The NY Times publishes it's expected opinion about the lack of a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda - The Plain Truth.

It's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.

Now President Bush should apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different.

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide. While it's possible that Mr. Bush and his top advisers really believed that there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, they should have known all along that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. No serious intelligence analyst believed the connection existed; Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief, wrote in his book that Mr. Bush had been told just that.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11.

First of all, the Times is confusing three separate issues here. Was Iraq tied to 9/11 specifically? Was Iraq ties in any other way to Al-Qaeda? Was Iraq tied to terrorism at all?

I especially like the comment about President Bush convincing the people about Saddam being tied to 9/11. As if everyone doesn't get the administration's views filtered through the media first! If the people are too stupid to separate links to Al-Qaeda in general from the specific 9/11 attack, that's not Bush's fault.

At least the Times finally admits that it's conceivable for someone to have thought that Iraq had WMDs. That's very big of them.

As for Richard Clarke, who I thought would have been fully discredited by now, he claimed that Iraqis were helping Bin-Laden at the chemical factory Clinton bombed in 1988. From the Washington Post of January 23, 1999:

Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings. While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.