Bush Was Right?

Issues & Insights
'Bush Was Right'
Posted 2/21/2006

WMD: The quote above is that of a former UNSCOM member after translating and reviewing 12 hours of taped conversations between Saddam Hussein and his aides. So what's on the covers of Time and Newsweek?

Funny thing about dictators and tyrants: Very often they are meticulous record keepers. The fall of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's Iraq all produced treasure troves of information. In Iraq's case, there were so many documents and records that even now only a small fraction have been translated and analyzed.

Among them are 12 hours of conversations from the early 1990s through 2000 between Hussein and his top advisers. They reveal, among other things, how Iraq was working on an advanced method of enriching uranium, how Iraq was conspiring to deceive U.N. inspectors regarding weapons of mass destruction and how these weapons might be used against the U.S.

The tapes were officially presented Sunday by former FBI translator Bill Tierney to a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts in Arlington, Va. Tierney is an Arabic speaker who worked in the mid-1990s for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the agency responsible for overseeing Iraq's disarmament.

On one of the tapes, made in 2000, two years after Saddam kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, two Iraqi scientists can be heard briefing Hussein on their progress in enriching uranium using plasma separation. If successful, their work would have given Saddam the fissile material he needed to make a nuclear bomb.

The plasma process got a brief mention in the 2004 final report of CIA arms inspector Charles Duefer, but only as a legacy program the Iraqis allegedly abandoned in the 1980s. "This not only shows the capabilities the Iraqis had, but also the weakness of international arms inspection," Tierney believes.

Some highlights from the tapes were played last Wednesday night on ABC's "Nightline." The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pete Hoekstra, has listened to some of the tapes and said they were "authentic."

In one exchange taped in April or May 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil al-Majid, briefed Saddam and his aides on his success at concealing Iraq's WMD from inspectors. "We did not reveal all that we have," he said. "They didn't know the extent of our work on missiles."

Of the information turned over to U.N. inspectors, Hussein Kamil told Saddam: "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of materials we imported, not the volume of production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct. They didn't know any of this."

Skeptics will no doubt claim that this is merely a case of a sycophant massaging Saddam's ego, telling him of programs that didn't exist and progress that was never made. But many of these were programs and weapons the U.N. documented after Desert Storm and of which the U.N. itself demanded a full accounting in Resolution 1441.

So what happened to them? Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told the conference that former Russian intelligence boss Yevgeny Primakov went to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise WMD transfers into Syria.

According to Georges Sada, Saddam's No. 2 Air Force officer, two Iraqi Airways Boeing jets were converted to cargo planes and moved the WMD to Syria in a total of 56 flights six weeks before the war. The flights were disguised as part of a relief effort after a Syrian dam collapsed in 2002.

So what is on the media's mind? Not Saddam's secrets, but those of Vice President Dick Cheney — as evidenced by his failure to notify the Washington press corps immediately after his hunting accident. That subject graced the covers of both Time and Newsweek and preoccupied the weekend talk shows.

A better cover story would be Saddam's tapes, and a better headline was uttered by Tierney on "Fox & Friends" Monday morning: "President Bush was right."

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I wonder where the MSM coverage of this story is? I guess they are still consumed with the "great quail hunting cover-up".

Once again libs will be on the wrong side of history. And just in time for the 2006 elections. Can anyone say "October Surprise"?!!!!