Subject:
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Oct. Report Said Defeated Hussein Would Be Threat
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 22 Jul 2003 17:05:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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126 times
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Oct. Report Said Defeated Hussein Would Be Threat
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20698-2003Jul20?language=printer
Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an
unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological
weapons to terrorists.
“Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon
to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” President Bush said in
Cincinnati on Oct. 7. “Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to
attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”
But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president’s
speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely.
In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence
services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda
terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing
after a military attack by the United States.
“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,” one key judgment of the estimate said.
It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the “extreme step” of
assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it “would
be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with
him.”
The declassified sections of the NIE were offered by the White House to rebut
allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq’s
nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions
about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the
intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by
Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.
I think that pretty much says it all...
-- Hop-Frog
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