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.)

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Investigat...tory?id=1616996

 

This is definitely going to be a must-see tonight.

Wow. Just wow.

So in other words they're from the mid-90's, when everyone knew that Saddam was hiding things and before the time when we could actually say he was "disarmed"?

So I don't see what's so shocking?

So in other words they're from the mid-90's, when everyone knew that Saddam was hiding things and before the time when we could actually say he was "disarmed"?

Yep... dismiss... nothing wrong here... precedence CAN'T be set from past actions... deny deny deny...

 

*sigh*

No, but it's no smoking gun either.

No, but it's no smoking gun either.

I don't disagree... but at the same time, it is news to HEAR him say this stuff.

I don't disagree... but at the same time, it is news to HEAR him say this stuff.

I didn't say it wasn't news. All I wanted to know was if there was some suggestion in it of something new during the 2002-2003 period.

Saddam is currently on trial in Iraq for ordering the killings of more than 140 Shiite Muslims in 1982. One of his former military advisors and top generals, Georges Sada, has written a book titled: "Saddam's Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein."

 

Sada, who is a national security adviser in Iraq's new government, alleges that in June 2002 Saddam transported weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq and into Syria aboard several refitted commercial jets, under the pretense of conducting a humanitarian mission for flood victims.

 

A Feb. 2 Cybercast News Service article quoted Jamal Ware, the communications director for Rep. Hoekstra as saying that "the chairman has read General Sada's book ... He will meet with General Sada to hear first-hand him laying out the case that this transferal may have happened." The New York Sun article from Feb. 7 indicated that Sada has since met with Hoekstra to talk about the issue.

 

Intelligence Summit to Air 'Saddam's WMD Tapes'

 

SFF