Secret Saddam WMD Tapes Subject of ABC Nightline Special

[igloo]

Secret Saddam WMD Tapes Subject of ABC Nightline Special

By Sherrie Gossett

CNSNews.com Staff Writer

February 15, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Secret audiotapes of Saddam Hussein discussing ways to attack America with weapons of mass destruction will be the subject of an ABC "Nightline" program Wednesday night, a former federal prosecutor told Cybercast News Service.

The tapes are being called the "smoking gun" of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The New York Sun reported that the tapes have been authenticated and currently are being reviewed by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The panel's chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), declined to give the Sun details of the content or context of the recordings, saying only that they were provided to his committee by former federal prosecutor John Loftus.

Loftus has been tight-lipped about the tapes, telling the Sun only that he received them from a "former American military intelligence analyst."

On Tuesday night, Loftus told Cybercast News Service that ABC's "Nightline" would air an "extensive report" on the tapes Wednesday night. Loftus also described an ABC News "teaser," which reportedly contains audio of Saddam Hussein discussing ways to attack America with WMD. "Nightline will have a lot more," said Loftus.

The tapes are scheduled to be revealed to the public Saturday morning at the opening session of The Intelligence Summit, a conference which brings together intelligence professionals from around the world.

Loftus is president of The Intelligence Summit. Its advisory council includes generals, a former F.B.I. official, a former senior Israeli Mossad officer and the former chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, according to information posted on the summit website. Currently a private attorney, Loftus says he works pro bono to help intelligence agents obtain lawful permission to declassify and publish the "hidden secrets of our times."

He purportedly has held some of the highest security clearances in the world with special access to NATO Cosmic, CIA codeword and Top Secret nuclear files.

This year's Intelligence Summit will bring together top terrorism experts including Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of "Funding Evil," 9/11 investigator Jean-Charles Brisard, author of "Zarqawi: the New Face of Al-Qaeda;" former CIA agent Michael Scheurer, author of "Imperial Hubris," and Richard Marcinko, former head of SEAL Team Six, and author of "Rogue Warrior."

The Intelligence Summit will be featured not only in the Wednesday Nightline report but also on ABC World News Tonight.

In a March 2005 addendum to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, ISG head Charles Duelfer wrote that while there continue to be reports of WMD in Iraq, the ISG found "such reports are usually scams or misidentification of materials or activities."

A limited number of cases involved the discovery of old chemical munitions produced before 1990, Duelfer wrote. He also reported in the addendum that a large collection of audiotapes from Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council meetings chaired by Saddam was in the process of translation. While he conceded there were "remaining uncertainties," the chief weapons hunter said it was "not likely" the documentation would provide "significant surprises" regarding WMD.

"[T]here were no weapons," Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-N.Y.) recently commented, "or if there were, they certainly weren't used or they were in some way disposed of or taken out of the country." Her comments were reported in The New York Sun.

On Tuesday night, Loftus praised a Cybercast News Service article published on Oct. 4, 2004, entitled Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties.

The exclusive report featured documents showing numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans.

The documents also demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. The papers showed that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

[obby]

I read this yeasterday. Here is another link to the same related.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200602\NAT20060215a.html

ABCNEWS PLANS AIRING OF SADDAM TAPES: Saddam talking with his advisors about hitting Washington with WMD, hiding weapons, etc... Developing...

Intelligence Summit to Air 'Saddam's WMD Tapes'

By Monisha Bansal

CNSNews.com Staff Writer

February 15, 2006

See Related Story: Secret Saddam WMD Tapes Subject of ABC Nightline Special

(CNSNews.com) - Reportedly armed with 12 hours of Saddam Hussein's audio recordings, the organizers of an upcoming "Intelligence Summit" are describing the tapes as the "smoking gun evidence" that the Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction in the period leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which according to the New York Sun has already authenticated the Saddam tapes, has reopened its investigation into the possible existence and location of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But some long-time liberal skeptics are showing no inclination to change their minds.

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, the Bush administration argued that the war was necessary as a preemptive strike because the Iraqi president had WMD and there was a danger that he would use them against the United States.

On Oct. 6, 2004, Charles Duelfer, advisor to the director of Central Intelligence on Iraqi weapons, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam did not have WMD at the time of the invasion and that the weapons were likely destroyed following the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. On Jan. 12, 2005, the U.S. announced that is was stopping its search for the weapons in Iraq.

But a four-day Intelligence Summit, to be held Feb. 17-20 in Arlington, Va., is re-igniting the debate over the Iraqi WMD. The featured discussion, on Saturday, Feb. 18, is titled: "Saddam's WMD Tapes: 'The Smoking Gun' Evidence." The agenda for the event indicates that the person who will speak about the tapes is at this point "anonymous."

The New York Sun on Feb. 7 reported that Rep. Peter Hoekstra's (R-Mich.) committee had obtained the audio tapes from former federal prosecutor John Loftus. According to the report, Loftus received the tapes "from a former American military intelligence analyst." Loftus is president of the Intelligence Summit, which is a yearly gathering of experts in the fields of counter-terrorism and intelligence gathering.

Jodie Evans of the anti-war group Code Pink, however, told Cybercast News Service that she does not think the Saddam recordings will lead to any new information. The government, according to Evans, has "said a lot of things for a long time."

"There's a difference between what they've been saying and what's real, and when they find something real, I'll comment."

Danny Schechter, author and producer of the film version of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception," said he is "weary of these intercepts."

"Nobody denies that Saddam Hussein did have a WMD program. The United States knows that, we have the receipts, we supplied some of the initial technology," Schechter said.

But the weapons were destroyed in 1991, after the first Gulf War, he asserted.

"The question is not, did he have a program, but did that program represent a threat to the United States, to England, or to anywhere else," Schechter said. "I would be hesitant about raw intelligence that has not been analyzed, but that is being used in a partisan way by members of Congress," he told Cybercast News Service.

"Saddam Hussein is probably one of the most demonized world leaders, with Dick Cheney a close second," Schechter added.

Saddam is currently on trial in Iraq for ordering the killings of more than 140 Shiite Muslims in 1982. One of his former military advisors and top generals, Georges Sada, has written a book titled: "Saddam's Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein."

Sada, who is a national security adviser in Iraq's new government, alleges that in June 2002 Saddam transported weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq and into Syria aboard several refitted commercial jets, under the pretense of conducting a humanitarian mission for flood victims.

A Feb. 2 Cybercast News Service article quoted Jamal Ware, the communications director for Rep. Hoekstra as saying that "the chairman has read General Sada's book ... He will meet with General Sada to hear first-hand him laying out the case that this transferal may have happened." The New York Sun article from Feb. 7 indicated that Sada has since met with Hoekstra to talk about the issue.

[igloo]

Saddam talked of WMD attack in U.S.

Tapes show him ‘almost obsessed’ with weapons, don’t prove he had them

By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit

NBC News

Updated: 6:29 p.m. ET Feb. 15, 2006

Lisa Myers

Senior investigative correspondent

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.

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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.â€

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.’’

Importantly, though, many U.S. intelligence experts say the 12 hours of tape does not solve the riddle of whether Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

NBC VIDEO

• Saddam says he’s on hunger strike

Feb. 14: Saddam Hussein said at his trial Tuesday that he was on a hunger strike. NBC's Preston Mendenhall reports.

MSNBC

“It certainly shows that he was trying to deceive the U.N., but it doesn't show that he actually had weapons in his possession at the time of the invasion,†says Bill Harlow, a former CIA spokesman and an NBC News analyst.

In the transcripts, one of Saddam’s aides discusses filling missiles with germs. “Yes, the intention is that the missile will be filled with chemical or germ, and when it comes down it will cover a wider circle than the traditional missile,†the aide tells Saddam. Saddam replies: “That’s good, they are teaching us things that will be useful in the future.â€

Other aides seem to discuss hiding weapons from U.N. inspectors. “We have not told them the truth about the imported material,†one says. He adds, “Where was the nuclear material transported to? A number of them were transported out of Iraq.†He also says: “We will confess, but not to the biological program.â€

The debates over Iraq’s WMD will likely continue. The House Intelligence Committee is pressing U.S. intelligence officials to publicly release more than 35,000 boxes of documents recovered in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., does not believe the documents have been fully translated and analyzed.

John Loftus, an author and former federal prosecutor, obtained the Saddam audiotapes through a former U.S. military intelligence analyst, he says. Loftus tells NBC News he will play the tapes this weekend at an intelligence summit he is hosting in the Washington area.

NBC News has not listened to the tapes and has not been able to independently confirm the accuracy of the translations.

Lisa Myers is NBC's senior investigative correspondent.

[igloo]

The New Documents

The release of the Saddam tapes should neither be hyped nor dismissed.

by Stephen F. Hayes

02/15/2006 3:25:00 PM

FOR MORE than a year, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has sought the release of documents captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have pressured Pentagon officials, cajoled intelligence analysts, listened to would-be whistleblowers, interviewed Iraqis and filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests with multiple government agencies. Today, because of two developments that have nothing to do with these efforts, we will all learn more about the captured documents and what they tell us about our enemies in the global war on terror.

Yesterday, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, released 28 captured al Qaeda documents in connection with the publication of a study called, Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al Qaeda's Organizational Vulnerabilities. The documents come from the Department of Defense's HARMONY database. They provide a fascinating look into the ideology of terror that motivates al Qaeda members and sympathizers, the conflicts among these individuals and groups, and their widely disparate views on everything from Mohammad Farah Aidid in Somalia to the late King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, from working with "infidels" to the terrorists' reaction to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Tonight on ABC News, first on World News Tonight and later on Nightline, we will hear excerpts from 12 hours of audio recordings reportedly made of meetings Saddam Hussein had with his senior advisers over the course of a decade. The full tapes, or transcripts of them, will be made available Saturday. The recordings are said to contain numerous references to weapons of

mass destruction and Iraq's thwarting of U.N. weapons inspectors. Already, some are touting the tapes as a "smoking gun" that will prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Others are dismissing the tapes as old news and insignificant. All of this before anyone other than a handful of people know what is on the tapes and before one second of any of the tapes has been played in public.

So let's take a step back and put this in context. Estimates from people involved in the document exploitation project tell us the U.S. government has in its possession some 2 million "exploitable items." Of that number, less than 3 percent--somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 items--have been fully exploited. The information that will be made public by the end of this week--28 captured al Qaeda documents and 12 hours of audiotape from Iraq--will provide a glimpse of a fraction of a fraction of the total collection.

A hypothetical: If the tapes are in fact authentic, imagine that they include audio of Saddam Hussein talking about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Does this mean that Iraq actually had these weapons Saddam thought he had? Not necessarily. One of the leading theories about Iraqi WMD holds that Iraqi scientists misled Saddam about his WMD capability. These scientists, according to this theory, lied to their superiors for fear of reprisals if their lack of progress on WMD development was discovered. That Saddam believed he had these proscribed weapons is not proof that he did.

Similarly, on the al Qaeda documents: The scholars from West Point examine the relationship in the 1980s between the jihadists from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and the former Iraqi regime. Saddam supported and trained some of these jihadists in his effort to destabilize the Syrian regime. On the one hand, this data suggests that whatever their religious and ideological differences, the jihadists and the allegedly secular Iraqi regime were not opposed to cooperating against a common enemy. This view is supported by an al Qaeda document that reports, among other things, that Osama bin Laden's chief deputy Ayman al Zawahiri sought assistance from both the Iraqi regime and Iran. On the other hand, another al Qaeda document sets forth "lessons learned" from the experience of the past jihadist-Iraq collaboration and concludes that such relationships can be counterproductive and are to be avoided in the future. It's all very interesting and it will be helpful to learn more.

What these documents demonstrate more than anything else is that the U.S. intelligence community and the Bush administration should make document exploitation a high priority.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

[igloo]

Furor Erupts Over Recordings of Saddam

By ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun

February 16, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt - Two former CIA directors have resigned from the board of the organization planning tomorrow to make public secret recordings of Saddam Hussein and his advisers.

In the last week both John Deutch and James Woolsey abruptly left their positions at Intelligence Summit, according to its president, John Loftus, who said their departure is part of a campaign by the directorate of national intelligence to punish him for releasing the recordings.

The reason both men gave for their resignations was new information they received regarding one of the summit's biggest donors, Michael Cherney, an Israeli citizen who has been denied a visa to enter America because of his alleged ties to the Russian mafia.

Mr. Loftus said Mr. Cherney was framed by the Russian mob as part of a scheme to extort him. Mr. Woolsey, however, wrote in an e-mail, "My only response is that I got new information this week about the funder from someone I know and whose judgment on these matters I trust. Based on that information I decided to withdraw. If Mr. Loftus is saying that anyone pressured me about this issue he is quite wrong." Mr. Deutch did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Loftus has promised that the recordings he will release to the public tomorrow will show that Saddam personally discussed a germ attack on Washington at some point after 2000. However, ABC News, which obtained the recordings from Mr. Loftus's source - a former U.N. weapons inspector, John Tierney, who was asked by the FBI in September 2005 to translate them - says otherwise.

ABC News reported that Saddam is quoted as saying, "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well ... that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction."

The deposed Iraqi tyrant, however, added that Iraq would not authorize such an attack, but speculated that a chemical, nuclear, or biological attack could be launched from a boobytrapped car.

he 12 hours of recorded conversations are part of a vast trove of untranslated documents, recordings, videotape, and photographs captured in Iraq during the war. Whether this information will be examined for clues to the whereabouts of WMD stockpiles is a matter of debate within the intelligence community.

The CIA, FBI, and directorate of national intelligence have resisted calls from Congress to reopen the hunt. But an interagency outfit known as the Media Exploitation Center, administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency, last month started its own search of these materials to attempt to discover the location of the weapons of mass destruction.

"There are elements in NSA and DIA that believe there is enough evidence to warrant further re-examination and a relook at all the material," a congressional staff member told The New York Sun yesterday. "This includes the imagery, documents, and human sources. They also think a more extensive debriefing of knowledgeable human sources and third party nationals is in order."

The quiet re-examination parallels efforts from the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican of Michigan, who is in the early stages of his own review. He told the Sun last week that he checked the authenticity of Mr. Loftus's recordings with the intelligence community and confirmed that it was Saddam's voice on them.

Mr. Hoekstra has also been pestering the directorate of national intelligence to translate and make public what he claims are nearly 36,000 boxes of captured documents and materials from Iraq that may shed clues on the WMD front.

The Defense Department now appears to be working on the directorate to make other Iraq files public as well. A February 6 letter from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to Senator Santorum, a Republican of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Rumsfeld is working with the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to release Iraqi files sought from the Harmony database, which catalogs material on terrorism secured since September 11, 2001.

Mr. Rumsfeld wrote, "You should know that Mr. Negroponte has lead responsibility within the US government for this material. As such we have been working with his office to establish the best path forward."

Mr. Loftus claimed that he is a victim of this intramural intelligence battle. "Why is Negroponte and the FBI trying to smash my little charity operation?" he asked. "They have called my board members saying you have to resign. As soon as the audio tapes hit Negroponte's office, they are told they have to quit."

But the reason Messrs. Deutch and Woolsey gave for their resignation centered on concerns about Mr. Cherney. The Russian businessman immigrated to Israel in 1995 after allegations in his native country swirled that he was involved with assassinations and other criminal enterprises.

In 1998, he was barred from Bulgaria for an alleged plot to assassinate the son of a Cabinet minister. The information originally was passed on by Israeli law enforcement authorities, who later rescinded the claim.

Mr. Loftus said he checked with his board last year when Mr. Cherney offered to make a large donation to Intelligence Summit and did not hear any reservations. In December, Mr. Loftus authored a piece for the group's Website titled, "The Framing of Michael Cherney."

A spokeswoman for the Directorate of National Intelligence would not comment on the resignations of Messrs. Deutch and Woolsey. About the Saddam recordings she said, "Intelligence community analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs, nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey Group report.

"The tapes mostly date from the early to mid-1990s and cover such topics as relations with the United Nations, efforts to rebuild industries from Gulf War damage, and the pre-9/11 situation in Afghanistan."

Mr. Loftus, however, expressed disagreement. "There is a candid discussion between Saddam and his top aides to launch a sneak attack against the United States, whether to use a nuclear or germ weapon. It is discussed that maybe we would have the others do it, that is an unclear reference. It becomes very clear, though. Saddam thinks this is something the Iraqis should do."

The Intelligence Summit will make the recordings public tomorrow at its annual conference in Arlington, Va.

[igloo]

The Connection between the Spring 1995 Saddam Tape and the March 2003 Invasion

Daniel McKivergan

Not that facts matter anyone more in the Iraq debate, but Nightline's report last night on Saddam's tape-recorded meetings, specifically the April/May 1995 one, is key to understanding the 2003 decision to invade. On the tape, Saddam's son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamal, briefs Saddam on his efforts to hide weapons information from UN inspectors.

A short time later, in August, Kamal would defect to Jordan. His defection would fully expose the massive concealment campaign the Iraqi government had conducted of its weapons programs. UNSCOM chief Richard Butler told to the Security Council “that a program of concealment, run at a very senior level in Iraq, must have operated successfully for over four years without detection by the Commission.” He added that with the defection:

mmediately, the entire basis upon which the Commission was conducting its assessments and analysis was undermined. It became clear that Iraq’s declaration of March 1992 was itself a fraud; everything had NOT been declared to the Commission; everything had not been destroyed.

From then on, the UN inspection team's conclusions on the state of Iraq's disarmament were to be solely based on "obtaining verifiable evidence including physical materials or documents; investigation of the successful concealment activities by Iraq; and, the thorough verification of the unilateral destruction events."

In other words, Saddam had to prove he got rid of the stuff to ensure that he did not just stash it away somewhere beyond the eyes of the UN. Clinton Defense Secretary Cohen explained it this way in 1998:

[inspectors] have to find documents, computer disks, production points, ammunition areas in an area that size [California]. Hussein has said, 'we have no program now.' We're saying, 'prove it.' He says he has destroyed all his nerve agent. [W]e're asking 'where, when and how?'"

Here's what UNMOVIC head Hans Blix said on the verification standard in late January 2003.

Resolution 687 (1991), like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq but such was often withheld or given grudgingly. Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.

As we know, the twin operation “declare and verify,” which was prescribed in resolution 687 (1991), too often turned into a game of “hide and seek.” Rather than just verifying declarations and supporting evidence, the two inspecting organizations found themselves engaged in efforts to map the weapons programmes and to search for evidence through inspections, interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations.

Blix also gave some concrete examples of the difficulty in verifying Iraq's disarmament without the active help of Saddam's regime. For instance,

January 27, 2003

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions…. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

March 6, 2003

The result, so far, is that no underground facility of special interest has been found. Although they may be easier to find than mobile facilities, they are still a difficult target and it is always possible that inspectors have missed a hidden entrance. Like mobile facilities, any dedicated underground CW or BW facility could also have been dismantled prior to inspection. UNMOVIC does not dismiss the possibility that such facilities exist and will continue to investigate reports as appropriate. Given the vast number of potential underground “sites” capable of hosting CW or BW production or storage facilities in Iraq, inspections in this area will have to be dynamic and rely on specific intelligence information….

The long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was neither shortened by the inspections, nor by Iraqi declarations and documents.

The fact the Saddam Hussein never complied with UN disarmament resolutions led Defense Secretary William Cohen to state on CNN one month AFTER coalition forces entered Iraq:

I am convinced that he has them. I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out. I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. We will find them.