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."
I think that Saddam has already secreted plenty of anthrax or smallpox in the USA, and his "failsafe firing system" is providing the address of the mini storage garages or similar where they are hidden to Al Qaeda.
Remember last year they arrested an Al Queda stowaway in a container in Italy with air holes, commode, food, GPS, sat phone, and a washing machine?
My guess is the heavy bulky washer was the stand in for a nuke in a test run. It's easy for a stowaway to slip off a ship in port, harder for him to deliver a washer to an address in NYC or DC to prove the delivery route's reliability.
Tierney answered this question on Sean Hannity as well. His opinion is that Ritter went way out on a limb for his country and was rewarded by the administration cutting the limb off then jumping out of the tree to stab him in the back before he could get up. This is a paraphrase, but I do remember it was pretty close to that.
A prayer for Exorcism!
I thought it was illegal for Americans to work for Iraq?
At some point, (possibly during our liberation of Iraq), some islamic nations are going to go nuts and lynch every Westerner they can get hold of.
If a WMD is loosed in America, there will be open season on muslims here.
I think we'll see a "quarantine" of islamic nations, for the safety of the West. No travel between the two worlds.
We can "handle" our islamikazis handily in the USA, but "Eurabia" is in for a real hell on earth when the $#!+ hits the fan.
I think it really was right the way I had it: there was no test on the U-235 gun design (Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima), but the plutonium-based implosion design (Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki) was tested, at Alamogordo, before actual use in war.
Yes, I remember that. Wasn't he caught in Rome in the middle of a trip from Egypt to Canada?
...My guess is the heavy bulky washer was the stand in for a nuke in a test run.
Could be. Or maybe something could have been hidden in the washing machine.
I'm reminded of the refrigerators in an article from the March 25, 2000, issue of The New Yorker containing the following [the boldface is my emphasis]:
A year later, there was a new development: Othman told Jawad to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Iraqi Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad said that he asked Othman for more information. "I said, 'Othman, what does this contain?' He said, 'My life and your life. ' He said they"-the Iraqi agents-"were going to kill us if we didn't do this. That's all I'll say.
"I was given a book of dollars," Jawad went on, meaning ten thousand dollars-a hundred American hundred-dollar bills. "I was told to arrange to smuggle the motors. Othman told me to kill any of the smugglers who helped us once we got there." Vehicles belonging to the Taliban were waiting at the border, and Jawad said that he turned over the liquid-filled refrigerator motors to the Taliban, and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.
Jawad said that he had no idea what liquid was inside the motors, but he assumed that it was some type of chemical or biological weapon. I asked the Kurdish officials who remained in the room if they believed that, as late as 2000, the Mukhabarat was transferring chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. They spoke carefully. "We have no idea what was in the cannisters," the senior official said. "This is something that is worth an American investigation."
When I asked Jawad to tell me why he worked for Al Qaeda, he replied, "Money." He would not say how much money he had been paid, but he suggested that it was quite a bit. I had one more question: How many years has Al Qaeda maintained a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime? "There's been a relationship between the Mukhabarat and the people of Al Qaeda since 1992 ," he replied.
Not at all.
It's a strange business, from beginning to end. When I originally read that the first atomic bomb design was used before being tested, I found it a bit hard to believe, but it turned out to be true.
I agree. The hardest part for Saddam may be to get his own nuclear engineers to do their jobs. The engineers and physicists assume that nuclear weapons use by Saddam would result in they and their family being obliterated in nuclear retaliation. So they are scared to death to actually succeed in producing bombs. On the other hand, they are also scared to death to be found out for foot-dragging and then tortured. As a result, truth is in very short supply but underestimating Saddam's capabilities or resolve is a terrible mistake.
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