Reply #3: Something about this is suspicious.

[Wordie]

The article says that the tapes were provided to the House committee by former federal prosecutor John Loftus. The article describes Loftus like this:
Loftus is president of The Intelligence Summit. Its advisory council includes generals, a former F.B.I. official, a former senior Israeli Mossad officer and the former chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, according to information posted on the summit website. Currently a private attorney, Loftus says he works pro bono to help intelligence agents obtain lawful permission to declassify and publish the "hidden secrets of our times."

And the OP quote also made reference to how this was a "smoking gun." Well, the obvious question then is, if this info only just now came to light, where the hell was it all this time?

Loftus has been tight-lipped about the tapes, telling the Sun only that he received them from a "former American military intelligence analyst." However, on Wednesday he told Cybercast News Service, "Saddam's tapes confirm he had active CW and BW programs that were hidden from the UN.":

...On Tuesday night, Loftus praised a Cybercast News Service article published on Oct. 4, 2004, entitled Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties.

The exclusive report featured documents showing numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans.

The documents also demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. The papers showed that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

If the tapes are the smoking gun (which implies that the evidence was not there previously), then what was Loftus doing way back in 2004, praising an article purporting to show the very ties that he only now claims to have found evidence for? This sounds to me like a guy with a preconcieved political bias.

This all just seems a little too convenient to me...