Eli Lake throws a log on the fire:

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.

Hey, don’t look at me.

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.” […]

The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.

“I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated,” Mr. Hoekstra said.

Go Pete, it’s your birthday . . .

He added, “Right now, it’s not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don’t fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, ‘you really ought to look under this rock.’ This gives me cause to take up the issue again.”

Funny what you find when you pick up rocks. They look creepy, but they sure are interesting. Get past the gross factor and it is amazing what you can learn if you are willing to work hard enough.

Captain Ed also weighs in at CQ

About the Author

Michael Tanji

Michael Tanji spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East.