Saddam Reportedly Warned U.S. of Terrorism

Saddam Reportedly Warned U.S. of Terrorism
By GERALD NADLER, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 14 minutes ago



Saddam Hussein told aides in the mid-1990s that he
warned the United States it could be hit by a
terrorist attack, ABC News reported Wednesday, citing
12 hours of tapes the network obtained of the former
Iraqi dictator's talks with his Cabinet.

One of Saddam's son-in-laws also explained how Iraq
hid its biological weapons programs from U.N.
inspectors, according to the tapes from August 1995.

The coming terrorist attack Saddam predicted could
involve weapons of mass destruction.

"Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans," Saddam is
heard saying, adding he "told the British as well."

"In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped car
causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or
a chemical one?" Saddam said.

But he insisted Iraq would never launch such an
attack. "This story is coming, but not from Iraq," he
said.

The State Department had no comment on the report,
which aired on "World News Tonight." ABC News said
U.S. officials confirmed the tapes were authentic.

ABC News said the CIA found the tapes in Iraq and that
the 12 hours were provided to it by Bill Tierney, a
former member of a U.N. inspection team who was
translating them for the FBI. ABC News quoted Tierney
as saying the U.S. government was wrong to keep the
tapes secret.

Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told Saddam on the
tape that "the biological (attack) is very easy to
make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a
bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and
kill 100,000."

"This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a
state. An individual can do it," he said.

Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam's, who was then
in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
efforts, explained how Iraq held back information from
the U.N. inspectors.

"We did not reveal all that we have," he said. "We did
not reveal the volume of chemical weapons we had
produced."

Kamel said Iraq had not revealed "the type of weapons,
not the volume of the materials we imported."

Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan shortly after the
tapes were recorded, and Iraq was forced to admit it
had concealed its biological weapons program. Kamel
returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was killed by
security forces.

Charles Duelfer, who led the official U.S. search for
weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War,
told ABC News the tapes show extensive deception but
don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at
the time of the U.S.-led war in 2003.

"What they do is support the conclusion in the report
which we made in the last couple of years, that the
regime had the intention of building and rebuilding
weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances
permitted," he said.

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