Most of the evidence, besides the press release Saddam issued after 9-11 offering asylum to Osama (pause to reflect on that - reported by CNN and just as quickly forgotten by them as inconvenient), was either filtered through the Clinton-era CIA apparatchiks which were clearly incompetent and hostile to the administration (bunch of CYA going on in October of 2001), or were since found on the ground in Iraq.
That last part is crucial. Remember, for months the Saddamites were staging as much or more often than the terrorists. We had a Werewulf situation akin to what happened in the Occupation of Germany in 1945-46. (Werewulf units were Nazi troops mainly in Bavaria that were the final gasp of the Third Reich. The resistance/attacks lasted a long time).
There were a significant number of highly placed fascists (Baathists) with high clearances that were for months, at-large. There were a large number of risks involved in that phase - among them, the risk that if the Saddamites knew we had located certain caches, that they would accelerate their actions and precipitate a chemical attack out of panic. We could also use the caches to mousetrap them, which wouldn't work well if we blabbed about it. Until we rounded up the top echelon of these creatures, they still had a likelihood of knowing/accessing large caches of weapons & supplies, clearance and control of "resistance" cells, and the ability to grab cash and fund terrorist attacks to take the pressure off. We still haven't found all the money, by the way, but we did find hundreds of millions. (and gave it to the government of Iraq). Pretending cluelessness forces your enemy to underestimate you, to his death.
The documents and evidence found in Iraq wasn't fully dispersed or discussed until it had been analyzed. We're talking about details of who had influence, who was assigned certain areas of the country to attack/murder, as well as details of who approached the Taliban and what was done.Plus, we're talking the archives of an entire country. That's a lot to wade through and use.
The sensitive stuff was probably too buried or time-critical to use for political purposes. The historical record was clear on the connections - the democrats just tried to ignore it or to rewrite history completely.
Seems to me that there was always the attitude in the administration that "the truth will out".
And so, lately you've seen mass amounts of seized documents available for translation by the public. After all, we've caught or killed nearly every top criminal in Saddam's regime, and we've had time to transition out any human-intelligence sources that needed to be rescued.
In short, the proof was needed in the past for operational reasons - again, it looks like the administration kept quiet because the war was more important than politics.
I'll agree 100% that the war is more important than politics, with the caveat that should Republicans lose control of Congress in '06 and the WH in '08, we'll be pulling out of Iraq.
Now, if support for the war was still strong, then even Democrats wouldn't be advocating an early withdrawal.
Regarding the Werewulf situation in Germany, we watched The History Channel one evening where they talked about the number of American soldiers killed by Hitler supporters. I wrote to the Library of Congress to try and find out how many soldiers we lost during that time since I couldn't find information on the internet, and surprisingly they didn't have any information on how many soldiers we lost Post WWII by Werewulf operations either.
Great analyses!