Where Are All The W.M.D.s?

Yes, that must be it, Mc...

"Let's hide our weapons so well that the Americans do not find them. We make Boosh look bad and bring the world to our side!"

Powell: No Question Iraq Had WMDs Before War

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that he has no doubt ex-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. attacked his country two months ago.

"There can be no question that there were weapons before the war," Powell told "Fox News Sunday's" Tony Snow.

"They have had weapons throughout their history," Powell explained. "They have used chemical weapons. They have admitted that they had biological weapons. And they never accounted for all that they had or what they might or might not have done with it."

Powell noted, "It was the unanimous judgment of the U.N. Security Counsel that Iraq was in violation of its obligation" to dispose of its WMDs.

In February, Powell told the Security Counsel, "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents."

Asked if he still stood by those comments, the top diplomat was unequivocal.

"Yes," he told Snow. "I've been studying this for many, many years. . . As I prepared that statement, I worked very closely with the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet."

Powell continued:

"That statement was vetted very thoroughly by all the analysts who are responsible for this account. We spent four days and nights out at the CIA making sure that whatever I said was supported by our intelligence holdings."

Powell also denied reports that Vice President Dick Cheney had pressured U.S. intelligence services to tailor their WMD findings with an eye towards attacking Iraq.

Last week, Britain's Guardian newspaper apologized for a report saying that Powell told British Foreign Minister Jack Straw that he feared U.S. and British intelligence on Saddam's WMDs would "blow up in our faces."

On Thursday the Guardian issued the following retraction:

"In our front page lead on May 31 headlined 'Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims,' we said that the foreign secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr. Powell addressed the United Nations on February 5. Mr. Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did."

Reuters) - They have torn down his statues and peppered his portraits with bullet holes, but Iraq's interim U.S. rulers have been forced to print millions of new banknotes bearing the face of Saddam Hussein. Officials sitting at makeshift desks in the plundered and fire-ravaged central bank building say printing presses began cranking out vast quantities of Saddam dinars last week to ease a cash crisis that has enraged Iraqis. The problem lies with the purple-and-yellow 10,000-dinar notes, worth about $10 dollars, that Saddam's government introduced in the last years of its rule.

... The Observer has established that it is increasingly likely that the units were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987.