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Galt, your citations are misleading, to say the least. The first article is titled Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link , making it seems as if Bush is making a conclusive denial of any link. But read the second paragraph of that article:

Mr Bush did however repeat his belief that the former Iraqi president had ties to al-Qaeda - the group widely regarded as responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.

So Bush doesn't deny AQ links or WMD. Not then, not now, especially with this Jordanian episode. You misrepresent his and the entire administration's views, and you misconstrue statements that are perfectly true and documentable to make them sound like deceptions, condtradictions or failures of judgment. Same tactics that the lefties use.

I corrected your point of contention in the post right after when I stated Bush has made it clear there is no link between Saddam and 9/11; Bush has been somewhat ambiguous in describing what he sees as the relationship between Saddam's government and Ansar al-Islam.

However if you are honestly stating to me you see no concerted effort to link Saddam with 9/11 in the public mind then all I can say is you are naive, and see the tagline. The fact remains that there are no WMDs, no links between Saddam and 9/11, and at best a loose relationship between Ansar al-Islam and the Saddam government, though other intelligence sources indicate that relationship was meaningless and non-operational. While the War in Iraq may well have arguable national security benefits to the United States, these silly hysterical proclamations in the echo chamber of believers do not serve your countrymen well and frankly makes the propagators as guilty as the men who used Chalabi's bogus stories to propogate political support for the war. Recent polls suggest that Americans do believe Saddam had WMDs (he does not) and Saddam was linked to 9/11 (he wasn't.) Certain men in power loved their agenda so much, and yet hated their fellow countrymen who they feared might not be able to see the 'brilliance' of the agenda, they were willing to choose any means to get their end.

As we saw on this thread, the partisan, i.e. the ideological or "leftwing" adherents to the policy don't really know much about the situation on the ground or basic geography of Iraq. This is not the level of serious discourse conservatives traditionally pursue.

Also, several of the people I am posting with believe in a tinfoil conspiracy theory propagated by Laurie Mylroie whose chief sources, which she does not deny, are from the Chalabi camp. IMO, Mylroie should be tried under dusted off Un-American Activities laws from the 50s for her fraud and either put in prison or at the least, have her government pension stripped.

Furthermore, the complete refusal of the hawks to acknowledge that the stated goal of the Iraq policy is "global democratic revolution," a concept rooted in the left and particularly the Trotsky Left represents intellectual denialism at its most egregious. While I appreciate the need for supporters of this current policy to continue the charade of finding a rightwing spin on the war (i.e. the nation in threatened)they sacrifice reason and their countrymen in pursuit of an abstract agenda.