I suspect that they were, or still are, where you said biological weapons might be in Biowarfare as a Science Project -- in small labs that could be easily hidden or quickly destroyed. (And the CIA memo to which you linked in that story is official.) I don't think that prospect is too far in the future to be concerned about; it is quite likely that more has been known for quite a while than could be publicly stated, and certainly Saddam was investigating it, given his record of using poison gas on his own people.

As far as that goes, though I'm sure you're more knowledgeable about nuclear weapons than I, personally I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that one or more could be built by terrorists in secret -- they wouldn't need a whole bomb factory. (Years ago Tom Clancy wrote a novel in which this happened, just as he wrote a novel in which a commercial jetliner was purposely crashed into a building; he seems pretty accurate in imagining possibilities that the public wants to believe couldn't exist outside of fiction.)

It all depends on how one defines "mass destruction," I guess. To me, and to many people, killing off the population of just one major American city would be "mass destruction" -- would we really want to wait around for enough destructive power to destroy our entire nation to be developed? Did our 20th-century fears of a confrontation with the Soviet Union desensitize us to the point where anything short of all-out nuclear warfare isn't considered a threat?

Sylvia

Meanwhile, in Britain, President Bush defended the decision to go to war in Iraq, saying that Vice-President Dick Cheney had found new intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to obesity.

Safire refers to the article "Case Closed: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." and you should also read the rebuttal to the Defense Department's "official backpedaling" in response to that article, "The Saddam-Osama Memo (cont.)"

Safire concludes, " Intrepid journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case."

Sylvia