Earlier today Sen. Barbara Boxer scolded Condi Rice:
Boxer, who was one of Rice’s most persistent critics during a contentious confirmation process last year, also recalled Rice’s warning before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the world could not afford to let the “smoking gun” of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction become a “mushroom cloud.”
“That was a farce and the truth is coming out,” Boxer said.
Why yes it is Barbi…
ABC news is going to air some of the 12 hours of tapes it has in it’s possession of Saddam talking about his WMD’s, amongst other things:
WASHINGTON – Among the treasure trove of information captured after Saddam Hussein’s fall were tape recordings of the Iraqi leader discussing weapons of mass destruction with top aides.
Transcripts of Saddam’s tapes reviewed by NBC News show him ruminating about future terror attacks in the United States using weapons of mass destruction.
“We shouldn’t be surprised to see a car bomb with nuclear [material] explode [in] Washington, either germ or chemical,” Saddam tells aides. “So this is coming,” Saddam says on the tapes, “but not from Iraq,” he adds, seeming to indicate that Iraq would not be the source of any such attack.
An unidentified Saddam aide replies that biological weapons are easy to construct: “… any biologist can make it in water tank and kill 100,000 person … so you can’t accuse a country, one person can do it. One American person can do it in a house, next to the White House.”
On another tape, Saddam says future terrorism will be with WMD. “It is possible in the future to see a booby trap and the explosion turns out to be nuclear, germ or chemical.”
U.S. intelligence analysts have confirmed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Saddam’s voice on the audiotapes is authentic. The analysts believe most of the tapes were recorded in the ’90s, after the first Gulf War.
“What the tapes show is that between the first gulf war and the second gulf war, Saddam Hussein had not lost his appetite for, or interest in, weapons of mass destruction,” says Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project, an advocacy group working to slow the spread of weapons of mass destruction. “To the contrary, he was almost obsessed by them.”
Yes, these do not answer the question about whether he had the WMD’s in 2003, but they sure do bolster the case that Bush had about this guy. They show he wanted to hide these things from inspectors:
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.)
And they also bolster Charles Duelfer’s report in which he stated Saddam appeared to be ready at a moments notice to start producing these WMD’s once again:
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.”
These tapes are obviously not a smoking gun that he had the WMD’s immediately prior to our invasion, but they can most certainly be used as evidence that Saddam intended to keep his WMD’s, even going so far as to hide them from inspectors (shocker!). So, he suddenly decided a few years later to get rid of them? Um, sure thing.
Don’t forget that there is still over 2 million documents to be translated. Documents found after the invasion that belonged to the former Iraqi regime. Stephen Hayes described them during a radio interview in December:
Scott – It’s just very frustrating because these titles raise a lot of questions and beg for more investigation into what?s behind them. We talked about one of these titles about this secret meeting 10 months before 9/11, give me some other examples of documents that you?re seeking, what we know about them anyway.
Stephen – Well, there any number of documents, one of them has to do with, a document that?s titled “Iraqi intelligence service request to move persons, prisoners, and the VIP’s to private residences.” and the date of that document is December of 2002 so 3 months, more or less, before the US attack began. There’s another one that’s called “Intelligence coded memo by two Iraqi intelligence officers containing info on various topics, weapons, boat, Palestinian?s training in Iraq, etc.” and then the short description that I got for that particular document which is dated March of 2002 says “Lists Palestinian?s trained in Iraq.” which if true certainly, we knew that Saddam was supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad and a variety of other Islamist groups but if we have actual rosters of these people, that could be helpful in a very actionable both whether we’re talking about in the Middle East or we’re talking about in Israel or we’re talking about people who might be fighting in Iraq today. It would certainly be helpful to know who they were, where they were trained, what their background was, etc.
More on these documents here and here.
How about the recent admissions from Saddam’s Air Force General:
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein?s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
In any jury trial you take the totality of the evidence and present it to the jury. The totality of the evidence so far would definitely cause a reasonable person to concede that yes, Saddam had WMD’s. Key word there is “reasonable person” which we all know does not include lefties.
So I guess the answer Condi should have given to Mrs. Dimbulb should have been “yes, the truth is coming out, and very soon.”
The left will cook up something to try to discredit the documents and tapes that will be forthcoming in the future. Claim they are all the brainchild of Rove or something. Hell, Newsweek rushed a article to print to point out what’s wrong with these tapes:
But intel agencies are skeptical. The tapes were taken without permission from an FBI-run translation center, officials say, and are years old. Two government officials, requesting anonymity because of the sensitive subject, say the tapes in no way prove that WMD stockpiles or programs existed at the time of the U.S. invasion or were moved to another country before U.S. troops arrived.
Curious how the MSM rushes to the defense of Saddam but went out of it’s way this week to nail Cheney to the cross. But I digress.
But those of us who have kept our braincells intact will know the truth.
I’ll end this with a couple great points made by Ace:
* When Saddam said he didn’t have WMD’s, the Left believed him, and called him truthful and Bush a liar.
* When Saddam said he did have WMD’s, the Left didn’t believe him, and called him a liar and Bush (who has admitted that Saddam seemed to have no stockpiles in Iraq) truthful.
It’s getting kinda confusing.
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