I’m glad to see that non-bloggers are beginning to pick up on the Weekly Standard’s leaked-memo story, originally reported by Stephen Hayes. Here’s Slate’s Jack Shafer, arguing persuasively that the allegations of a link between Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists proferred by the memo merit attention and scrutiny by the major media; Here’s Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball paying the memo just that, but finding it wanting.
And while we’re at it, here’s Hayes’s rebuttal to the Defense Department’s quasi-dismissal of the the memo story. And as a supplement, here’s Slate’s Edward Epstein describing exactly why the jury’s still out on the much-ridiculed notion of the Prague meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent.
I, for one, am glad to see this stuff being discussed again anywhere, and am saddened that it still hasn’t become the major story it deserves to be in the mainstream press. Yes, I tend to credit the notion that Saddam and al Qaeda were acquainted with one another’s operations, for several reasons. The specious argument that Saddam is secular and bin Laden fundamentalist and never the twain shall meet is belied not just by their sharing of a common and far-more-hated enemy (the U.S.), or by Saddam’s increasing tilt towards Islamism himself (adding the Koranic verse to Iraq’s flag, writing a Koran with ink containing his own blood, the constant language of jihad and infidels he employed on every occasion), or by the fact that despite their much-touted animosity for one another bin Laden never once took action against Saddam