Mel sums up:

'what is clear is that the mainstream media, both in the US and in Britain, is now simply incapable of applying proper journalistic criteria to the subject of the war in Iraq. Whether through venomous ideology or sheer incompetence and laziness, it is not prepared or able to do the spade-work and actually read what is in the public domain, let alone try to excavate more material.'

There's something deeply wrong with the analysis of the 9/11 commission, and equally the reporting of its findings. It seems that evidences of contacts- real meetings on actual dates; real associations representing a pattern- have been made to defer to a cultural understanding that Saddam and Al Qaeda could not have cooperated because fundamentalist Islam and secular Baathism couldn't endure each other's company.

I look at it this way:

Islam is a political religion. Baathism is a religous kind of politics (if you doubt that consider how Baathists would commit acts of torture while chanting the name of Saddam). Both Pan-Arab nationalism (of which Baathism was a product) and Wahabi Islam (from which Al Qaeda is a paramilitary offshoot) are about the restoration of Islamic/Arabic pride (one emphasising an Arab 'empire', the other a caliphate). Far from being alien, they are, at best, 'cousins'- and we all know what cousins are like in Arab countries. Saddam's government was a government of cousins for cousins, by cousins.

I read Melanie's response to the 9/11 commission findings, and then I read her link, to Andrew Mcarthy at NRO. Mcarthy surely makes the kind of points all sane, concerned, informed people ought to make. His comment on the Mohammed Atta controversy for instance:

'I am perfectly prepared to accept the staff's conclusion about Atta not being in Prague — if the commission provides a convincing, thoughtful explanation, which is going to have to get a whole lot better than a cell-phone record.

Perhaps the 9/11 Commission wasn't intended to do that. Perhaps it was a political sop to Bush's opponents, giving them a chance to put things in a manner acceptable to Democrats, to give the Dems an entree into the War on Terror.