Blair's Case Against Osama Bin Laden
This is the full text of the document, entitled Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States, released by the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair about the evidence against Osama Bin Laden.

As Fisk reports, the "evidence" is irrelevant or conjecture.

This Loose Conjecture is Unlikely to Cut Much Ice with the Arab Nations

The Americans are finding it a hard sell in the Middle East, and the British Government's document "proving" Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the 11 September atrocities is unlikely to rally the Arab world to the West's "war on terrorism". Only nine of the 70 points in the document relate to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and these often rely on conjecture rather than evidence. Claiming that "an operation on the scale of the 11 September attacks would have been approved by Osama bin Laden himself" (point 63) is not going to cut much ice in Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states.
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Susan Schmidt and Bob Woodward at the Washington Post report that the FBI has found no links to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

FBI, CIA Warn Congress of More Attacks As Blair Details Case Against Bin Laden

The FBI has found no links between any of the 19 alleged hijackers or their possible accomplices and any of the 1,000 to 2,000 suspected terrorist sympathizers in this country, including known Al Qaeda supporters, lawmakers were told. The group that conducted the Sept. 11 attacks and anyone who might have helped it operated as a closed unit and there may be other such cells as yet undetected by law enforcement, some members of Congress were told.

"The investigative case has to take a back seat to preventing the next terrorist act," a senior law enforcement official said. "That comes right from the top, from the president of the United States on down."
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

Apparently finding that link isn't that important. Bush and Ashcroft will just scare the bejeesus out of everyone with the possibility of new attacks and hope no one will notice that they don't have any proof of who did it.

And something that Bush should be thinking about:

Politics as Usual
In America, history shows, war does not override the calculus of politics

The political aftermath of the terrorist attack on the United States is the least of our concerns now, and properly. But beneath the calls for bipartisan unity in the coming months, the congressional politics of 2002 and the presidential politics of 2004 will take shape, for war does not adjourn democracy in America. The historical precedents of war's effect on politics cannot be encouraging for President George W. Bush.
(...)

But the portent with the most meaning for George W. Bush is his father's defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992—this after Bush senior racked up approval ratings of 90 percent the year before for his handling of the Gulf War. The build-up to the Gulf War in the fall of 1990 coincided with the onset of an economic recession, whose ill effects outweighed any benefits Bush could derive as the liberator of Kuwait. His son is in precisely those circumstances today—on the edge of war and recession—and his father's war is responsible for this war. Bush senior's deployment of troops to protect Saudi Arabian oil from Saddam Hussein touched off the terrorist campaign against the United States that has now come back to haunt the younger Bush and afflict his country. Repetition is not the pattern of history; tragic irony is.
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