St. Monk

It was, according to the Left, an illegal war, fought against a nation who had no ill intentions towards America. Here's yet more proof that they are wrong:

David Nason, New York correspondent
February 17, 2006

SECRET tapes recorded in Saddam Hussein's inner sanctum in the mid-1990s reveal the former dictator discussed the inevitability of terrorist attacks on the US.

The tapes, recorded by Saddam in his palace office, also provide strong evidence that Iraq's chemical weapons program was hidden from UN inspectors.

On one of the tapes, Hussein Kamel, a Saddam son-in-law who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, speaks candidly about deceiving the UN.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in a meeting with Saddam and his top henchmen. "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."

The tapes, broadcast yesterday on the ABC television network in the US, support claims that the 2003 "coalition of the willing" invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was intent on developing WMD and could have provided them to terrorists.

But Saddam is also heard telling aides that Iraq would not launch terror attacks on the West and that he had even warned the US and Britain that they were terrorist targets. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans and told the British as well," Saddam says on the tapes.

"I think Hamed was there keeping the meeting minutes with one of them, that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.

"What prevents this technology from developing and people from smuggling it? In the future, what would prevent that we see a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?

"This is coming, this story is coming, but not from Iraq."

On the same tape, Iraq's former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz tells Saddam a biological attack would be easy to arrange.

"It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000," he says.

Good. I'm encouraged. In fact, we should use a stronger medium to spread this news. Why not have the president include this bit of trivia in a fireside speech?

"This is not done by a state. An individual can do it."

The ABC said it had obtained the tapes from John Tierney, an Iraqi-speaking former UN weapons inspector who was hired to translate them for the FBI.

The CIA had recovered the tapes in Baghdad after Saddam was deposed in 2003.

Mr Tierney said he leaked the tapes because he felt they were "too important" for the US to keep secret. The US State Department had no comment, but Charles Duelfer, head of the US-led search for weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War, told ABC News the tapes supported the view that Saddam was intent on rebuilding weapons of mass destruction.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, said the US was sitting on 35,000 boxes of Saddam tapes and documents that were yet to be translated or analysed.

Mr Hoekstra said they needed to be examined urgently.

US officials confirmed the Tierney tapes were authentic, and that they were among hundreds of hours of tapes Saddam recorded in his palace office.

Mr Tierney intends to publicly release 12 hours of the tapes at a non-government intelligence summit this weekend.

"Because of my experience being in the inspections and being in the military, I knew the significance of these tapes when I heard them," he said.