Weren't these attacks supposed to have been about Iraq?

The Washington Post reports that about a week before the 9/11 attacks, members of the Turkish cell who carried out the Istanbul bombings in November 2003 - the four nearly-simultaneous truck and car bomb explosions that killed 58 people and wounded 750 that targeted Jewish and British interests - met with bin Laden and obtained Al Qaeda's support and blessing for the attacks.

The organization wanted to "take action against American and Israeli targets and break their dominance over Islamic countries," a suspect in the bombings told Turkish authorities. As the Post points out, this implies the attacks were being set in motion long before the U.S. even thought about sending troops into Iraq.

Like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's franchisee in Iraq, at least for most of his "substantial collaboration" with Al Qaeda (to use a 9/11 Commission phrase), the Turkish cell was not required to pledge their fealty to bin Laden in exchange for the financial, spiritual, and logistical support, and explosives training they received in Al Qaeda's terrorist training camps then still operating in Afghanistan.

As one of the cell members told the Turkish investigators, "We are different from al-Qaeda in terms of structure, but our views and our actions are in harmony."

We'll be following the news of this trial, about to commence in Istanbul.