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BAGHDAD: For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi named Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi. As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization publicly backed by Al Qaeda, Baghdadi issued a steady stream of incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by Iraqi officials that he had been killed in May, Baghdadi appeared to have persevered unscathed. On Wednesday, a senior American military spokesman provided a new explanation for Baghdadi's ability to escape attack: He never existed. Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman,...

NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, in the introduction to an hour-long PBS documentary called Saddam's Ultimate Solution, former Clinton State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said:"Tonight, we examine the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Ten years after the Gulf War and Saddam is still there and still continues to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Now there are suggestions he is working with al Qaeda, which means the very terrorists who attacked the United States last September may now have access to chemical and biological weapons."The documentary, broadcast on July 11, 2002, laid out in exhaustive detail alleged Iraqi...

According to Knight-Ridder, the mysterious Iraqi was "employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer" and later "accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000." Interesting, no?THE WASHINGTON POST reported yesterday morning that an Iraqi present at a key al Qaeda summit may not be the same Iraqi listed on lists of officers of the Saddam Fedayeen captured in postwar Iraq. In Al Qaeda Link to Iraq...

<p>LONDON, England (AP) --Documents discovered in the bombed out headquarters of Iraq's intelligence service provide evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, a newspaper reported Sunday.</p> <p>Papers found Saturday by journalists working for the Sunday Telegraph reveal that an al Qaeda envoy met with officials in Baghdad in March 1998, the newspaper reported.</p>