For the record: Davin's post links:

AAI 101

Salman Pak

I hope I got them right, Davin. Please add more in a reply if I missed some important ones.

AAI:

There are a number of sources tying Ansar Al Islam to Saddam, and also to Al Quaeda, but since most of them are Kurdish and Kurdish newspapers, you will of course discount them. In any case, it's a lot more than one guy with an axe to grind. The most reasonable take I've seen on it, from someone who seems anti-war, is here:

All that said, the fact that an al Qa’ida cell is operating in Iraqi Kurdistan, getting backing from both bin Laden and Saddam, does not logically lead to the charge that Saddam is linked with bin Laden. The White House’s reasoning seems to go thusly: Al Qa’ida backs Ansar al-Islam. Saddam backs Ansar al-Islam. Thus, Saddam and al Qa’ida are linked and work together.

While it may be true that Iraq and al Qa’ida are linked, this is not the argument that makes the connection. I talked about this here. Think of it this way: The Soviet Union supported some mujahadin groups while they were in Afghanistan. The United States supported some of the same groups. Ergo, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the 1980s. See my point?

While I will concede that it may be overreaching to make the AAI represent a direct link between Iraq and Al Quaeda, you must also concede that it is highly likely that Saddam was supporting these terrorist camps in Northern Iraq, primarily as a weapon against the Kurds. But it is also likely that these camps represented a potential threat that extended outside Iraq through outside connections. And whether this was Saddam's real intent or not, squashing him squashed that support.

Salman Pak:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but all your links discounting the Salman Pak terrorism link seem to boil down to this Seymour Hersh article, although certainly there are others.

Supporting the scenario of Salman Pak as a terrorist training facility were Iraqi Army captain Sabah Khodada, and an unidentified Iraqi Lt. General. Their statements were described in detail in a Frontline article.

Hersh quotes only two unnamed sources as saying this was NOT a terrorist training camp. The idea that for some reason it would be impractical to practice taking over an airline on a mockup, but not taking one back, makes little sense on the face of it. Why?

Hersh's conclusion, since the two former Iraqis are connected to an anti-Saddam group (the INC), they therefore must be lying. For some reason, his own sources are assumed to be unimpeachable. Why?

There are other sources besides the two mentioned by Hersh that tend to support Salman Pak as a terrorism training camp. This article discusses a civil trial at which the terrorism connection was established at least well enough to impress a judge (which I suppose is neither here nor there. You can convince judges of anything sometimes). Appearing at the trial were two more experts supporting the 9/11 terrorism connection with Iraq, even if not the specific Salman Pak location: Former CIA Director James Woolsey and Iraq scholar Laurie Mylroie.

"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common effort in the sense of aiding or abetting or conspiracy was involved here between Iraq and the al Qaeda," Woolsey said on March 3. President Clinton's CIA chief from 1993 to 1995 added: "Even if one cannot show that...any of the individual 19 hijackers were trained at Salman Pak, the nature of the training and the circumstances suggest, to my mind, at least, some kind of common aiding, abetting, assistance, cooperation — whatever word you might want to take."

Mylroie, a Pentagon terrorism consultant and Iraq-policy adviser to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign (and author of The War Against America), also testified March 3. She believes "It took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive and deadly as what happened on September 11."

Personally, I think this is still a little fuzzy...how do they know these guys weren't trained in some other large state, like Saudi Arabia? Why would it be impossible to do such training in Afghanistan? I would really like to see the full transcript.

Khidir Hamza adds his voice to the previously-mentioned pair of Iraqis. As does Charles Duelfer, someone I have some personal knowledge of as a reliable source. But then Hersh doesn't like Hamza either, and has probably never heard of Duelfer.

The point is, it's not just the two guys from Iraq, and even if it were, they are objectively no less credible than the people disagreeing with them. All of them have big axes to grind.

And, as an add-on, despite the fact that the Atta meeting in Czechoslovakia has been absolutely written off as a falsehood by the Left, in reality, it's still controversial. One article on the subject can be found here.

While some in the Czech government and the U.S. say there is nothing to this, as far as I know, Minister Stanislov Gross and Czech newspapers still stand by their story. So there it remains.