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"The Weekly Standard and National Review are not magazines I would consider part of the media. But if you want to accept press releases from the PNAC as factual evidence that's your business.."

Actually prior to the war, the New Yorker ran an article about the Saddam / Al Qaeda links and what we in the US knew about it. Good journalism. But the New Yorker hates Bush and so will now run only anti-Bush hate pieces that deny the very evidence this liberal magazine once ran.

The fact that only some conservative magazines will present thse facts is a fine example of how solid the wall of liberal media bias is in America.

Curiously, the article was written IN 2002 BEFORE BUSH MADE A CASE FOR WAR. I read it; it is very interesting. But I cant find a link --- it's been scrubbed! ...
http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/Archives/Archive_05/wwwboard/messages/193.html

See also the guts of this article, mentioning again the New Yorker 2002 article.
http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_04/7235.html

Here is what was written in the New Yorker in Feb 2003:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030210fa_fact

"In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda operative—a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi—was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi's mission was successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists. (Training in hijacking techniques was also provided to foreign Islamist radicals inside Iraq, according to two Iraqi defectors quoted in a report in the Times in November of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda operative, the Iraqi-born Mamdouh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liaison in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intelligence. Salim, according to a recent book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," by the former N.S.C. officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden's chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons development in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and was extradited to the United States. He is awaiting trial in New York on charges related to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings; he was convicted last April of stabbing a Manhattan prison guard in the eye with a sharpened comb.

Intelligence officials told me that the agency also takes seriously reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, whose real name is Saadoun Mahmoud Abdulatif al-Ani, is the liaison of Saddam's intelligence service to a radical Muslim group called Ansar al-Islam, which controls a small enclave in northern Iraq; the group is believed by American and Kurdish intelligence officials to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad."

etc.