From the New York Sun:
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 35,000¹ boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.
One possibility, of course, is that these revelations will cement the case for Saddam having destroyed his WMDs, completely dismantling any program that could quickly reconstitute such weapons well in advance of the US invasion—which still wouldn’t mark George Bush a liar, but which would almost certainly provide anti-war Democrats additional material to redouble their efforts at painting the GOP as a disorganized gang of thugs mired in a “culture of corruption,” beginning an ending with a President who took us to war “under false pretenses.” But even in the unlikely event this scenario is what the recording reveals, at least we’ll know for certain what became of those WMD he’d used previously (and every intelligence agency in the world, it seems, believed he still had), and we can finally rest assured (if we believe the recording to be in good faith) that those weapons are out of circulation. Which is good news for everyone—except perhaps Sean Hannity.
Having gotten that bit of speculation out of the way, however, what I really suspect we’ll find is some degree of corroboration for the criminally underreported story being told by Sada, the former Iraqi general, who has been appearing (mostly on FOXNews) the last few weeks to insist that he had personal knowledge of (and a hand in) how Saddam moved WMD in advance of the American offensive. The political reaction, I suspect, will be twofold: some quiet and some quite vocal triumphalism on the right (who, after having had to “concede” that the “main reason” for going to war in Iraq—as it was “sold” to gullible Americans by Bushco, themselves were so desirous of bloodsport that they “cherrypicked” and “manipulated” the evidence, even going so far, in Dick Cheney’s case, as to make provocative visits to the CIA which may have, wordlessly, “influenced” the final intelligence report); and, at least initially, silence on the anti-war left—which will be followed by attempts to throw doubt on the authenticity of the recording, then to question the motives of those who brought it forward, then questioning of the timing (NSA “corruption scandal”? Abramoff?), and finally, the suggestion that perhaps Saddam knew he was being recorded, and was simply setting up another red herring meant to provoke the US into a strike of (likely) Syria. WHICH IS WHY WE MUST RESIST THE URGE TO STEP UP OUR ENGAGEMENT WITH DAMASCUS.
Others, I suspect, will suddenly embrace the thesis that, though Saddam himself thought he had WMD, behind his back, the military was hiding from him the bankruptcy of the program; and still others will simply deny the authenticity of the recording—and would do so even were Saddam himself to confess, miraculously, under a Perry Mason-esque cross examination.
Either way, the WMD question may finally get the new airing it deserves; and if it turns out that Saddam was indeed able to get the weapons hidden away before the coalition’s (and Congressionally sanctioned) “rush” to war (how many months warning did we give him, anyway?—144 or some such? C’mon. Is that really enough time to move weapons caches?), then it will be the liberal Democrats who are put on the defensive, and deservedly so. WMD or no, the idea that the entire world intelligence community was mistaken—but that only George Bush was lying about their existence—has been a shameful narrative driven by a party whose leadership has permitted rhetorical excesses that would make Jesse Jackson blush.
That the Dem leadership within the last several months (before the recent and, to my mind, quite effective, White House pushback against progressive attempts to ossify the Iraq narrative as a bungle based on a lie) decided to step up that rhetoric and begin making claims that not only did the President lie, but that they themselves weren’t given “complete” access to the intelligence—a gambit designed to allow those who voted for the authorization try to walk back their earlier position in the face of a war that was becoming increasingly unpopular thanks to the Dems own narrative and the impassioned speeches of John Murtha—shows them in an even worse light: disloyal to a wartime CiC; actively seeking to undermine a war that it turns out was indeed justified on the narrow question of WMD (there were, of course, other reasons given in the resolution, but those have since been erased from the official narrative); and opportunistic to a fault.
If this latter scenario plays out (and I admit that the Dems’ continued aggressiveness on the NSA issue gives me pause, suggesting a kind of recklessness that one wouldn’t ordinarily attribute to a party that knows the hammer is about to drop), the political damage to Democrats on the issue of national security will take them years to overcome—especially as it comes during a time when they appear to be actively and cynically trying to embattle the administration over foreign intelligence gathering, a ploy that was politically tin-eared to begin with, but one that will become downright embarrassing in a new context that includes proof of WMD availability and mobility. Additionally, such a revelation will have the longer term effect of forcing the party back to the center, where a certain degree of plausible hawkishness might convince the American voter disappointed with GOP performance in social arenas that the Donks can, perhaps, be trusted to protect our safety and carry on the war on terror by embracing the Bush doctrine.
But the ‘72 Democratic revival show? Dead as a boot.
Either way, circle February 17 on your calendars, and have some snacks at the ready. Should be quite a show.
More from Dread Pundit Bluto, Blue Star Chronicles, euphoreality, Castle Arrghhh, Jawa Report, Stop the ACLU, and Captain’s Quarters
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Recent useful background work done on Saddam’s WMD / al Qaeda ties by the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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¹As Stephen Hayes notes in the 1/30/06 issue of the Weekly Standard, “To date, some 50,000 of the 2 million “exploitable items” in the possession of the U.S. government have been examined by U.S. intelligence analysts, many of them only for their relevance to the search for weapons of mass destruction. (The numbers are the best guesses of several officials who have worked on the document exploitation project.) There remain, then, approximately 1,950,000 items whose contents are unknown to anyone in the U.S. government.”
Accepting the fact that they were wrong and that Bush didn’t lie, will never happen in a million years.
After all, it would remove the only reason they still exist.
Dude. Please tell me–PLEASE–that the only source here isn’t the New York Freaking Sun?
What a great analysis. I think it’ll come down exactly as you say.
I personally thought going into Iraq was a brilliant strategical move – regardless of WMDs or not. But that puts us with a standing army right dab in the middle of the Middle East.
We can turn in any direction and deal with what we have to.
The only problem I’ve had with it is reducing the troops. We need strength and to hold the center (so to speak).
But seeing it like that means seeing it as a global war of ideologies rather than just paying back one group that hit us on 9/11.
I think the liberals are blinded to seeing the bigger picture.
I’ve heard Sada himself make claims of the airlift on FOXNews, but I haven’t heard of the recording until today.
I suppose if you don’t trust / believe the Sun, you could try contacting Hayes. I have to go out for a bit.
If the recordings are real, and if they prove Saddam disposed of/moved/buried WMD in the lead-up to the invasion, the left will revert to the argument they used originally:
It wass irresponsible to put our troops at risk from WMD by attacking Saddam.
if true, when do we get to drag a naked Sen. Jay Rockefeller down the steps of Congress and try him for treason?
from Captain’s Quarters last November:
<blockquote>Jay’s Bogus Journey?
A number of CQ readers caught something significant that I missed earlier in the quote from Jay Rockefeller. In trying to attack George Bush and fend off Chris Wallace, Rockefeller tells Wallace that he went out to Arab leaders to conduct his own foreign policy:
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No. The � I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I’ll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq � that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11.
Now, what the hell was Rockefeller doing revealing his analysis of American foreign policy and the direction of war strategy to Bashar Assad??
If this is true, Rockefeller should get ejected from the Senate and possibly stand trial for treason. In 2002, we were at war against Islamofascist terrorists, and Syria has long been listed by the US State Department as a terrorist-supporting state. What Rockefeller admitted was conspiring with the enemy during a state of war—and he should be held accountable, especially considering his admission of the act on national television.
UP
Does this mean I need to practice all that MOPP 4 stuff again?
We need Arabic OCR and machine translators, and perhaps a few non-Islamic Israeli translators just the keep the rest honest.
Jeff,
My gut feeling is that the perfidy on display in what is left of the top crust of the Dem caucus may well dilute the “all elections are local” conventional wisdom.
Ed Koch is still right: It’s not safe to vote for Democrats. Not if you are looking for an adult approach committed to countering the threat of Islamic terror. Lot’s of people, many of them Republican or Libertarian, have deep reservations about large chunks of Bush’s domestic agenda and the conduct of the Republican dominated legislature… but those problems are secondary when looking at the available electoral options.
Koch,in a New York Post interview quoted by Jay Nordlinger:
“<i>I disagree with President Bush on a whole host of domestic matters, from taxes and Social Security and prescription drugs . . . Nevertheless, the single most important matter to me, and one that should be to the whole United States, is terrorism, security of the country, security of the homeland, standing up to those who want to destroy us, and he’s doing that better than Gore would have, and I don’t know anyone who would do it as well at this moment in the Democratic party.”</i>
Nothing remotely in the way of thoughtful critique or honest alternative has originated from the Democrats since the time that interview was conducted. On the contrary, the few sane members of the Dem caucus have been marginalized and the leadership has spent the intervening time seeking any perceived failure, any manufactured outrage, by which they can placate their BDS base, at the expense of effective prosecution of the war we are engaged in – all in a pathetic, transparent, convulsive attempt to retain individual political perks and power. All at the expense of the general good of the nation.
All elections are local. Unfortunately for the Dems, that means that the likes of Dean, Kos and Co’s/MoveOn/Soros’ organized and activist minions may well have dramatic effect in primaries, but not to win general elections. Not to mention what has happened to fundraising by small contributors; they are for all intents owned by their fringe.
TW = “normal”. These are not normal times. Interesting in the extreme. Not normal at all.
They exist. I can’t say too much, but I interviewed for a job recently with an organization that specializes in this stuff. It’s out there. It works fairly well, and it’s getting better all the time.
Think about all of the pre-OIF paperwork that is being processed from Iraq. It is literally impossible to do it all by hand. And it is, slowly, being translated. In spite of some of the claims to the contrary. What we are doing with these translations is another matter entirely.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually linked to my own blog before, but… here:
And that’s the whole substance of it; the rest is just examples of how nutty the Democrats have been sounding all along. I resisted the temptation to lay the whole thing at Rove’s feet, but the more loudly they insist that of course Bush broke the law with the whole NSA program thing, and take the tack that it’s the supposed illegality of the program that’s important rather than how to do the necessary work, and continue to wax self-righteous over Bush as the only liar in the whole frickin’ world while every other person touting WMDs in Iraq was just taken in by the Bush Administration’s breathtaking duplicity (except maybe Chalabi – he was probably in on it)… well, it’s hard not to postulate a Divine Hand, isn’t it?
TW: I’d feel so much better if I knew one way or the other.
If we use a three-way split in the electorate, for ease of figuring only, we can remove the third that are “Red, and the third that are “Blue”, who will side with their side anyway. That leaves the final third in play here.
I hope you are right in your estimation of what will happen. I think that the Democrats will put it all on the line, with regards to the p.r. campaign they will unleash at this point. There is enough naivete amongst this last third that will allow the mouthpieces of the Party (MSM) to control the flow of information to be spun as yet another example of incompetence of the Bush Administration. With so much at stake, I can’t see any other way out for them. This, of course, is dependent on at least a semblance of a smoking gun in the presser.
There comes a point when each of us has to make a choice between politics or security. I chose security. Like many others out here, I won’t say that I totally agree with a lot of the local domestic issues that the Republicans stand for. But, I can live with those and deal with them another day.
I liken those that blindly follow the Democrats lead to something that just recently happened. The ship from Egypt. I read that the crew told many people not to put on their life jackets because it would scare the children. How many of those that listened died?
I prefer to where my life jacket, just in case.
Actually, I prefer to wear my life jacket, just in case.
Others, I suspect, will suddenly embrace the thesis that, though Saddam himself thought he had WMD, behind his back, the military was hiding from him the bankruptcy of the program
Me, I’ve long thought that plausible, given the nature of vicious dictatorships – and as an added bonus, it perfectly explains why the world’s intelligence services thought Iraq wasn’t disarmed; because everyone in Iraq either believed they had WMDs, or desired ferverently for their own skins that everyone else believe it.
I have always believed that the “intelligence failure” was not “Sadam destroyed every ounce of WMD’s and we thought he didn’t” , but that after the First Gulf War, they consolidated and reduced their inventory (it really doesn’t take tons of that stuff to kill every man, woman, and child in the U.S.) They stored their reduced/consolidated inventory in such a way it could be quickly and totally moved to a “friendly country” if attack were eminent. The intelligence failure was to believe that they still had tons of the stuff spread out all over the country in such a way they couldn’t move it all, and we would find enough of it left behind to prove our case.
The other failure was not to “secretly” intercept some of those transports into Syria. They were transporting tons of “goods” by land as well as air during the build-up to the war. We would have caught some flack about our aggressive act before war was declared, but we were already enforcing no fly zones, so it wasn’t like we weren’t militarily active already. And being able to show large amounts of nerve agents are partially assembled nuclear warheads pretty much covers our ass. We told Sadam to clean up his act and follow UN sanctions, and what does he do, outsources his WMD’s, and here is proof.
I had a chemistry professor, of all fuckin’ disciplines, say that Saddam had destroyed all of his WMD and that whole fear o’ Iran thing kept him from coming clean. Of course, Saddam had tons of chemicals, A + B + New York City = necropolis.
Kind of like finding 1000 tonnes of rifles and 1000 tonnes of bullets but, gee whiz, we still haven’t found 1000 tonnes of loaded rifles.
Hunhhh, gotcha.
Whatever the truth of the matter is, it will destroy the left, simply because you don’t put your faith behind genocidal murderers. They always disappoint.
But this is where we dance the Forbidden dance!
Yayyyy!!!!!
Jeff,
I believe that you forgot what I believe will be the most common response from the Left. Both index fingers inserted into the ears, the eyes closed and the mouth whining, “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
Great writing, great read.
Yeah, Dean, ‘cuz if it wasn’t reported in the NYTimes, it’s not true.
John Loftus is a bit of a nut. He was infamous in CA for giving out an adress on the air of a Muslim radical that turned out to be the address of a Joe Shmoe regular guy American. So Fox fired him and yada yada.
I do hope this is true, though.
Well, if I were trying to get a Democrat elected President in ‘06 – and thank God that I’m not – the absolutely first thing on my agenda would be to find a way to silence in the, ah, enthusiasts. Letting them smash the party into the wall in ‘06 might be a risk, but it’d be at least a calculated one.
And it would do the trick.
Turing word: months. Yes, we’ll see in the ones ahead.
I believe similar information remained unexamined until far too late after it was seized in the original Nosair investigation (he’s the guy who shot Meir Kahane, aquitted by a bunch of dumb asses of the kiiling, and was later convicted in connection with the 1993 WTC bombing). And it was a lot less to wade through.
The “whereabouts” of Saddam’s WMD?
Yeah.
Three years after Mr Bush’s invasion of Iraq there’s still no trace of WMD.
Yet somehow, somewhere, there exists Saddam’s WMD, at least according to the Weekly Standard.
That’s the assumption isn’t it?
That assumption is totally baseless, but what’s happening of course, is that in the face of failing public support, the GOP is still trying to justify the invasion of Iraq.
They are being assisted of course by right-wing rag sheets such as the Weekly Standard; who are interested in trying to find something, anything, that will boost the GOP’s chances of keeping their majorities in Congress.
The fact that the hacks at the Standard are pushing this wild-goose chase tells you how desperate the far right has become.
Fact, is, the Iraq War is broken and there’s nothing Mr Kristol, his employees or his allies in Congress can do about it.
Nice strawman, Carl W. Goss:
“somehow, somewhere, there exists Saddam’s WMD, at least according to the Weekly Standard.
That’s the assumption isn’t it?”
I for one don’t assume that at all. I consider it possible that they exist and were hidden elsewhere, like Saddam’s air force in 1991, but I must admit that at this point I’d be surprised if it were the case.
Or it’s possible that, as the left insists is obviously the only remaining conclusion, they were destroyed in secret, and Saddam was too proud/scared to cooperate even on the eve of the invasion.
What I can’t quite buy is that we could reasonably have known this, or that “waiting for the inspections to take their course” would have resolved the question, given that Saddam was still playing keep-away when we said the hell with it.
And I really wouldn’t want a president who could have convinced himself of this in the absence of any evidence for it.
Carl W. Goss, notwithstanding any disputes about subsequent subtraction, the top line of the devil’s arithmetic on Iraq’s WMD—the material balances as of the time the inspections stopped—isn’t a U.S. number. It isn’t a Weekly Standard number. It’s a UN number.
Bill Clinton himself has said that “it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”
Or do you deny Hussein ever had them?
My favorite was the hydrogen gas for weather balloon crap. You might have been able to get hydrogen out of that machine, but only in a Rube Goldberg sense.
The WMD evidence is there, it just makes no sense to keep trying to get an admission from folk whose whole existence depends on no WMDs.
Det. Carl Goss, Homicide. (/cue dramatic cop show music)
Goss: What have we here, looks like a dead body.
Flatfoot: Yes sir, her throat has been slashed.
Goss: I see, did you find a murder weapon?
Flatfoot: No.
Goss: Obviously death by natural causes.
Flatfoot: But her head is nearly severed, it is a murder!
Goss: There is no murder weapon, it can’t be murder. My work here is done.
(/cut to commercial)
Since Saddam Hussein indisputably had and used WMDs, and since he never adequately documented their complete destruction, I’d say that the prudent course was and is to assume that even if he never made another gram, missile, or spore, we ought not to assume that our inability to find what he had equals their nonexistence.
If we were talking about whether that frozen pizza that I could’ve sworn I bought a month or two ago is or is not somewhere buried in the chest freezer in the garage, “prudence” takes on a whole ‘nother meaning… but we’re not talking about pizza.
Whenever there is a choice to be made, some will suggest the other way was wiser. The failure of the democrats to show why their path of continuing to fail to react to stimuli is why they are out.
If I were trying to get anyone elected President in ‘06, I think I’d lose some credibility.
The Democrats, of course, don’t have quite exactly that kind of problem.
OK B Moe, where exactly are those WMD? I mean, we’ve been in Iraq for about three years now, looking here and there, and nothing’s come up.
So where are they?
And what does Stephen Hayes really know about WMD? How good are his sources? Hayes has no security clearance, so it’s unlikely he’s actually seen these documents he writes about, or could interpret them if he could see them.
It’s all political.
Don’t think for a minute Hayes is interested in an unbiased pursuit of truth. Far from it. He’s just a hack being paid a large sum of money to push a treasured Neocon myth concerning WMD.
The Weekly Standard will stop writing about the imaginary WMD of Saddam just as soon the GOP is certain of maintining their majority status in the upcoming elections. Then the issue will be forgotten.
Like I say, the Standard is keeping this nonsense up in an attempt to shore up support for the war and support for the GOP.
Nothing more, nothing less.
…and the left will stop denying the obvious as soon as they get an issue.
Carl W. Goss, all you seem to have, at the end of the day, is a thinly veiled appeal-to-authority and some other ad hominem b.s. So the problem with Hayes’ story is Hayes? Wow. Compelling stuff.
I don’t think I’ll be wasting any time on you anymore.
It is inconsistent with the total picture that Saddam did not have WMDs. Innocent explanations for a few discrepancies, but for all of them? Vegas loves folk like you.
Well, Carl, I’m not motivated by party politics, and I’m just curious how you can be so sure that not finding them means they must have been destroyed in secret sometime after we pulled out our inspectors in 1998. I mean, really, put aside politics: How can you know that? It seems to me that politics drives your conclusion that of course it must have been that.
To take just a small example: While our guys were poking around looking for chem/bioweapons, they happened upon the tailfins of some MiG-25s. They were buried in the desert in 1991, and eventually the wind carried off part of their cover. Strange thing to do; it’s not the recommended way to store a jet, the engines would probably eat themselves the next time someone tried to fire them up.
Now, if we’d actually been worried about Saddam’s regime possessing Mach 3 fighter-interceptors, and we’d been looking for them, that would have been one damn frustrating search. People like you would have laughed your asses off (of course he doesn’t have ‘em!). And if someone, for the sake of argument, had suggested they were hidden somewhere, even buried, you could easily heap scorn on him: Why would anyone be so stupid/illogical/irrational as to do that?
For that matter, why’d he send the rest of his air force to arch-enemy Iran? It’s the kind of thing we’d be sure he’d never do, except of course that we know he did it.
So no, I’m not clinging to my comforting fantasy (or my cynical ploy to support the GOP) that these weapons really weren’t destrroyed in secret, but were trucked across the border to Syria during the run-up to war. I don’t even necessarily believe that. But it’s not impossible, not even absurd, and I don’t see how it’s been disproven.
So while you’re taunting us with questions (where are the WMD?), let me pose one to you. That major chemical attack the Jordanians foiled in Amman, the one CNN reported them saying could have killed 80,000 people: Where’d those chemicals come from? (Hint: I don’t know, and neither do you, so quit being so damn smug.)
Sometimes you need to go with the odds. You never know which horse is the swiftest until after the race, but that is too late to make a bet.