Saturday, March 04, 2006

In one particularly chilling passage of the tape recordings, the dictator discusses the threat of WMD terrorism to the United States

Saddam Hussein had a habit of tape-recording meetings with top aides
writes the Wall Street Journal.
The former U.N. weapons inspector and experienced Arabic translator recently went public with 12 hours (out of a reported total of 3,000) of recordings in which we hear Saddam discuss with the likes of Tariq Aziz the process of deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors and his view that Iraq's conflict with the U.S. didn't end with the first Gulf War.

In one particularly chilling passage, the dictator discusses the threat of WMD terrorism to the United States and the difficulty anyone would have tracing it back to a state. With the 2001 anthrax attacks still unsolved, that strikes us as bigger news than the DNI or most editors apparently considered it.

In another disclosure, The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes was told by about a dozen officials that Harmony documents describe in detail how Saddam trained thousands of Islamic radicals in the waning years of his regime. So much for the judgments of many in the intelligence community--including Paul Pillar, the latest ex-spook to go public with his antiwar message--that the secular Saddam would never consort with such religious types.

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