What's keeping the pack from tearing Hayes' story to shreds, from building on it or at least exploiting the secret document from which Hayes quotes? One possible explanation is that the mainstream press is too invested in its consensus finding that Saddam and Osama never teamed up and its almost theological view that Saddam and Osama couldn't possibly have ever hooked up because of secular/sacred differences. Holders of such rigid views tend to reject any new information that may disturb their cognitive equilibrium.

Of course it's possible that much of the press viewed the material as old news or unproven, as Shafer noted, but the pattern described is identical to what I've found in the way the issue has been covered by the Washington Post, TIME, NEWSWEEK, CBS, MSNBC, The New York Times, etc. (with a few exceptions), as well as my personal exchanges with many of these writers.