Al-Qaeda and Iraq

I'd love to see some confirmation on this story! While the Dems seem to be doing their best to turn the Senate Intelligence Committee into an arm of the Democratic Election Committee, some of the folks on the SIC are bent on actually performing the mission assigned.

This story, if confirmed, would be a near-knockout blow to the anti-war Left, or at least that portion to whom facts rather than rhetoric actually still mean something. One of the great underpinnings of the new mythology of the Iraq invasion is that there was absolutely no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. While there were indeed some indications that Iraq had provided material support to AQ, the evidence was circumstantial. Kuwaiti passports from the first Iraq war (manufactured and matching records inserted into Kuwaiti records during the Iraqi occupation) turning up in the hands of AQ members, Iraq's "blind-eye" acceptance of the Dar Al-Islam camp, an AQ offshoot and ally, in northeastern Iraq, terrorist training camps in Iraq that were known to be used by Hezbollah and PLO, but not directly known to have been used by AQ.

Of course, no evidence will ever be good enough for the ideologically committed. Even if there had been direct involvement and support of AQ's 9/11 attacks by Iraq, the odds of any direct evidence existing would be small. Hussein is not a total idiot, and any direct communications would not have been either traceable or in writing. But the leaked memo, if confirmed, would bring the connection a quantum leap closer.