The 9/11 Commission has declared that there was no operational link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and an alleged smoking gun, the discovery that a member of the Fedayeen Saddam had a name similar to that of a man who was present at an al-Qaeda conference, has gone down a damp squib.

Laurie Mylroie isn't deterred.

Last Thursday she published a 2,400-word article in the New York Sun in which she insisted, yet again, that "Iraq was almost certainly directly involved" in 9/11.

Her theory? That many of the best-known terrorists aren't actually related, as most observers believe. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, isn't really the nephew of the notorious Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and other terrorists who are believed to be members of their family aren't members of their family.

It's all a fake. And just about everyone is in on the cover-up:

The Clinton administration, however, did not want to hear this....

I met with [Itamar Rabinovich, then Israel’s ambassador to Washington] to explain that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. Mr. Rabinovich was not keen to hear that....

The CIA is a bureaucracy run amok, more interested in covering up its mistakes than understanding Al Qaeda. Senior administration officials responsible for the Iraq war have come under vicious attack, and they are on the defensive....

But a few people believe her, as I learned from an April Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. And at one point they wanted to retroactively declare Ramzi Yousef an "enemy combatant" just so they could test her cockamamie theories:

...The proposal, pressed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, called for President George W. Bush to declare Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as an enemy combatant in the war on terror....

Wolfowitz contended that U.S. military interrogators -- unencumbered by the presence of Yousef’s defense lawyer -- might be able to get the inmate to confess what he and the lawyer have steadfastly denied: that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent dispatched by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 as revenge for the first Persian Gulf War....

Now, let's round up the usual suspects:

Wolfowitz’s interest in the procedure, sources said, stemmed from his longstanding interest in the theories of Mylroie, a controversial academic and former fellow of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Her 2001 book, "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussen's War against America," cites Wolfowitz in the acknowledgements for providing "crucial support" for the project. Others who merit expressions of gratitude in Myleroie's acknowledgements are three top aides to Cheney -- chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby and foreign-policy advisors John Hannah and David Wurmser-- as well as Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Francis Brooke, a principal Washington lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress.

In Mylroie's current article, she says the fakery took place in Kuwait when it was occupied by Iraq in 1990 -- there are fingerprints in a file in Kuwait for Abdul Basit, whose identity Ramzi Yousef assumed, but it doesn't matter if those fingerprints match Yousef's because, Mylroie says, the Iraqis corrupted the Kuwaiti files.

Er, but Isikoff and Hoseball point out this:

Wolfowitz’s interest in proving Mylroie’s "switched identity" theory got him to persuade the Justice Department shortly after September 11 to provide a government jet and FBI staff support for a secret mission to England by former CIA director James Woolsey. The idea behind the mission was to check fingerprints on file in Swansea, England, where Basit had once gone to school, and compare them to the fingerprints of the Ramzi Yousef in prison....

Justice Department officials tell NEWSWEEK that the results of the Woolsey mission were exactly what the FBI had predicted: that the fingerprints were in fact identical...

So another set of fingerprints -- in England -- provided a match ... two and a half years ago.

But Isikoff and Hosenball say Wolfowitz wouldn't let the theory go. And clearly Mylroie won't, either.

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I don't think we'll ever know the whole truth about the Iraq war until we know who in the administration believes Mylroie's theories, and until we know how much those beliefs influenced the decision to go to war. I think Cheney believes them, and I think that may have been a huge factor in the decision to invade.