| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes |
| 2006-02-07 |
| More background from the New York Sun, on a story they ran a couple days ago ... EFL. 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. He added, "Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again." ... Personally, at this point, I need ocular proof -- get your hopes up at your own risk. But I admit, I've got Feb. 17th circled on the calendar now ... |
| Posted by:Mizzou Mafia |
| #3 It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, bush is still a poopey head! Poopey head, Poopey head! And the democrats are going to lose the next election as protest against this outrage. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2006-02-07 21:06 |
| #2 *snicker* I find this all very amusing. The dems were cautious at first with the "now WMD's" "Bush lied" meme. Remember how they didn't take the bait for quite awhile. So the Bush administration gave them more rope. And when they got bolder - the Bush admin built them a platform with carefully worded statements saying that "much of the information they knew about WMD's was wrong". And then the election came along and Bush gave them a horse to ride, encouraging them to boldly put the noose around their necks. Apparently on Feb 17th - someone is going to spook the horse. Heh. Popcorn! |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-02-07 21:06 |
| #1 I'm also sceptical there will be any definitive answers, but Saddam giving the order to send WMDs to Syria is going make for some very interesting times. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-07 19:44 |