WMD Smoking Gun

Do you think the Left will admit they were incorrect? Remember all the hand-wringing about "he won't even admit his mistakes"? Will they do the same or will they find/create reasons that this does not prove anything, or even start in the direction of proving anything.

What is this?

ABC News obtained the tapes from Bill Tierney, a former member of a United Nations inspection team who translated them for the FBI. "Because of my experience being in the inspections and being in the military, I knew the significance of these tapes when I heard them," says Tierney. U.S. officials have confirmed the tapes are authentic, and that they are among hundreds of hours of tapes Saddam recorded in his palace office.
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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."

Now, is it not true that the Left has been droning on about there being NO weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Me personally I have been saying that the amount of time wasted at the United Nations gave Iraq plenty of time to hide, destroy or ship to friendly nations anything they had. (Has anyone yet found out what was in those three freighters that left Iraq just before we went in?)

A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, said information contained in the transcriptions of the tapes was already known to intelligence officials.

Hmm, you mean the intelligence community knows things that the general public does not know? Interesting. I thought it was not possible for the public to know less than the White House, CIA, FBI, etc. I mean, how else could the Left continue saying with such confidence that there were NO weapons of mass destruction and continue on about "faulty intelligence"? Is it not at least within the realm of possibility that the rap of "faulty intelligence" is accepted so that the good intelligence (and its sources) can be kept secret?

Now these tapes are a bit old. What can be said about that?

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the tapes are authentic and show that "Saddam had a fixation on weapons of mass destruction and he had a fixation on hiding what he was doing from the U.N. inspectors." Hoeckstra says there are more than 35,000 boxes of such tapes and documents that the U.S. government has not analyzed nor made public that should also be translated and studied on an urgent basis.

Yep, it does show a fixation. And why would some who lived with such blatant disregard for the UN be expected to not pursue fixing the fixation?

There is the other side of the issue to also consider.

"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 post-war analysis of Iraq's weapons programs nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey group report," she said in a statement.

Fair enough point...but I think that is a lazy answer as it does not address the fixation. It also does not address the repeated violations previously.

How is that Saddam would violate UN resolutions constantly EXCEPT this ONE time? This time he actually did get rid of all of his chemical & biological weapons and quit pursuing nuclear weapons. This ONE time he actually was pursuing nuclear technology for ONLY energy purposes.

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."

A couple of key things there. The Left ignores the "intetion of building and rebuilding" part. They also fail to answer WHERE did these weapons suddenly disappear to? There is no denying that Iraq had them, where did they go? (And what the hell was on those freighters?) The Right seems to glance over the fact that these weapons were not found. Now the WMD assertion was NOT the only reason given for going into Iraq (a lie that the Left intentionally perpetuates) so it is not highly relevant, but it is nonetheless a fact. (Can we please check those freighters?)

Iraq was not THE threat, they were the location of the threat thus making them A threat. The threat moved and is hiding with other enemies.

The answer. I think Saddam got rid of the WMD evidence before we went into the country. Which means that some other country has them (Syria is my guess, maybe even somehow Iran). That is what the UN's role was...delaying us from getting in there to stop the threat.