Posted on 02/05/2003 5:47:25 PM PST by HAL9000
Saddam Hussein's top intelligence officials held secret talks with Osama bin Laden, US Secretary of State Colin Powell has claimed, as he set out America's case for war with Iraq.
Addressing the United Nations Security Council in New York, Mr Powell used satellite photographs and intercepted telephone calls to spell out how the US believed Iraq was continuing to work on its banned weapons programmes.
He said the US had uncovered evidence that Iraq was using a fleet of mobile production units to conceal its biological weapons programme from the UN inspectors; had tested chemical nerve agents on death row prisoners and was still trying to acquire materials to build a nuclear bomb.
But the most dramatic section of his lengthy presentation - lasting well over an hour - was the most detailed account yet produced of Saddam's alleged links with bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
He said that America had evidence from an unnamed foreign intelligence agency that bin Laden himself had twice met senior Iraqi intelligence officials in the mid 1990s, including the head of Iraqi intelligence.
Iraq had offered chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaida associates and Iraq had helped one "militant" to acquire poisons and gases.
Nearly two dozen "extremists" linked to al-Qaida were now based in Baghdad, co-ordinating the movement of people, money and supplies throughout the country, he said.
He said that members of the network had been arrested across Europe and that Dc Stephen Oake - the murdered Manchester police officer - had been killed during the disruption of one of its cells in Britain.
He set a deadline of February 14 - when the UN weapons inspectors report again to the Security Council - for Iraq to co-operate with the inspectors and surrender its weapons of mass destruction programmes.
Mr Powell told the Security Council: "We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented in this body."
This is only a possibility but the administration's knowledge of any such link may, in fact, be based on classified top secret intelligence.
That sounds logical. I just wish there was solid evidence to throw back at the idiots who keep parroting, It's all about oil, or, Bush only wants to go to war to finish what his father didn't. Stupid comments like that, that my Democratic colleagues toss at me.
Everything is precisely calibrated to achieve the desired effect. The Bush Administration wants to keep the pressure on Iraq, but it doesn't want to go to war with Iraq any time soon, because Saddam has an unbeatable ace up his sleeve -- he already has WMD, right? This will keep up the heat enough to strengthen the inspections regime and therefore keep Saddam in the crosshairs, but we'll get enough concessions from the UN and Iraq to have a pretext to postpone any attack for the next couple of months. Then we can use the "blazing heat of the Iraqi summer" excuse again to put it off for another six months. It's basically just what happened last September, but with everything ratcheted up another notch.
I hear ya. But if the choice is between having to listen to such whiners, and (say) getting our courageous informants in Iraq killed for having revealed info to us, I choose the former.
After all, most of the people doing the whining wouldn't be convinced by any evidence short of a mushroom cloud over an American city (if that).
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