Saddam warned terrorists would hit US: tapes
(AFP)
Updated: 2006-02-16 08:47

Saddam Hussein told aides he warned America before 1990 that terrorists would launch a huge strike on US soil, even raising the spectre of a nuclear attack, according to secret tapes obtained by ABC News.

The toppled Iraqi leader is heard on the recordings he made in his presidential office during the 1990s, ruling out any such strike by Iraq.

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein addresses the court soon after arriving for the start of proceedings in Baghdad, 14 February. [AFP]

The recordings also feature members of Saddam's family talking about how to conceal data on illegal weapons programs from UN inspectors, according to ABC which was to show the tapes late Wednesday.

"Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well and that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction," Saddam is heard to say on the tapes.

The mention of "August 2" on the tape, which ABC said was recorded in the mid 1990s, appears to be a reference to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

Saddam, who is now on trial in Baghdad for war crimes, speculates that an attack with such weapons could be difficult to stop.

"In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" he said, but added Iraq would not contemplate such an act.

"This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq."

The United States argued it could not risk a tyrant like Saddam passing weapons of mass destructioin to terror groups, as part of its justification for war with Iraq in 2003.

No weapons were found, but those in favor of the invasion will likely cite the tapes as evidence that Saddam had in the past hidden weapons programs, and would be likely to reconstitute them if allowed.

ABC said the tapes were recorded in his presidential office by Saddam Hussein himself, and were provided to the station by Bill Tierney, a former member of a UN inspection team who was translating them for the FBI.

At the same meeting at which Saddam speculated on terror strikes, his former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is heard to say that Iraq is being unfairly accused of involvement in terrorism.

"Sir the biological (weapon) 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, Aziz said, according to extracts released by ABC news.

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

ABC said the tapes, to be broadcast on its World News Tonight and Nightline programs, also reveal Iraq's bid to hide information about weapons of mass destruction programs.

At what ABC described as a "pivotal" meeting in late April or May 1995, Saddam and senior advisers discuss the discovery by UN teams of a biological weapons program, the existence of which the government had previously denied.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel is heard to say.

"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."

Hussein Kamal, who was in charge of weapons of mass destruction programs, later defected from Iraq, Jordan, before he was killed in a firefight with Iraqi forces after returning home in February 1996.