No, I do not base my belief entirely on Scheuer’s book. But what if I did? Is Scheuer not a strong source? He is militantly anti-Iraq war. He is militantly anti-Bush. Surely his opinion on an al-Qaeda/Iraq connection is worth listening to.
Here is another link that discusses the Iraq-al-Qaeda link more extensively.
http://thomasjoscelyn.blogspot.com/2006/09/show-us-documents.html
Here is something else:
http://www.nysun.com/article/29746?page_no=1
I do not claim that Saddam and al-Qaeda planned terrorist attacks together. I do claim that they had worked and met together, and that this relationship was of significant concern to the U.S.
Your first link examines the question of whether or not al Qaeda was in Iraq prior to our invasion. The very fact that this is a real debate illustrates the problem of any hard evidence proving the idea. How is it that Saddam is such a master at deception? We didn't have nearly this much trouble finding real links between the USSR and terrorists back in the 70s and 80s. And they had the help of some real intelligence pros. Read some of Claire Sterling's work from back then.
The second link is Bob Kerry speculating that there might be something definitive in the documents released around March 2006. That's a year ago now- so where's the smoking gun? You can believe it's there if you like, but where's your evidence?
I much prefer some real evidence that we do have. Al Qaeda living and organizing in Hamburg, Germany, in San Diego, in Florida. We know where they plotted. Here. Because we had a sloppy immigration policy that acted as if everyone who comes here never means us harm. And George Bush has demonstrated very little interest in curing that situation, one that conflicts with his single-minded obsession with bringing millions of new immigrants to this country.