Iraqi documents: Game Over
Documents Show Saddam's WMD Frustrations
On the one side we have anonymous sources and second and third-hand reports; dubious raw intelligence that some conservative bloggers have claimed as proof of Iraqi WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda. On the other hand, as this report shows, we have Saddam Hussein's own words to his closest associates.
"We don't have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.
At another, in 1996, Saddam wondered whether U.N. inspectors would "roam Iraq for 50 years" in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. "When is this going to end?" he asked.
Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon.
"We played by the rules of the game," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. "In 1991, our weapons were destroyed."
The inspectors "destroyed everything and said, `Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment,'" Saddam said at one meeting. "We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to (verify).Honest conservatives will now have to admit that Iraq did not have WMDs. I wonder how many of them there are.
"Don't think for a minute that we still have WMD," he told his deputies. "We have nothing."
