Dissecting The Case

(5 of 6)

U.S. officials tell TIME they have also obtained electronic messages passed between Baghdad and the group. "There's all sorts of signal intercepts that indicate communications," says a State Department official. "There's clearly a dialogue going on." Those threads, the official tells TIME, suggest Ansar had approached Baghdad to obtain help making biological and chemical weapons. But after that, the intelligence peters out. Did Baghdad help them? "That we don't know," the official says. But some U.S. officials say they do know Ansar eventually figured out how to make toxins.

Officials are also talking up the presence of al-Qaeda bigwigs in Baghdad. The only one identified so far is a chemical-weapons operative named Abu Musab Zarqawi, who stopped in the Iraqi capital last summer to have his leg amputated after he was wounded in Afghanistan. Iraq let him escape when Jordan sought his extradition. Since then, he has been fingered for involvement in the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan and in the London ricin plot. A senior Administration source claims that Zarqawi met with Saddam's lieutenants in an effort to acquire chemical weapons.

Officials say their information on this is very touchy, since some of it comes from countries not openly allied with the U.S. "Several Middle East partners have either helped obtain information," says a senior Administration official, "or they are giving refuge to people they are getting this from." One especially shy source would be the Syrian government. Sources tell TIME that Syria has given the U.S. information about contacts between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime gleaned from a suspected al-Qaeda operative in its custody.

But Powell will need to brandish some terrific intelligence to prove there are solid lines--and not just dots--between Saddam and terrorists. A knowledgeable intelligence official says whether Powell can provide sure-shot evidence lies "in the remains-to-be-seen category." Some officials say what they've glimpsed of the Ansar info tends to look convincing only to those predisposed to believe it. Says an intelligence official: "If they're trying to compel people, that's not the place I'd rest my argument." Some in Congress say it will take more than the one-time visit to Baghdad by a one-legged al-Qaeda operative to convince them. Democrats who have heard the pitch tend to agree with Illinois Senator Richard Durbin: "What I have seen is so minimal that it seems like a stretch."

Saddam and His Intentions

For Bush, this is both the beginning and the end of his case. So let's start where he does, even if it has become a cliche: 9/11 changed everything. Even the intellectual godfathers of the get-Saddam campaign admit that the terror assault showed America's enemies a new and more lethal way to fight and spotlighted how a rogue state--namely Iraq--with the resources to develop weapons of mass destruction might employ them. The abiding conviction that tyrants and terrorists would surely combine forces to attack America carried the Administration across a threshold.