Thursday, February 16, 2006

The Saddam Tapes.

Transcripts for last night's Nightline regarding the Saddam tapes are here.

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.
[. . .]
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."


It goes on:

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."


I don't think the tapes reveal anything that reasonable people didn't already know. The one question that no one seems to be asking is how Saddam was so sure that terrorism was coming to the United States?

The tapes do not tell us why they were so determined to hide information for UN inspectors either. If you have nothing to hide, why do this?

via Redstate

As Redstate reminds us:

...the tapes remind us why the world believed Saddam was so dangerous back in the days before the main stream press and looney left started their campaign to revise history with the Bush lied meme.