WMD: The quote above is that of a former UNSCOM member after translating and reviewing 12 hours of taped conversations between Saddam Hussein and his aides. So what's on the covers of Time and Newsweek?
Funny thing about dictators and tyrants: Very often they are meticulous record keepers. The fall of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's Iraq all produced treasure troves of information. In Iraq's case, there were so many do ents and records that even now only a small fraction have been translated and analyzed.
Among them are 12 hours of conversations from the early 1990s through 2000 between Hussein and his top advisers. They reveal, among other things, how Iraq was working on an advanced method of enriching uranium, how Iraq was conspiring to deceive U.N. inspectors regarding weapons of mass destruction and how these weapons might be used against the U.S.
The tapes were officially presented Sunday by former FBI translator Bill Tierney to a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts in Arlington, Va. Tierney is an Arabic speaker who worked in the mid-1990s for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the agency responsible for overseeing Iraq's disarmament.