No weapons of mass destruction? Bush lied? Read selections from the following article.

Tape bares Saddam's chilling admissions of war crimes
By JOHN F. BURNS, New York Times, Published on: 01/10/07

In audio recordings made years ago and played this week in his absence, Saddam was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, predicting they would kill "thousands" and saying he alone among Iraq's leaders had the authority to order chemical attacks.

In the sequence of scratchy recordings — some with the dialogue quite clear, some barely decipherable — Saddam repeatedly showed the ready resort to brutality that made Iraq a nation seized with fear during his 24 years in power.

One recording revealed, more clearly than anything before, Saddam's personal involvement in covering up Iraq's attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the program that ultimately led to President Bush sending U.S. troops to overthrow him. Talking to the Iraqi general heading Iraq's dealings with U.N. weapons inspectors until weeks before the 2003 invasion, he counseled caution in the figures being divulged on the extent of Iraq's feed stocks for chemical weapons, so as to disguise the use of unaccounted-for chemicals in the attacks on the Kurds.

But it was Saddam's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilian populations that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Saddam that a plan was under development for having transport aircraft carry containers packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each rolled out of the back of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

(Television footage taken in the aftermath of the Halabjah attack, which more than any other event focused world attention on the atrocities committed under Saddam,) showed the horrors: a father wailing in grief as he found his children lying along a street littered with bodies; dead mothers clutching gas-choked infants to their breasts in swaddling clothes; young sisters embracing each other in death; and trucks piled high with civilian corpses. "I ask the whole world to look at these images, especially those who are crying right now," Faroun said, referring to the outpouring of sympathy for Saddam.

U.S. Justice Department lawyers who have done much of the behind-the-scenes work in sifting tons of documents and other evidence gathered after the invasion of 2003 had never hinted that they held the trump card, judicially and historically, that the audio recordings seem likely to be.

I give credit to the administration for keeping details of the evidence about Iraq's WMDs secret to obtain a conviction rather than giving it up simply to silence Democratic and foreign critics.

Is everyone satisfied, now, that Hussein had and used weapons of mass destruction, or do you have to experience them yourself to be convinced? How long would you have allowed these mass murders to continue if you were President? So much for "Bush Lied." At what point would more weapons be manufactured and provided to terrorists for use against us? Did we have to know any more to be worried about our security and about justice and to act, while the U.N. stalled as its officials were profiting from Hussein's payoffs?

Are there any admissions of being wrong on this issue and apologies forthcoming or just more blind patisan denials?

Finally, where do we go from here? Pull out and abandon the Iraqi people again to terrorists and tyrants or stay until we win the battle?

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