In the immortal words of Nick Danger, Third Eye: "Thanks, half-pint, you've just saved me a lot of investigative work." I'd been thinking the same things, and it's both a great convenience, and very informative, to have this put together into one coherent narrative.

It certainly made up my mind and that in the end is enough. I do my own thinking.

It won't matter to people who JUST KNOW the truth. What ever that happens to be according to who is in charge. If Gore was in charge the left who be pointing and grow at the outstanding veracity. Unfortunately (but really fortunately), Bush is in charge so everything has to be the opposite. If Saddam and OBL were caught infragrante delicto, it would still be considered a scam. Remember after 9/11, the left continued to say that in no way was OBL responsible. And even after he admitted there are those that wag their collective fingers and spin conpiracy theories.

You will never convince these people, never.

that should be truth not veracity, early morning

Yes I love your conclusion:
'Theres enough random linkage in here to justify my preconcieved notions'
Yes so now that weve established that you believe this random collections of factoids when will this administration reach an official conclusion? Im sure it will be tough with all the republicans controlling things right? Oh no it will happen just as soon as Bush cooperates with the 9/11 investigation....which means never... Becouse the Bush administration doesnt even believe it. Oh thats too bad...

Now lets review the real facts...
Clinton spent an inordinate time on terrorism issues- but Madeline Albright said that Bush & Co. when the came into office and werent interested..
Clinton could have started the Afghanistan was before he left office and had a plan to do so but didnt want to leave Bush with a war he just started.
Democrats wanted to establish a homeland security department but Bush resisted until overwhelmed by the post 9/11 outcry and even then wouldnt do it until he could strip the department of civil service protection- so they could bully anyone in it who didnt toe the Bush company line...
Oh and lefts not forget Afghanistan- oh, Im sorry we have. Werent we supposed to find Bin Laden? Whens that going to happen? Guess who is there- Oh Hillary Clinton- she hasnt forgotten.

And where is Bush? Getting another photo op with the troops- right in Iraq, thats fine and good. Now remind me, when will he be attending a funeral for any of the troops that his war of choice has caused? Oh never- becouse he's a disgrace..

We now return you to our regularly scheduled speculation...

Right. Hilary goes to Afganistan, and that's proof she hasn't forgotten; Bush takes his life in his hands to go to Iraq, and that's a photo op with the troops. Clinton spent an inordinate amount of time on terrorism -- and turned down a couple of chances to get bin Laden, but did manage to blow up a pharmacy. Bush got rid of the Taliban and Saddam -- and he's not really interested. Bush finally turned around on the Homeland Security Department -- after complaining for months it would be a boondoggle -- and now that there is a DHS, and it is a boondoggle, and it's Bush's fault.

I'm hindered in my ability to properly describe this, since as I recall Winds of Change prefers a level of diction above what is really needed. I hope you will understand, then, if I point out simply that your nonsensical argument is probably best applied to roses to make them grow, or added to compost to enrich it for the springtime, when it will at least have some little utility providing nitrogen and trace nutrients. If it did nothing but grow nettles and poison ivy, it would at least serve a better purpose than what you've spewed here.

Oh, and as for you, Mr Anyone-but-Bush: you should only aspire to someday find your mother in the Humane Society kennel were I'm sure she languishes today.

Strong letter follows.

Well, Dan probably put together these points as well as Feith or Hayes, or better. I couldn't possibly find the time to go through them point by point, so I'm going to re-summarize the comments I made earlier.

1. A great many of the points cover (alleged) meetings between persons associated with Saddam, and persons associated with Al Qaeda. In the absence of evidence that these meetings were part of a joint effort of some sort, this isn't very important. I have no doubt that if you tracked our intelligence assets as closely, they, too, met affiliates of Al Qaeda, to turn them, to pump them, maybe just to size them up. Given the frequent hostility of Osama towards secular regimes (like Iraq's), mere meetings are not evidence of an alliance.

2. Following from point 1., by everyone's agreement, these points haven't been analyzed (or in cases even verified). As a result, we're left with a very one-sided view, seeing none of the evidence the intel community might have that individual items are simply false, or that while true, the interpretation of a "connection" is unfounded.

The methods used by Feith?s Pentagon analysis shop were widely panned and the consensus within the intel community was that the findings didn?t pass the laugh test.

4. Speaking of which, it's quite remarkable how little additional evidence of the alleged connection has surfaced, despite the fact many leaders of both Iraq and Al Qaeda in custody, plus documentary evidence.

5. Maybe this is because Feith is in the unenviable position of the Little Boy who Cried Wolf. His office was responsible for claims about Saddam's WMD that we now see are totally bogus. The reliability of the various human sources from whom Dan's data were acquired is much, much lower today than when the material was first assembled. Have descriptions like "reliable source" been updated to reflect which sources turned out to be unreliable with respect to WMD or other whoppers? (I don't have time to research how much of the prewar rumint came from defectors arranged by Ahmed Charlatan Chalabi for a fee, but I've got a good guess.) Now, maybe this time there is a wolf, agreed. But shouldn't we be much more skeptical after the Bush claims about so much of Iraq didn't turn out? (Prewar: 30,000 troops by Fall 2003, total cost to US taxpayer for reconstruction, $1.7 billion.)

I'm sitting here reading Unholy Wars, a book written by reporter John Cooley and published in 1999. It's an intricate if poorly-written account of how the Soviet-Afghan war led to the rise of Al Qaeda and other groups.

Not much about Iraq at all, other than the possible link between the Sudan VX plant and Iraq, doesn't mention Iraq at all. There's also an interesting map that shows where all the "Afghanis" went after the war. No arrows point to Iraq. Not sure that necessarily precludes an Al Qaeda connection, but it does put things in context, I think.

"Right. Hilary goes to Afganistan, and that's proof she hasn't forgotten; Bush takes his life in his hands to go to Iraq, and that's a photo op with the troops. Clinton spent an inordinate amount of time on terrorism -- and turned down a couple of chances to get bin Laden, but did manage to blow up a pharmacy. Bush got rid of the Taliban and Saddam -- and he's not really interested..."

"Strong letter follows."

Save the letter Charlie, you got him on the first salvo. :)

In reply to Andrew:

I'm not sure if me having tied all of this together as well as Feith and Hayes is a compliment or not ;)

Now, to address your specific points:

1) I agree that if you tracked our own assets closely enough you would see meetings between the US and al-Qaeda or its affiliate organizations. There is at least a plausible scenario to be made that elements within the CIA and the US State Department facilitated the spread of Islamic extremists (read: al-Qaeda) to the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia to fight the Serbian military as the Kateebat al-Mujahideen Battalion of the Bosnian 3rd Army.

However, assuming the US intelligence on the al-Shifa plant was accurate (and like I said, read The Age of Sacred Terror for a defense of the decision to attack it) and that Iraq and al-Qaeda were willing to cooperate on the development of non-conventional weaponry (as is at least implied by the 1998 indictment against bin Laden), that certainly puts these meetings in an entirely different light because since cooperation has already occurred once and the meetings are continuing it does not seem altogether improbable to suggest that it may occur again.

2) I concur entirely, which is why I noted all of that at the very beginning of the analysis. The methods I utilized are far from ideal and basically leave us with a theory that happens to fit the facts, not a definitive answer one way or another. But aside from letting you and me loose inside of Langley or another memo leaking out detailing the evidence against such a connection it's probably going to be the best that we're going to get until everything gets declassified.

3) The Feith information was sold around in August 2002 and this is highly significant because most if not all of the information that we had from the 1990s (with the notable exception of al-Shifa) dealt largely with meetings and what not, some of which cannot be verified because we were not tracking bin Laden's movements during this time period or are in conflict with other data, especially the meeting that allegedly took place in Sudan.

However, the really freaky stuff in the memo (particularly the casus belli variety) regarding Iraq and Abu Musab Zarqawi didn't occur until October 2002 - two months after the Feith data had been laughed out. That put things in a whole new light and CIA director Tenet evidently felt a good chunk of the post-August 2002 information contained in the memo when he testified before Congress in February 2003.

4) According to the memo (as well the two additional excerpts that were published in reply to the Isikoff/Hosenball piece - see a link to my response to Isikoff/Hosenball in my Winds of War) as well as open source media, we have Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, one of the top 12 al-Qaeda leaders, we have a guy who is probably Zarqawi's lieutenant Moammar Ahmed Yousef, we have a "senior Iraqi intelligence official," and according to the memo itself (in contradiction to Isikoff/Hosenball's reporting, which leads me to question the validity of their sources concerning the memo) we have Farouk Hijazi. Abu Zubaydah's denial was a lot more qualified than was reported at the time according to the memo excerpt and additional anecdotal evidence has been reported on by a number of papers including The Scotsman and the Christian Science Monitor. I can provide links if you desire.

In regards to documentary evidence, this is very much a gray area since we just don't know a lot of what the thousands upon thousands of documents that have been recovered from Iraq are saying in regards to the connection between the two entities except for those documents that were recovered by the Daily Telegraph describing a connection between Saddam Hussein and the Allied Democratic Forces (an al-Qaeda affiliate operating in Uganda) as well as now-famous evidence of the arrival of an al-Qaeda emissary in Baghdad. We still have yet to be told what all of these documents say, if anything, about the Iraqi WMD program, for example.

5) Skepticism (or at least caution) is certainly warranted, but there is a fine line between being cautious and being overly skeptical. But then I myself don't consider the jury completely out on Iraqi WMDs just yet, something perhaps I'll have the opportunity to wax eloquent upon later. But even if the reports as to the size or existence of Iraq's arsenal were exaggerated or completely wrong, being wrong on one subject doesn't prevent Feith from being correct on another. The same people who laughed at the idea of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda in many cases resoundingly supported the belief that Saddam Hussein had lots and lots of nasty toys to play with.

That being said, Clinton and his national security team (my conservative polemics aside) evidently felt that there was enough of evidence of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda (the first time such a claim was made to begin with) to order a missile strike on al-Shifa. They made a judgement call, one that they continue to stand by to this day.

"The reliability of the various human sources from whom Dan's data were acquired is much, much lower today than when the material was first assembled."

I concur. As I said, this is far, far from ideal at the very beginning of the analysis for that very reason. But I don't think that the potential lack of reliability (something which, let us be honest, you deal with every time you cite a story dealing with anonymous sources) makes this exercise any less interesting or useful for readers like yourself ;) I don't have access to classified material, nor am I seeing all of the evidence for or against, so I'm going on what I do know in this case.

"Have descriptions like 'reliable source' been updated to reflect which sources turned out to be unreliable with respect to WMD or other whoppers?"

WMD seems to be the main source of intelligence failure at this point, so I'm not certain what other whoppers you're referring to. The stuff about human rights abuses and like by the defectors all panned out fairly well, I very much doubt that anybody was going to disagree with those assertions to begin with.

"(I don't have time to research how much of the prewar rumint came from defectors arranged by Ahmed Charlatan Chalabi for a fee, but I've got a good guess.)"

In the interest of keeping a civil tongue, I really don't want to get into my opinion of Chalabi. The way he has IMO basically betrayed us and lied to us on every count, I don't see why he isn't warming a Jordanian jail cell right now instead of sitting on the Governing Council. I here the weather's lovely in Amman at this time of year ...

"Now, maybe this time there is a wolf, agreed. But shouldn't we be much more skeptical after the Bush claims about so much of Iraq didn't turn out?"

It depends on the nature of the claims. To be quite frank, nobody predicted the guerrilla resistance and most of the Baathists were slated to be killed in a Stalingrad-style battle at Baghdad and then a Gotterdammerung at Tikrit. I also think that the CIA got a little too polyannish after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the real reason, incidentally, that I don't think we saw any terrorist attacks during the war) and thought that al-Qaeda was more or less beaten and hence under-estimated the network's durability or its ability to rally hundreds (thousands?) of individuals to go to Iraq to fight for them on either an ideological or a membership basis. These issues were developments that nobody, pro or anti-war, were able to predict beforehand.

And as I said before, Feith may well have been entirely wrong on WMDs (he certainly was at least on their locations) but that does not preclude him from being correct on other issues. Caution is warranted, overdue skepticism is not.

Bubba -- Something tells me that the "Strong letter follows" joke is too old for me to have incorporated it by reference. Thanks for the kinds words, anyway.

Even if I do suddenly want a hit of Geritol.

Dan, a very good comment. If the WMD show up, I have a lot to retract. I'd rather do that than weasel about it. Somewhere down the line, maybe years, much more data will appear and you and I will agree on which of these "facts" are true, and I suspect afterwards our analyses and recommended policies will be more much more convergent than now.

Small points:

(1) The State Department's team preparing for Iraq was much better prepared, but someone (probably VP Cheney, under the influence of Chalabi) suppressed their work in favor of very hastily concocted and much inferior Pentagon plans, and for good measure chased the State Department's man off Jay Garner's initial team. Garner has started complaining about that in public.

The Pentagon planning group, directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official, included hard-line conservatives who had long advocated using the American military to overthrow Saddam. Its day-to-day boss was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon. Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups - in power in Baghdad. The Pentagon planners were convinced that Iraqis would warmly welcome the American-led coalition and that Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and impose order.

Andrew,

I expect that this is very likely to be the case and I look forward to reading the declassified stuff a decade or so from now so that we can see who was right and who was wrong. If it makes you feel any better, I would very much hope that we were misled versus all of that stuff still being out there somewhere.

And as I said before, I don't think I can accurately express my opinion of Chalabi while at the same time maintaining a civil tongue. IMO, the man is the epitome of a liar and betrayed our trust - he should be dealt with accordingly.

Ahh, yes another one of those winger factoids comes out of the woodwork: clinton "turned down a couple of chances to get bin Laden"... In case you havent heard that is completely without a factual basis- kind of like Bush's WMD claims.. you remember those- they were the reason we were told we were invading Iraq..

Oh and remember Afghanistan? Didnt we go there to rid the country of the Taliban and get bin laden? And now the Taliban are back and we still havent gotten bin laden. Now when are we going to commit the resources to secure Afghanistan? How bout Iraq??

Hey heres a paradign: Bush can go there and appear before a sign that says mission accomplished. Im sure that will do the trick.
In the meantime when will Bush go to a a funeral of a US soldier who died? I hear its right after we find the WMD's.

To the contary, "Anyone...", that the Clinton administration rebuffed Sudan's approaches regarding Bin Laden is indeed factual. Whether they were right to distrust Sudan can be debated, but not whether or not the approach was made.

The Taliban are back? Really now? And just when did the Taliban regain control of the country? Seems like it is "Anyone..."'s claims that are devoid of factual basis.

Dan, you've done nice work in this series and I think shown that while the memo has its flaws, that there is good reason to think that Iraq and Al Queda had a working relationship.