Sunday, September 08, 2002

Some Additions to Saddam's Resume
The AAP (Australia) is reporting that Atta 'met Saddam' before attacks:
MOHAMMED Atta consulted Saddam Hussein prior to leading the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, according to Richard Perle, an adviser to the US defence secretary.

"Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn't just there for a holiday," Perle told Italy's business daily "Il Sole 24 Ore".
And then Saddam's Alleged Mistress Says He Met Bin Laden:
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites) met Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites) on two occasions and gave money to the al Qaeda leader in 1996, a woman who claims to be a long-time mistress of the Iraqi leader told ABC News.

Parisoula Lampsos, who claims to have been Saddam's mistress on and off for 30 years, told ABC she personally observed bin Laden in one of Saddam's palaces in the late 1980s. She said Saddam's oldest son, Uday, told her Saddam also met with bin Laden in the 1996 and game him money.

ABC News interviewed Lampsos, now 54 and hiding out in Lebanon, for its "Primetime Thursday" news program to air later this week. The network released excerpts of the interview on Sunday.
And Cheney says Saddam is actively and aggressively seeking nuclear weapons:
Saddam Hussein is aggressively seeking nuclear and biological weapons and "the United States may well become the target" of an attack, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday as the Bush administration pressed its case for toppling the Iraqi leader.

Cheney and top administration officials took to the Sunday talk shows as part of President Bush's effort to convince the public, Congress and other countries that action against Saddam is urgently needed. The officials cited the Sept. 11 attacks in making the case that the world cannot wait to find out whether the Iraqi president has weapons of mass destruction.

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN's "Late Edition."

"How long are we going to wait to deal with what is clearly a gathering threat against the United States, against our allies and against his own region?"

Added Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on CBS's "Face the Nation": "Imagine, a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000; it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Saddam's 15 minutes of fame have been unduly prolonged by the handwringers at the UN and in Europe. It's time to put down the rabid dog.