About Those Saddam Tapes
ABC reports on the audio tapes from Saddam Hussein's office that will be made public this weekend:
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."
These tapes are early enought that they can't resolve the question of what happened to Iraq's WMDs prior to the 2003 invasion:
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 U.S.-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."
The most significant point, I think, is that these tapes are just one item among tens of thousands that can shed light on Iraq's pre-2003 activities:
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, ... 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 translated and studied on an urgent basis.
The two heroes of this effort so far are Congressman Hoekstra and the Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes. We join in their plea to make these documents and tapes public so that the truth about Saddam's regime can be more fully known.
UPDATE: Steve Hayes weighs in here. I think it's fair to say that his view is the same as ours.
