Enemy of Our Enemy

NYT reported Bush administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league.

And anyone else with any intelligence could see they are right. The NYT is apparently not intelligent.

Even though the 9/11 commission

Which did not examine all of these documents, since they could not read Arabic

found no "collaborative relationship" between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein, the administration's reiterations of a supposed connection — Vice President Dick Cheney has argued that the evidence for such an alliance was "overwhelming" — have convinced two out of three Americans that they had "strong" links

two out of three is not bad.

.... What do the new documents establish? According to ABC News's translation of one of the most credible documents, in early 1995 Mr. bin Laden — then living in Sudan — met with an Iraqi government representative and discussed "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. The document also noted that the "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties" was "to be left according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation."

The results of this meeting were ... nothing.

If you consider a car bombing and the Khobar Towers attack nothing.

Two subsequent attacks against American forces in Saudi Arabia — a car bombing that year and the Khobar Towers attack in 1996 — were carried out, respectively, by locals who said they were influenced by Mr. bin Laden and by the Saudi branch of Hezbollah, a Shiite group aided by Iranian government officials.

Can the NYT prove that Iraq did not help, since they had just agreed they would?