Discounting the Saddam-Al Qaeda Link Discounted Theory

I haven't yet seen the declassified reports that supposedly discount Saddam's prewar ties to Iraq, but I wonder why the Washington Post keeps recycling the following as evidence that there were no prewar ties between the two:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

The Post knows that KSM, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (and various other Al Qaeda plots), never formally pledged his allegiance to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda because this is what the Post reported in 2004, after the 9/11 Commission Report came out:

Bin Laden made no commitments but asked Mohammed to join al Qaeda. Mohammed declined. Even after joining al Qaeda several years later, "KSM states he refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to Bin Ladin, thereby retaining a last vestige of his cherished autonomy," the report says.

Mohammed also claims that he would have worked with any terrorist group, not just al Qaeda, and that he would have gone forward with the Sept. 11 attacks even if bin Laden had canceled them.

"KSM presents himself as an entrepreneur seeking venture capital and people," the commission report says. "He simply wanted al Qaeda to supply the money and operatives needed for the attack while retaining his independence."

So like Zarqawi, KSM was just an "unaffiliated terrorist" with occassional associations with Al Qaeda adherents.

As Stephen Phillip Roth, a South Asia expert and former State Department official put it "[bin Laden] operates as sort of the Ford Foundation of terrorists. He will make grants, provide support for operations which function not only in Afghanistan—that's only a small part of the zone—but throughout a number of countries, including the United States."