This morning the New York Sun has a new report on the so-called “Saddam Tapes.” The article, entitled “Furor Erupts Over Recordings of Saddam,” reports that two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and John Deutch, have resigned from something called the Intelligence Summit, run by a former federal prosecutor named John Loftus.

The Intelligence Summit is scheduled to release the Saddam tapes tomorrow. Loftus has been a moving force behind the appearance of the tapes; last week, the Sun reported that the House Intelligence Committee was studying the tapes, which “were provided to [the] committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military analyst.” The Sun said the committee had authenticated the tapes through its work with the intelligence community.

Now, the Sun reports that Woolsey and Deutch resigned from Loftus’ group because of their concern over “new information they received regarding one of the summit’s biggest donors, Michael Cherney, an Israeli citizen who has been denied a visa to enter America because of his alleged ties to the Russian mafia.”

Whatever the status of Cherney, and whatever the motives of Woolsey and Deutch, what is missing from the story is some perspective on John Loftus. I first encountered his name in the fall of 2003, when I was working on a story about Bush hatred. I was looking at the people who claim that the Bush family got its wealth from financing the Nazis, and I discovered that one of the sacred texts of that particular worldview is a book, The Secret War Against the Jews, by the authors Mark Aarons and…John Loftus. In 1995, when the book appeared, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman, who can reasonably be counted on to speak out against people who financed the Nazis, called it “so exaggerated, so scantily documented, so overwrought and convoluted in its presentation, that Loftus and Aarons render laughable their claim to offer ‘a glimpse of the world as it really is.’”

One might guess that the Sun is not aware of Loftus’ other work, but that would be incorrect. In January 2004, the paper published an article on those notorious MoveOn.org ad submissions that compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. The story included a quote from Loftus, who said the ads were basically accurate. “The Bushes played a significant role in bringing money into the Third Reich,” Loftus told the paper. “They literally financed Hitler. It was all about the money. It wasn’t about the ideology.”

Loftus has other interests. A visit to his website finds, among other things, a May, 2002 article by him entitled “What Congress Does Not Know About Enron and 9/11.” In the article, Loftus reports that the now-defunct energy company had a contract with the Taliban to build a pipeline, and that Vice President Dick Cheney, determined to help out Enron, forbade U.S. intelligence sources from investigating the Enron/Taliban/al Qaeda connection in the months leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. After outlining this somewhat Fahrenheit 9/11-like theory, Loftus concludes, “The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse.”

Now, Loftus is on to the Saddam tapes. If the House committee is correct, the tapes are legitimate. But their release is sure to be accompanied by forceful commentary from John Loftus. In assessing that, you might want to be careful.