Audio Tapes May Provide WMD Evidence

There is an interesting development in the search for Iraq’s WMD as reported yesterday by Eli Lake of 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."

It will be interesting to see exactly what, if any, information these tapes reveal about Saddam’s WMD program and/or the steps he took to either move or hide them in the run up to the war.

This is apparently the issue that refuses to die for the simple reason that there are still many more questions than there are answers. Many have raced to the conclusion that the weapons never existed as if time alone was the determining factor. In reality, new evidence presents itself on a continual basis, and until it is fully parsed, the truth will never be fully known.

If these tapes reveal any verifiable information that can tip the scales in one direction or the other, it would at least be a positive step toward resolving this issue once and for all.
I think we can all agree we are much better served by the truth than we are by speculation.

Tags: Politics, Eli Lake
Iraq, Saddam Hussein, WMD, Peter Hoekstra, John Loftus