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| Think at your own risk. |
| Thursday, February 16, 2006 |
| Once upon a time when we had inspectors |
I missed the Nightline episode on the Saddam tapes. But the news that was apparently made at the House of News Disney is that the former Iraqi dicatator is heard to warn America and Britain that terrorism was coming our way, including bioterrorism and other WMD related attacks, but that Iraq would not be behind it.
Interestingly, the tape, thought to have been made around 1995, also reveals Iraqi efforts to conceal its own bioweapons program -- a fact which only emphasizes the extent to which the U.N. weapons inspections during the 1990s were successful in smoking out those weapons and destroying them, such that by the time Mr. Bush decided to give the neocons their war, there were no WMD left to find...
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 Aug. 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.) The complete ABC News report on the tapes can be found here.
Also from ABC News: What's hot in the new Iraq? Death squads!
Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Iraq War, WMD |
posted by JReid @ 10:55 AM   |
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