[Southack]

...and yet, Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu al-Zarqawi was in Iraq from December 2002 until we killed him in June of 2006...

That little detail must be too trivial for the ComPost to bother highlighting.

[kingu]

...and yet, Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu al-Zarqawi was in Iraq from December 2002 until we killed him in June of 2006...

While that's true, I think the more interesting topic is how many families of murder-bombers Saddam paid, and how many Americans those murder-bombers killed. But I won't hold my breath awaiting these facts to appear in the popular press.

[GOPyouth]

Abu al-Zarqawi was strictly there on a humanitarian mission. Just a coincidence that he has previously been in Afghanistan fighting the US and ended up in Baghdad.

[Steel Wolf]

...and yet, Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu al-Zarqawi was in Iraq from December 2002 until we killed him in June of 2006...

That little detail must be too trivial for the ComPost to bother highlighting.

Probably because in Saddam's day, AMZ was not the big player that he was in 2006 when he got woken up by the 500lb JDAM alarm clock. In fact, AMZ was more of a freelancer at the time, working on his own projects, not for AQ senior leadership. He was trained in the Afghan camps years before, but had gone his own way long since. It wasn't until well into the insurgency that AMZ swore alleigence to UBL and put his group under the AQ wing.

So, the Saddam/AMZ link is pretty flimsy. Even if Saddam was tight with AMZ, which it's doubtful, AMZ wasn't tight with AQSL. Even when they were working together during the insurgency, we know from Ayman al-Zawahiri's intercepted letters that the Z man didn't approve of AMZ's extreme methods at all.

The links, as we know them, might work in the Kevin Bacon game, but it falls far short of being a 'smoking gun', for intelligence purposes.