veiled4allah: smoke and mirrors

In the news recently are claims that an al-Qa'ida-linked group in Iraq has received a shipment of VX, a chemical weapon.

The Washington Post story linked above says that the name of the group is Asbat al-Ansar. Asbat al-Ansar is a militant group of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. They have no known connections with Iraq. However, there is another group with a somewhat similar name, Ansar al-Islam, that is in Iraq. See Taliban Style Group Grows in Iraq from March 2002, and more importantly, U.S. suspects extremists linked to al-Qaida tested biological weapons in Iraq.

Assuming that the recipients of the VX gas are in fact Ansar al-Islam rather than Asbat al-Ansar, the group is predominately Kurdish and is based in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq (which the U.N. and U.S. have been supporting against Saddam Hussein for the last ten years). See Al-Qaeda Members Fled To Kurdish Area Of Iraq, State Department Says and Fighting in the Mountains: Fierce Clashes Spark Tensions in Kurdish-Controlled Northern Iraq.

OK, so a group opposed to Saddam Hussein's regime and based in the part of Iraq that Saddam Hussein doesn't control has allegedly got chemical weapons but Saddam Hussein is somehow implicated. Did Ansar al-Islam (or Asbat al-Ansar) get the weapons from Baghdad? No; according to the Washington Post story, the VX was smuggled into Iraq from Turkey.

So what exactly does Saddam Hussein have to do with it? According to the Washington Post:

On the central question whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein knew about or authorized such a transaction, U.S. analysts are said to have no evidence. Because Hussein's handpicked Special Security Organization, run by his son Qusay, has long exerted tight control over concealed weapons programs, officials said they presume it would be difficult to transfer a chemical agent without the president's knowledge.

OK, so even though there's no evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein knew about it, the U.S. government is assuming that he did because he has such a great internal security apparatus (hopefully much better than America's own, which apparently did not know about the 9/11 hijackers even though they were living in our country for up to two years, and not in an autonomous region either). And his alleged knowledge therefore becomes his consent and authorization? How's that again?

P.S. No one has ever explained convincingly why Hussein would ally with groups that want to overthrow his regime as illegitimate as al-Qa'ida does.