One more thing on this point, powell and rice were more than clear that he DID NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO THREATEN HIS NEIGHBORS.
With WMD, perhaps, because it would have ellicited a massive response by the US. The very fact that we had forces in the region to deter such a threat was the reason that both Powell and Rice made such statements, not because Saddam was absolutely incapable of making such a threat. A threat was made to invade Kuwait in 1994, which prompted the US sending a small "trigger" force to the country that would have immediately involved the US had he attacked.
jcgi.pathfinder.com
So what changed regarding Saddam's capabilities to make tacit threats between 1994 and 2001? There had been NO UNSCOM inspections since 1998. We had NO IDEA what he did, or did not have, or what he might have reconstituted in those 3 years, or up to 2003. All we knew was that Saddam was in material breach of the obligations demanded of him by the ceasefire resolution.
You should further define your experiences in iraq that led you to believe saddam maintained high-level contact with al quida.
DTK, I provided you a link where Saddam ordered his IIS to cooperate with Zawahiri's Egytian Islamic Jihad in 1993. Zawahiri is the second in command of Al Qai'da. If that's not proof enough for you, then nothing I can provide will suffice.
Besides, those scanned Iraqi documents, although unclassified, are in the Harmony database. The US government was releasing those documents in an attempt to enlist the support of the academic world in translating them all (there were over 25 million scanned pages when I left in 2005).
What's ironic is that recently someone discovered that a document related to Iraq's nuclear program has been inadvertantly placed on the government website. It contained information that the Iraqi scientists had kept related to some their mistakes in developing nuclear weapons and it dealt with how to avoid these missteps in the future should the nuke program be reconstituted. A very valuable document that could be extremely useful to other countries attempting to develop nuclear weapons. It was immediately taken off the website and Negroponte terminated any further release of these "unclassified" Iraqi documents until they had been screened. Which essentially means some government paid translator (sorely in demand) will need to screen them before they are release, which places us back to square one in the document exploitation process. The alphabet soup agencies weren't too keen on publicly releasing these documents anyway, so don't expect this situation to resolve itself any time soon, if ever.
en.wikipedia.org
msnbc.msn.com
Pressed by Republican members of Congress, Negroponte’s office last March ordered the unprecedented release of millions of pages of Iraqi documents, most of them in Arabic, collected by the U.S. government over more than a decade.
Intelligence officials had objected at the time — but were overruled by President Bush.
According to the Times, conservative politicians and publications hoped analysis of the some 48,000 boxes of documents seized in the Iraq invasion would reinvigorate the search for proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Now what you should be asking yourself, DTK, is WHY, given Iraq's obligation to provide all such documents to UNSCOM/UNMOVIC, this VERY IMPORTANT document was never before known to exist.
They should never have possessed this information after UNSCOM began its inspections. They should have been declared and confiscated. Yet, this information related to nuclear triggers remained in the hands of Saddam's regime.
Hawk |
