Saddam talked of WMD attack in U.S.

WASHINGTON - Among the treasure trove of information captured after Saddam Hussein's fall were tape recordings of the Iraqi leader discussing weapons of mass destruction with top aides. "We shouldn’t be surprised to see a car bomb with nuclear [material] explode [in] Washington, either germ or chemical," Saddam tells aides. "So this is coming,” Saddam says on the tapes, “but not from Iraq," he adds, seeming to indicate that Iraq would not be the source of any such attack. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11373537/ 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. http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=128343