Congressman Pushes Release Of Saddam Tapes

The American government is in possession of between 2,500 and 3,000 hours of secret audio recordings captured during the Iraq war, most featuring Saddam Hussein and his advisers.The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence says he wants them translated, analyzed, and made available to the public.In an interview yesterday, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican of Michigan, said he was planning on holding hearings this month, before the Easter recess, and was marking up legislation he introduced last week to force the directorate of national intelligence to declassify the tapes and what he now believes are 48,000 boxes of documents captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom.The move to pressure the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, comes as the committee has hit a dead end on what appeared to be a promising lead only last month. Mr. Hoekstra said that after the committee’s staff had interviewed former Iraqi regime officials recommended by a former general, Georges Sada, he could not confirm General Sada’s account that weapons of mass destruction had been transferred to Syria in the spring of 2002 in a converted civilian aircraft.“We have not been able to verify the claims made in General Sada’s book,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “We followed up pretty extensively. There were some interesting things. But we can’t verify the aircraft transfer.”Despite Mr. Hoekstra’s position on Mr. Sada, the chairman remains agnostic on whether Saddam possessed stocks of germs and chemicals and had an active nuclear program prior to the 2003 American invasion. He said yesterday that he was not comfortable in drawing any firm conclusions until he sees the trove of unexploited documents and recordings now being sifted through by the intelligence community in something called the Media Exploitation Center.In the meantime, he now acknowledges he is in a fight with the president’s director of national intelligence. “I saw Negroponte last week. What I told him was, ‘Obviously we have a significant disagreement. I am going to do everything I can to direct you to do something I know you don’t want to do.’ The only way I can get this to happen,” he said yesterday.Of particular interest are the 2,500 to 3,000 hours of recordings of Saddam and his top deputies. The existence of the stockpile of recordings suggests the former Baathist tyrant was not unlike former presidents Johnson and Nixon in his desire to keep a record of his decision-making for posterity.So far, 12 hours of those tapes have made it to the public thanks to a part time FBI translator and former military intelligence officer, William Tierney. Mr. Tierney gave those tapes to the president of the Intelligence Summit, John Loftus.Mr. Loftus advertised the tapes before his conference last month as a smoking gun that would prove Saddam intended to strike Washington with a biological weapon. But the portion of the tapes that include this segment only had the former Iraqi dictator saying that he warned “the Americans and the British” that a big terror attack was coming.Mr. Hoekstra said he considered the 12 hours declassified by the Intelligence Summit to be “of historical interest.”“I tried to stay away from whatever claims Loftus was making,” he said.Nonetheless, Mr. Hoekstra said he thought the audio recordings could provide a unique insight not only into what happened to the weapons of mass destruction (no evidence of their destruction has been turned up by American weapons inspectors, though they concluded that Saddam shelved the programs in the 1990s), but also Iraq’s links to international terrorism.One lead Mr. Hoekstra’s committee is pursuing relates to four sites a former Air Force Intelligence officer says were never fully checked out by the Iraq Survey Group, the American intelligence body charged with finding the weapons. Last month, the Sun reported in an interview with David Gaubatz that he discovered the four underground concrete bunkers in southern Iraq within the first four months of the war, but despite repeated requests of the inspectors, they were never fully exploited.Mr. Gaubatz said yesterday the House intelligence committee had conducted three interviews with him. He also said he has been in touch with his old colleagues at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in Iraq, who have expressed interest in the sites as well.“I provided the committee with the dates, markers and such for my intelligence information reports on the four sites,” he said. In a later e-mail, he wrote, “As I informed the House Intelligence, I will testify under oath about everything I have reported and discussed, will ISG members testify under oath that the sites I identified were searched/exploited?”

Congressman Pushes Release Of Saddam Tapes

Congressman Pushes Release Of Saddam Tapes

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