An American Black Hawk helicopter crashed Thursday after making an "emergency landing" near the Iraqi town of Fallujah.
The US military reported that all nine passengers on board were killed. There were no survivors among the nine American soldiers aboard the medical evacuation helicopter that crashed about 2:20 p.m. near the city of Fallujah, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt. The cause of the crash was unknown, he said, according to The AP.
An Iraqi eyewitness said the copter was hit by a missile. "The warplane was hit by a missile, and we rushed to the area only to see a trail of smoke billowing up in the air from the burning chopper," eyewitnesses told Al-Jazeera television.
Meanwhile in Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged Thursday that he saw no "smoking gun, concrete evidence" of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, but insisted that Iraq had dangerous weapons and needed to be disarmed by force.
Speaking at a State Department news conference, Powell disagreed with a private think tank report which maintained that Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States.
"My presentation ... made it clear that we had seen some links and connections to terrorists organizations over time," Powell said. "I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed."
Three experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report Thursday that the Bush administration systematically misrepresented a weapons threat from Iraq.
"It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity," said the report by Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich.
Powell noted that Saddam obviously had, and used, destructive weapons in the late 1980s, then refused for a decade to assure the world he'd gotten rid of them.
"In terms of intention, he always had it," Powell said. Of Carnegie's finding that Iraq posed no imminent threat, Powell said: "They did not say it wasn't there."
(Albawaba.com)
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