If this story is true, and we have evidence of what Saddam did with his WMDs, that would be very, very good news for everyone. Well, almost everyone. The lack of WMDs is an ongoing embarrassment to the administration. The burden of proof is on them to deliver. So far, they haven’t. Maybe, just maybe, they can.

Congress’s Secret Saddam Tapes
BY ELI LAKE – Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 7, 2006

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.

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.” Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.

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.

As you would expect, the best commentary on this is found in the blogosphere right now. Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog has had it with the ‘no WMDs’ crowd, especially those that expouse those views from, oh, I don’t know…the pulpit during funerals.

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom rightly credits Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard for his work on this isuse. He has also has a great analysis of the potential fallout,

the WMD question may finally get the new airing it deserves; and if it turns out that Saddam was indeed able to get the weapons hidden away before the coalitionâ??s (and Congressionally sanctioned) â??rushâ? to war (how many months warning did we give him, anyway?â??144 or some such? Câ??mon. Is that really enough time to move weapons caches?), then it will be the liberal Democrats who are put on the defensive, and deservedly so. WMD or no, the idea that the entire world intelligence community was mistakenâ??but that only George Bush was lying about their existenceâ??has been a shameful narrative driven by a party whose leadership has permitted rhetorically excesses that would make Jesse Jackson blush.