You may have heard that Charles Duelfer, who's replacing David Kay as America's lead WMD hunter in Iraq, is a "skeptic" on the subject of whether those weapons will be found; The New York Times used that word to describe him a few days ago. But in a story posted Friday, the far-right NewsMax site correctly points out something about Duelfer that was overlooked by the Times:

The investigator picked by the CIA to replace David Kay as head of the U.S. team in Iraq hunting for weapons of mass destruction has told British reporters that he saw terrorists training near Baghdad in airplane hijack techniques resembling those used in the 9/11 attacks.

In a November 2001 account to the London Observer, Charles Duelfer, the former No. 2 United Nations weapons inspector who was appointed Thursday to head the U.S.'s Iraq Survey Group, corroborated the testimony of Iraqi military defectors who said they helped train radical Muslim recruits to hijack U.S. airliners aboard a Boeing 707 fuselage parked at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak.

At the time the London Observer reported:

"Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training."

"Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter,'" Duelfer told the Observer.

"I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq," he added....

(The Observer story is here; the quotes are accurate.)

So is Duelfer in Iraq to beat the Saddam = Osama dead horse?

Today, in another story, NewsMax alleges that, as a U.N. staffer during the Clinton years, Duelfer, working with Madeleine Albright, was engaging in back-channel communications with Iraq to avoid "regime change." But the story also adds this:

NewsMax has also learned that during his final months at the U.N., Duelfer had numerous dealings with the Bush-Cheney campaign, specifically Condoleezza Rice. Sources at the U.N. claim that the acting U.N. arms chief was "unofficially" providing "thoughts" on Iraq to the Bush campaign.

Curious, if true.

And there's this:

NewsMax has learned that Duelfer first entered Iraq shortly after U.S.-U.K. troops invaded in March 2003.

Neither the U.S. government nor Duelfer would disclose what he was doing in the Persian Gulf war zone during the period in question.

And even the Times story links Duelfer to spooky doings, however obliquely:

Near the end of [Duelfer's] tenure [at the U.N.], the disclosure of a covert American effort to install listening devices and otherwise gather intelligence in Iraq under cover of the inspections effort strained relations between Washington and the United Nations.

Paging John le Carre....