Editor’s note: DEBKAfile’s electronic news publication is a news-cum-analysis
live wire, online round the clock seven days a week. A weekly edition, DEBKA-Net-Weekly, is now available through WorldNetDaily.com. Drawing on DEBKAfile’s unique sources, analytical talents and forward-looking insights, it is presented as a compact, intelligence-angled weekly package. It is available as a direct e-mail feed or via the Internet.
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are working together on the operational coordination of a potential terrorist nuclear attack on the West, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly.
Hussein ordered his top nuclear scientists to make devices in stock ready for arming earlier this week – the first time this order has ever been issued.
A day later, bin Laden declared: “… if America uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.” Asked where he got the weapons from, he responded: “Go to the next question.”
In 1997, before Saddam threw them out of the country, United Nations arms inspectors reported “credible intelligence” that Iraq had built and maintained three or four “implosion devices” that lacked only cores of enriched uranium to make 20-kiloton nuclear weapons. Since then, very little information on the types and quality of Iraq’s nuclear devices has reached U.S., British, French or Israeli intelligence agencies, but DEBKA sources believe it safe to assume that Saddam has since made up for his deficiency.
Hussein’s Nov. 6 visit took his nuclear program heads, including Dr. Fadhi al-Janabi, its director, by surprise. Middle East intelligence sources add that al-Janabi only had three hours’ notice of the presidential visit. He was advised that the event would produce the most important communiqu? ever issued on Iraq’s nuclear capability. Saddam arrived with two of his sons, Qusai, in the uniform of an Iraqi general and Odai, who edits and owns the newspaper Babil.
In covering the visit, Babil’s Nov. 7 report contains two ominous references: one calling the researchers and engineers of the National Nuclear Program “warriors”; the second, a quote from Saddam’s words to them: “When the human brain is alive and has a big objective, it will not be diverted from its goal when constrained, but will search for more effective means to reach the goal.”
Taken together, these references imply warm praise for the “warriors” of Iraq’s nuclear program for their success in developing ways and means of overcoming the obstacles heaped by international sanctions on Iraq’s road to attaining nuclear weapons.
The White House said it was taking bin Laden’s threat very seriously. DEBKA’s intelligence sources say it is possible that al-Qaida’s chief may have accumulated as many nuclear devices as Saddam, with only a part of his nuclear stock kept in Afghanistan. Some devices may even have been smuggled into the United States.
