Posted on 12/06/2002 3:52:00 PM PST by SirChas
Saddam Has Nukes, Ex-Weapons Inspector Says
A former U.N. weapons inspector who was renowned for his ability to ferret out Iraqi weapons violations during the late 1990's charged point blank on Thursday that Saddam Hussein now has nuclear weapons.
"I have no doubt that he has nukes," Bill Tierney told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity.
"He's going to use non-persistent chemicals against his own people to put down an insurrection," the ace inspector predicted, before adding chillingly, "He'll use bio and nukes against us."
Stunned by the revelation, the radio host pressed for confirmation:
HANNITY: You have no doubt that he has nukes? Or he's close (to getting them)?
TIERNEY: I have no doubt that he has nukes.
HANNITY: You think he has nuclear weapons.
TIERNEY: Yes.
HANNITY: Why are you the only (former weapons inspector) saying that?
TIERNEY: Well, there's a few more. One reason why is, during the 90's in the intelligence community, there was just a pathological risk aversion. The reason being was that our president at the time, Bill Clinton, fundamentally changed the purpose of the United States military from fighting and winning wars to crisis management and keeping his poll numbers up.
Now, if you're not out to win, there's no need to take risks. And so what you found is people being very guarded about everything, every kind of assessment you could make. (End of Excerpt)
Before he ran afoul of the system Tierney had built a powerful reputation for credibility, prompting the U.N. to personally recruit him in 1996 for the task of inspecting some of Saddam's most sensitive suspected weapons facilities.
But he was forced to resign two years later amidst charges he was spying for the U.S. Tierney now says he was locked out for doing what he figured was his job - giving the Pentagon targets for military action.
"What I did was identified those people who have sold their souls to keep Saddam in power. I made it my goal to find every place where they are," Tierney told the London's Daily Mirror in October.
Still, his aggressive pursuit of Saddam's weapons violations won him more than a few fans at U.S. Central Command, where Tierney's boss, Army Brig. Gen. Keith Alexander, wrote in one of his job evaluations: "His ability to consistently seek and identify priority target intelligence information is uncanny and is the characteristic that separates him from his contemporaries."
Tierney told Hannity that a 1997 inspection he attempted to conduct at Saddam's Jabal Makhul presidential palace lead him to suspect that the Iraqi dictator already had the bomb.
"Certain things convinced me that they had proscribed items at this presidential site. That led to the inspection in September 1997 where we were locked out. There was something about that. The just came up and said, 'There will be no inspection. Good Day.' And they walked off."
Tierney said the rebuff was "completely different" from other inspections of sensitive sites, where some sort of compromise was always worked out.
Another sign of sinister activity: As Tierney and his team were being turned away, a U.N. helicopter attempting to overfly Jabal Makhul nearly crashed when an Iraqi official on board lunged at the controls.
"That was a distraction to keep that helicopter from going over to the other side of the mountain to see what they were doing" at the facility, said Tierney.
He described Jabal Makhul as a "gigantic" complex of warehouses and underground tunnels, before noting that last year the London Times reported Saddam was storing nuclear weapons in bunkers in and around the Hamrin Mountains.
"There is only one heavily guarded place in the Hamrin Mountains," Tierney told Hannity. "And that's where we were, Jabal Makhul."
Still, despite efforts by Iraqi officials to keep inspectors away from Jabal Makhul, U.N. officials continued to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt, he complained.
"If you had ambiguous reporting; it could mean he has the nukes, it could mean that he doesn't." he said. "Normally the call would be, 'Oh well, that doesn't confirm so therefore he's still developing. He doesn't have it,'" Tierney said he was told.
The ex-inspector predicted that Saddam would likely use his nukes, "maybe (in) Israel, maybe here."
Calling the current inspections "a complete total waste of time," Tierney warned, "You have a leader of a country who's bent on stealing, killing and destroying. And it is time to resolve the issue and solve it. Crisis management is over."
"There's way too much at stake," he added. "We could lose millions more of our citizens unless we wake up and take care of this."
To whom are your referring? Ritter or Tierney? That's the problem with people using too many pronnouns, and are not name-specific.
He has a Nebuchdenezer complex, and is very concerned about earning a permanent place in history.
That's why he has mega murals and 40' statues of himself in every village in Bagdad.
Which bomb would it be??
Seriously, though, Nuclear Weapons are 60 year old technology. You know, back when Slide Rules were state of the art computing technology.
To assume that Saddam doesn't have them is foolish. The only part of either device that is still "classified" is the Initiator for the Implosion or Nagasaki type weapon.
Ritter was correct to say that Saddam needed to be monitored, but under the circumstances when he left, it was just another UN boondoggle since Saddam was refusing access to the spots most in need of inspection. I therefore conclude that Ritter has been full of S#1+ all along since it appears that what he wanted was "the spotlight". Obviously UN inspections as he was demanding were useless and of value only for propaganda purposes ... by Saddam (just like now, hmmm?).
That's what the U.S. did with the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima ("gun" design, using U-235). The scientists had such confidence it would work, plus the U-235 was so expensive and time-consuming to produce, that they did not test the design before using the bomb. [It's presumably even easier now, since the Iraqis wouldn't be working from scratch.]
On the other hand, the much more complicated plutonium-based implosion-type design was tested before it was dropped on Nagasaki.
All the talk about a hypothetical Iraqi atomic bomb seems to be of the U-235 gun design. (North Korea, on the other hand, first focused on the plutonium implosion type, and the North Koreans only switched to U-235 after the agreement in the 1990's that they have now admitted abrogating.)
I think the cases of "norwalk" virus on the cruise ships is a demonstration of how easily a smallpox attack could be accomplished. The spread of West Nile is also an example of how simple it is to introduce a vector borne virus. These are simple "probes" to test the perimeter. There isn't one. A release of a weaponized bioweapon is unlikely to be detected or halted until well after a significant deployment. It won't be a very nice situation.
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