Monday, July 21, 2003

Here's what you get when you have a President that can't read and has his staff deliver the Cliff Notes on the crisis issues after the dog eats their homework.

Questions About Saddam's Threat
(CBS/AP) U.S. intelligence believed that the risk that Saddam Hussein would link up with terrorists — a key rationale for the war — was greatest if the Iraqi president were under attack or desperate, a newspaper reports.

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda … already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," concluded a National Intelligence Estimate in October.

The White House released portions of the NIE on Friday to counter charges that it had ignored warnings from intelligence agencies over the president's claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

Iraq's alleged illegal arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and his supposed pursuit of nuclear arms, were the most prominent justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Baghdad's reputed ties to terrorism were another. Bush administration officials have said the war was aimed at eliminating the potential "nexus" of terror groups and terror weapons within Iraq.

But according to The Washington Post, the estimate predicted that a U.S. attack could itself trigger such an alliance...






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