Sunday morning digest

- Good luck to the Carleton Ravens today as they go for a fourth straight national men's basketball title.

- Hilarity at the Queen of All Media's expense, here and here. Read it with your morning coffee and it will start your day out right, I guarantee.

- What's this?

NEWLY released documents seized in Iraq immediately after the American invasion in 2003 point to the presence of Al-Qaeda members in the country before the war and moves to hide traces of “chemical or biological materials” from United Nations weapons inspectors.

The documents were posted on the internet as part of a rolling programme by the US government to make public the contents of 48,000 boxes of untranslated papers and tapes relating to the workings of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Saddam is said to have routinely taped talks with cabinet members and intelligence chiefs.

John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, was ordered by President George W Bush to release the material. Hundreds of thousands of previously unseen documents and hundreds of hours of tapes will be placed on the web in the coming weeks.

The first documents to be released offer tantalising clues to possible Iraqi contacts with Al-Qaeda. An Iraqi intelligence report dated September 15, 2001 — four days after the attacks on America — says Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban were in contact with Iraq and Al-Qaeda members had visited the country.

It claims America had proof that the Iraqi government and “Bin Laden’s group” had agreed to co-operate to attack targets in America and that the US might strike Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation.

Smoking gun or not, as the Wall St. Journal says,

This information may well shed light on whether Saddam planned the insurgency that we and the Iraqis are now fighting, or whether he canoodled with Islamist terrorists, as some of the documents already translated suggest. We are learning from the new book on Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor that many of Saddam's own generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. So much for the allegation that "Bush lied" about WMD; Saddam lied to everyone.

All of these issues are highly relevant to the ongoing debate over how the U.S. is fighting both in Iraq and in the larger war on terror, and where we should go from here. The Iraq War is a long way from being over, and anything we can know about the accuracy of our judgments before and during the fight is well worth trying to uncover and understand.

- I just can't seem to consider the Globe and Mail as an authoritative news source. Here's why. They seem to have a very static definition of who really matters in Canada, and apparently it includes chiefs-of-staff to underwhelming ex-pols.

- This is going to be great.