Just in case this is…

Just in case this is glossed over on the nightly news, here’s some new information on the Iraq WMD issue. Tapes and documents are being translated, and more details have come out today.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

“Uranium from Africa”. Gosh, that phrase really sounds familiar.

The documents also speak of burying prohibited missiles, according to a government official familiar with the declassification process.

But it is not clear whether Baghdad did what the documents indicate, said the U.S. official, who asked not to be named.

“The factories are present,” an Iraqi aide tells Saddam on one of the tapes, made by the dictator in the mid-1990s while U.N. weapons inspectors were searching for Baghdad’s remaining stocks of weapons of mass destruction.

“The factories remain, in the mind they remain. Our spirit is with us, based solely on the time period,” the aide says, according to the documents. “And [inspectors] take note of the time period, they can’t account for our will.”

Whether or not it was acted on, it was certainly planned and intended. But there is further information that indeed Hussein was in the WMD biz.

Mr. [Bill] Tierney [who translated the tapes for the FBI] said that the quote from the Saddam aide, and scores of others, show Saddam was rebuilding his once-ample weapons stocks.

“The tapes show that Saddam rebuilt his program and successfully prevented the U.N. from finding out about it,” he said.

There also exists a quote from the dictator himself, who ordered the tapings to keep a record of his inner-sanctum discussions, that Mr. Tierney thinks shows Saddam planned to use a proxy to attack the United States.

Of course he’d use a proxy. That way the anti-war Left would continue to insist that he had no ties to terrorism. Hussein knew his audience.

And stay tuned…

There is more to come. House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, told The Washington Times that about 500 hours of additional Saddam tapings are still being translated and analyzed by the U.S. In addition, in Qatar, U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters in the Persian Gulf, sit 48,000 boxes of Iraqi documents, of which the military has delivered 68 pages to the committee.

“I don’t want to overstate what is in the documents,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “I certainly want to get them out because I think people are going to find them very interesting.”

He said the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is now weighing the congressman’s request to release 40 of the 68 pages.

Of the tapes released so far, Mr. Hoekstra said, “Everything [Saddam] is doing is saying, ‘Let’s take it and hide it’ with a clear intent. ‘As soon as this is over, we’re going to be back after this.’ ”

The article goes on to cite the evidence that the WMDs may indeed have been shipped to Syria, citing satellite photos. Even the Duelfer report acknowledged this possibility. Because, after all, this was a murderous dictator we’re talking about.

Mr. Tierney said he thinks the regime poured chemical weapons into lakes and rivers and sent other stocks over the border to Syria. Mr. Tierney served as a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s.

“The ISG, they were lied to in a very systematic way,” he said. “Lying. They were very good at it.”

But will the press notice, and will the Left care?

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

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