know now about the hiring practices of the CPA, that although this judge might not have known the first thing about Arabic or Iraq or Islam, his views on Roe v. Wade are probably sound.)

The article on Antiwar.com goes on to debunk the list as the creation of "Comical Ali", the Minister of Disinformation, and places it within the context of internal Iraqi politics (perhaps fueled by U.S. meddling) -- none of which is very interesting now. The only interesting point is that by Kevin's own admission this information, whether credible or not, was well-known to U.S. neo-cons at the Weekly Standard, and would therefore have been available to the 9/11 Commission -- which found that there had been some contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but no cooperation regarding terrorism or anything else. No "operational relationship" is the phrase used by the 9/11 Commission, if I remember correctly.

Where Kevin's argument fails is his making baseless leaps of faith from mere contacts to cooperation, and from paying bounties to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine (which, however unsavory, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda) to "working with al-Qaeda in acts of terror around the world" (or however it was that Kevin phrased it). Unless one truly and foolishly believes that all Arabs are equally complicit in the act of any one Arab, it is exactly such leaps of faith that allowed Bush Jr. to drag the U.S. into a hopeless war in Iraq by waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 before a credulous media and public.