Recent US statements on whether there's a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda:
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Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld: 'I have no desire to go beyond saying the answer is yes.'
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President George W Bush: 'The danger is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.'
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Security adviser Condoleezza Rice: 'There clearly are contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented and there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship here.'
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Bush again: 'I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil and equally as destructive.'
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Where's the evidence of a link?
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White House spokesman Ari Fleischer: 'We have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members.'
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Rumsfeld: 'We have credible evidence that al-Qaeda leaders have sought contacts in Iraq.'
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Fleischer again: 'In the shadowy world of terrorism, sometimes there is no precise way to have definitive information until it is too late.'
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So who's more dangerous: Saddam or bin Laden?
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Bush: 'That is an interesting question. I'm trying to think of something humorous to say. But I can't when I think about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They're both risks. They're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that al-Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government.'
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What more proof do we need?
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
Read on:
spiked-issue: War on Iraq
'A link between Saddam and bin Laden? No way', by Brendan O'Neill
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