Sixth Circuit Appeals Court Judge Gilbert Merritt is in Iraq studying documents as one of 13 experts selected by Department of Justice to help rebuild Iraq's judicial system. He writes in The Tennessean that he has come across a "List of Honor" published in November, 2002 in the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper, run by Uday Hussein. The list contains the names of 600 people deemed to be regime persons.

Judge Merritt writes:

Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.''

Judge Merritt then reports:

At the same time this was published, Saddam was denying that he had any relationship with Osama. Therefore Saddam had all the papers confiscated, and he ordered that publication of the paper be stopped for 10 days.

From this, Judge Merritt concludes:

I believe that President Bush was right when he alleged that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama and was coordinating activities with him.

It does not prove that they engaged together in any particular act of terror against the United States.

But it seems to me to be strong proof that the two were in contact and conspiring to perform terrorist acts.

Instapundit takes this as extremely significant proof of the Saddam/Osama connection. We don't think anyone ever denied there is a relationship between Saddam and Osama. But where is the proof they "conspired to commit terrorist acts?" We think the critical sentence in Judge Merritt's article is this one:

It does not prove that they engaged together in any particular act of terror against the United States.

There still has not been any evidence that we are aware of that Saddam was a part of 9/11 or any specific terrorist act against the U.S. We take Judge Merritt at his word, but we don't think this information in any way establishes the need for a preemptive strike against Iraq.

In fact, the Associated Press reported yesterday:

"There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Intelligence agencies agreed on the "lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaida" and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September. Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaida. "The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous," the former official said.

Update: SKBubba has this priceless gem about the Osama-Saddam connection. Too funny.