Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

You have to READ THIS: Intelligence sources admit to Whitehouse pressure to fabricate evidence linking Saddam and bin Laden. In other words, your ‘leaders’ are lying to you.

“Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews with Knight Ridder. No one who was interviewed disagreed.

They cited recent suggestions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network are working together.

Rumsfeld said Sept. 26 that the U.S. government has “bulletproof” confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaida members, including “solid evidence” that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.

The facts are much less conclusive. Officials said Rumsfeld’s statement was based in part on intercepted telephone calls, in which an al-Qaida member who apparently was passing through Baghdad was overheard calling friends or relatives, intelligence officials said. The intercepts provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq, they said.

Rumsfeld also suggested that the Iraqi regime has offered safe haven to bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

While technically true, that too is misleading. Intelligence reports said the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, a longtime Iraqi intelligence officer, made the offer during a visit to Afghanistan in late 1998, after the United States attacked al Qaida training camps with cruise missiles to retaliate for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But officials said the same intelligence reports said bin Laden rejected the offer because he didn’t want Saddam to control his group.

In fact, the officials said, there’s no ironclad evidence that the Iraqi regime and the terrorist network are working together, or that Saddam has ever contemplated giving chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida, with whom he has deep ideological differences.

Look at it this way, the only similarities between bin Laden and Hussein is that they’re both arabs. Bin Laden is a religious fanatic and Hussein is a secular, pan-Arabist dictator.

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