With regard to the other issues cited in your post, I have a question - a serious one, not a rhetorical shot. Do you believe everything that is asserted by the U.S. gov't based upon "intelligence sources"? For example, do you believe those trailers were, in fact, mobile bioweapon labs, and that we just can't prove it? If not, how do you distinguish between which assertions by "intelligence sources" can be believed and which can't?
To be more explicit: a case that Saddam was linked to "Al Qaeda" which used the Ansar al-Islam connection, would have to be based on two pillars:
1. That Saddam was supporting Ansar al-Islam.
2. That Ansar al-Islam was a subsidiary of "Al Qaeda", or at least had been infiltrated by, or co-opted by, "Al Qaeda" operatives to serve more "Al Qaeda"-centric ends.
The article above does not support #1, but we know it from other sources, including the link I gave you and the Zarqawi-in-Baghdad for medical treatment story.
What the article *does* support is pillar #2. This is because, a year or two ago, when people wanted to dispute #2 they'd say stuff like "it's just a local jihadi home-grown organization, there's no evidence they're part of 'Al Qaeda', they just care about fighting the Kurds..." etc. Even Zarqawi's "membership in" Al Qaeda used to be disputed (hopefully only a very few lunkheads would dispute it now...).
Yet here is a guy who's bona fide "Al Qaeda", who participated in an "Al Qaeda" style attack in Jordan, and yet says that he trained at (we are all presuming) the (supposedly unconnected to "Al Qaeda" according to previous talking-points) Ansar al-Islam camp with Zarqawi, in Iraq. That shows that Ansar al-Islam was indeed connected to "Al Qaeda".
As if there were any doubt!
Because the connection between AaI and AQ has not been in much doubt for quite a long time to begin with. So you may be, in the end, correct to downplay the significance of this article - because it proves something we *already knew*. :-) Namely that AaI was an "AQ" subsidiary. Pillar #2 is already proven.
If you doubt that Saddam was funding/supporting AaI for his own purposes, that's your right, and you can safely look at this article and say it doesn't help prove Pillar #1, I guess. However, I still believe Pillar #1 to be true, based on the pattern of other data we have about these matters. And you may too if you take a look at the info.
But if Pillar #1 and Pillar #2 are both true, then we're done, we've got the Saddam/AQ link. At this point I suspect that the only real question for each individual is when he decides that the preponderance of evidence forces him to acknowledge it, and some may do so a bit later than others, that's all ;-) Best,