The Little Brown Reader

September 11 crystallized how vulnerable we are to terror, and showed what our enemies are willing and able to do. President Bush promised the American people that he would not stand idly while dangers gathered abroad. Saddam Hussein's regime was a grave and gathering threat that the U.S. and our allies could not afford to ignore because it:

• Possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, and was known to be pursuing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs.
• Saddam Hussein's regime used weapons of mass destruction against Iraqi civilians in Halabja in 1988, and against the Iranian army in the 1980s.
• The Iraqi regime failed to account for at least 30,000 liters of biological agents (including anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin), 3.9 tons of the nerve agent VX, nearly 30,000 empty munitions that could be filled with chemical agents, 550 artillery shells filled with mustard agents, and over 6,000 chemical aerial bombs.
• Saddam maintained a cadre of nuclear scientists that he called his "nuclear Mujahadeen," and aggressively and covertly sought to acquire equipment necessary to manufacture gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. After the Gulf War in 1991, we discovered that Saddam Hussein was several years closer to developing a nuclear weapon than our intelligence experts predicted.

Repeatedly defied the will of the international community that it abandon its weapons of mass destruction program and submit to U.N. weapons inspections.

• Iraq defied 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions over a 12-year period.
• Iraq repeatedly defied and deceived international weapons inspectors. The semi-annual weapons updates provided by Iraq to Dr. Blix contained over 600 instances of missing or incomplete data on chemical, biological, and missile related imports, and Iraq was cited for willful attempts to hide growth media that could be used to produce biological agents.

Sponsored and harbored known terrorists and terrorist groups.

• Iraq stoked terrorism and instigated violence in Palestinian territories, paying the families of suicide bombers $25,000 for attacking innocent civilians.
• Iraq harbored the notorious Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than 90 terrorist attacks in 20 countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans; and Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger.
  
• Iraq harbored Musab al-Zarqawi, a known associate of Usama Bin Laden who directed an al-Qaida training camp in eastern Afghanistan until late 2001. Zarqawi directed poisons/toxins lab in northeast Iraq alongside the radical Ansar al-Islam group, and his terror cell was responsible for assassinating an American foreign aid worker in 2002.

Represented a potentially devastating nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terror organizations that could have had threatened millions of civilians in the region and at home.

• With its weapons program and known support for terrorism, Saddam's regime could have secretly passed the world's deadliest weapons to terrorists. From information obtained in Afghanistan, the United States knew that Al-Qaida was aggressively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Was one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world, which practiced ethnic cleansing, used chemical weapons on its own citizens, and committed numerous atrocities.

• Saddam's ethnic cleansing campaign displaced some 700,000 people throughout Iraq and destroyed more than 2,000 Kurdish villages.
  
• The Iraqi regime had more forced disappearance cases than any other country in the world.Ø We are only beginning to uncover the truth about the Iraqi regime. Over the last four months, U.S. and coalition forces, human rights groups, and Iraqi citizens themselves have found:
• Mobile chemical and biological labs of the kind described in Secretary Powell's presentation to the United Nations.
• Nuclear arms materials, including documents and components of a gas centrifuge used for uranium enrichment, hidden in the garden of an Iraqi nuclear scientist.
• Mass graves of thousands who were slaughtered by the regime.
• More than seven miles worth of documents that are being analyzed to provide a fuller picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.