Posted on 02/15/2006 12:24:52 PM PST by jmc1969
ABC news has obtained 12 hours of tape recordings of Saddam Hussein meeting with top aides during the 1990's, apparently recorded in the Baghdad version of the Oval Office.
The tapes were provided to ABC News by Bill Tierney, a former member of an UN inspection team who was translating them for the FBI. He says 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 know the significance of these tapes when I heard them" said Tierney. U.S. officials confirm the tapes are authentic and are among hundreds of hours of tapes Saddam recorded in his palace office.
One of the most dramatic moments on the 12 hours of tape 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 2nd 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 says 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 UN 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 UN inspectors had uncovered evidence of Iraq's Biological Weapons program—a program the existence of which 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 UN.
"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.)
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., 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 UN 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 US 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 tapes public at a non-governmental meeting this weekend in Arlington, Va., known as "Intelligence Summit 2006," which is run by former federal prosecutor John Loftus. "We think this is a tape that is unclassified and available to the public. We just want to have it translated and let the tapes speak for itself. [I] just want to have it translated and let the tapes speak for itself."
And still the media hounds Libby over the Plame "leak".
Never fear, ABC and the msm will put their own spin of, "it doesn't prove Iraq had WMD at the start of the war".
I'll wait until I see the transcripts, but it sounds like there's not much on these tapes and that ABC and the others are just trying to make money off of them.
However, I wonder what's on all those other tapes that are classified?
You have to get to the fourth paragraph in ABC's press release before you find out that Saddam was hiding his WMD projects. The spin is already beginning. "These tapes do not prove that Saddam had WMD's."
uhhhh...what, put the boxes of tapes and documents on display??? show and tell??? "here's what we have folks, not sure what it is, but we have it by gum!"
I thought the Duelfer report--and all Lefties-- concluded that Saddam's WMD were destroyed following the 1991 Gulf War. Now, he's forced to admit that as late as 1996, there were still WMD in Iraq.
The ever-moving goalposts to support liberal claims and CYA from people like Duelfer.
Wasn't Tierney one of the WMD specialist we sent over (Kaye being the other). If this stuff is being withheld by the CIA or other intelligence agencies, then the Bush Admins feelings about being screwed by them isn't paranoia as the NYT likes to portray.
This is going to be about "nuance". The WMD were there before they weren't. Well if they were there, where are they now?
To the RAT, that is an irrelevant statement because, if "where are they now" means Syria, then why did we attack Iraq? Every RAT pol will come out of the closet and say, "see? we told you they had them but got rid of them before we attacked."
Buried in the last paragraph will be something about Saddam wanting to reconstitute the programs and dig up all the crap he hid.
Bump!
bump
Truly, this is all that REALLY matters.
Whatever became of the "original" WMD -- destroyed, buried or sent to Syria -- he full intended to produce more when the heat was off.
This was the key finding in Duelfer's report ... which explains why it was ignored.
That is, "At least, it won't be traceable to Iraq..."
EXACTLY!
Exactly! And that is exactly what the democrats wanted to do, "contain" Saddam, then call off the inspectors, which of course would free him up to plan and carry out a WMD attack against us.
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