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He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it. On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post , the Associated Press , the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.” That sound you hear is a Democratic Party meme shattering into teeny tiny pieces. The attempts to put Humpty Dumpty together again, both by Panetta himself and the establishment press contingent following him, have been pathetic and ineffectual, which is what happens when one is up against succinctly stated truths. Aaron Worthing at Patterico's place correctly characterizes Panetta's statement “the Mother of All Kinsley gaffes.” Named after lefty journalist Michael Kinsley, it actually has its own Wikipedia entry , where it is defined as “a politician inadvertently saying something publicly that they privately believe is true, but would ordinarily not say publicly because they believe it is politically harmful.” Perhaps indicating that the Defense Secretary himself realizes the extent of his Kinsley gaffe, Panetta's statement does not appear in any of the four reports the Armed Forces Press Service filed from Camp Victory ( here , here , here , and here ). We wouldn't want the troops getting the wrong idea, eh Leon? Panetta's own attempt at the impossible walkback is as follows: Pressed by reporters to elaborate, Panetta said: “I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion — or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with al-Qaeda here; they developed a presence here and that tied in.” His aides then intervened and shooed the press corps away. Sorry, Leon, yes you were saying that 9/11 justified the invasion. That there is substantial evidence that there were meaningful ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein is an inconvenient truth the left and Democrats have attempted to shout down and whitewash for almost eight years. Stephen Hayes's September 1, 2003 Weekly Standard report (“Saddam's al Qaeda Connection”) cited the many items known before the Iraq War began, including the following: A letter from CIA Director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham said that “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade.” “Iraqi defectors had been saying for years that Saddam's regime trained 'non-Iraqi Arab terrorists' at a camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. U.N. inspectors had confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707.” Though there seems to have been reluctance to tag Al Qaeda recruits as being among the “non-Iraqi Arab terrorists,” it's not like there were dozens of such organizations at the time. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia . “According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, an (Al Qaeda affiliate) Abu Sayyaf leader who planned … a bomb attack in Zamboanga City in the Philippines) bragged on television a month after the bombing that Iraq had contacted him about conducting joint operations. Philippine intelligence officials were initially skeptical of his boasting, but after finding the telephone records they believed him.” Hayes also noted information obtained after Saddam Hussein was toppled, some of which includes the following: “Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.” … “(That) meeting was reported in the press at the time.” The day after a hawkish Bill Clinton speech about “an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals,” specifically on February 19, 1998, “according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda.” “According to U.S. officials, soldiers in Iraq have discovered additional documentary evidence like the memo Potter found. This despite the fact that there is no team on the ground assigned to track down these contacts–no equivalent to the Iraq Survey Group looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Interviews with detained senior Iraqi intelligence officials are rounding out the picture.” Hayes correctly faulted the Bush administration for not more aggressively building and publicly noting evidence of the AQ-Saddam Hussein connections and cooperation. Support for the AQ-Saddam connection is also nicely accumulated here by a person who says he was a high school student at the time, and who clearly had more willingness to