Advanced Custom Bookmark Query

Hey all,
I’ve been looking around here for a couple of days now. I know the codex wp_list_bookmarks, and I found Otto’s query below:

<?php
  $taxonomy = 'link_category';
  $title = 'Link Category: ';
  $args ='';
  $terms = get_terms( $taxonomy, $args );
  if ($terms) {
    foreach($terms as $term) {
      if ($term->count > 0) {
        echo '<p>' . $title .' ID = '. $term->term_id . ' ' . $term->name . ' contains ' . $term->count . ' link(s). </p> ';
      }
    }
  }
?>

(which i thought was pretty cool)
If someone has a way to accomplish the following, it’d really help me out:
I have a set of pages set up to use the same template (issues.php) Now, i have it all dynamically set up so that the template knows which page it is and it calls in posts related to that page (by a custom field selection) using a custom query. My hope was to have a section of related “outgoing links” on the pages as well…

So I need a way to query the database, check to see if there are links in the necessary category. If there are, create a wrapper div that will hold the list of links.

I hope that makes sense, Here is an example of the code i’m using to pull in related posts, I guess I need something like this, but querying the links instead?

<?php
/* QUERY FOR RELATED BLOG POSTS */
 $querystr = "
   	SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id)
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id)
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)
	WHERE $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = 15
	AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
	AND $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish'
	AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = '$issueCategory'
	AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value = 'on'
	ORDER BY $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value ASC
	LIMIT 4
	";
?>

<?php /* RELATED BLOG POSTS DISPLAY */ ?>
<?php $pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);
if ($pageposts): ?>
<div id="recentPosts" class="module">
	<div class="title">Related Posts</div>
<?php  foreach ($pageposts as $post):
... so on and so forth

Thanks in advance to anyone who can point me in the right direction