THE UN/IRAQ: Proof linking President Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with Islamic terrorist groups is needed before the US or Britain can move to topple him, a former Iraqi weapons inspector for the United Nations said yesterday.
"If someone can make a case based on substantive fact that Saddam Hussein's regime is in cahoots with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or any other anti-American, Islamic terrorist organisation then Iraq poses a threat," Mr Scott Ritter told Sky television.
"This case has not been made," said the former UN weapons inspector.
"If you're going to link Saddam with terrorist organisations, there must be hard fact and to date no hard fact has been presented," he added.
The United States considers the Iraqi president to be a threat to its national security and to the wider world because of what it claims is his appetite for weapons of mass destruction and his alleged links to terrorist groups.
Mr Ritter said that if Washington could come up with the data showing the link between President Hussein's regime and weapons of mass destruction then he would stop saying what he knew about the extent to which Iraq had disarmed before April 1998.
However, British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair said yesterday that the threat posed by Iraq's policy on weapons of mass destruction was "growing, not diminishing." He said the September 11th attacks on the United States demonstrated the importance of acting against emerging threats.
"What we should learn from that is that if there is a gathering threat or danger, let us deal with it before it materialises rather than afterwards," he added.
Mr Ritter, a former US marine resigned as head of the UN Special Commission in 1998 and has criticised the US-British air strikes on Iraq as "bombing for bombing's sake".
- (AFP)