Since before the commencement of the war in Iraq, the two main reasons to remove Saddam from power have been under daily assault by the Left, using the media to push their agenda. The Stop Accusing Poor Saddam people (or SAPS) have ignored every piece of evidence indicating that Saddam Hussein ever had weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist groups. The problem is that the SAPS drew their conclusions before most of the evidence was even discovered. In most cases, they decided Saddam was innocent for political reasons, and no evidence will serve to shake their conviction. Yet the evidence keeps piling up, as the SAPS shut their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears.

Twelve hours of tapes from a meeting in April or May 1995 are about to be released to the public by the International Intelligence Summit, a non-government, non-profit group that collects intelligence reports from around the world. Saddam recorded hundreds of hours of meetings with his subordinates, who probably did not know they were being taped. Documents and tapes were turned over to the FBI for translation, and tens of thousands of boxes full of evidence remain untranslated to this day. On this particular tape, Saddam can be heard discussing both WMDs and terrorism.

Bill Tierney, a former United Nations weapons inspector, translated the tapes for the FBI. He turned them over to ABC, which used a few choice excerpts from them in a Nightline special. The SAPS will be hard at work making sure the following quotes are interpreted in the way most favorable to Saddam. That only works if you listen to them in a vaccuum, completely forgetting everything else that's known about Saddam Hussein's regime. Keep in mind, too, that Saddam knew his words were being recorded.

HUSSEIN: Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well, I think Hamed was there keeping the meeting minutes with one of them, that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. What prevents this technology from developing and people from smuggling it? All of this, before the stories of smuggling, before that, in 1989. I told them, "In the future, what would prevent that we see a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?"

The SAPS would have us believe that Saddam was lamenting that his warning about terror attacks went unheeded. Knowing Saddam's history, keeping in mind that he rose to power as a thug and enforcer in the street gangs of Tikrit, and given the fact that he was training terrorists at Salman Pak at the time of this conference, this sounds more like he had delivered a threat than a friendly warning.

HUSSEIN: This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq.

Of course not from Iraq, the SAPS will say. Saddam would never plot a terrorist attack (since, they say, he had no ties to terrorists) using biological or chemical weapons (that they believe he never had). Saddam knew "the story" would not come from Iraq... because the use of terrorist groups affords a rogue nation a certain "plausible deniability." Keep this in mind as you read the next statement:

AZIZ: Sir, the biological is very easy to make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a germ bottle and drop it into a septic tank and kill 100,000. This is not done by a state, no need to accuse a state, an individual can do it. Even an American in a house, close to the White House, I mean, they don't have a logical argument.

According to the SAPS, this would indicate that Tariq Aziz was worried someone might accuse Iraq, should some unknown third party use biological or chemical weapons in a terrorist attack. When one considers that Iraq's biological weapons program was still in secret operation at this time, Aziz was most likely reassuring Saddam that a biological terrorist attack could not be traced back to Iraq.

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, spoke of Iraq's WMD programs. Keep in mind that since 1991, Iraq had been ordered several times to turn over all of its WMDs, including related materials and equipment, to the UN for verified destruction. Holding anything back was a violation of all resolutions back to UNSC#687, and a valid reason to terminate the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War.

HUSSEIN KAMEL: We did not reveal all that we have... Not the type of the 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. They don't know any of this. We did not say we used them on Iran. We did not reveal the volume of the chemical weapons that we had produced. We did not reveal the type of the chemical weapons. We did not reveal the truth about the volume of the imported materials. Therefore sir, if they want to create problems, I see that our argument now is that biological is everything. No, sir, I disagree and I have to be candid in front of your Excellency. I substantially disagree on this issue. They want it item by item. For the time being, they are not raising all of them with us and we did not declare. I will come back, sir, to the question of whether is it better for us to declare or to stay? In the nuclear, sir, in the biological, we also disagree with them. Not the 17 tons, no. We have a disagreement which is essential and known. We know it ourselves.

Kamel may have been referring to the 17 tons of anthrax growth media that UNSCOM still listed as unaccounted for after Kamel himself revealed the bioweapons program upon his defection later that year. The SAPS will, of course, say that it was the UN's duty to ferret illegal weapons out, and that it was Saddam's "right" to hide and dissemble. In fact, Iraq was originally given three months to disclose and surrender everything relating to biological, chemical and nuclear programs. Four years later, Saddam's henchmen were still playing hide-and-seek. Saddam never had any intention of complying with his responsibilities, as this short exchange clearly shows.

Eight years after that, following a tragically successful terrorist attack on US soil, it became clear that we couldn't keep waiting upon the whims of dictators. Don't let the SAPS bleat about the "rush to war" and repeat that "Bush lied" about WMDs and ties to terrorists. Saddam Hussein could have easily stopped the slow crawl towards war at any time, had he been willing to come clean. Instead, he appears to have wasted the time of his "final opportunity" to hide and smuggle his illegal weapons out of the country.

What information remains hidden in the tons of documentation that haven't yet been translated? As more information comes to light, the removal of Saddam from power looks more than ever like the right thing to do.

18 Feb 06 UPDATE: It seems Bill Tierney has some complaints to make about ABC's handling of the tapes. ABC discarded Tierney's translation in favor of a "less threatening" version of Saddam's word. "He was discussing his intent to use chemical weapons against the United States and use proxies so it could not be traced back to Iraq," Tierney told FNC and ABC show host Sean Hannity. ABC also decided not to air a segment in which Saddam says, "In the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. What if we consider this technique, with smuggling?"