Secret Saddam WMD Tapes Subject of ABC Nightline Special (Live Thread for Tonight)

CNSNews ^ | February 15 2006 | Sherrie Gossett

[jmc1969]

Secret audiotapes of Saddam Hussein discussing ways to attack America with weapons of mass destruction will be the subject of an ABC "Nightline" program Wednesday night, a former federal prosecutor told Cybercast News Service.

The tapes are being called the "smoking gun" of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The New York Sun reported that the tapes have been authenticated and currently are being reviewed by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The panel's chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), declined to give the Sun details of the content or context of the recordings, saying only that they were provided to his committee by former federal prosecutor John Loftus.

Loftus has been tight-lipped about the tapes, telling the Sun only that he received them from a "former American military intelligence analyst."

On Tuesday night, Loftus told Cybercast News Service that ABC's "Nightline" would air an "extensive report" on the tapes Wednesday night. Loftus also described an ABC News "teaser," which reportedly contains audio of Saddam Hussein discussing ways to attack America with WMD. "Nightline will have a lot more," said Loftus.

This year's Intelligence Summit will bring together top terrorism experts including Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of "Funding Evil," 9/11 investigator Jean-Charles Brisard, author of "Zarqawi: the New Face of Al-Qaeda;" former CIA agent Michael Scheurer, author of "Imperial Hubris," and Richard Marcinko, former head of SEAL Team Six, and author of "Rogue Warrior."

The Intelligence Summit will be featured not only in the Wednesday Nightline report but also on ABC World News Tonight.

[admiralsn]

Their news report ended with the statement: "But Saddam said that Iraq would not be responsible for any attack."

Another of the many reasons for going to war-- Saddam was dangerous and had ties to dangerous people.

[sauropod]

Honey, pls remind me to set up a tape for this

[Grampa Dave]

The uber liberal Eisner has been quietly driven out of Disney. The new controllers are old Disney types not the left wing hate America/Pro Jihadist Homosexual types.

On the 13th of this month Disney announced that it would be selling the ABC radio network.

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=business&id=3882788

Jennings died last year and the marmot hair piece wearing liberal of nightline has recently retired.

Maybe so changes are up at ABC TV. Don't hold your breath.

[petercooper]

bttt

[El Gato]

ABC is no friend to our country, and Loftus should be considered negligent or worse to give them the scoop

Perhaps there are other, more extensive, versions of the tapes floating about too. Ready to pop out and bite ABC in the Buttocks, along with the rest of the old media.

[rfp1234]

---""[T]here were no weapons," Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-N.Y.) recently commented"

Please explain your husband's repeated statements that there were.---

BJ will just say, "That depends on your definition of the word "were"!"

[rfp1234]

--If these tapes are real (and I believe they are) then why didn't the WH use them over the past 2 1/2 years to debunk the MSMs' and dems' attacks?--

Apparently the tapes were stored in a Baghdad warehouse for 2+ years and ignored, and have only been translated recently. The new info has likely been slogging through the usual bureucratic channels, and the WH may well be unaware. Many in the intelligence bureaucracy will soon have egg on their face (again) and would prefer that the tapes had never surfaced.

[moose2004]

"Many in the intelligence bureaucracy will soon have egg on their face (again) and would prefer that the tapes had never surfaced."


You mean Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson?

[rfp1234]

'' "Many in the intelligence bureaucracy will soon have egg on their face (again) and would prefer that the tapes had never surfaced."

You mean Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson? ''

Yes, we could include them, but sadly there may be dozens of additional anti-Bush "plames" or "wilsons",including whoever leaked the phony Al-Kakaa weapons dump story, one week before the '04 election.

[teeman8r]

can we really put any credence into tapes that are translated by former disgruntled saddam henchmen...

abc news reporter: what did saddam say just then?

translater: saddam said, 'i am fully cooperating with the un so there is no need for me to worry... more scones?'

[pawdoggie]

If these tapes are real (and I believe they are) then why didn't the WH use them over the past 2 1/2 years to debunk the MSMs' and dems' attacks?

Because the WH staffers are media savvy enough to realize that unless the tapes contain specific names, dates, times and other operational ("actionable") details of Saddam plots (or involvement in/foreknowlege of plots by affiliated groups), the MSM will (in their best, Harvard law-school professor manner) say that the tapes "only hint at, but do not prove, Saddam's involvement in....". So if, as may in fact be the case, Saddam and his henchmen are overheard talking about how Al-Qaeda or the jihadi network is going to blow up the Pentagon and the White House (two proposed targets of the 9/11 attacks), the MSM will say that this was an example of "Arab group think", that since both Saddam and the Jihadis hated the US Government, such a "prediction" was nothing more than an "educated guess", rather than gleanings from a terrorist grapevine of which Saddam was a part.

[muleskinner]

This A.M., I heard from a local reporter who also hosts a local A.M. talk show. The person just returned from Iraq a few months ago and said there are all kinds of CD's and documents that haven't even been translated yet. So it's about time something important finally surfaced.

The problem with these tapes are that they cover about 12-1/2 years, and there is a gap, naturally, around 1999 - 2002. (I was 1/3 asleep when I heard this last night, so some details could be off a bit)

These tapes should make it clear Saddam was actively playing hide and seek with WMD's and playing the weapon inspectors for fools.

[zook]

I think that everyone needs to realize that by talking about these tapes ABC is actually doing damage control for the left. Moments ago on their radio news, they made a huge point to claim that the tapes suggest that Saddam was innocent of any aggressive intentions against the US.

Other MSM outlets will soon be able to say, "old news, nothing new."

[theophilusscribe]

EXCLUSIVE: The Secret Tapes -- Inside Saddam's Palace
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Investigation/story?id=1616996
ABC News Obtains 12 Hours of Recordings of Saddam Hussein Meeting With Top Aides



ABC News has obtained tapes of Saddam Hussein discussing WMDs and the inevitability of terrorism, recorded in the years before the dictator was removed from power. (Jassim Mohammed/AP Photo)
By BRIAN ROSS and RHONDA SCHWARTZ

Feb. 15, 2006 — ABC News has obtained 12 hours of tape recordings of Saddam Hussein meeting with top aides during the 1990s, tapes apparently recorded in Baghdad's version of the Oval Office.

ABC News obtained the tapes from Bill Tierney, a former member of a United Nations inspection team who translated the tapes for the FBI. Tierney said the U.S. government is wrong to keep these tapes and others secret from the public. "Because of my experience being in the inspections and being in the military, I knew the significance of these tapes when I heard them," says Tierney. U.S. officials have confirmed the tapes are authentic, and that they are among hundreds of hours of tapes Saddam recorded in his palace office.

Watch "World News Tonight" for more on the secret tapes, and watch ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross' full report on "Nightline" tonight.

One of the most dramatic moments in the 12 hours of recordings comes when Saddam predicts — during a meeting in the mid 1990s — a terrorist attack on the United States. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well … that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction." Saddam goes on to say such attacks would be difficult to stop. "In the future, what would prevent a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" But he adds that Iraq would never do such a thing. "This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq."

Also at the meeting was Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who said Iraq was being wrongly accused of terrorism. "Sir, the biological is very easy to make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000. This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a state. An individual can do it."

The tapes also reveal Iraq 's persistent efforts to hide information about weapons of mass destruction programs from U.N. inspectors well into the 1990s . In one pivotal tape-recorded meeting, which occurred in late April or May of 1995, Saddam and his senior aides discuss the fact that U.N. inspectors had uncovered evidence of Iraq's biological weapons program—a program whose existence Iraq had previously denied.

At one point Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the man who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts can be heard on the tapes, speaking openly about hiding information from the U.N.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in the meeting. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct." Shortly after this meeting, in August 1995, Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, and Iraq was forced to admit that it had concealed its biological weapons program. (Kamel returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was killed in a firefight with Iraqi security forces.)

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the tapes are authentic and show that "Saddam had a fixation on weapons of mass destruction and he had a fixation on hiding what he was doing from the U.N. inspectors." Hoeckstra says there are more than 35,000 boxes of such tapes and documents that the U.S. government has not analyzed nor made public that should also be examined.

Charles Duelfer, who led the official U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction after the war, says the tapes show extensive deception but don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at the time of the U.S.-led war in 2003. "What they do is support the conclusion in the report, which we made in the last couple of years, that the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted."

Tierney, who provided ABC News with the tapes, plans to make the 12 hours of recordings public at a nongovernmental meeting — called Intelligence Summit 2006 — this weekend in Arlington, Va. John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor, runs the meeting. "We think this is a tape that is unclassified and available to the public," says Loftus ["I] just want to have it translated and let the tape speak for itself."

ABC News' Hoda Osman and Avni Patel contributed to this report.

[VOA]

bump for publicity...
and a TV Headsup for tonight's ABC "NightLine"

[theophilusscribe]

bump

[VOA]

bump for publicity...
and a TV Headsup for tonight's ABC "NightLine"

[angcat]

I saw a CNN headline say "tapes do not change facts on WMD" I was laughing CNN already discounted the tapes as bogus. I just scanned with my clicker and all I see is Hate Cheney and all negative news. Shut TV for night!

[FreedomNeocon]

Bah what time is this on, can't find it listed.