The Saddam tapes

I'm reserving my judgement on the Saddam tapes ABC possesses until they release them. My biggest fear is that this turns out to be as fruitful as Geraldo's opening of Al Capone's vault. Things look promising, though:

At one point Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the man who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts can be heard on the tapes, speaking openly about hiding information from the U.N.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in the meeting. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct." Shortly after this meeting, in August 1995, Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, and Iraq was forced to admit that it had concealed its biological weapons program. (Kamel returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was killed in a firefight with Iraqi security forces.)

Tempering any optomism is this quote from an aide to John Negroponte:

"Intelligence community analysts from the CIA, and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their post war analysis of Iraq's weapons programs nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey group report," the spokeswoman said in a statement.

We shall soon see.