News today that we have 12 hours of Saddam Hussein voice recordings that may confirm the existence of WMD’s and may even tell us what happened to them:
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam’s voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.
Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization’s Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings “will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important – and controversial – weapons of mass destruction questions.” Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.
The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.
Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general “should not just be discounted.” Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee – Iraqis and Americans – who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.
“I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated,” Mr. Hoekstra said.
I wonder if these recordings are part of the documents Stephen Hayes spoke out recently.
Would it surprise anyone to know that the CIA had screwed things up once again in it’s post-war intelligence analysis. Hell, with what we have found out recently regarding the rogue elements in the CIA, the screw up could have been intentional to make Bush look bad.
Taken together with Iraqi Gen. Georges Sada testimony that 56 flights of gutted planes were made from Iraq to Damascus all carrying WMD’s and you have the makings of a big story. Everyone and their mother knew he had WMD’s, even the lefties know he had them, they just can’t admit it since they can NEVER admit Bush was right on anything. The ‘Bush Lied – NO WMD’s” mantra is something that the democrats can not and will not concede no matter what the evidence. We could have Saddam standing up and telling the world he had WMD’s and they would not believe him.
Either way, this may not be THE smoking gun, but if exiled Syrian Vice President Abdul AL Halim Khaddam is talking and verifies that Saddam moved these weapons to his country, then the Democrats can kiss power goodbye for a LONG time to come.
Now onto the negative regarding this story: John Loftus. He is someone who has flip-flopped almost as much as Kerry so until we get another source I am not getting that excited.
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Thanks for the heads-up. I just heard it on the radio by a caller. It was 4:23 am when I heard it. No, I did not get up early. I’ve been up since 10pm and just had lunch. LOL. Have a great day.