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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, (web site) 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 (web site) 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. (web site) 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.

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