Today’s Journal features an op-ed piece by Edward Jay Epstein on the recent confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The article is headlined “KSM’s Confession.” The subhead (that’s how it appears online — in the print paper, it appears as a blow-up quote) reads: “New Questions About the Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda.”
I’d read the general coverage of this event, in which the imprisoned al Qaeda leader confessed to a long list of attacks and crimes. I hadn’t followed it in great detail, but I couldn’t recall anything in the confessions that seemed to offer any real news about the long-discredited notion that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots (they were, it was reasonably clear before the war and even more evident today, enemies).
So I read the Epstein piece closely, looking for “new questions” about “the link” that never was. And, strangely, though the article discusses many subtleties about the information the 9/11 commission relied on, about possible connections between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and other complex intelligence issues, the name “Saddam” does not appear once in the piece. There is virtually nothing in the article about putative links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
There is only one paragraph that even mentions Iraq: that’s where one of the 1993 bombmakers, a guy named Abdul Rhaman Yasin, fled. But the notion that this reopens the question of a Saddam-Qaeda link depends on a long list of conditionals — If KSM is telling the truth (which Epstein says is a big question); if the network KSM used to plot the 9/11 attack also drew on support from his former cohorts from 1993; if one of those supporters was the Baghdad-protected Yasin. There are no “new questions” at all; there is, at best, a set of preliminary question that, should they all align in one direction, might set up a new question or two. That may be why Epstein himself confines the matter to a convoluted aside in his article, which mostly focuses on what he views as mistakes made by the 9/11 commission (which he’s writing a book about).
Is it possible that someone at the Wall Street Journal editorial page is still clutching desperately at the thinnest reeds of justification for the Iraq war, still trying to put flesh on the ghastly skeleton of Dick Cheney’s misleading claims about the Saddam-Osama axis, still doing everything possible to burn the phrase “link between Saddam and al Qaeda” into our consciousness?
Oh, right, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.
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