The Saddam Tapes - Firsthand From the Intelligence Summit
Thanks to Manchester Terrier for being our typing fingers this morning in a hurried cell phone de-brief from the Intelligence Summit in Washington, DC. He hit the highlights very well. All errors are ours. We will attempt to correct them today and tomorrow. It was an exciting day, with notes already filling half a notebook - the fodder for many blog posts to come that go way beyond Saddam and WMD: China, Maldives, Iran, NoKo. A very rich vein. We've got another meeting in 20 minutes, so just a few more notes here...
We got to meet Bill Tierney after his two-hour session this morning. Interesting guy. He makes a living as a non-native Arabic translator. He encourages others to review the tapes themselves - to a point. When Roger Simon of PJ Media asked him why more material of this kind wasn't put out there for the blogosphere to vet, he expressed concerns (backed by experience and several anecdotes) that our Arabic translation capabilities, in addition to being inadequate, have been infiltrated by (first) Iraqi agents and (later) by various Islamofascist sympathizers.
In a small hallway gathering of a handful of reporters (including yours truly), Tierney confessed to being an evangelical Christian - something that may have been a factor in his being pushed out of UNSCOM. At least that was his implication. He is clearly a committed American. For a brief moment in the hallway, he broke into genuine tears of frustration and anger when describing how his ideals had been compromised by the UN bureaucracy as well as (sadly) that of the U.S. intelligence community. Says he quit because he was tired of being villified by military personnel because of his association with Scott Ritter - "in the closet" as he put it. Interesting...
The overall picture he painted was one not of a single smoking gun out of Saddam's mouth, but of a climate in which Saddam and his deputies were supremely confident of their ability to evade - and efficacy in having evaded UN inspections... all the way up to 2002. The tapes are subject to varying interpretations because so much depends on one's interpretation of context, the nuance of particular words and guesses as to how to fill in blanks in the conversations.
Much more to come... have to run (family stuff). Lots more later.
Three tidbits to hold your attention from retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (did I say Allen? D'oh!):
- the 81 targets in Iran are all set
- the six U.S. cities for simultaneous nuke detonations by Iran are all set
- Gitmo detainees average 4,200 calories per day (!!)
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