Help Me Do Something Bad

I know escaped content in xml is bad, but I've got some and I wanna do
something with it. Pleas help?!

I have markup like this:
<description>Platform Computing's &lt;a
href="http://www.platform.com/newsevents/pressreleases/prelease.asp?id=82"
&gt; announcement &lt;/a&gt; However, &lt;a
href="http://www.gridsystems.com" &gt;...</description>

I want to transform it to html. Like this,

<xsl:for-each select="description" >
        <xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:for-each>

I do not believe disable-output-escaping is the solution cuz it has already
been disabled. So I am stumped how do I de-escape this? Any help would
really be appreciated.

Thanks

kent