Just a few excerpts from Powell's presentation to the U.N.

Intercepted communications:

Col: Peace. We just have a small question.
Gen: Yeah.
Col: About this committee that is coming...
Gen: Yeah, yeah.
Col: ...with Muhammad El Baradei [Director, International Atomic Energy Agency]
Gen: Yeah, yeah.
Col: Yeah.
Gen: Yeah?
Col: We have this modified vehicle.
Gen: Yeah.
Col: What do we say if one of them sees it?
Gen: You didn't get a modified ... You don't have a modified...
Col: By God, I have one.
Gen: Which? From the workshop ...?
Col: From the al Kindi Company.
Gen: What?
Col: From al-Kindi.
Gen: Yeah, yeah, I'll come to you in the morning. I have some comments. I'm worried you all have something left.
Col: We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left.
Gen: I will come to you tomorrow.
Col: Okay.
Gen: I have a conference at headquarters. Before I attend the conference I will come to you.

Now, I'm sure it's possible that there is some innocent reason that these military men would be trying to hide a vehicle from the U.N. inspectors. Maybe it was missing its catalytic converter, and would have failed a pollution test. Hey, it's just a conversation. But this pattern of concealment is almost universal through all of this.

Many of the slides in the presentation show a pattern of massive truck and other vehicle activity at about 30 sites just prior to inspections. Suspected chemical weapons bunkers and missile storage sites are typical of these. Areas were "sterilized," including in one case the removal of all topsoil.

The mobile laboratories that were found are a spitting image of the drawings Powell presented of such things. These are NOT balloon filling plants. I have researched such things, and seen the plants built by Marconi, and they look nothing like this. In any case, one would have to assume the intelligence services would be too stupid to recognize a stock piece of military equipment. The fact that the ones they found are clean may simply have meant they hadn't been used yet.

The entire presentation amasses enough evidence to make it very hard to come to any other conclusion except that Saddam was hiding weapons and/or production systems he did not want the U.N. to find. Some evidence is circumstantial, but as Thoreau once said, circumstantial evidence can be quite conclusive, as when you find a trout in the milk.

One can also look at the CIA report of October 2002, and Blair's dossier on Iraq, taken from British intelligence.

It is not necessary for me to reiterate all this. It speaks for itself.

Are some of the conclusions mistaken? Probably. Like I have said before, it would take omniscience to be error-free on this sort of thing. But some of the conclusions cannot be explained any other way.

I'm sure an enthusiastic opponent will leap on one or two of these mistaken items and declare that they prove the other fifty conclusion invalid, but that is not reasonable either.