It would be nice if there were tapes of Saddam Hussein saying, "I've got weapons of mass destruction.

* It would be nice if there were tapes of Saddam Hussein saying, "I've got weapons of mass destruction. I've hidden them from everybody. Someday I'll use them against the United States. Bush and Cheney are right." It would, indeed, be nice, but so far those tapes haven't surfaced. Still, there is significant news on the Saddam/WMD front. Newly released audio tapes of the deposed Iraqi dictator meeting with aides show that Saddam lied to U.N. weapons inspectors, and that he desperately wanted to keep the capacity to produce WMDs in the future. That might not be the smoking-gun proof of weapons stockpiles that some had hoped for, but it is enough to reaffirm the war's justification, which depended as much on the weapons Saddam might build as on the weapons he had already built. Unfortunately, there's one more issue: The tapes come with what might be called a messenger problem. The man who brought them to the public's attention is a former federal prosecutor named John Loftus, who in the past has written that the Bush family owes its fortune to the Nazis and that there was some sort of Enron/Taliban/al-Qaeda conspiracy before the September 11 terror attacks--a conspiracy that was, naturally, covered up by Cheney. Loftus, in turn, got the tapes from former U.N. weapons inspector William Tierney, who has said he relied on God, and, in one case, a friend's visionary dream, in his search for weapons sites. Loftus and Tierney are poor salesmen, but the tapes have been unquestionably authenticated.