The Secret Tapes -- Inside Saddam's Palace, Discussions of terrorism and <gasp> WMDs!

[The Shadoe]

The Secret Tapes -- Inside Saddam's Palace
Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz
ABC News

Wow! ABC News is actually covering some real news!

They have obtained some videotapes of Saddam's meetings where he and his staff discuss terrorism and <shock> WMDs! Could ABC be admitting that America was right to bring Saddam down?

Also at the meeting was Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who said Iraq was being wrongly accused of terrorism. "Sir, the biological is very easy to make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000. This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a state. An individual can do it."

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.

And yet, some people still cling to the fantasy that Iraq had no ties to terrorism whatsoever, the inspections were working, sanctions were working and that the Hussein government had completely abandoned its pursuit of WMDs.