Conservatives carrying on about Iraq-9/11 connections are beginning to sound like Miss Havisham ranting about her wedding dress. They just can't let go.

Articles by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard and Andrew McCarthy on National Review Online read more like the headspinning pieces you might see in The New American about the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission running the world. It's conspiracy theory stuff that cites the absence of proof as proof, demands the opposition prove negatives, relies on unfounded assertions as premises, and invents dots when the existing ones don't connect to make the right picture.

In a preview of his book The Connection, Stephen Hayes posits that an Iraqi intelligence agent may have helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Let's get Hayes's story straight: a man named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who may or may not have been the same Ahmed Hikmat Shakir in the Fedayeen Saddam, was in Kuala Lumpur and may or may not have attended a meeting there with three of the 9/11 terrorists. Based on this, Hayes writes: "The Shakir story is perhaps the government's strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11." This information is worth investigating, but at this point Hayes doesn't commit to it being the same man, doesn't know if Shakir attended the meeting, doesn't know what was said at the meeting (although one needn't be a conspiracy theorist to imagine), and doesn't know if the man shared information from the meeting with Saddam Hussein.

Other "evidence" forwarded in the brief is similarly unpersuasive:

* Hayes quotes a 1999 "report on the psychology of terrorism" that speculates that Saddam and al Qaeda might work together in the future. Wow, that's convincing stuff!

* Hayes points to the alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. But U.S. intelligence has been unable to corroborate this story and even the Czech government--the sole source of the claim--has backed away from it.

* Hayes cites Bill Clinton's ill-fated bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan--widely panned as a "wag the dog" scenario at the time--as further proof of an Iraqi-al Qaeda tie. He notes, "at least six top Clinton administration officials have defended on the record the strikes in Sudan by citing a link to Iraq." (Might these be the same people who assured us that Bill Clinton "didn't have sex with that woman"?) But evidence that the al Shifa plant even manufactured chemical weapons rather than pharmaceuticals is scant at best. If it hasn't been proven that the Sudanese target made chemical weapons, what would a connection to Iraq prove?

The Weekly Standard piece is heavy on charges, but short on proof. Add a whole bunch of zeroes and you get a whole lot of nothing.