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FINALLY. For much of the past week, the White House has been engaged in an aggressive effort to defend the case for war in Iraq. Thus far, it has mainly pointed out the obvious: In the months and years before the invasion, many of those who now accuse the White House of misleading the country to war themselves were making precisely the same claims about the threat from Iraq as the Bush administration.President George W. Bush accused his critics of "rewriting history." Vice President Dick Cheney called the attacks a low point of his three decades in public life. Defense...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

The Kerry campaign's extraordinary response to the newly released tape from al Qaeda's leader.IN THEIR FORMAL STATEMENTS reacting to the new videotape from Osama bin Laden, both President Bush and John Kerry were statesmanlike. Each man called for Americans to unite against terror and vowed to defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda.The Bush campaign wisely avoided going political. But the Kerry campaign--in comments from a top adviser and the candidate himself--did not.Kerry gave what appear to be his first extemporaneous comments about the tape in a previously scheduled satellite interview with Kathy Mykleby, a veteran anchor with WISN TV in...

The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes (HarperCollins, 224 pp., $19.95) "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie," screamed the New York Times headline. The Times could not have been more wrong. The 9/11 Commission staff had released a report containing an offhand paragraph that appeared to undermine the notion of any meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's international terrorist network. But even the commission staff grudgingly acknowledged that there had been contacts, though it left the impression these had been unconsummated dalliances. It's a shame that neither...

Did al Qaeda and Iraq have a "collaborative relationship"?THE FINAL REPORT from the 9/11 Commission is scheduled to be released this Thursday. It will be a dense thicket of chronology, narrative, analysis, and proposals for reform. But one issue is likely to be prominent in the news coverage. In fact, it already has been. "9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance." That was the headline over a July 12 New York Times report. We hope the Times is mistaken. It doesn't have a great track record on the issue, insisting (erroneously) that the commission's staff statement last month found...

Carl Levin distorts and exaggerates intelligence on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. The Bush administration was careful with its words, the Michigan senator is not.DOES SENATOR CARL LEVIN believe in preemption?The Michigan Democrat, one of the fiercest partisan critics of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, held a bizarre press conference Thursday to criticize the Senate Intelligence Committee's not-yet-released report on prewar intelligence. Levin faulted the exhaustive document for failing to include a critique of the Bush administration for its alleged "exaggeration" of the connection between the former Iraqi regime an al Qaeda.No one in the Congress has had...

the Connection From the June 7, 2004 issue: Not so long ago, the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda were conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom was right. by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED THE COUNTRY with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Stephen F. Hayes, the author of The Connection: How al-Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. FP: Mr Hayes, welcome back to Frontpage Interview. Hayes: Great to be here with you again. FP: First things first, what did you think about the 9/11 Commission report? Hayes: It was poorly worded, self-contradictory and vague. It seemed to reach conclusions not warranted by the evidence. And it added to the confusion on an already difficult issue. The staff statements felt like the cursory treatment given to an issue by an individual – or group of...

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...

Did the 9/11 commission staff statement really say that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?LAST WEDNESDAY, the September 11 commission issued a staff "statement" that further complicated an already confusing issue: the nature of the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. On the one hand, the statement confirmed several contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda terrorists, including a face-to-face meeting between a senior Iraqi intelligence official and Osama bin Laden in 1994. Then, calling into question its own findings, the statement reported that two al Qaeda terrorists denied the existence of any ties...

MSNBC has continued to try to flog the dead horse by this morning repeating on one of its news shows the big lie that the 911 Commission contradicted the Bush administration with the finding that there was no terrorist relationship between Al-Quaeda and Saddam Hussein; to back this up they brought in Commission member and long-time 'rat shill Richard Ben-Veniste instead of, for example, relying on statements from the Commission chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton that the findings were being misinterpreted. Nonetheless the NBCABCCBSNYTIMESWASHPOST cabal seems to have failed to convince the public of this disinformation, in part perhaps...

Weekly Standard reporter Hayes marshals a wealth of evidence that, in contrast with the tenuous connections that have so far made news, point to ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda. Most intriguingly, Hayes finds links between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, one of whom apparently received shelter and financial support from Iraq after the attack. Hayes also gets confirmation by Czech officials of the alleged Prague meeting between September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. Elsewhere, Hayes points to Iraqi intelligence documents that mention a "good relationship" with bin Laden. Other sources note...

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

The Connection, The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda. From the June 7, 2004 issue: by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and...

GET THIS BOOK! NOW AVAILABLE FOR ORDER AT AMAZON.The Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes (Author) According to John Batchelor and John Loftus (WABC), Stephen F. Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, is going to be on Meet The Press this Sunday with Tim Russert. Batchelor and Loftus said that information in this book is going to be explosive.

This was announced on WABC radio last night on the the john batchelor show, there is no mention on the MSNBC web site regarding his appearance. The Connection, a book on al Qaeda’s links to Iraq, to be published by Harper Collins in June.   The Al-Qaeda/Saddam Link   FrontPage Magazine Terrorism, War, and EvilReflections on September 11 BreakPoint with Charles Colson New Book.. "The Connection" by Steven Hayes embargoed till tomorrow ...subject of the lead editorial in Wall Street Journal  on May 27... The author will be on Meet the Press Sunday May 30th This Sunday, May 30th,...

"THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on March 21, 2004. The editor of the Los Angeles Times labeled as "myth" the claim that links between Iraq and al Qaeda had been proved. A recent dispatch from Reuters simply asserted, "There is no link...

The Connection From the June 7, 2004 issue: The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda. The weekly standard by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes. "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W....