Here is the money quote form the Guardian:

The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad’s ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam’s most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.

and here is the money quote form the more recent article:

Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him haven in Iraq.

They left out the rest of the story. Bin Laden said he’d consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Saddam’s offer because “if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.”

So, four years before 9/11, you have a member of Saddam’s intelligence who might have offered Bin Laden asylum — an offer Bin Laden refused. Even if you remove all doubt as to why Saddam would want to do this (and the idea that Saddam would have liked to have had under his thumb a man who had declared him an enemy of the faith must have crossed your mind. if it didn’t — why the heck not? The Middle East is a dangerous place, and even nations that we consider friends have had these kinds of contacts with al-Queda. At least some of that is an attempt to prevent al-Queda form harming their countries. Explain to me why Iraq would be the only country stupid enough to not attempt to infiltrate the organization of its enemy.) you still don;t have a connection. If you ask a woman out and she says no, you don’t have a connection to her — you have a rejection. They are different things.

And don’t you dare say “Well, it proves that he wanted to have connections to terrorists”. First, as already noted, there are lots of reasons a dictator in the middle east would want to know what a bunch of frigging religious lunatics were doing. Second, who cares what he wanted — he was obviously not getting it. Wanting and getting are not the same thing, and I should really not have to point out that there were other nations in the region — like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia — who actually got close ties to al-Queda. So, again, you would just be arguing that we should have invaded the country who was really, really bad at getting closer to al-Quiada instead of the countries that were really, really good at it. Not, I must say, a terribly convincing argument.

Also, if this information is such a slam-dunk of a link, why has the Administration never trumpeted it, instead preferring to use the long-since debunked Prague-Atta connection.