The supposedly tenuous nature of the connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11, 2001, attacks on America has become a linchpin in the argument of those opposing war in Iraq.” American efforts to tie Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been unconvincing,” President Carter wrote in Sunday’s New York Times. “Despite endless efforts by the Bush administration to connect Iraq to Sept. 11, the evidence simply isn’t there,” a staff editorial in Sunday’s Times said. “The administration has demonstrated that Iraq had members of Al Qaeda living within its borders, but that same accusation could be lodged against any number of American allies in the region.”

These claims are disingenuous. Virtually everyone acknowledges that the September 11 attacks were carried out by a network headed by Osama bin Laden. The question, then, is the nature of the relationship between Iraq and Mr. bin Laden.

Here’s what the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 11: “Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of Osama bin Laden. We know Zarqawi’s network was behind the poison plots in Europe that I discussed earlier as well as the assassination of a U.S. State Department employee in Jordan. Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to Al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two Al Qaeda associates; one of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources. And it is consistent with the pattern of denial and deception exhibited by Saddam Hussein over the past 12 years.”

Providing “training in document forgery and bomb-making” is a far cry from merely having terrorists who happen to live within a country’s borders.

On top of the Tenet testimony to Iraq’s Al Qaeda links, we have the matter of the April 2001 meeting in Prague between a leader of the September 11 attacks, hijacker Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi government official, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, who was expelled from the Czech Republic later in April. The latest of the Czech officials directly involved to comment was the Czech ambassador to the United Nations, Hynek Kmonicek. Reports Edward Jay Epstein, “The last statement to date was made on October 26 th, 2002, by Ambassador Kmonicek, who was deputy Foreign Minister at the time and served the expulsion notice on al-Ani. He flatly told the Prague Post that ‘the meeting took place’ and that ‘the Czech government collected detailed evidence of the al-Ani/Atta meeting.'”

In addition, there are the reports — in the New York Times, in Aviation Week, and in the New Republic — of the Iraqi government training camp at Salman Pak, where Islamic militants were trained in hijacking around a Boeing 707.

The relevant congressional resolution here is the one passed September 14, 2001, by a vote of 98 to 0 in the Senate and a vote of 420 to 1 in the House of Representatives. It said “the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Note the words aided and harbored.

There would be a logic to this war even if there weren’t links between Iraq and the September 11 terrorists, just as there was for a preemptive strike against Al Qaeda before September 11 — in other words, before there were any September 11 terrorists. Still, there’s a lot more evidence here than commonly thought, and one can only wonder at the motives of those who would belittle, ignore, or deny it.