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# Posted 4:14 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

CIRCLING THE WAGONS: The Weekly Standard has joined NRO in its all-out assault on the 9/11 Commission's finding that there was no active relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Following NRO's Andrew McCarthy, the Standard's Stephen Hayes has thrown a spotlight on the equivocations and oversights of the Commission's recent report, not to mention press coverage thereof.

While I agree with a good number of the individual points that Hayes and McCarthy make, I disagree with their apparent premise that the 9/11 Commission could (and should) have resolved certain questions left unanswered by their report. In contrast to the independent counsels responsible for both the collection and interpretation of evidence during Iran-Contra and Monica-gate, the 9/11 Commission seems to be wholly dependent on the intelligence community for providing it with material to evaluate.

Perhaps more importantly, this administration has a powerful incentive to provide the Commission with all relevant material that might have established an active relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam. In contrast, the Reagan and Clinton administrations had every incentive to cooperate with investigators as little as possible.

Thus, the real question here is not why there are certain oversights in the Commission's report, but rather why the administration, after investing so much time and effort in the search for compelling evidence of an active Saddam-Al Qaeda relationship, hasn't been able to come up with anything more definitive.

That said, Hayes and McCarthy do a good job of identifying three potential points of contact between Al Qaeda and Saddam that I expect to become the staple references for all those who take issue with the Commission's report. Those points of contact are:

The undefined relationship between Iraqi agent Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and 9/11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar.
The unverified but undisproven claim that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague in June 2000.
The connection of both Bin Ladin and the Iraqi government to the Sudanese chemical plant levelled by an American attack in June 1998.

With regard to each, Hayes and McCarthy make a good case that there is more to know than the Commission lets on. But if the Bush administration couldn't demonstrate that these points of contact were part of a collaborative relationship, why should one expect the 9/11 Commission to support that allegation?

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