This issue is getting more interesting. While Saddam my not have directed the 9/11 attacks, even 9/11 Commissioner Lehman explained that documents uncovered in Baghdad:
"Indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaida."
Continuing, he said..."the one striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work."
He also went on to highlight much of these other connections from Malaysia and the meetings Ahmed attended. With these acknowledgments, how can some other members of the 9/11 Commission come to any other conclusion. And how can the media continue to perpetuate the lie that Saddam was never a threat...or supporting terrorists.
Whether it was this guy Ahmed, Ramsey Yousif, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas...or the presence of Al Zarqawi in Iraq even before the war, the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam was a threat. He had already offered UBL santuary on several occassions after Sudan wanted him gone.
Heck, the establishment of Ansar Al-Islam...an AQ affiliate, just after 9/11 in N. Iraq is another issue that's been largely ignored. While they list December of 2001 as the date of formation, Zarqawi and AQ were meeting with both Arabs and Kurds "before" 9/11 to help in launching this outfit.
Human Rights Watch even admits through interviews, that AQ had given over $600,000 dollars to this outfit, along with several vehicles. It's my contention that Ansar and N. Iraq was going to become one of AQ's new bases of operation had the war in Afghanistan succeeded in ousting the AQ and the Taliban. And this was confirmed when Zarqawi ended up in Baghdad for two months shortly after the Afghanistan war started...only to find himself back with Ansar.
Further interviews also noted that fellow Kurds reported the influx of hundreds of foreign fighters, from Afghanistan...before we even went into Iraq. With Saddam's propencity for harboring wanted terrorists...and supporting terrorism, we just couldn't allow Iraq to become the next Afghanistan. Especially with the resources at Saddam's disposal.
Part of the problem with the media's ignoring of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection via Ansar Al Islam is that they sloppily report Ansar as having been a "Kurdish resistance group in territory beyond Saddam's control." That is baloney.
Ansar was co-headed by one of Saddam's top intelligence generals, a man whose name now escapes me, and the group was used regularly to attack anti-Saddam Kurdish forces. It is highly doubtful that Ansar consisted of Kurds at all. It is likely that they were mostly the foreign fighters who escaped from Afghanistan that you make reference to using the cover of being some sort of Kurdish resistance group to shield themselves from US scrutiny. They were also likely the vanguard force of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement in Iraq headed by Zarqawi.
But this doesn't fit with the pre-conceived story line developed by the MSM on Ansar Al Islam, the same kind of story-line thinking Hayes makes reference to in his piece. The MSM just took in the bull that Ansar Al Islam was an anti-Saddam Kurdish resistance force, despite being headed up by one of Saddam's intelligence generals, and never again bothered to examine what Ansar really was all about. Saddam likely sent his general to keep an eye on Zarqawi who was the co-head of the group and to help direct Ansar's activities.
And if Ansar which was co-lead by Al Zarqawi was an anti-Saddam resistance force, why was he treated in an elite Baghdad hospital reserved for Baathist party officials and then allowed to freely return to Ansar's camps afterwards? Saddam was not known to be this magnanimous to his enemies.