..guaranteed..? Well, I did express an opinion and I'm still of that opinion. Namely that Powell did not produce faked evidence in his famous speech to the UN.
I'm also still of the opinion that WMD programs in the hands of a ruler which has launched several unprovoked invasions against neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and who has attempted to assassinate a US President constitutes a danger. No, not necessarily an imminent danger, but a danger nonetheless.
Saddam Hussein did have illegal programs designed to produce bio/chem WMD's on short notice even though we haven't found stockpiles of WMD's lying around.
..and yellow cake.. My earlier post didn't refer to yellowcake but we know Iraq did purchase yellowcake back in the 1980's (plus two nuclear reactors from France) and we know Iraq mined yellowcake itself in Iraq:
www.command-post.org/2_archives/009603.html
January 16, 2004IAEA Confirms Yellowcake Found in Rotterdam Likely From IraqAMSTERDAM, Netherlands — The U.N. nuclear watchdog confirmed Friday that Iraq was the likely source of radioactive material known as yellowcake that was found in a shipment of scrap metal at Rotterdam harbor.
Yellowcake, or uranium oxide, could be used to build a nuclear weapon, although it would take tons of the substance refined with sophisticated technology to harvest enough uranium for a single bomb.
A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said the Rotterdam specimen was scarcely refined at all from natural uranium ore and may have come from a known mine in Iraq that was active before the 1991 Gulf War.
"I wouldn't hype it too much," said spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. "It was a small amount and it wasn't being peddled as a sample."
The yellowcake was uncovered Dec. 16 by Rotterdam-based scrap metal company Jewometaal, which had received it in a shipment of scrap metal from a dealer in Jordan.
Company spokesman Paul de Bruin said the Jordanian dealer didn't know that the scrap metal contained any radioactive material. He said the dealer was confident the yellowcake, which was contained in a small steel industrial container, came from Iraq.
Jewometaal detected the radioactive material during a routine scan and called in the Dutch government, which in turn asked the IAEA to examine it.
Fleming said the agency will compare the chemical composition of the sample to other samples of ore taken from Iraq's al-Qaim mine, which was bombed in 1991 and dismantled in 1996-97.
She estimated that the Rotterdam sample contained around 5 pounds of uranium oxide.
President Bush came under heavy criticism last year when he asserted in his State of the Union address that Iraq was shopping in Africa for uranium yellowcake -- intelligence that turned out to be based on forged documents.
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