Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that "there's no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11."

Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, "which organization do these terrorists come from?" But they should be asking the empirical question: "Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?" I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Most don't really understand Al Qaida.
To use an analogy... AQ is the United Way of Islamist terrorist organizations. It funds them and controls them to some extent (through the threat of withdrawing the funds). It is also a terrorist organization in its own right (as UW is a charity in its own right).

Thus, "links to Al Qaida" is essentially redundant. I doubt we'll ever find an Islamic terrorist organization that doesn't have "links to Al Qaida"

The IRA and PLO trained in the same camps in Liyba during the 80's. I don't think there ever was a division when it came to modern terrorist.

After hearing Mughniyah's name come up when I was educating myself on Al-Queta after 9-11, I looked into him in more detail. Bin Laden's main danger is as a Jihadist figurehead, but Mughniyah is VERY bad news in terms of technical knowledge and experience. I'd go so far as to argue that as long as he's out there, the war on terror cannot be "won"; so many different disasters and plots have had his fingerprints on them. Where this guy goes, Westerners die. Unfortunately, he plays the "brains behind the bomb" role, so he's going to be hard to catch.