It's odd how every one of these so-called evidences of connections to Al-Quaeda didn't turn up until AFTER the invasion of Iraq. In fact, The original planners of the invasion had no access to any of these factoids to justify their war plans. #5, mentioning Saddam's plans for a post-war insurgency, doesn't even mention Al-Quaeda at all, I can't see why they even bothered to include it in this list. The other items are not evidence of deep cooperation, but only of occasional contact.

As for all the other reported connnections, meetings, kickbacks, payoffs, relationships, contacts, and other reported connections, can we be surprised? Saddam, a secular dictator on the ropes, and Al-Quaeda, a religious organization on the rise, distrusted each other intensely, but did have one thing in common, they both considered the USA as an enemy. I'm not surprised they kept tabs on each other and even occasionally cooperated, just like we occasionally cooperated with Bin Laden in Afghanistan agsainst the Russians, or how we cooperated with Saddam against Iran. I would be willing to bet similar catalogs of Al-Quada contacts could be assembled with most of the countries of the middle east, including some who are our allies now, like Pakistan.

So in other words, a detailed dissection of Iraqi documents going back to 1992 shows that Iraq and Al-Quaeda members had contacts in the past (which probably includes just about every anti-western jihadist in the mideast, these guys are all interconnected), but I still see no evidence of any large scale cooperation or operations, other than vague terms like "saw value with working with each other", or "good relationship", or "discussions of cooperating in attacks". Look closely at the cherry-picked evidence in that list...there is not one Al-Quaeda operation backed by Iraq. It's all vague allusions and juxtapositions. I'm not saying Saddam was a nice guy, he just didn't think he could get away with it, not with this gang of jihadist wackos.

I'll concede, the way they were feeling each other out, I wouldn't have been surprised if at some future time they might not have entered into an operational partnership, but there was no evidence available to the CIA in 2003 that this was so, as they themselves now admit.
Absence of solid connections to Al-Quaeda is going to be harder to prove than the presence of missing WMDs, so I'm not surprised we're hearing so much about this now. It's awfully convenient. Even if the evidence in that list is all true, and even if it indeed is as bad as it been interpreted, and even if we had known it in 2003, that's still not good enough reason to invade a foreign country. WMDs was a good reason and I believed it at the time. You're going to have to do better than that now.