Boldfaced Minds
Claudia Rosett, no slouch herself in making the connections between Saddamite Iraq and the al-Qaeda network, helps to spread the word of Stephen Hayes' and Thomas Joscelyn's crucial new NRO piece by talking it up in today's Opinion Journal from the Wall Street Journal.

It's really important for people who advocate war in Iraq to stand up and insist on its necessity to those who do not know the facts ---especially when this Administration so routinely fails itself at making that case to the public.

As Rosett recounts (with emphases added ---because I'm a didactic bastage):

Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

Yep. But if we leave it up to the fucking [mainstream media], all we're going to hear about is missing and attractive white girls, shark attacks, and how awful Karl Rove's crime against Valerie Plame and our national security is. This issue of Saddamite Iraq's ties to the jihadists, however, is the real one ---and people need to be paying attention.